TW and I just returned from a trip of Chicago. We had very fond memories of our first trip there, to visit Alinea with Danielle and Dave, so we decided to come a bit early to our friend’s wedding and to leave a bit late and to spend some time exploring the city. We went to Blackbird, and had our breakfasts Intelligentsia cafes, and had cheap sandwiches and hot dogs for lunch, and I think we have a new model for eating in a city we visit - good coffee and a meal in a good restaurant and don’t overthink the rest.
We tried a few interesting things at Blackbird, and since we don’t really believe in posting restaurant reviews (how many of you are likely to be in Chicago? how many will remember anything we said about Blackbird if you do go?), I’ll write instead of some things that meal made us think about.
Parmesan gazpacho. Probably made with oats, and served with cured sable, granola, and fresh plums. The accompaniments worked well enough, although no particular magic there, but the gazpacho itself was fabulous. We’ll have to try making it. We have made cheese stock before (with cheddar, cooked with onions and apple cider and strained out), but this was a very different beast and tastier.
Eggplant and pumpernickel pave. It was a vegetarian entre, a block of alternating layers of roasted eggplant and pumpernickel, served with braised spigarello, cucumbers, oven-dried tomato and cinnamon consomme. Very nicely savory. Rye bread may work better than pumpernickel, and it needed more eggplant, but an interesting idea.
I also liked the cinnamon consomme. Next time I may add some sundried tomatoes and a stick of cinnamon to my vegetable stock.
Avocado cream on a shortbread biscuit was surprisingly good. And it made a good dessert with hyssop jelly and charteuse granita.
The picture is of our Intelligentsia breakfast. Good coffee really does make traveling much more pleasant.
I feel rather bad whining about an ingredient, but I cannot help whining about okra. It’s a nice-tasting vegetable. It’s pretty as few other vegetables can be, whether it’s whole, or halved along the pod, or sliced across. The seeds are unbelievably cute. But the slime. Oh, the slime.
Some people apparently like it - witness the gumbo, which okra mucilage helps thicken. Some even claim it has health benefits, although that strikes me as too desperate an attempt to make a virtue of necessity (”The okra juice coats the intestines with a natural lubricant, and relieves constipation and other problems without harsh chemicals or habit-forming drugs,” writes the author of In Defense of Okra . I might prefer habit-forming drugs. I’ll just have to give up burgundy first; I’ve been told that would finance any drug habit.) Mr. McGee, our favorite food scientist, informs us that the slime is “a complex mixture of long, entangled carbohydrate molecules and proteins that helps plants and their seeds retain water” and that the same mucilage, in smaller quantities, is produced by basil seeds, purslane and cacti for the same purpose. Frankly, I cannot stand it.
But the vegetable is tasty, and there are a few things you can do to control the slime. Cook it dry (fry, stir fry or grill on high heat). In our experience, it also helps not to cut the pods too much - halving or quartering them length-wise is better than slicing across. Tiny okra pods that you don’t have to cut at all are best - you can even toss them into stew without turning the stew into gumbo! - but they are almost impossible to find. As the last measure, you can also soak the slices. Give them a couple of hours, change water several times, and dry them as thoroughly as you can (start in a salad spinner lined with a paper towel, then spread and air dry if you have time). Okra goes great with onions and caraway seeds and a bit of dried chili.
We might also like to find a use for okra seeds - they are really pretty, and taste mildly vegetal, although harvesting them would be rather time consuming.
“What about serving falafel?”
“… I think we have to alienate it first.”
“Alienate it? Like from its species being?”
“If we think about it as falafel, we box ourselves into the Middle Eastern thing. Instead we have to think about it as a savory chickpea and herb fritter.”
“So we’re not actually serving falafel, we’re serving the anguished cry of falafel denied?”
“I think it’ll go great with peaches.”
This is not a chemistry experiment, dear readers. This is Japanese sweet potato soup.
As we have discovered, there are two kinds of “Japanese sweet potato” you can get around Boston. One is a delicate cream color, tastes of chestnuts, and goes by the Japanese name satsumaimo. You can get it at farmers markets at the same time as regular orange sweet potatoes appear, but their season is a bit shorter. Grateful Farm grows marvelous specimens.
There’s also a vivid purple kind that you see above. It is also called an Okinawan purple potato or Okinawan yam. It tastes intensely of roses and violets and starchy sweetness. You can buy it in Reliable Market in Union Square (a Korean grocery).
The two look exactly the same on the outside, so ask. They are very different beasts.
The soup above is Okinawan purple potato mashed with almond milk and cut with shiro miso, water and a bit of rice vinegar to temper the floral sweetness, brighten up the starch, and bring to the right consistency.
Today TW delivered a box of ox heart confit to our meat supplier, Aidan, who just had his first child. We’ve been getting hearts - beef, lamb, pork - from Aidan as an ‘extra’ in our meat share, because nobody else wants them. It’s tragic. I have little sympathy for people who are squicked by offal, but heart does not deserve to be lumped with offal at all. It’s a muscle, and it feels and tastes like one, with none of the deeper, sweeter, more animal tastes of liver and kidney (or metallic / ammoniac taste of badly raised or poorly prepared liver and kidney), none of the weird texture of tendon, lung or tripe, and none of the overwhelming richness of brains, sweetbreads or marrow.
Over the last couple of weeks we turned two ox hearts into confit - slicing them into strips, curing with salt, pepper, crushed juniper berries and herbs, then gently poaching in duck fat in a low, low oven for a very long time. Recipes suggest 2.5 hours, we usually go for 4 to 5, with delectable results (the only drawback is for the dog, who starts camping outside the kitchen an hour into cooking, as the aromas of meat and duck fat begin wafting out and stays there until the confit is packed away into the fridge, sometimes eight hours later).
Hearts also make excellent burgers. Trim and grind - or whiz in the food processor, as we do - and add fat, as hearts have none of their own. Nice, juicy ground chuck would be about 15% fat, as a guideline. The result is a burger that’s larger than life - deeper, meatier, with an umame kick that no chuck can deliver. Experiment with fat - smoked? cured? clean and pure? You can make a bacon burger without any bacon in evidence, confusing your guests in the most delightful way.
Finally, you can marinate and grill, or pan-grill. A gently acidic marinade will turn the hearts tender, helping them to withstand intense, dry heat without toughening, and giving the texture just the right mix of yield and bounce.
“We can have an egg with a crumpet and piperade!”
“It’ll be tasty, but we can’t put this in this menu… It just doesn’t feel right”
“Yeah. Its chi is the wrong color!”
The inspiration for this dish was an actual borsch we once had in Polonia, which has since closed. What they called a borsch was a gorgeous clear broth of beets and beefstock, topped with a dollop of sour cream. It was nothing like the borsch my grandma made - practically a stew, thick with sliced potatoes, carrots and beets, a plateful of it a hearty meal all by itself. Polonia, not a terribly refined place in its intent, managed to achieve refinement.
We played with this some more. Our soup consisted of a vegetarian beet broth (not our first choice, but some of the guests didn’t eat meat), slices of grilled skirt steak, and a scoop of rye bread ice cream, all of it served cold. Boston summers make you want to do that (and sometimes they rain on your grilling). Next time - a horseradish or dill crisp.
The recipe from rye bread ice cream was derived from Ideas in Food, although we used rye and not pumpernickel, could not get our hands on glucose, and cut down on heavy cream (the fat proportion in IIF recipe is actually unusually high). A five-year-old would not recognize it as ice cream, but it was lovely. You need to soften it in the fridge long before scooping, as starch and gluten add a lot of structure and it’s extremely dense when frozen.
These are some of the six quarts of strawberry “seconds” we picked up at the market last week - they are probably the last ones of the season, which seems to have been short and intense here this year. Most of them are now pureed in the freezer, waiting for their star turn. Some have become strawberry marshmallows.
The yield for these was surprisingly high - four quarts of puree, and that’s after we tossed some berries that were too far past their prime.
We are delighted to cook fresh green vegetables again, and have made a couple of discoveries.
Apparently the key to tasty summer squash is to add garlic, finely minced, when the squash is almost cooked. Toss in some assertive herbs, too - marjoram, or thyme, or lots of fennel fronds. The squash forms a delicate, sweet background to the pungent garlic and aromatic herbs, and everything in the dish shows at its best. The alternative, we find, is squash so delicate that it’s bland, a mere texture, and not an interesting one at that. I used to dislike cooking squash, even in its summer abundance. That is no longer the case.
Pea soup has been our bete noir ever since we tried it at Iggy . Iggy’s was a carefully layered concoction of basil-flavored hot pureed peas that became cooler as one drank it and finally, at the bottom of the shot glass, met an icy-cold and very intense layer of mint-flavored pea soup. That was almost two years ago.
We encountered two problems trying to recreate it - color and consistency. Green herbs oxidize and turn brown, and while flavor improved the longer the chopped mint or basil sat in the soup, the color became increasingly unappealing. Also, while making an intensely flavored pea puree was not a problem, diluting it to the desired soup consistency was. By the time we added enough water to get the soup to flow right it was no longer that intense. We did not want to add stock, to preserve the purity of the pea flavor.
Our new recipe involves diluting the pea puree with pea stock - an infusion of pea pods or whole snow- and sugar snap peas, brewed much like tea. We also now blanch our herbs before blending them into soup, which helps, although I think we need to compensate by adding more of them, since some flavor does leech out during blanching. We haven’t tried layering after the first lackluster attempt, although we should.
We’re sorry we’ve been quiet.
We tried to spend more time cooking and less time writing, and perhaps swung a bit too far in that direction.
We’re waking up again. There will probably be fewer pictures, but that’s not a promise.
We hope you’ll keep reading.