a very massachusetts meal

Tonight was a particularly Massachusetts meal. I bought wild-caught Massachusetts bluefish and cooked it following
D.L.'s recent creation: simply dipped in brown rice flour (and he was right, it does make all the difference not using wheat flour) and served on a bed of zucchini that he told me about. (We discussed my -- until recent -- aversion to zucchini, mostly in that it's almost always overcooked and squishy). It's julienned zucchini tossed with hot olive oil and almonds: not cooked; just warmed. The zucchini was from Hadley, as well as the haricots verts that I blanched and tossed in olive oil, and then there were these incredible fingerling potatoes that I believe to have come from Deerfield. They're the Russian -- not French -- fingerlings, if I remember correctly, from Linda at the farmer's market. So creamy that it was incredible.

The the bluefish was done perfectly, rich and moist, and the vegetables complemented the fish very well, not overpowering, just there and fresh. The zucchini was just pliable enough to be twirled on a spoon like spaghetti.

last day/new day

So I'm retiring the pickles that I've been making to the fridge, and started new ones yesterday with yellow and green pickles from the Northampton market. I have a real crock, about 2L in size, where I can actually use a saucer as a weight. (The glass jar had two little sauce bowls in it, but they slide down as the pickles settle/get eaten and can't stop garlic from popping up without a network of grape leaves). Same recipe, I added yellow and brown mustard seeds this time.

day 10

A hardboiled egg, a tomato and a pickle for dinner.

It's day 10, and last night the pickles were half-sour dills, and quite good. I'm going to keep on going for a few more days and see how they continue as we go along.



Sorrel + ricotta + pine nuts + paramsean = this.

Throw it in the food processor, add it to fresh pasta, top it with parsley, and that's it.

(And there's wild purslane growing in the garden!)

day 5.

Pickles, day 5: some cloudiness, CO₂ bubbles come up when it's tapped, smells like pickles. Thinking I'll taste next week?

(and some fresh cucumbers, the first from the garden)

my garden.

borage, cabbage, parsley

cucumber plants, nasturtium, lemon cucumber

basil, pickling cucumber, borage [2]

a quick project; a new project; cauliflower

Today I bought a bunch of zucchini and made a zucchini-marmalade bread. Zucchini, orange marmalade and lots of walnuts made for a moist, dense bread. It's a Tartine recipe, from the book that M. gave me for my birthday last year...

...And, I started making pickles. I bought a dozen small cucumbers (they at least look like pickling types) at a farm stand on Hadley. I've yet to find a good pickle crock, so I used a two-liter jar with a locking lid (I'll save the lid for when I put them back in the fridge).

I made pickles back when I was canning, but those were pickled in vinegar. They did come out quite well, although more than one clove in a pint jar is way too much. Even one clove made for a strong pickle -- I liked it moderation (only 3 cans had any cloves).

This time I used the Wild Fermentation recipe. It's a real pickle, vinegar-free and preserved by lactic acid fermentation. I'm excited to see how it come out. Because the jar tapers, I couldn't fit a plate in there so there's just a weight (and grape leaves). (I'd love one of those fancy water-sealed Harsch crocks, but they start at a hundred bucks.)


Last night we have some of L.'s interns over for dinner and had mostly vegan fare: orecchiette with grilled red peppers, basil and pine nuts, a slow-cooked onion tart, mizuna-pear-walnut salad and cookies and a cake were brought. The discovery of the evening, an experiment really, was grilled cauliflower. I've roasted it, so I figured I could grill it. I seasoned it, drizzled it on olive oil, grilled it until browned and chopped it up. I grated some nutmeg on top and it was really quite incredible.

raspberries, blueberries, currants and some cream.

Family function this weekend, and I got some raspberries and blueberries from a farm stand (the currants are from a bush I planted -- the robins had more than I did, actually).

The borage and nasturtium are from the garden (what's left of it -- it's still recovering from roaming house painters). Basic pastry cream (with tapioca starch, not corn), and a pâte sablée (sweet egg-based) for the crust.

And, more exciting than the post, I have a digital camera that works again.

july. peas.

I saw a recipe for a pea pesto a couple of weeks ago. It had cooked, frozen peas. (Not particularly aestival). I forget what else was in it.

It's July, and I had a bunch of fresh peas, and it's hot and I wanted simplicity, so I decided to work with that. I made papardelle with 1/3 whole wheat pastry flour and 2/3 semolina. I then put 3 or 4 cloves of garlic, a half-handful of pine nuts, maybe 2 cups of shelled raw peas, some grapeseed oil and some parsley.

The result was almost fluorescent green and certainly very delicious. Really really really good. And it'd be quick if I hadn't tried to make hand-cut pasta by hand on a hot, humid day. (It got fickle and a little sticky...)

(Now I need to figure out what to do with purple kohlrabi...)

two desserts.

During the height of strawberry season, I made a strawberry-rhubarb tart. First, I made a pâte sablée, the sweet and made-with-eggs crust that I somehow had never bothered to make, mostly in trying to perfect the flaky crust. Next, I made a pastry cream but substituted buttermilk for the milk or cream (out of principle: I wanted a tangy cream), and tapioca flour for cornstarch (out of necessity: I bought a whole box last summer for peach pie and have no cornstarch at home). Right as the vanilla bean-buttermilk mixture was about to separate (think of heating yogurt), I added the eggs and tapioca. The separation of the buttermilk was a first moment of doubt, the stickiness of the tapioca in the cream a second. But, once settled, the pastry cream was incredible.

Tart crust baked, cooled and filled with pastry cream, I topped it with strawberry lightly macerated in lemon juice and sugar and added one-inch lengths of rhubarb cooked in sugar until just soft.

If was really good. Really really good. I brought an 8" tart to work and it was gone (with four of us) by the end of the day.


On another note, today: Grilled nectarines. Vanilla ice cream. That after chorizo and pattypan squash grilled was really really good (I'm in love with my hibachi). Think warm peach pie without the work and crust.

fiddleheads, chiffon

Wednesday, while on the bike path, I passed a patch of ferns and thought "shit, is it too late?"; On the way back I passed two friends harvesting fiddleheads! Obviously, it just took it little more work than a quick pass. I went back last night, since Wednesday I was without bag or pockets, and collected some.

I boiled them for the sake of pulling out any potential toxins (I did some research, and these should be the Ostrich ferns, whereas the Bracken have been tied to stomach cancer), and then sautéed them in butter and ate them with toast and 4-minute eggs. It was really good. Very green, very earthy.

I'm also making a birthday cake (for my Dad), a strawberry chiffon (from Tartine's recipes)... the chiffon cake rose (& fell) like a soufflé. It cut into rounds well. I halved a 10-in recipe into a 7-in (10in² is roughly twice 7in²). It's two layers of cake soaked with strawberry purée with strawberries in a layer a pastry cream and whipped cream. This is the first real cake I've made... we'll see.

Last night I saw duck legs for $4.99/lb. And supposedly all-natural all-of-that. (Breasts at at least twice that, naturally.) As I've wanted to make duck for a while now (since realizing that duck, unlike chicken, has flavor), I figured I'd give it a go. I'd had confit, magret and breast before, but never a leg that wasn't confit.

I looked through recipes, most of the books I have sugesting roasting or braising, but mostly as a duck or a breast or a leg confit. I ended up marinating the legs in a Côtes du Rhone with rosemary and sage for an hour, then searing until caramelized and braising until "done." Well, had I not forgotten my research, that should take about an hour and a half. Not the forty minutes that - maybe, if that - I gave myself.

The leek-potato soup that I distractedly made earlier-and-during, as well as the earlier-and-during baguettes, were a bit sad, the former not thick enough and the latter not light enough. The soup was good, and the bread wonderful with gravy, just not my best effort. (The bread I had tried as an overnight rise, which was part of the problem. In cast iron and free-form is one thing; in a baguette form is another.)

Anyway, duck, braised, with spinach sautéed in duck fat (and fond) with a quarter preserved lemon and a reduction of the braising liquid was delicious but a bit tough. I took the second leg and roasted it, so we'll see how the twice cooked leg fairs tomorrow for lunch.

On a literary note, started a cover-to-cover read of South Wind Through the Kitchen, an Elizabeth David collection. She refused to sell garlic presses at the shop that she owned. Sigh. And, for the moment, I sell high-end culinary gadgets -- no, "tools," claims the Rösle rep., -- for a living. Some things are tools, some things are gimmicks. (Who am I to make the distinction?)

I purchased Euell Gibbons's Stalking the Wild Asparagus tonight. That and the David book (and Mann's Joseph...) at once. Gibbbons makes me wish it were fall and I had the foraging skills of a squirrel and I'd make acorns into acorn meal, and then acorn meal into acorn pancakes. I like that he admits that much of the edible flora he omits from the book as it's edibly inedible. It makes him seem a bit more reasonable.

And that makes me think of a delicious succulent green that I ate up the slopes of Mount Eisenhower with my 12th grade Biology teacher. Joseph Rodrigues, what became of you? And what was that plant?

sans chouriço

I'm trying to make kale soup tonight... kale, potatoes, garlic, leek, onion, white beans and chorizo (etc.)-- too far from New Bedford here to get the real thing. Part of the lure was thinking of grilled chouriço this summer at A. & A.'s wedding (a ceremony on the sea, but with an amazing chouriço and karaoke after party). It's in it's last stages, and the chorizo is yummy and the broth rich, ready to be soaked up in bread...

I made my second load of Bittman's NYT "No Knead Bread" (interestingly, same title as my first bread from a Home & Garden red+white checkered kids' cookbook that got this whole thing started) today, this time with 1/3 whole wheat flour. 3 cups flour, 1 5/8 cups water, 1/4 tsp yeast and salt... a wet, sticky dough, rising for 24 hours (Bittman suggests 12-18, but 24 seems perfect), then cooking in an oval 3 1/2 qt dutch oven (I have no idea why he suggests a 6-8 qt -- it'd be flat). Nonetheless, it's the best bread ever. Great crust, soft inside, perfect structure.

Poilâne, you're dead and I'm far I way.

On another note, I'd been thinking of coq au vin, and went to a dinner of exactly that Saturday night. It's really good. Falls off the bone. That, plus wine and bacon, just might be ecstasy. A kale-potato galette was the side, and strawberries and raspberries in lemon juice fiinished us off. Damn fine dinner.