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.