Weeknight Cooking: California Salad

With more limited time to cook these days and an upcoming trip to San Francisco on the horizon, the mind has a tendency to wander sometimes quickly over the pictures of recipes to prepare and turns them Californian.  To midwesterner, California cuisine is nearly as otherworldly to the imagination as considering French.  Like Mediterranean, Californian has evolved from regional roots; as the French style gathers in its rustic towns agriculture from the likes of the Pyrenees, and cheese from its lowland pastures, San Francisco seeks out its local sustenance from the native agriculture up the bay at Point Reyes, and counts on those cows to produce world class dairy.  The parallels continue on, seafood from a cool shore, sunshine from a generous sun, and as many invested chefs as there are restaurants.  We would like to visit Tyler Florences Wayfare Tavern and see how his powerful style

translates from cookbook genius to the real thing.  We could see a salad like the Smoky Sea Scallops with Avocado-corn Salsa showing up on the menu – a recipe I just tried last night for preparation – a great admixture of things that could become Californian with a few adjustments.  The picture in the cookbook shows blackened scallop, avocado, corn and tomato.  The combination looks good, so why not take inspiration from the components and put the salad together in a way that might be successful?  Although my preparation was simplified, if I were to Californianize I would take fresh shrimp, rub them with a Mediterranean concoction of spices, sprinkle with lime juice, and stick them

over a running flame on a beach fire as the seagulls squawked in jealousy above.  I take several handpicked cobs of corn from  the Point Reyes Pierce Farm, open the shucks, lace them Cowgirl Creamery Mt. Tam, same spices, maybe a touch of paprika, and let them blacken over the same fire

then cut down their sides leaving the kernel dice hot over the plate.  Now the sand plovers are squawking in unison as they comb the beach and the tide is slowly rising up over the lip of the berm of the sand.  Avocado, hand picked from Morro Bay Avocados, diced and also slightly dripped with lime juice, spread out over the plate for texture and substance.  Many other ingredients could be added over the top at this point, to further Californiafy, (garlic, some heat with peppers, cilantro) but I would choose a homemade batch of buttermilk dressing from the Point Reyes Creamery, made of crumbled

blue cheese, sea salt, pepper, chives, sour cream, buttermilk from the local herd, a pinch of vinegar.  By the now the Pelicans have smelled the aroma and are circling with very wide beaks above awaiting our departure so that they may find their own leftover California ingredients.  It would be time at this point to douse the fire, pack the beach picnic and gently lay the utensils down into the floor of the rowboat and oar off around the still calm spit into the mouth of the Estero and glide on into Nick's Cove where time has stopped at 1930.

French A-Z
Daube Provencal

"Daubes were traditionally cooked in a covered urn-shaped pot called a daubiere. The pot was placed in the fireplace – away from direct flame – on a bed of hot embers, with more embers piled into the indentations in the lid. The result? Even heat from above and below that gently simmered the stew.  So oven braising is not only more effective than a stovetop simmering but also more authentic."





At some point, the very idea of rustique in Provencal style cooking has to have something to do with the indented lid of an old daube pot set into the embers of a cottage fireplace...as described above. The very smell that emanates from the description of the old farm recipe of Daube Provencal, cooked as it was for multiple hours in order for the roast to break down properly, is tempting just to think about.  The tested and suggested version from Cook's Illustrated: All-Time Best French Recipes, wonderfully places its readers inside the kitchens of old.

The testers in the kitchen suggest a particular way to handle the meat so to maximize this eventual rusticity: "Our choice of meat for all stews is cut from the chuck, or shoulder, which is notoriously tough (the meat softens nicely during long, slow cooking) but also flavorful..."  The right stock of meat decided on, the author goes on to mention that all authentic stews tend to have a certain flavor profile that elevates them to Provencal, some with a particular wine or beer, but for the Daube it is the dynamic mixture of such items as dried mushrooms, Nicoise olives and later, at the very end of the cooking of the dish, an addition of canned whole peeled tomatoes for brightness.

One of the ingredients that truly stands out for this particular 'test,' are Ortiz Oil Packed Anchovies, which tasters, although apprehensive in the beginning, began to praise "the rich, earthy flavors of the dish and noticed a nutty – not fishy – complexity that had been missing without them."  The second exclusive ingredient added to the Daube test was a temporary submersion of salt pork, cured (but not smoked) pork belly gives the stew richness of flavor.  "In any case, the salt pork was added in a single piece that I removed and discarded just before serving, once the pork had given up its flavor to the stew."

Add one bottle of a good red cooking wine over the vegetables, meat and anchovies and let simmer stovetop for two and a half to 3 hours and the result is a modified version of beef stew that is meant to re-perfect some old techniques and to create a dish that is memorably regionally distinct.  The point with Provencal cooking, it seems, is to create dishes that are formed by the local produce and meats available and cooked in such a way that instills patience for the very process of rustic cooking.  For the discerning eater, that patience almost always translates to dynamic flavors and textures that truly would be impossible to duplicate in any shorter, less considerate mode of cooking.  When the bites out of the pot begin to taste like the surrounding earth, then you know you are eating history right out of the spoon.

French A-Z:
Coq Au Vin

"Woe to the child who tried to pass off a substitute hen from the one Maman wanted! Inevitably, after a morning of scrambling up haystacks or crawling through the woodpile to find the hiding place, the old hen was caught and brought to her just reward."
– Monique Hooker, from Cooking with the Seasons







Monique Hooker tells us in the introduction to her wonderfully personal Cooking with Seasons that "I learned early and well that the hand of the seasonal cook is the link between the good earth and family.  The important lesson was taught to me while I was growing up on our family's farm in Brittany.  There, my mother's daily call of 'table!' was a welcome summons to meals celebrating the bounty of each season."  Each spring Monique and her siblings would be asked to track down a chosen hen, which they did, and their just reward "came the next day, as a pot of coq au vin proudly took center

stage on the dinner table."  As I tried her particular recipe (have tried at least two others), it struck me that the most obvious thing in the world is true about this symbolically French recipe named "chicken in wine" – be sure to pick a proper red cooking wine!  Although the recipe does simply call for 4 cups of red wine, the type I chose to execute the dish with, Cupcake Red Velvet,  did not work as intended.

 
The rest of the ingredients were quite beautiful and the chicken itself turned out tender and complex to taste.  It calls for 4 cloves of garlic, peeled and crushed, 1 leek trimmed and coarsely chopped, 1/2 pound mushrooms quartered, diced onion, and one half an onion studded with 4 cloves. Place a 3-lb chicken (in 8 pieces) in a pan with these ingredients, leaf and thyme, the bottle of wine and let sit in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours or overnight.  Some of the next steps will be to pull out the chicken from marinade, pat dry, brown the chicken on both sides, and eventually add some flour back into the pot with all the ingredients for thickening and stir in the wine marinade plus enough chicken stock to cover the chicken and simmer for at least an hour.  This process, as chef Hooker so wonderfully conveys, reveals an earthy kitchen aroma virtually unrivaled.  However, and this is a big however....choose the correct red wine!  Elizabeth David, the virtuoso French culinary writer, recommends in her own recipe for Coq Au Vin French Provincial Cooking, a Burgundy or Beaujolais red.  I used what I thought might be appropriate but the Cupcake, it turned out, was far too purple, of all things.  A combination of Zinfandel, Merlot, and Petite Sirah, the Red Velvet, although a considerably adorable red to sip, was not a well chosen cooking wine, which I should have known.  The chicken, yanked out of the pot of more than pleasant French

vegetable, was visibly purple to the skin – it had similarly bizarre features as we see pictures of a human heart!  We peeled the skin away and, not necessarily to our surprise, the interior of the chicken was the kind of tender that cooks dream of, juicy, not in the least over done, moist and yes, tasting of leek, clove, a pinch of bay, etc.  Would I love to make this recipe again with a different red?  Yes.  And I will, yet I will remember that it is the heat and the marinade that makes a chicken, not its color.

Basque Chicken Stew

"Poultry is for the cook what canvas is for the painter."
–Brillat-Savarin











It is written by the great Joel Robuchon that basquaise food refers to "any dish combining local

country ham, tomatoes and peppers...It is the peppers that give their local name pipers to the specialty – the piperade – a tradition that cannot be separated from that of the Espelette pepper, which is the cornerstone of local cuisine."

Basque Chicken Stew

And so, armed with even this small morsel of culinary history, it was fun to tinker for the first time with a few of the traditional ingredients of the French Basque region – peppers, tomatoes, and bacon (ham), to create an aroma and taste that would come to transport the cooking imagination.  Two likewise traditional cooking techniques were asked for in this recipe.  The first is the roasting of the peppers before cut into long slices, a process, it is described, that heightens the natural sweetness and

juicy texture inherent.  Red peppers are nearly completely transformed in the process of cooking, going from its raw state – a sort of crisp astringency – to a state of soft subtle flavor. The other technique is the peeling and seeding of ripe tomatoes, which allows for the tenderest and juiciest cores to be used.  Once bacon is added to this essential duo of the recipe, the heavier proteins follow, yet the sweet, the

smoky, and the acid is firmly established and comes to coat both the chicken pieces and potatoes as they tender.  The recipe asks that the onion and bacon fat begin the cooking process of quartered potatoes, adding parsely, thyme and a bay leaf for the aromatics, then add your variety of chicken pieces, some flour for thickening, white wine and chicken stock, preparing the stew for its fairly short simmer on the burner for somewhere around 25 minutes, flipping the chicken, and finishing with another 20 minutes at least.  As the chicken and potatoes soften and cook, the under contents also soften turning this dish to a near soup, yet saved from that form by the addition of liquid.

As you watch, a learning experience is being acquired.  Just as you come to learn how soup forms its many kinds of bases depending upon stocks and waters, a stew, it seems, has its own criteria of thicker textures and certainly more full portions of meat and in this case potatoes, but none the less also maintains enough liquid form to elevate itself from a standard portioned meal.  As you picture the terrain of the Basque country, perhaps overlooking the Bay of Biscay, one can easily imagine settling in at a bistro table somewhere along the countryside enjoying a stew that smells and tastes like the farmhouse kitchens surrounding.  

Alsace, France

"My choice of subjects has been guided by a set of simple questions.  Does the subject interest me?  Does it amuse me? Is there an aspect of it that is not well known?  It's the technique of the magpie, hopping from one promising distraction to another, and it has the great advantage of being virtually all-inclusive."
– from Peter Mayle's Provence A-Z







The old writerly adage "write what you know" is as good of advice to a young want-to-be writer as there is.  Scan back through the vast images and dramatic twists of childhood and turn those episodes into something you can really sink your pen into.  Drifting upward upon middle-age, however, those same episodes, one hopes to some degree, lose some of their initial bluster.  The past becomes history, the future, well, we'll see, but let's do our best.  Regardless, there is always the prospect of the wish if one chooses to invest a bit of imagination in the direction of something that neither has, or more than likely, will ever exist.  If I am reading the wonderful culinary history French Regional Food by Joel Robuchon, for example, and come across the chapter covering the administrative region of Alsace, and look on over to the facing page at the wonderfully clear photography of the Christmas Market at Place

Colmar, Christmas Market at Place des Dominicains

des Dominicans, or a snapshot of a brewer at the microbrew pub Les Brasseurs in Strasbourg, well, I might wish to go there.  But will I?  The culinary arts are always at least two things at once: first, the very plate of food and the drink which the cook has just pleasurably created and will be consumed in moments; and second, the more abstract portion of culinary history – the intention and accident of food.

Les Brasseurs, Strasbourg

As hard as modern cultures have tried escape their culinary regionality via the consumption of long distance products at the grocery store or the vast network of chain food, once one settles down for a moment, takes a deep breath, and comes to grips with the beauty of real food resources, it all comes back to us once again – we are where we eat as much as what we eat.  Only the skittish mind of the digi-holic will continue to try to escape his or her history forever; it is a little like taking a warm bath and denying you are in water.  All of this is to say that a little re-investment in food history might take some slight prodding from a dream, a wish, or a bucket list as much as anything else.  As for my list, then, I could visualize such trip that would include an evening stroll in among the crowded streets of Colmar's Christmas Market, an evening sipping a micro pilsner at Les Brasseurs in Strasbourg, maybe a slight touch of Eau de Noix (local walnut liqueur) as a nightcap, and somewhere in between an order of Pates d'Alsace, a pasta made with fresh eggs. "The very first cookbook to be published in Alsace in 1507 already referred to Wasser Strieble, a liquid batter from which more or less thick fragments of pasta dough are dropped into boiling water.  At the end of the 17th c., Abbot Buchinger provided a recipe for Alsatian pasta that is still used today....In 1840, the first pasta business opened near

Colmar...after 1870, hundreds of bakers were making egg pasta...Today, only two companies produce this pasta."

Pork Tonnato

There are as many possible pitfalls as hopes or ambitions in cooking Mediterranean cuisine for family.  The Pork Tonnato recipe, out of the fine Food Network Magazine cookbook, looked

very graceful over on the accompanying page, pork medallions scattered over by capers, what looked like a rich hollandaise of sorts, and a pile of arugula for roughage.  A few things almost always come up when trying to reproduce the glossy pics however.  In this case, there were not available at the grocery store non-marinated pork tenderloins.  It should be said directly that our store has always carried excellent deli pork loins, usually soaked tastefully by cherry or, in the case of the loin I had to choose, apple.  Set on the grill with nothing more than olive oil for moisture and non-stick, these loins rarely disappoint.  But, as I hadn't completely grasped the concept of the full tonnato recipe, I wondered if other ingredients might not 'jive' with the apple?  Up until the very beginning of the cooking process (all the way until taste time to be exact), I would not know if the pork, the very showcase of the dish, would work.  I moved my mental finger over the rest of the tonnato (Italian for serving with tuna) list.  Looking at the pic, the tuna is not quite visible, which is surprising because the recipe eventually calls for 5 oz tuna packed in olive oil, drained, to drape over the two loins in the skillet.  By the end, before cutting into medallions, the tuna and the capers formed a very significant row of texture over the top of the

loin, and the combined smells were accordingly distinct.  But this is getting too far ahead: this wonderful little Mediterranean recipe begins with a fine base of two hard-chopped shallots, hard-chopped carrots, four fresh basil leaves (how aromatic!), and then doused to settle by a cup of white wine (chardonnay is what we had on hand).  The fully browned loin sat over the top of this mixture for approximately another 20 minutes until the heat reached at least one hundred and fifty degrees, the tuna and capers absorbing the wine and vegetable steam, the pork loin building up its own internal juices.  The rest of the recipe consisted essentially of a lemon infused mayonnaise which was to be dolloped over the pork and a bed of arugula.  I had previously decided to boil some asparagus – still a

nice fresh green even in late September – and was to create a simple hollandaise packet to go over.  I decided that the hollandaise might substitute just fine for the mayo.  I cut what looked like the perfectly cooked loin into medallions, not quite as thin as what was pictured, but instead closer to an inch and half thick, a personal preference.  Placed them vertically on the plate (tuna still on top), ladled some of the shallot, carrot, wine sauce over, tossed arugula and asparagus down, and then drizzled the entirety with hollandaise.  At this moment, the dish looked considerably like the book pic; the heat was still nicely in the loin; the aromas clean, some sweet, some acid; and the additional greens looking, honestly, quite healthy.  Serving only myself the dish would have been a self-shoulder slapper: I liked the look, I liked the smell, I knew the pork was done well.  But what about the apple infused pork commingling with tuna, capers, a dash of lemon...and hollandaise?

Could this pass the common family critic?  The beauty of cooking for family and children is that there is always a hungry audience; the difficulty is that the subtleties of intention found throughout any given recipe are rarely if ever as important to them.  Either the bites work and are edible or they are not. A cleaned plate versus smashed-up piles food on plate will always indicate whether you have pushed over to the other side of gourmet a bit too far, or held in tight to the notion of sheer edibility.  Simple elegance seems to be a very worthwhile fine-line to shoot for as the aspiring home cook.  In this, the fantasy of cooking fine meals is accomplished, yet the result is enjoyed, even sometimes commented on as "something I never would have thought of, but good."  The loin was tremendous.  The apple had simmered down and become the essence of the tonnato ingredients.  The hollandaise pulled each of the components together.  It was devoured in minutes.

Chicken Tagine with Sweet Potatoes and Prunes

"Here in London it is an effort of will to believe in the existence of such a place at all.  But now and again the vision of golden tiles on a round southern roof, or of some warm, stony, herb-scented hillside will rise out of my kitchen pots with the smell of a piece of orange peel scenting a beef stew.  The picture flickers into focus again."  – Elizabeth David, on Provence






The gist of this blog is about the imaginative transportation from one place to another via the process of cooking.  David, above, in her classic the Cookery of the French Provinces, describes the "country to which I am always returning, next week, next year, any day now, as soon as I can get on to a train."  Although I have visited France twice myself, once to Provence, primarily in and around Nice, Mougin, and Aix, I do not have any more specific plans to return than common hope.  And so, as I begin to move through recipes such as Dorie Greenspan's 'chicken tagine,' the cooking becomes, I will quickly admit, partially about the  meal that I hope will result, but partially about the "vision of golden tiles on a round southern roof...some warm, stony, herb-scented hillside."

There's no real way for the artistic person to ever free from the dilemma of art for self versus art for others. Cooking just happens to be, I believe, the greatest medium we have for doing both simultaneously, and for which both gain... if the cooking is good.  I like to try to ensure both.

This meal is particularly 'exotic,' as Greenspan describes. Yet warm, soft and comforting.  I liked the approach to the softening of the white onions as step one: slicing two, and letting them essentially

slowly break down for half an hour on low heat at the bottom of the 'tagine,' or in my case a good sized dutch.  This would then create the steam base for the assembly of the rest of the meal, creating a wonderful bottom-to-top cooking sequence which permeated the chicken pieces and finally up to the top layer where one pound of sweet potatoes perfectly cooked (no stirring, or the 2-inch pieces, too soft by the end, would break to mush).  The onions, chicken, and potatoes then were the solid layers; what was sprinkled or poured in between served as the pique for the imaginative transportation to the

Mediterranean.  Two large pinches of saffron were added, as well a star anise, a touch of cayenne, a

a pinch of cinnamon, bay leaf, a touch of honey, and 12 prunes.  Just as Greenspan predicts, once the entire tagine cooks (45 minutes at a slight bubble), and the chicken pieces are draped by the onion, potatoes and juices, it becomes quite an adventure in discovery to figure out whether you are entering into a bite of sweet (especially prune and honey) or of earthy spice (especially the hay-like saffron and edge on the cinnamon).  What you do know is that by the time all of this ventilates up to the potatoes, they have captured a North African, Southern French region.  The afternoon sun outside shines a little bit brighter; the family eaters raise their chin muscles, nod in the affirmative, and dive back down into the plate.