Cookbooks

Recently, a friend of mine sent me an email:

I realized the other day that I have all these fancy schmanzy cookbooks, but for anything basic I always resort to the net, which bugs me, because I prefer to have a giant, ingredient-stained tome on the table behind me when I cook, rather than an ingredient-stained laptop.

What's your favorite basic cookbook?

She also called the CC useless, but the CC refuses to succumb to bitterness.

I'm going to give a non-answer in a Zen sort of way.

I don't have a favorite basic cookbook. There, I've said it!

The CC's shelves are lined with regional cookbooks. Everything from Afghani to Haitian cooking is included. There are regional cookbooks from just about every region of India, and translations of books from the 17th century to the present.

So the CC is really unable to recommend a specific cookbook.

I don't like The Joy of Cooking (too bland!) I do like Julia Child but only when I'm in the mood to be a perfectionist. I prefer Patricia Wells if I just want to put together a quick French bistro-style meal.

So what is the CC good for?

What the CC can do is to recommend a basic cookbook for any given cuisine. For Italian, I'd pick Marcella Hazan, for Mexican, Diana Kennedy, for Greek, Diane Kochilas, and so on and so forth.

How's that for a non-answer?

Tomato Paste

Homemade tomato paste is simply one of those finer pleasures of life. The CC hates to act all rhapsodic but give this a whirl. You'll thank me in February!

When the CC fries the tomato paste in winter, the entire house smells of tomatoes!

The CC prefers to use heirloom tomatoes (preferably federle.)

Photos of the process will be posted in a separate post.

Ingredients

12 lbs ripe summer tomatoes (quartered)
olive oil
salt

Recipe

The recipe is absurdly simple but takes a long time. You don't really have to do anything but you gotta stick around since you don't want your house to burn down.

Fry some olive oil in a pot. Toss in the tomatoes, and let them melt (covered) on a low heat for roughly 30 mins or so. Take a food mill, and pass the stuff through the finest sieve.

Put the strained stuff in a pot, and let it simmer on extremely low heat. This will probably take more than 6 hours or so, and no! you can't hurry the process.

You will have to skim it every hour or so. The oil will separate out rather cleanly because of the extremely low heat. (You can even just sop it up with a paper towel!)

By the end, the tomato paste will be very syrupy (caramelization is taking place,) and it will be a deep dark red.

Toss in quite a bit of salt. You need this to preserve it. You can tone down the salt in the recipe that uses the tomato paste later.

This stuff freezes beautifully, and should last a year.

Risotto

Risotto minus a dusting of parmigiano-reggiano is a travesty. I speak from experience.

Weep, New York restaraunts, and weep, all you New York lovers, this is a fucking travesty.

You may as well live in fucking Idaho!

Mussels with garlic

This is such an easy recipe, but unbelievably good. Try it on some Friday night when you're too tired to cook, but still want a good meal.

Ingredients

3 shallots cut into rounds
10-12 cloves of garlic, cut into thin rounds (or more!)
mussels
clams
1/2 cup finely chopped parsley

salt
lots of black pepper

bottle of dry white
crusty bread

Recipe

Fry the shallots in olive oil till they are light golden, fry the garlic. Add lots of black pepper, and some salt (not too much, the clams will exude some too.) Toss in the mussels, and clams, 1/2 cup of the wine, and 1/2 cup of water.

Steam the mussels till they open (no more than 5-6 minutes.) Take it off the heat (important: or else the mussels and clams will shrink.) Stir in the parsley, and serve with bread. There should be a lot of liquid to sop your bread with (and it's fucking delicious!)

If you like, you can pull the mussels, and clams with tongs, reduce the broth a bit, and then stir in the parsley, and pour it over the mussels.

Dry wine, crusty bread, mussels with garlic. This is the life!

Fava Bean Risotto

OK, we've been through the risotto stuff on this blog before so let's keep this short and simple.

Everyone should know the trick of a making a good risotto. Broth, on a low simmer in a different vessel. Keep adding to rice at periodic intervals, and stir.

Ingredients

2 lbs fresh fava beans (peeled, cooked, and 3/4-th of them pureed, keep the rest.)
6 shallots (finely diced)
4 cloves garlic (finely diced)

4 cups arborio, or vialone nano
5-6 cups vegetable broth (homemade, but use commercial, you wimps!)

salt (depending on broth)
pepper (a tad)

freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano
freshly grated black pepper

Recipe

Fry the shallots, and garlic soffrito. Add the rice, and fry for at least a minute or two, till each grain is covered in oil. Add the broth a ladleful at a time, and keep stirring. Add the fava bean puree towards the beginning, and the whole fava beans towards the end.

Serve while hot, with freshly grated Parm, and black pepper to taste.

Pappa al Pomodoro

This is a poor man's recipe that went upscale, and over many years this is the most requested recipe chez the CC.

The CC came across it in a bizarre manner.

Many years ago, the CC was in Firenze on a conference, and we went to a restaurant appropriately titled "The Mad Cook".

Now, this was a family space, and the chef was the seater, order-taker, and waiter.

In deciding the "specials of the day", given that he spoke limited English, he called this "tomato soup".

On ordering it, the CC had furious scorn heaped upon him by his friends -- "You come to Italy, and order tomato soup, etc."

The soup arrived. It was unreal. Everyone wanted a part of the action, and the CC allowed them all a meagre taste, and left them to their pathetic appetizers while he enjoyed a wondrous soup.

Two evenings later, the CC strolled by the restaurant to ask the chef about the recipe. The CC knows barely some Italian (Romance-language related), and the chef barely spoke English but somehow I convinced him that I was no rival chef, that I was a student, and "No, I will not open a restaurant with your recipe."

These are important things in Italy.

Ingredients

1 large red onion (coarsely diced)
lots of garlic cloves (chopped into largish pieces)
1 stalk celery
8 tomatoes (diced)
3 tbsp tomato paste (homemade, but use commercial, you wimps!)

basil leaves (two piles -- one loosely torn, one chiffonaded)
stale bread (cut into largish rounds)
olive oil.

Recipe

Fry the onion and garlic till light golden. Toss in the celery. Fry briefly. Toss in the broth, tomatoes, salt and pepper (to taste), tomato paste. Simmer on extreme low heat till the tomatoes concentrate. This should also sweeten the mixture. Add two cups of broth/water, and bring to a slow rolling boil.

Turn off the heat, add the bread, and mix it all up. Make sure the broth covers all of it. Let it sit for a while.

Add the torn basil just before reheating.

When serving, serve with the chiffonaded basil, and fresh cracked pepper.

Confessional

It's Sunday, and even though I'm not Catholic, it's time to 'fess up on stuff I hate.

Father, forgive me for I have sinned against the temple of cooking by hating:

• Plucking cilantro leaves (or similar.) In fact, it always puts me in a crappy mood to the point where my friends volunteer to do it rather than have me bitch and moan.
  
• Peeling the skin off the garlic.
  
• Mincing garlic (ok! I hate it but it's gotta be done 'cause the end product matters, and the CC is a perfectionist.)
  
• Taking the skin off the goddamn' fava beans.
  

I used to hate my life until I bought a juicer. Now, I can juice 40 lemons (yep! 40), and not hate it.

Fresh Fava Beans

If you haven't ever eaten them, or cooked them, consider suicide as an alternative, given that you seem to be leading a mere simulacrum of a life eating crapola!

They are easy to cook but time-consuming.

Pod them, drop them in boiling water for 5-8 minutes, dunk them in cold water, and take off the papery outside shell.

A bit of work, but not that much if you drink a fine glass of wine, and listen to some music while doing it.

Vegetable Broth

Most people don't seem to realize how easy broths are to make. They take time and effort, but the commercial crap is so fucking awful that the CC wants to cry over the death of the culinary arts.

Normally, the CC's freezer is chock-full of broths, but I didn't have an appropriate broth for tomorrow's meal.

So it was off to the local farmers' market to get fresh veggies in pissing rain.

Everyone has a favorite broth recipe so you should take what's below as "generic", and feel free to muck with it.

The only caveat that I want to add is that mushroom-based broths have a unique character so be sure that's what you want before you head there.

I wanted a light summer broth, and wanted a mild citrusy flavor so I added lemon-grass (but you don't have to.)

Ingredients

1 red onion (chopped into large pieces)
3 carrots (with fronds, chopped coarsely)
1 zucchini (chopped into large rounds)
3 leeks (cut into large rounds)
3 stalks of celery (coarsley chopped)
1 potato (cut into chunks)

1 tsp fennel seeds
1 tbsp black peppercorns
3 bay leaves

Recipe

Fry the onion, and the leeks until they are translucent. Add the celery, and fry for a minute or two. Add the fennel, peppercorns, and bay leaves and fry for a minute.

Now add the rest of the veggies, and fry them for at least 5-7 minutes. (I will explain the science behind this in a later post.)

Add cold water to the brim of the pot (it is crucial that the water be cold!)

Now the hard part, let the mixture come to a slow boil. As it does, the fat will come to the surface.

Skim, baby, skim

Let it simmer (uncovered) on a very slow heat for the better part of two hours. Keep skimming. (Yes, this is painful.)

Take a cheese-cloth, and separate the broth from the crap. (Toss out the crap!)

If you plan to freeze it, add salt to it. Don't worry about the fact that it is concentrated, you can always dilute it later.

A Grand Meal

Well, a grand meal is being prepared at the CC's place for a cousin (of sorts) whom I haven't seen in ages.

The requirements are vegetarian ("trivial! you call that a challenge?") and kid-friendly ("there's a challenge") but also grand ("now, I double-dare you!")

Watch this space. I will be blogging as I prepare the various items from scratch.

Persistence Pays : A Black Bean Soup story

In times past, the CC lived in another city, and within that city there was a Jamaican restaurant. They made a killer black bean soup.

Now, this being one of those happy, clappy neighborhoods, they made it vegetarian (tradionally, they would've used some ham.)

Oh, how we loved that soup!

So, a friend and I went there three days in a row trying to discover the secret of this soup. Finally, one of the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed waiters noticed, and asked us what was up. So we told him, and he ran into the kitchen. He ran back (being all of 18, and not yet quite jaded) and told us the "important part", and the rest we just kinda figured out ourselves.

Patience is required since this requires some planning.

Ingredients

4 cups dried black beans
1 red onion (finely diced)
2 tomatoes (finely diced)
4 cloves garlic (finely minced)

1/2 scotch bonnet (yep! 1/2, diced)

2 tbsp fresh rosemary (finely chopped)
1 tsp cumin
3 bay leaves
1/2 tsp ground cloves
black pepper (lots)
cilantro (finely minced)

cooking sherry (sweet)

Pre-preparation

Soak the beans in water overnight. Next morning, rinse them, and then soak them in cooking sherry for at least 8 hours. Before cooking, separate the beans from the sherry, but keep the sherry.

Recipe

Fry the onion, and the garlic. Toss in the tomatoes, beans, water to cover, and the spices, and a good fraction of the sherry (depending on how sweet you want it to taste.) Cook for about an hour or more till the beans are cooked through.

Throw in the scotch-bonnets towards the end otherwise it'll make the soup too hot.

The cilantro is for sprinkling right before serving.

A Haitian Meal (Part 4)

Gluttonous, and happy, the CC and his friends sit.

The house smells like tomatoes.

The CC is deliriously happy, and is behaving like the average 7-year old (and the friends are too drunk to care!)

Thank goodness for stone walls, floors, and ceilings!

A Haitian Meal (Part 3)

RICE & RED BEANS

Deceptively simple, and yet utterly beguiling!

Ingredients

2 cups red kidney beans

2 cloves garlic (minced)
4 large shallots (diced)
1 large onion (finely diced)
8 cloves
8 whole peppercorns

4 cups long grained rice (the CC used basmati)

2 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp fresh thyme leaves
salt to taste

Recipe

Soak the beans overnight (or at least 8 hours.)

Pressure cook them with salt till tender but not soft. (This is a tricky assignment!)

Heat the oil, and fry the onions and shallots till soft. Add the garlic, and fry till golden. Add the cloves and peppercorns, and fry till they "plump" slightly.

Add the rice, and fry for roughly a minute. Add the beans, thyme, and salt, and roughly 6 cups of water. Bring to a simmer, and let it cook until the rice is done. (roughly 10 minutes. You may need to add a little bit more water.)

A Haitian Meal (Part 2)

LAMBI

Ingredients

1 lb squid (cut into rings)
Juice of 13 limes
2 habañeros (chopped coarsely)

4 lbs tomatoes (quartered)
1 tbsp tomato paste (homemade, but substitute commercial you wimps!)

1 large red onion (cut into semi-rounds)
2 cloves garlic (minced)
2 small green bell peppers (cut into strips)
2 small red bell peppers (cut into strips)

1 tbsp olive oil
salt and black pepper

Recipe

The recipe really goes in three stages: marination, preparing the tomato puree, and cooking the stuff.

Marinade the lime with the squid and habañeros for at least 4 hours.

Prepare a pot of boiling water. Dunk the tomatoes for 4 minutes or so. Pass them through a fine food mill, and collect the puree. (A deceptively large amount of work is hidden in this rather innocent description.)

WARNING: If you use heirloom tomatoes like I did, they have seeds that passed through the finest grade of my food mill. I had to pass it through a sieve lined with cheese cloth again!

Heat the olive oil, and fry the onions until limp, and translucent, and the garlic, and saute until it turns light golden.

Add the tomato paste, and fry for about a minute. Add the puree, and half of the both of the bell peppers, salt and pepper to taste, and turn the heat as low as possible.

At this point experienced readers should know what to do.

Skim, baby, skim.

Add the rest of the bell peppers, and turn off the heat, and take the pot off the hot stove.

Dump the squid, and a bit of the lime (but not the habañeros) in there.

The last instruction may seem a tad mysterious but it isn't. One of the culinary crimes that this country commits is "overcooking the squid". Squid should not be rubbery! You are dumping it into a hot puree, it will cook by itself. Of course, if you cook with different seafood, the instructions will change.

The idea behind adding half the bell peppers later is to create two textures, one slightly crunchy, and one more "soggy".

Culinary Disasters (a clarification for posterity)

The CC in one fell swoop will raise the quality of your Indian cooking to a new level.

In an Indian cookbook, when they say lemon, they actually mean lime.

The CC would know.

This is a linguistic disaster turned into the Hindenburg of culinary disasters!

A Haitian Meal (Part 1)

A friend of mine has been begging me to write about this forever, but alas destiny intervened, and those that know the CC know that when destiny calls, the CC calls destiny back, and screws destiny to the wall.

However, that is tedious and time consuming.

But summer is here, and so are the good tomatoes. Since this recipe is tomato-heavy, the CC wandered down to the Farmer's Market to get some heirloom tomatoes. Once again, the guy berated me, "You weren't here last week. You expect me to sell these heirloom tomatoes to these proles?"

The recipe is somewhat time consuming but obviously worth it. If you think it's not worth it, we'll settle it like gentlemen, "Chocolate soufflés at ten paces."

I first had this meal at a Haitian restaurant. I desperately wanted to reproduce it so I consulted my two Haitian cookbooks.

They agree on the fundamentals, but differ slightly on the details.

Two things stand out:

[1] Haitian food is heavily influenced by French cooking. Not a big surprise there. The same themes stand out : skimming, rouille, etc.

[2] However, they adapted it to native fish, vegetables, etc. Shouldn't be a big surprise either.

I chatted with the woman who runs the restaurant, and she said while it was traditionally made with conch, it's really adaptable to any kind of seafood, and once you see the recipe, you will see why.

I made it with squid although I plan to make it with conch now that she told me where in New York I can find it.

Tomatoes

Well, summer is here, and so are the good heirloom tomatoes.

The CC wandered down to the farmer's market yesterday morning. Had a chat with the farmer with the good tomatoes who complained that I buy nothing from him but tomatoes (simply not true, he has awesome fresh herbs.)

Well, he's my age, and he's known me for five seasons so in a spirit of exuberant comradery, he yelled out to his siblings and co-workers, and most of New York, "Give this man whatever he wants! He's the only one who knows good tomatoes."

The yuppies on the Upper West Side were surprised, and the CC blushed a deep red.

However, it was supremely gratifying.

I bought ten pounds of tomatoes (yes, you heard that right!), and dinner consisted of tomato soup, a baguette, and a bottle of wine.

Two kinds of food enthusiasts

There are two kinds of "foodies".

The first are the ones who worship at the altar of the Michelin three-star -- white tablecloths, "fine" cuisine (*), and "service".

The second prefer substance over style, and hence, authenticity over presentation. They'll take rickety plastic tables, and naked hanging bulbs if the food kicks ass.

The CC clearly belongs to the latter school (although he will be the first to admit that he has learnt a lot from the former.)

Consider this the first salvo in the "food wars".

(*) You can always disguise crap cuisine with truffles! (And the sad truth about New York is that most "top" chefs do. Sad, really! Truly sad.)

Calamari

A.K.A. "squid", a.k.a. creepy-crawly stuff in the American imagination.

The food critic for Vogue, Jeffrey Steingarten invented what he called the "Calamari Index", as in, how easy is it to get "fried calamari" in a typical American restaurant?

It was obviously tongue-in-cheek, but has turned out to be remarkably prescient.

There's scarcely a bar/pub on either coast (and a lot of in-between) that doesn't feature "fried calamari" on the menu. Note the change of name from "squid" to the much fancier Italian -- "calamari".

Anyway, I highly recommend both of Steingarten's books : The Man Who Ate Everything, and It Must've Been Something I Ate.

For the record, the CC is not getting any money off the links above, and the CC's friends will NOT be getting those books for their respective birthdays/Christmas.

For the first time, ladies and gentlemen (you know who you are!), it's time to prove your dedication to the culinary arts.

A.K.A., pony up the dough, bitches!

Pasta nero

A.K.A. "black" pasta. It's made with squid ink.

It may not sound like much but it's utterly delicious, and served topped with squid in a tomato sauce, the dish is better than sex. (Well, not quite, but you get the idea.)

Anyway, a few months ago the CC was dining at one of the local Italian restaurants on the Upper West Side, and was shocked to see that that the above mentioned dish had disappeared from their menu.

The CC told the waiter, "Why would you do something that stupid?", at which point the waiter ran back to the kitchen, came back, and informed the CC that the chef would be happy to make the above dish for the CC.

The chef delivered, and the CC was happy.

(NOTE: Contrary to popular opinion, I'm actually easy to please. I just have high standards.)

Why the post now?

The CC is happy to report that the chef has seen the error of his ways, and as of last night, features, not one, not two, but THREE dishes with "pasta nero".

Enough said!