Life Begins at 30

A Truffle Named Luigi

Editor's note: I orginally wrote this post for KQED's Bay Area Bites in December 2006.  I searched for it today to make the boar ragu, and thought I'd share the recipe with you -- especially because posting recipes is such a rare thing for me!

As someone who loves food, and who spends a good amount of time looking for the next great meal, I have many bites each year which are completely memorable and exciting. But it is rare that I have a bite that flattens me, that is transcendent, that makes me want to jump up and down in joy because of its perfection. And that experience? That is what people like me live for. It's the reason that we trudge through insipid bites, through bites that are boring, and through bites that are just uninspired.

It happened to me this year at Oliveto Restaurant. My good friend Jeanne took me to Oliveto yearly truffle dinner this year for my birthday. The dinner is a joyous event. Everyone in the restaurant seems to be in a good mood, and the intoxicating scent of white truffles permeates the entire evening. At the beginning of the meal, we were presented with different sizes of truffles and asked what our truffle strategy for the evening would be. Our choices were to purchase and entire truffle, and to have it as our dining companion for the evening, or to have truffle shaved and weighed on each dish. We opted for the former, and purchased a truffle which we promptly named Luigi.

Each dish that we ate at the dinner was designed to show off the wonder of Luigi, and dish after dish coming out of the kitchen was wonderful. And then came The Dish. The dish that, looking back on this year, will be considered the highlight: a wild boar ragu served on a delicious polenta. It was simple and rich and each bite was full of flavor and depth. There is something about ragus that I have eaten in Italy - it's a back of the mouth tang or bite that I rarely taste here. It also had specific taste that comes from using the best ingredients one can find, and a flavor that only comes from patience and time with the dish.

With my first bite, I declared that I would like to marry the man who created the ragu, who was responsible for this amazing bite (by chance, the next day, I met his lovely wife - the owner of the wonderful Ici).

While many of the dishes this evening were completely heightened and made infinitely better by the addition of truffles, this didn't need the truffle and stood on its own in its fantasticness.

Since that day, I have spent some time working on a recipe for wild boar ragu, and have managed to make a successful rendition at home. I bought the wild boar at Golden Gate Meat Company in the Ferry Building. Wild boar is lower in fat than pork or beef, so I made up for that by adding a couple of slices of pancetta to the recipe in order to bring the richness up a bit. The recipe is very forgiving in the amount of time that you cook it -- I would suggest cooking for three hours at a minimum, and anywhere up to about five hours.

WILD BOAR RAGU

2 slices pancetta chopped into small pieces (about 1 oz)
3 T butter
1/2 cup chopped onion
2/3 cup chopped celery
2/3 cup chopped carrot
3/4 pound wild boar, cut into very small pieces by hand
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper
1 cup whole milk
1/8 t freshly grated nutmeg
1 cup red wine
1.5 cups diced tomatoes with their juice
1 pound dried egg noodles (I like Rustichella D'Abruzzo Pappardelle)
Parmigiano Reggiano cheese.

Equipment: a large Dutch Oven or heavy enameled cast iron pot that can be used in the oven. I use a Le Creuset 6.5 quart dutch oven.

1. Place the empty pot on the stove and turn the heat on low while you are prepping your ingredients.
2. Raise the flame on the stove to medium.
3. Add the pancetta and let it cook until the fat has begun to separate from the meat and the pancetta is beginning to brown (About 5 min).
4. Add 2T of butter and let it melt.
5. Once the butter has melted, add onion and cook until it becomes translucent, about 5 minutes.
6. Add the celery and carrot and cook for about 2 minutes, stirring.
7. Add the boar, a pinch of salt, and a few grindings of pepper. Stir and allow the boar to cook until it is brown on the outside, about 5 minutes.
8. Add the milk and the nutmeg. Let the milk cook until it is almost all boiled off, about 10 minutes.
9. Add the wine and let it cook until it is almost all boiled off, about 10 minutes.
10. Add the tomatoes. Once the tomatoes begin to bubble, lower the heat to the lowest it will go.
11. Preheat the oven to 250 degrees.
12. Cook the ragu on top of the stove, uncovered for 1 - 1.5 hours. If you are able to achieve a very low flame and the sauce is bubbling only occasionally, you can cook the ragu on top of the stove the entire time if you'd like. If, like me, you have a cranky stove that doesn't heat the pot completely or a flame that doesn't go low enough, place the entire pot in the oven, covered, after 1 hour of cooking uncovered on the stovetop.
13. Continue to cook for 3-5 hours, stirring only occasionally.
14. By the time the ragu is done, there will be very little liquid and any remaining fat will be separated from the meat. If at any time during the process you feel that the sauce is beginning to burn, you can add water, 1/2 cup at a time, to the sauce. When the sauce is complete, there should be no trace of water in the sauce.
15. In the last 20 minutes of cooking, taste and adjust the salt and pepper if necessary.
16. Just before serving, cook the egg noodles and toss with the remaining 1T of butter. Serve with freshly grated Parmigiano Reggiano cheese.

Oliveto Restaurant
5655 College Ave
Oakland, CA
(510) 547-5356

The bread chronicles, part II

I have a friend who has been spending a good part of the summer perfecting his bread technique.  Every couple of days, I get an email detailing his progress.  Here's an example from a recent email:

This refrigerated dough thing is definitely great, it's going to be my go-to bread for white loaves.  I might have two different doughs in the fridge at once, maybe one with up to 10% rye, and another with some (but not too much) whole wheat flour in it.  I'm also going to keep making the 30% oat flour bread with raisins and pecan ... in the standard no knead method.  And I'm going to start working on a sourdough starter and then will try to figure out how to incorporate it into my process...

It's been funny to receive what is basically his bread diary.  And, while I care about how it's going, I really wasn't relating to the whole bread thing.  Because, you know, I wasn't a baker. Until Monday.  When we left off a couple of days ago, my bread was in the oven and I was waiting for it to finish. 

It came out!  It was a little funny looking and scrawny (length of a dollar bill, as you can see), but totally delicious.  You can see from this picture that it was small and kind of dense because I handled it poorly.  But whatever.  I.  Made.  Bread.

"It's stupid how happy this loaf of bread has made me," I wrote to him that night while noshing on my creation.

Since then, I made another loaf that came out way better than the first.  ("What hydration was this?  I'm guessing based on the large holes that it was 80%, right?" asked the bread guru.)  I have to say that I can finally see what all you bread people have been going on and on about lately.  It's really satisfying and delicious.  I work at home, and in a more random moment today I thought that I could make bread for my neighbors and charge them to have hot bread ready when they got home.  That went by the wayside when I reminded myself that I have a real job, and cannot give it up to be a baker after only two loaves.

My first loaf of bread

"Oh, darn it," my mom said, acting disappointed, "this oven doesn't bake either."

It was 1981 and my sister and I were standing in the kitchen of our new house staring up at her.  I was so disappointed to hear of our bad luck.  The house that we had just left in Lake Arrowhead had an oven that didn't bake and now it seemed that that the new one didn't either. 

Mom could make us delicious savory concoctions in the oven including scalloped potatoes, macaroni and cheese, and stuffed mushrooms, but something about the circuitry of the oven didn't allow it to bake sweet dishes or breads.  No cakes, no cookies, and no pies.  While other mothers had the scent of chocolate chip cookies coming out of their ovens, ours often sat cold.  At two different houses, mom convinced us that she would love to bake sweets for us, but that it was impossible with our ovens.

Trusting (or gullible) as I was, I went along with this story, sometimes relating it to the parents of friends who probably didn't know what to say to my pronouncement that our oven didn't bake.  I went along with the story until the day of the Ethiopian Bake Sale.  There was a famine in Ethiopia, and we were all asked to bring baked items to school for a bake sale fundraiser.  Mom sent brownies that she had made, and the jig was up -- I finally realized that the oven did bake, but that it was my mother who didn't unless Ethiopians were involved.

Not surprising given my upbringing, but I've never been a baker.  I make a cake or cookies every once in a while, but baking has always been a mystery that I have not mastered.  That is why it was significant that I listed "bake something" as a task on my 20 Things to do in 30 Days.  I needed to tackle bread.  So finally, nearly two years after the no-knead bread craze, I made my own loaf and it's in the oven as I write this.

I hope my oven bakes!

Caldo de Queso, A Family Recipe

My sister and I were raised in "it takes a village" fashion.  My mom was a single parent, so a lot of our after-school time was spent at my grandparents' house or at my godmother's house.  My godmother -- who we called Nina -- was a cousin of grandma's. 

While my mother was quite strict, we basically had the run of the house at Nina's.  She indulged us in nearly every way, letting us stay up late, letting us watch whatever we wanted on television, and letting us eat whatever we wanted.  By the time I was 10, I could have in-depth conversations with her about the characters on General Hospital and Young and the Restless.

For reasons that I can never explain, when we were in trouble, my sister Annie and I would be sent off to Nina's house which was the best "punishment" there was.  She would ask us what happened, and then pretend nothing was wrong and we went about our day, working with her in the garden, cooking, playing bingo, taking the bus to Newberry's, or watching t.v. together. 

In a testament to the innocence of the time (or my innocence), she would send me about a block away to the corner store to buy her cigarettes when I was about 11.  She would send me with a note, and they would oblige.  "Please allow Jennifer to buy cigarettes for me.  Thank you, Armida."  I usually had enough money leftover to buy grape flavored Now & Later candies, and then obediently walked back to bring her cigarettes.

While I spend a lot of time talking about my grandparents and their influence in my life and in the life of my family, I have no doubt that I am who I am today in part because of Nina's influence and her constant support.  She was always on my side.  And magically for two sisters who didn't always get along, she was also always on Annie's side. Nina died when I was 17 and beginning my senior year in high school.  It was the first death that absolutely rocked my world. 

Recently, mom gave me a copy of my application essay to Pepperdine.  And the topic of the essay was going to Nina's after school and having her make caldo de queso for me.  Caldo de queso is a very simple Mexican soup.  Realizing now how easy it is to make, I find it interesting that it held such magic for me when I was young.  It was the process of making it, and helping her chop the onions and cutting the potatoes and learning how to make it for myself.  I guess that's the allure of family recipes -- they don't have to be complicated and involved.  It can be the simplest dish, but the comfort that lies in the repetitiveness and the flavors that build a tapestry of memories.

Caldo de Queso

This simple soup features potatoes, green chilies, chicken broth and cheese.  Other than those base ingredients, the recipe is very forgiving.  Truth be told, Nina used to use canned Anaheim chilies, though I now use freshly roasted chilies.  Roasting chilies is a very simple process once you get the hang of it.  I do exactly as Elise teaches on her blog Simply Recipes -- it's the way I've always roasted them and Elise is a much better teacher than I.  I use Yukon Gold potatoes for their ability to stand up in a soup.  No need to worry about the heat of the poblano chilies -- they are usually quite sweet.  If you live in the Bay Area, try the poblanos from Catalan Farm.

This recipe yields approximately 4 servings.

Ingredients

3 poblano chiles, roasted and cut into small strips.
2 T olive oil
1/2 white onion chopped
4 cups chicken broth
2 medium sized potatoes chopped into 6-8 piece each
sharp cheddar cheese, grated or cut into small cubes for easy melting

Optional:
1 tomato
1 ear of fresh corn
1 handful cilantro, chopped

Instructions

1.  Heat olive oil in a medium soup pot over medium heat.
2.  Add onion, and saute until translucent.
3.  Add the chile strips and saute for about a minute.
4.  Add chicken broth and bring to a boil.
5.  Add potatoes, then return to a boil.  Lower flame to bring the liquid to a simmer.
6.  Cook until the potatoes are cooked through - approximately 15 minutes.  Add salt and pepper to taste.
7.  Ladle the soup into bowls, and add some cheese to each bowl.  The goal here is not to create a French Onion soup amount of cheese, rather the goal is to add just enough cheese that it will melt into the broth and become an added dimension to the liquid.  It turns the liquid creamy without yielding large, goopy mounds of cheese.

If you like cilantro, you may add some at the end.  If you like tomato, add it about 5 minutes before the potatoes are done.  Corn adds a summery sweetness to the soup and can be added about 2 minutes before the potatoes are done.

Top photo taken around 1977.  From the left that's me, my cousin Julie, my cousin Yvonne, and Nina holding my sister Annie.

Biggles would be proud

Mom called me last night to report on the success of a barbecue she had at the house.  "I discovered the secret to the perfect hamburger.  Put herb butter in the middle of the patty, and baste with butter.  Biggles would be proud."

Farmers' Market Panzanella

I was overwhelmed today by the bounty at the farmers' market.  The entire market smells of melons, sweet and intoxicating.  Everyone I spoke with was in a great mood.  Stephanie picked up some gorgeous okra to continue her okra adventures. 

Exhausted this evening and consumed with everything I need to get done, I found inspiration from Mark Bittman's 101 Simple Meals Ready in 10 Minutes or Less and threw together a local foods panzanella.   The bread was an olive baguette from Brickmaiden Bakery (Pt. Reyes).  The Armenian cucumber was over two feet long and was brought to market by Full Belly Farm (Yolo County).  The gorgeous tomatoes were from The Peach Farm (Winters).  I used chives from one of my very favorite farms: Marin Roots Farm (Marin County).  I tossed everything together with some (local) salted anchovies, champagne vinegar, olive oil, salt and pepper.  One of the few times recently that eating a completely satisfying meal has taken longer than making it.

Thanks to Jeanne for sending me the Bittman article today!

fridge (and freezer), unedited

fridgeunedited, originally uploaded by jen_maiser.

Sam put a challenge to us asking what the inside of our unedited refrigerators look like.  And it's been fun over the weekend to see the shots of bloggers around the web.  It took some restraint to open it and not fuss in order to set up the shot, but I just opened and snapped.

I personally think my freezer is much more interesting, as it has crab and salmon from my father and not much else -- when he visited last month from Alaska, I had to do away with some of my other frozen foods in order to make room for this precious gift. 

Update: this is addictive!  I just added a pic of my freezer and refrigerator doors. Freezer's on top, fridge is on bottom.

Click on the photos to get to the flickr pages and see notes showing what's what.

Cookbooks as Therapy

So remember the other day when I mentioned The Cooks' Library?  I had to go back today. 

I had a meeting nearby, and I couldn't get Apples for Jam out of my head.  It's a gorgeously designed book, with an enticing mix of memories, prose, and recipes.  I hope the recipes are as good as the book is beautiful - but if not, it was worth it for the photography.

Other books I purchased:
Arabesque. A Taste of Morocco, Turkey and Lebanon, Claudia Roden
Counter Intelligence.  Where to Eat in the Real Los Angeles, Jonathan Gold
Madhur Jaffrey's World Vegetarian
The Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook, Julee Rosso

Cooking for One

One reason that I'm happy to participate in NaBloPoMo is because it's going to help me to get some posts out of my system that I've been working on for a while.  This is one of those posts.

So here's my secret: The past two months are the first time in my life that I've had to cook for myself.  I have lived by myself, but by the time I did I was dating Jason so I was always cooking for the two of us.  And before that, I always had roommates around.  So while I wasn't directly responsible for cooking for anyone, there was always a crowd to help eat the leftovers.

And when Jason and I were living together, there were times when I would completely luxuriate in the idea of cooking for myself.  But now that cooking for just myself is pretty much a fact of life, I am beginning to look at it differently in many ways.

During most of September, I found myself eating pretty sporadically.  A meal a day was really sustaining me most of the time, and I would usually cook too much or not at all.  Most of this month was a blur anyway, and I often ate just whatever would keep me going.  And when I was cooking, I would completely miscalculate the amount that I could eat, and that excess of food around the house would just help push me further into the funk that I was already in.

In October, however, I started to get the hang of things.  I bought a microwave -- spunky and red.  I haven't owned a microwave in years, but when I was at mom's house for a couple weeks recently I realized that it really does come in handy sometimes.  And it was just the thing that I felt would help my singleness be a little easier.  To tell you the truth, I think I've used it once.  To melt butter.  Oh ya, and then this morning to reheat my coffee (please, please James Freeman don't be reading this blog post right now).  But for some reason I feel better having it in the house. 

I bought a small 3.5 quart Le Creuset dutch oven - perfect for small batches of soup and other deliciousness.  This one now sits, all happy and blue next to my beautiful 6.75 quart dutch oven, which is much better suited to having friends over and making something substantial.  I bought the little blue dutch oven two weeks ago, and I think that I have used it every day that I've cooked since then.  Pretty great investment already.  The soup that I made here is a chickpea and spinach soup that was delicious -- the recipe can be found in Mark Bittman's newest book, The Best Recipes in the World.

So as I get into this rhythm of cooking for myself, I've had a series of small successes. 

I've learned how to make a mean risotto for one person.  After a stressful day, it's very therapeutic for me to stand at the stove and stir and stir and stir.  I have always seen cooking risotto as an act of love.  It's not something that can be rushed, and for me to make it for myself, I feel like I am saying that I'm important enough to take the time to make it.

I was able to prepare a "small" batch of cocido, a Mexican beef soup that I learned how to make from grandma.  Once the recipe's perfected, I'll pass it on.  This is a soup normally made for a crowd - and I successfully made it for two people with only a bit of leftovers for lunch the next day for each of us.

I'm remembering the art of making delicious sandwiches.  The one here is a lamb sandwich with arugula and a fantastic spicy mustard that I bought from the Mountain View Farmers' Market.

I definitely don't want to say that this has all been a walk in the park.  Last night I had popcorn for dinner.  And there was a time a couple weeks ago when I ate pumpkin pie for three meals in a row before being saved by a friend's invitation to lunch.  But, when it comes down to it, cooking for one can sometimes be just what is required to get through the tough times.

Two Day Chicken Soup

I have been taking a Boot Camp class very early in the morning three mornings a week for the past few months.  I love the camp, and highly recommend it.  But about ten days ago, we were doing side steps in Golden Gate Park, and I fell.  On to a curb.  With most of my weight.  And cracked a rib.

It hasn't been a very fun couple weeks.  As anyone who has had a rib injury knows, there's really not much you can do for it.  It just hurts, and the only thing you can do is take pain killers.  For the record, you're not supposed to bind your ribs which is an old method of healing that doctors used to prescribe.  Now, they know that the best thing to do is to encourage deep breathing, so that your lungs can stay healthy.  At least that's what my doctor told me.

Anyway, last week in a fit of helplessness, I went to an acupuncturist.  While I had gone to acupuncture before, this was my first time seeing this particular acupuncturist.  She was great, and I am going to go back to her.

At the end of the session, she said to me, "In Chinese medicine, they say that whatever you are deficient in, you should eat it.  Now I'm not telling you to go gnaw on a bone, but do you cook?"

"Oh, I cook.  And I have a bunch of chicken carcasses in my freezer."

I think I saw her give me a sidelong glance, but she seemed happy as she told me to go home and make a soup from all those bones to help my rib.  I thought to myself that Nigella would be proud, and headed home.

You must keep stock in your freezer, and also the bones you have saved to make it.  Turn your freezer into your very own Golgotha by throwing in lamb bones, chicken carcasses, and any other bones at hand.  I have been known to take home the carcasses with me after a dinner party once I've found out that (a) they have come from my butcher and (b) they were going to be thrown away. Nigella Lawson, How to Eat

So I went home and began the two-day soup.  Since I am not one for recipes (see some of my fellow bloggers for that type of blog), I can only tell you generally what I did:

The first step was to make the broth.  I put three chicken carcasses into a large pot, added a quartered onion (washed, not peeled), a head of garlic (not peeled), a couple of bay leaves, and enough water to cover the carcasses.  I brought the water to a boil, and then lowered it to a simmer.  After opening a couple windows so that our house wouldn't turn into a sauna, I let it go until I was about to go to bed -- probably a couple of hours.  When I was a kid, we lived in a 100-year old house in Southern California.  Our laundry room was an enclosed porch which was always cooler than the rest of the house.  If we were still in that house, I would have taken the entire pot out onto the back porch to cool overnight.

Since I wasn't in that house, I strained the broth through my chinois (you can use cheesecloth), and then put the pot in a coolish place in the house overnight.  I felt fairly safe keeping it out because of San Francisco's cool nights, but your other option is to put it in the fridge.  The next day, the fat will have raised to the top and it is easy to skim off.

After skimming off the fat, I took a whole chicken, rinsed and trimmed of extra skin, and added it to the broth.  After the chicken boiled for about 15-20 minutes and was cooked through, I removed it and let it cool.  I skimmed the broth once more, added some large pieces of ginger (large enough that they can be removed later) and a diced onion.  After the broth had cooked down a little bit -- probably about 20 minutes -- I added the chicken meat that I had removed from the cooled chicken by hand, added salt, removed the ginger, and spooned the soup into bowls.  I added some fresh basil leaves, a squeeze of lemon, and a spoonful of chili flakes to each serving. 

Delicious.  I'm feeling better all ready.