Orecchiete with Brussel Sprouts, Anchovies, Preserved Lemons & Hazelnuts

It may be counter-intuitive but winter is the season for citrus fruits. Of course, they all come from warmer climes than New York.

The CC is always reminded to update his batch of preserved lemons because of all the great Meyer lemons that are to be found in the markets.

So it's also time to use up some of them with this truly great recipe. You get umami from three separate sources — the anchovies, preserved lemons and the parmigiano-reggiano.

Also, the lemons are just mellow enough so they don't have that aggressive lemony flavor and yet they still have the all the fragrant citrus notes. This makes the dish easy to pair with wine which is difficult in the presence of aggressively sour flavors.

Lemon, black pepper and rosemary are a magical combination. Lemon and parmigiano-reggiano is also a magical combination.

The citrusy, resinous and umami notes pair perfectly while the hazelnuts act as the crunchy textural counterpoint to the dish.


Ingredients

18 brussel sprouts (halved)

1 onion (sliced into thin rounds)
1 whole preserved lemon (pith removed, cut into thin strips)
2 anchovies
1/2 cup hazelnuts

1 tbsp. finely chopped rosemary

olive oil
salt
black pepper
parmigiano-reggiano

2 cups orecchiete

Recipe

Pre-heat the oven to 350°F.

Roast the hazelnuts for about 12 minutes. They have a tendency to burn so make sure you don't overdo it. Remove from the oven. Process in a food processor until they are broken and uneven but not crushed to a powder.

Toss the halved brussel sprouts into the oven. Roast for about 18-24 minutes until they are just slightly brown but not charred.

After this, you need to time these two steps together:

Cook the pasta until al dente. Roughly 12 minutes.

Meanwhile, heat up some olive oil. Toss in the onions and let them fry for about 6 minutes until languid. Add the anchovies and fry for a bit. Add the brussel sprouts, rosemary, salt and pepper and toss together. Add some pasta water to make a thin sauce.

When the pasta is done, toss everything including the preserved lemons together.

Top with the hazelnuts, parmigiano-reggiano, and more black pepper.

The Oldest Recipe Books

Some of the oldest recipes come from Babylonia ca. 1750 B.C.E., the time of Hammurabi. They are inscribed in Akkadian and are clearly meant for experienced chefs because they are not detailed. Entire steps are skipped. Addition of fat and/or water is assumed. No measurements or timings are given. They assume a common culinary expertise. The recipes are both elaborate and call for rare ingredients which implies that they were meant for the royal palace or the temple. This tablet includes recipes for 25 stews — 21 involving meat and 4 involving vegetables. This one has seven detailed recipes. The second recipe involves "small birds".

Remove the head and feet. Open the body and clean the birds, reserving the gizzards and the pluck. Split the gizzards and clean them. Next rinse the birds and flatten them. Prepare a pot and put birds, gizzards and pluck into it before placing it on the fire.

Put the pot back on the fire. Rinse out a pot with fresh water. Place beaten milk into it and place it on the fire. Take the pot (containing the birds) and drain it. Cut off the inedible parts, then salt the rest, and add them to the vessel with the milk, to which you must add some fat. Also add some rue, which has already been stripped and cleaned. When it has come to a boil, add minced leek, garlic, samidu and onion (but not too much onion).

Rinse crushed grain, then soften it in milk and add to it, as you kneed it, salt, samidu, leeks and garlic along with enough milk and oil so that a soft dough will result which you will expose to the heat of the fire for a moment. Then cut it into two pieces. Take a platter large enough to hold the birds. Place the prepared dough on the bottom of the plate. Be careful that it hangs over the rim of the platter only a little. Place it on top of the oven to cook it. On the dough which has already been seasoned, place the pieces of the birds as well as the gizzards and pluck. Cover it with the bread lid [which has meanwhile been baked] and send it to the table.

(Source: Yale Babylonian Collection.)

Tsukemono (漬物)

This is a world of discussion so a blog post can, at best, just be an introduction to the concept.

The word is widely translated as "pickle" but that is a bit misleading. Pickles, at least in the American concept, refer exclusively to vegetables that are preserved in either a brine or an vinegar bath. (Both of which are acidic in nature.)

Tsukemono would better be translated as "preserved vegetables" or as in the original, "fragrant vegetables". Pickling is encompassed as a side-category.

The world of "preserved vegetables" globally is a little broader in its conception of what it means. The Japanese concept encompasses extremes where things are "lightly pickled" for as little as a few hours to everything that requires pickling for a few months. It also encompasses a style where vegetables are lightly cooked and then steeped in a marinade for a few hours.

That is a very broad range indeed.

The idea is to produce versatile side-dishes as accompaniments to the meal which are complex in nature and yet have an intense flavor either intrinsically or one that is drawn out from the vegetable in question.

The nature of the "preservation" also means that these dishes will last for a few days in the absence of refrigeration which can be rotated by the combinatorial game.

You "preserve" whatever is available fresh in the markets always rotating the ideas and serving different combinations at different meals that way keeping the meal fresh while still not wasting anything and sticking to the seasonal concept.

O Grandma! (Or in this case o-baachan — お祖母ちゃん.)

Them bitches be clever. What else is there to say?

Modern technology has really enhanced the ease of making these pickles particularly with the concept of a "pickle press". It's basically a plastic container with a lid and a screw press which allows you to compress the vegetables below the water line — a key concept in pickling without which they would rapidly spoil via fungal decay.

Japanese-style pickles are classified by what you are pickling with. The choices are multitudinous:

1. Shiozuke (塩漬け) — pickled with salt
2. Misozuke (味噌漬け) — pickled with miso
3. Suzuke (酢漬け) — pickled with vinegar
4. Amasuzuke (甘酢漬け) — pickled with sugar and vinegar
5. Shoyuzuke (醤油漬け) — pickled with soy sauce

There are other serious pickling techniques like nukazuke (糠漬け) but those are much more akin to a discussion of serious sourdough techniques so the CC will skip them for the present because they require a level of commitment that is unlikely to be found among the current readership.

All of the above pickling is taking place in an acidic medium with the explicit (miso) or non-explicit (salt and/or vinegar) introduction of the lactobacillus family of bacteria with which we are deeply symbiotic. They are salt-tolerant and feed on the sugars present either explicitly or implicitly (vegetables) producing lactic acid which is deeply hostile to other microbes and particularly fungi. The result is, you guessed it, preservation.

The simplest pickles are the ones which only have salt. They are typically made with vegetables which will give off a large quantity of water, e.g. cucumbers. You salt the vegetable and compress it and as it gives off water, it both ferments and inundates itself below the water line. After that you pull it out and enjoy its concentrated flavor which has been modified by the bacteria. The solution is solidly rich in bacteria and you'd use it going forward to inoculate your next batch of "pickles".

The Japanese being Japanese, the concept of umami is never very far from the palate. The bacteria naturally produce intense umami flavors but they can be enhanced by the introduction of konbu or mushrooms or both. The result is lip-smackingly delicious.

The others all follow roughly the same principles. The combinations are traditional and the mixing and matching is largely a matter of style matched to the nature of the vegetable.

Hard vegetables (like burdock — ごぼ) are suited to the shoyuzuke style whereas watery vegetables like cucumber fit the simplest shiozuke style.

The CC loves making misozuke which can range from the simple to the hauntingly complex.

There's a world of exploration out here!

Za'atar

This is always a pain-in-the-ass to explain because it's one of those complete linguistic fuckups.

It refers to a specific herb but also to a specific spice mixture. Most of the time it's the latter not the former but it still requires a ton of explanation every single time.

These linguistic faux-pas are not entertaining.

This one is the mixture.

It's terrific baked as a bread topping or even just for dipping with fresh pita bread.

Ingredients

2 tbsp. dried oregano (preferably Mexican oregano)
2 tbsp. sesame seeds (lightly toasted)
1 tbsp. crushed sumac.
1 tbsp. dried marjoram

salt

Recipe

Crush in a mortar and pestle and mix together.

Porn-tastic!

The latest internet trend in South Korea seems to be "dinner porn".

Dinner Porn Is South Korea’s Latest Internet Trend.

Young people in South Korea have a new hobby: It's live-streaming themselves gorging on enormous, sumptuous dinner feasts. Kotaku reports it’s called mok-bang, which is a portmanteau of the Korean words for eating and broadcast, and young folks in South Korea are totally into it. They broadcast their meals (from bunker-looking settings) to thousands of viewers a night. It's a really attractive online performance opportunity for people that eat food, wear clothes most of the time, and don't want to have sex on camera. 

Mok-bang has bred chewing stars. One known as the Diva eats for approximately two hours each night, streaming her meal to thousands of viewers and consuming a huge amount of food, like 30 fried eggs, plus crab legs, or two medium pizzas. She estimates she spends between $3,000 and $6,000 a month on food, and that she's gained 20 pounds since she started mok-bang.

The Pleasure Principle

If you want to understand that most cuisine is not about sustenance but pleasure, you don't have to look further than "spices".

Spices, by their very definition, are basically useless when it comes to sustenance.

However, they have been craved since time immemorial for the singular reason that humans crave novelty. They want things that taste "interesting" and different.

Humans crave novelty.

That should be tattooed onto every single critic's forehead when they discuss painting, music, theater, film or food. Such a monumental failure of imagination in so many different domains that it boggles the mind.

The same-ol', same-ol' didn't work three millennia ago and it won't work now, and given that we have fairly stellar memories connected to our senses, we demand that novelty not only reproduce the best of the past but surpass it.

However not too much novelty.

Take someone who's only eaten American food into a Sichuan restaurant and you are going to have an epic meltdown. The rules are different, the standards of excellence are different, and the entire experience is completely and utterly different. They are simply not relatable in any meaningful way unless a copious amount of explanation is forwarded.

And yet Americans do learn how to love Sichuan food. In fact, many become connoisseurs and go on to being passionate about it even though the foods are not "adjacent".

(This also explains the great difficulty that many people have in understanding the great modernist enterprise in art — literature, music, painting, theater. It's adjacent ironically but not "adjacent enough".)

Cuisines may be far apart and you may have to learn the rules of a new game like an experienced tennis player encountering rugby for the first time but it can be learnt. Different rules, different forms of engagement, and different skills of expertise.

Even the most ardent pork lover (or Ulysses-fan!) is unlikely to fall in love with huǒ bào yāo huā — fire-exploded kidney flowers (火爆腰花) on the first shot but it can be learned which brings us to:

Pleasure is a learned concept.

There is not a child in the world that is born loving red wine, blue cheese or stinky tofu. These are all acquired responses.

A baby will eat exactly one kind of food — anything sweet. Even salty is a bit of a stretch but they will eat it if accompanied by sweet food. These are genetic responses. These were the two safest kinds of food available to humans back when we still foraged for food. Foods with these properties (sweet, salty) are guaranteed to be safe to eat and so we are programmed to like them.

However, we don't stick to that stuff because as pointed out, we crave novelty. In time, we come to appreciate tastes that are astringent, bitter, pungent, metallic, stinky and sour.

The CC has always been wary of people who talk about food like its "just about sustenance". (Hint: Never ever date these people.)

Cuisine is about pleasure and the way to pleasure is through the brain. We learn new things and we experiment based on the solid knowledge of the cooks of millennia past. We are absurdly privileged to live in a world where one can have Turkish for breakfast, French for lunch, and Japanese for dinner.

So step out there whether it's the kitchen or the world and get your own personal slice of the pleasure pie!

New Year's Party

It's that time of the year again and the CC is hosting his annual party again after a hiatus of a year.

Four cheeses from Bobolink Dairy
Baguette
♦
Chilli-topped Parmesan Biscuits
♦
Candied Walnuts with Rosemary and Lavender
Almond-stuffed Medjool Dates sautéed with Lavender & Sea-Salt
♥
Champagne

Happy New Year!

Tools

No discussion of the culinary sciences can be complete without mention of the role of tools.

Tools are the foundation of any well-organized kitchen, and similar to the pantry, they depend on your needs, desires and wallet.

The goal of any tool in the kitchen is to make the chef's life easier. (This is not the general definition of a "tool". For example, weight-lifting tools are there to make your muscles work harder not make things easier.)

What tools you need fundamentally depend on the three things stated already — what you cook, how ambitious of a chef you are, and how much you are willing to spend.

If you live in New York, you have a fourth constraint — the size of your kitchen and storage space.

None of these four are trivial problems.

What you cook changes as you age. It's just a function of learning new things. You think you know who you are and then you fall madly in love one more time. It's the permanent escalator of new things and with that comes the permanent escalation of what you want out of your kitchen.

If you think you are immune to this, why not take a moment to reflect on what you used to make versus what you make today? Nobody, let's repeat, nobody is immune.

Ambition is a easy target to mock. The CC scoffs at the days when he considered stuffed omelettes as "ambitious". And so it goes. We are "learning types'. We learn new things and we can effortlessly knock that off which moves us on to bigger and brighter desires.

Budgets belong to brute-force reality but never before in history has so much equipment been available for so little. It's just a function of technology and productivity. And it will get cheaper!

Space is the real constraint for most people. Ruthless practicality drags us down to the ground even as our florid fantasies take flight. Even then we are "innovative" types and we figure out new ways to squeeze out extra space out of our limited floor space. (Experienced cooks will be nodding their heads here while Johnny-come-lately's might end up scratching their's.)

Good tools are critical to the cooking experience. They make life simple by doing mundane tasks either faster or better. While it is possible to function without them, they are the critical lynchpin that makes things efficient or easy. They make it possible to make gourmet meals at the drop of a pin in the evening when you are tired.

Good tools are like your helpful friends. You know every quirk, every twist, every angle of their very being. You can handle them without even thinking.

Good tools fit effortlessly into your hands. It's the first sign of excellence when you upgrade a tool which is superior to one that you have already owned. You are not just upgrading the tool but upgrading your ambition as well.

The CC has already traumatized countless friends and relatives by exclaiming that their kitchen was "like going camping" so his insensitivity and ruthlessness are well-known and well-traversed territories. In fact, he just prefers to travel with his own tools because that's what experienced people do.

Moving on though.

There are no "ideal tools" and even more importantly no such thing as an "ideal kitchen".

After tons of descriptions of her "ideal kitchen", Elizabeth David confessed that her "real kitchen" fell short. Remember that this is a woman at the top of her profession who could build any kitchen she wanted and in spite of that didn't manage to.

The dream of the perfect tools and the perfect kitchen is a mesmerizing chimera that can never exist for the simple reason that it would require us to be perfectly omniscient about our ever-changing desires and perfectly unchanging against the reality of our ever-learning selves.

It would also require all future technology to come to a perfect standstill.

What's left then is the imperfect present with three constraints — knowledge, ambition and budget.

Japanese Meal

For the celebration of a special friend's birthday dinner.

Bottom left:

Sautéeed scallops in miso-glaze reduction.

Left placement:

Miso Soup.
Asari Gohan (あさりご飯).

Down the center plate:

Fresh wasabi (わさび).
Pickled cucumber.
Pickled jellyfish with hijiki, ginger & cucumber.
Pickled burdock (ごぼ).
Fresh seaweed salad.

Bottom right:

Scallop Sashimi.

Right placement:

Symmetric placement of left.

Kookoo Sabzi

This is not a difficult dish but it requires effort. The CC assumes that everyone understands the difference between the words "difficult" and "effort".

Ideally, this dish needs a buncha Jamie's in the house all shredding the greens to precise effect. In their collective absence, you'll just have to shred them yourselves (or get a personal Jamie to do it — you do have one, don't you?)

The goal is an almost insane amount of fragrant greens all held together by just the barest amount of egg. This is an "inversion" of the frittata which features eggs as the main ingredient. Here the eggs are just there to hold everything together and they are cooked to a dark brown. The greens, barberries and nuts are the stars not the eggs. We are clear on this concept, aren't we?

It's best served with a sweetish side salad — Green on Green — there's a hit album in here!


Ingredients

All the cup measurements are after the chopping. This means that, yes, there's almost an insane amount of greens but we were clear on that, right?

2 cups Italian parsley (finely chopped)
2 cups dill (finely chopped)
2 cups chives (finely chopped)
1 cup cilantro (finely chopped)
1 cup mint (finely chopped)

4 tbsp. dried fenugreek

1/2 cup.barberries (zereshk)
1/2 cup. walnuts (chopped)

2 tbsp. flour
2 eggs — keep an extra egg or two around.

saffron
milk

salt
black pepper

Recipe

Note: Most recipes online call for turmeric not saffron because the latter is very expensive. However, there is no substitute. Use the real thing. This is for the betterment of your soul.

(The recipe was traditionally served at Nowroz — the New Years' Day because of the obvious metaphor between greens and prosperity.)

Preheat the broiler.

Heat the milk gently. A microwave works great as long as you don't let the milk spill over. Dissolve the saffron in the milk.

Beat the eggs with the flour, saffron, milk, salt and pepper. Add all the greens.

The CC has found it practical to add an extra egg if the mixture looks too stiff. It's very hard to predict this given the variability in the moisture of the greens and the size of the eggs. The mixture should barely hold together.

In a skillet, heat up some oil at medium-high heat. Add the mixture to the pan and cover. Cook for about 12-16 minutes.

At this point you can either flip the omelette or just put it in the under the broiler like the CC does. The top will turn beautifully golden and green.

Let it sit for about 5 minutes. (Yes, this matters and if you don't know why then you really need to read this.)

Slice and serve.

The Flair Factor

Have you ever said to yourself, "That person over there is a great cook." without tasting a single morsel?

A great cook bears the unmistakable stamp of a balance between extreme fussiness and extreme flexibility. These are the absolute flying banner heralds of a confident and experienced cook.

No thyme at the market, no problem. We'll just toss in some sage leaves. Missing some mirin, no problem. We'll add some sugar and some saké.

No eggplants, non-negotiable! We'll switch to a different dish instead.

No casserole, no problem. We'll just roast in this pan over there. No mortar and pestle, no problem. We'll just crush it in a different way.

Thirteen ingredients and seventeen steps, non-negotiable! Just do them in the order and stop fidgeting, for cryin' out loud.

If this sounds familiar then you know somebody like that already.

It is this intense focus and yet seemingly effortless adaptability that makes cooking seem so difficult to those not initiated into the process.

What does "sautée for a short time" mean? What constitutes "short" as opposed to "long"?

Two or three eggs. When would you pick two as opposed to three?

Salt to taste. What happens if it's raw meat and you can't taste it?

None of this makes any sense to an amateur who has yet to understand the internal logic that makes it all tick. However, like all things it's based in the only thing that makes any sense — experience and an intellectually-considered experience at that.

Cooking requires an adaptability to a changing landscape. No two ingredients that you buy are going to be the same or even similar. Things change with the seasons and much more importantly, you never dip into the same pool twice as a person because your very being is changing as you evolve in your experience. You are learning as you go along.

This is not exclusive to cooking.

Experienced musicians behave the same way. So do engineers. So do costume designers for the theater. As do the very best military generals and the finest surgeons.

This is a general characteristic of excellence in any field that requires adaptability based on field conditions that are variable and changing.

There is only one way to get from here to there. As the saying goes, the way to Carnegie Hall is "Practice, practice, practice."

It's rooted in experience but what matters is intellectual richness. The more you push yourself outside your comfort zone and grab new experiences, the richer you are for it. Even if you have absolutely no interest in Japanese cuisine, understanding its principles will enrich the flair with which you make Italian food. That's because you bring a brand new set of skills to the table (sic).

Great cooks are nerdy, by definition. They are continuously reading books to learn what they don't know yet. Almost every single one reads books about food in bed.

And paranoid. They always think they have missed something even though they have most likely not.

And intellectually curious. They revisit an old favorite that they could make in their sleep but they analyze it as if they had never seen it before in their lives to bring their new experiences to bear on it.

Naturally the goal of it all, when all is considered and done, is to don your ascot and say to your guests in a nonchalant manner, "Oh, that's just something I threw together."

That would be the flair part.

Lamb Tagine with Apricots, Dates & Almonds (Mrouzia)

Let's face it, chez CC, we are crazy but not insane. There is a massive difference. We recognize the limits of our ambition.

This dish is a classic of Moroccan cooking and it is great in winter. It needs to be made in a tagine ideally. The lamb is organic, the almonds were peeled by hand, the dates are authentic. The pita, however, at the right comes from Astoria. As we said, we're crazy but not insane. We can't do everything.

This is a rich winter dish. It takes time, effort and excellence of ingredients. Ironically, it's not hard. You throw everything into the tagine and then the dish makes itself while you enjoy a soothing drink.

It's medieval-ness should be obvious. The combination of meat and nuts, sweet and savory in the same dish gives it away on the first reading.

Ingredients

1 lb lamb (cut into chunks)
1 large carrot (cut into large chunks)

1 onion (diced fine)
2 cloves garlic (minced)

1/3 tsp. dried ginger
1 stick cinnamon
2 tbsp. ras el hanout

1/3 cup blanched almonds
1/3 cup dates (pitted and quartered)
1/3 cup dried apricots

6 cups water

butter

pinch of saffron
salt
pepper

Recipe

In a tagine, heat up some butter and fry the onions and garlic. Add the lamb but fry it just for a minute. Add everything except the saffron and let cook at a low heat until tender (roughly 40 minutes.)

Add the saffron. Stir and serve.

Black Salt (Kala Namak)

There are many things in life that are acquired tastes.

Nobody was ever born liking beer (bitter because of the hops) or liking either red wine or tea (astringent and bitter because of the tannins.) Every culture has a characteristic item (or ten) that you are going to have to come to terms with if you really want to enjoy the food.

Japanese food has natto. Indian food has kala namak.

(Chinese has all the gristly bits but that's for a different post.)

Kala namak is just salt which contains a number of impurities including greigite (Fe₃S₄) and sodium sulfate (Na₂SO₄.)

It was traditionally fired in a kiln with charcoal but no air and the reductive process created multiple sulfides which gave it the characteristic smell,. The greigite gives it the characteristic black/violet color (which changes to mauve when ground up.)

The CC cannot sugar-coat this part. It smells like rotten eggs or the sewer. We associate this smell with dirt and rottenness because of the hydrogen sulfide produced by the salt in the presence of air. (You may remember the smell of hydrogen sulfide from your chemistry class.)

However, a vast number of Indian recipes would simply be incomplete without this ingredient. It forms a crucial lynchpin in the sweet-savory-spicy-salty spectrum. The smell and sour taste is inimitable.

The CC has increasingly seen chefs use it in restaurants. Most notable was as a topping on a foie gras terrine. The smell was unmistakable and the salt cut through the fat perfectly as was intended.

Breakfast for Twelve

How do you make breakfast for a horde of hungry hungover guests? Especially if you happen to be hungover yourself?

The tricks are as simple as time. Everything needs to be simple except for the piping hot coffee which should be manageable even by the borderline criminally insane.

It even works for the non-hungry non-hungover times when you are just feeling a bit lazy. Quick pop in the oven and this stuff is ready before the animals start pawing at the breakfast table!


Cheesy "Shirred" Eggs with Tomato Paste

(Everything here is for one unit so you can just multiply by the number of servings. It scales effortlessly.)

Ingredients

1 oven-proof ramekin

1/4 dried-out bread slice
2 tbsp. tomato sauce

1/4 cup shaved blue-cheese
1/4 cup shaved parmigiano-reggiano

finely minced herbs (rosemary, oregano, sage)

2 eggs
salt
black pepper

Recipe

Everything in this recipe is about the assembly as would be logical for something that needs to scale.

Preheat the oven to 350°F.

Put the bread at the bottom of the ramekin. Top with the tomato sauce.

Mix the cheeses, herbs, eggs, salt and pepper. Whip till finely mixed. Top the ramekin with the mixture.

Put in the oven for 12-15 minutes. You will need to check at the 12-minute mark. The CC's oven tends to run a little cooler so it takes a little longer. Yours will be different by definition. So just check and you can adjust the last few minutes. The top should swell noticeably like a soufflé and be golden.

Smashed Chickpea Sandwich

The CC is not normally into celebrity chef-style recipes but this one is absolutely smashing.

It's from Tom Colicchio's 'wichcraft, and it's an absolute masterpiece in its simplicity, excellence and the fact that it can be made ahead of time.

The original is literally soaking in olive oil but you can go easy on that. However, this is the place to use your finest not the generic stuff. Incidentally, the filling works fine just by itself. It's something you can just eat from the container all day long.

Bookmark this one. The CC personally guarantees that it will rock your world!


Ingredients

2 cups cooked chickpeas
1/2 cup black olives (thinly sliced)
1 red onion (finely diced)
1/2 cup parsley (finely minced)

lemon zest (from 1 lemon)
juice from the same lemon

1/3 cup olive oil (your finest!)
salt
black pepper

Recipe

Smash the cooked chickpeas with a potato masher. You want a broken mixture not a puree.

Make a vinaigrette out of the olive oil and lemon. Mix everything together. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

Colored Cauliflowers

Recently more and more of the colored cauliflowers have started showing up at the farmers' market so the CC started doing some research on them. They are genetically-modified cauliflowers.

The CC is not afraid of the genetic modification because it has been going on forever. The "organic granolas" put scare-quotes around the "genetic" part but it's part of our legacy. We've been doing this since the birth of agriculture. Cross-breeding to get sweeter varieties or more hardy ones or ones that are more resistant to various pests and fungi.

Carrots were not originally "orange". They were cultivated specifically to appeal to the Dutch House of Orange and in return they became the "Royal Vegetable". They were also markedly sweeter which explains why they became the dominant variety.


The story of the colored cauliflowers is as varied as their colors:

The orange cauliflower was a genetic mutant first found in Canada in 1970. It was crossbred using conventional cross-breeding techniques at Cornell University until it now finds its way into the mainstream. The orange comes from beta-carotene — the same compound that gives carrots its characteristic color and which is absolutely necessary for humans to produce Vitamin A.

The purple cauliflower was a similar mutant found in Denmark in the 1980's. Same idea of cross-breeding. The purple comes from anthocyanins (also found in raspberries, blueberries, grapes, red wine, olives.) They are water soluble so if you want to preserve the color, you will need to gently roast it not boil it or steam it. It has a very characteristic smell when you cut into it and it's a lot milder in flavor than the others.

The green one is a cross-breed between broccoli and cauliflower. There is also the Romanesco cauliflower but that's a different breed.

A classic recipe is presented for your benefit.

Pasta with Cauliflower, Anchovies, Raisins, Pine Nuts & Saffron

Ingredients

2 cups rigatoni (or penne.)

1 head cauliflower (separated into medium-sized florets)
1 large red onion (chopped)
1/2 cup pine nuts
1/2 cup raisins
6 anchovies (preferably salt-cured)
2 tbsp tomato paste
1 tsp saffron

olive oil

sea salt
black pepper

1/3 cup grated parmigiano-reggiano

breadcrumbs


Recipe

Toast the breadcrumbs and set aside. Toast the pine nuts until golden. Be careful not to burn them. Set aside.

Heat an oven to 400°F and roast the cauliflower florets for 15 minutes.

Heat the olive oil at medium heat. When shimmering, add the onions and fry for a further 7-9 minutes. Add the tomato paste, and the anchovies and fry. The anchovies will "dissolve" as they fry. Add a cup of water, the raisins, sea salt, and black pepper, and let cook at low heat.

Meanwhile make the pasta until al dente. Drain.

The cauliflower mixture should be just slightly on the wet side. If dry, add some more water.

Toss in the saffron, cauliflowers and the pasta, and mix thoroughly.

Serve with the parmesan and roasted breadcrumbs on top with extra black pepper to taste.

The Pantry

The secret to success in the kitchen is to have a well-stocked pantry.

Pantries come in all sizes from dorm-sized entities to ones more resembling the running of a small-sized military operation so it is necessary to understand where you lie on this scale.

There are three variables at play — method, money and madness. Let's examine them in reverse order because that would be the methodical thing to do.

Philosophers through history have pointed out with tedious and wearisome regularity that madness is relative. What matters is the intensity of your cooking habit, the regularity of company showing up to partake, and the depths of your obsession. The CC is pretty clear that on a scale of 1 to 10, his dial goes all the way up to 11 (but that was obvious, right?)

Money is a subtle point and one not routinely discussed in polite company. You do not have to be rich to have a large pantry (but it helps.) What is more important that you have a sufficient amount that you can juggle a complex operation and keep renewing ingredients as they run out which they will. It helps if you live in New York or London because of the insanely well-stocked ethnic markets which are dirt-cheap but the Internet allows you to source far and wide with consummate ease at this point.

(On a historical digressive note, this is something that an upper-class Englishman could do with consummate ease pre-World War I — source top-quality ingredients from across the world — he used the telephone. The First World War destroyed the aristocracy and their elite tastes and the Depression and the Second World War laid utter waste to it. It's taken us 60 years to get back to where some were albeit with a much larger degree of democratization.)

Method, of course, is the magic that mediates between money and madness. Here tastes differ so you will have to define it for yourself. It matters what cuisines you routinely cook. The CC's tastes run to French, Italian, Indian, Japanese and Thai (in alphabetical order) with liberal elements of Greek, Mexican, Persian and Sichuan thrown into the mix but yours might differ.

De gustibus non est disputandum. (in this case, quite literally!)

The list conceals more than it reveals. Each of the first three (French, Italian, Indian) constitute of tons of regions with a variety of ingredients to juggle and this requires a level of complexity that is quite deceiving when it comes down to one sentence.

So you need to source your "stuff", stock it regularly, juggle it all correctly to make sure nothing gets wasted or destroyed and cook daily to enjoy it all!

Thanksgiving

Champagne with Pomegranates
♥ Bruschetta with Spicy Roasted Squash, Onion Jam & Blue Cheese ♣ Duck Confit with Spicy Pickled Raisins & Pomegranate Seeds
Frisée Salad
Duck-fat Roasted Potatoes with Rosemary
♦
Almond-stuffed Dates with Rosemary & fleur de sel
♠
Chocolate

Let's Bolt Out of Here

Have you ever had a lettuce and it was slightly bitter?

It's been "bolting".

No, the CC is not making this term up. It seems to be standard terminology in the horticultural world.

Bolting is the plants' attempt to produce seeds, flower and reproduce.

Once plants have bolted, there's no going back because it's just a fact that they just want to flower and reproduce whereas we want to eat them. They turn bitter because it's a first-line defense against predators including humans who most certainly are exactly that.

There's a general tendency of humans to buy larger produce. More bang for the unit buck and all that but you'd be better served to pick smaller varieties that haven't yet bolted out of town.

Plating Tricks

One of the more clever tricks that a talented home cook can learn from chefs is the idea of layering things on a plate beneath the main dish.

It's easy enough to sprinkle stuff on top but doing so beneath where it lies invisible involves a little bit of understanding. This is a technique that can only work for dishes that are more or less constructed in the French manner. It wouldn't work for Chinese cooking, for example, which has an entirely different aesthetic in terms of serving.

When we eat something, we inevitably press down (knives + forks) or we scrape (spoons). Either way you are literally touching and pressing down against the bottom of your plate. Compare with chopsticks where you lift away from the plate.

The idea then is that you can subtly enhance the flavor in ways that are entirely unobvious.

For example, you can put a dry powder at the bottom of a plate on which you serve a salad. The powder if suitably dry and crunchy will not only adhere to the greens as the fork presses down but hit the tongue first because of the way the salad is eaten. You will get a "hit" of a crunchy nature that constrasts with the salad.

A similar related idea is that of a gastrique served beneath meat and seafood dishes. It's a sweet-sour reduction that will adhere to the meat as you cut it. (Pressure on the fork; knife does the work.)

It's theatrical magic but entirely simple once you understand the trick that makes it tick. It's a pretty general concept only limited by your imagination. Two ideas are presented below for your delectation.

Almond Breadcrumbs

Ingredients

12 blanched almonds
1/3 cup breadcrumbs
salt

Recipe

Roast the almonds in the oven at 350°F for about 12 minutes. Make sure they don't burn. Chop fine.

Process the almonds, breadcrumbs and salt to a fine powder in a coffee grinder or a food processor.

Orange Gastrique

Ingredients

1 cup orange juice
2 tbsp. vinegar
salt

Recipe

Combine and reduce at medium high heat until thickened. Be careful that it doesn't burn.