New recipe adventures: Barbara Lynch's Stir

Occasionally you find yourself (by which I mean I find myself) arrested by an outfit, a magazine, a dish, a piece of cake or some other thing that you simply must own. This happened with me several weeks ago when, browsing in a bookstore, I found Barbara Lynch's Stir:Mixing It Up in the Italian Tradition. It's a very pretty book - not fluffy or silly in any way, but also not willfully plain.

Barbara Lynch's story is compelling - rags to riches, Southie to Beacon Hill. It's like a foodie fairy tale. And let me tell you, the recipes are simply divine. For my first outing with this book, I decided to try two things I'd never done before: homemade ricotta and homemade gnocchi. In her book, Barbara tells us that the first time you have hand-made gnocchi is a transformative experience and wow. She's right. The gnocchi I made with her help was tender, yet toothsome, with a very delicate potato flavor and divine texture. The dough was very tender and a little sticky. Perhaps it needed a little more flour? But I think my restraint with the flour, while it made forming the happy little nuggets difficult, probably resulted in the staggering tenderness of the finished product.

I topped the gnocchi with some simple tomato sauce and dollops of homemade ricotta. Before I go on to the tomato sauce recipe (very simple, so if you have even the vaguest idea how to make tomato sauce, don't bother reading on), a note on making ricotta: as with hand-made gnocchi, homemade ricotta is transformative. The flavor is intense, the texture is smooth, and it cooks up beautifully. If you haven't ever tried this, DO IT. It's the easiest thing in the world and the results are stunning.

My tomato sauce doesn't really follow a recipe as such, so take the following lightly and feel free to riff as you please. Also, the recipes for gnocchi and ricotta are in StirStir: Mixing It Up in the Italian Tradition, so have a look there!

Simple Tomato Sauce

• ~2 T olive oil
• 2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
• 1 large (15 oz?) can crushed tomatoes
• 1/4 t cayenne pepper
• salt and pepper to taste

1. Heat the olive oil over medium heat until shimmering.
2. Add garlic and cook until you can just smell it strongly, before it starts to brown.
3. Immediately add crushed tomatoes and cook until creamy.
4. Add cayenne, salt, and pepper to taste. Be sure you taste it before seasoning, as canned tomatoes have unpredictable saltiness.

To assemble this thing, I placed the gnocchi in baking dishes, topped with tomato sauce, and dollopped (yes, that is a verb) some ricotta on top. Then I grated pecorino romano on top and popped the whole thing in the oven for about 15 minutes at 400.

It's also possible that I am so very happy with this recipe because we ate it on the roof! It was the first rooftop meal of the year - first of very, very many this summer.

Mini Apple Pies: Ratio-izing my kitchen

I'm always reluctant to accept compliments on my cooking if I've cooked from a recipe. I mean, It's one thing to be able to follow a recipe and another entirely to be able to make a recipe or to cook entirely without one. Right? Usually when I wholly depart from recipes, it's while cooking something like a stew or a dish that resembles something I've made before. When it comes to baking? Oh, hell no.However, I've been wanting to learn a little more about how recipes work so that I can start to make my own. You all probably know where this is going, but a few weeks ago I got the book Ratio by Michael Ruhlman, which is basically the key to understanding how recipes work. It's kind of amazing. I mean, once you know the ratios, you can create whatever you want? No, it's not like you're working entirely without a recipe, but it does give you a nice feeling of freedom to not be slinging flour over your prized cookbooks and to be able to improvise a little - riff, even.

The first riffing I tried was a free-form pear tart. I used the 3:2:1 pie dough with a little added sugar and salt. It was a little tender for such a large tart and maybe should have been baked a little longer. However, for the mini apple pies I made last night, it worked perfectly. The crust puffed up and browned beautifully. It was sturdy, but flaky. Buttery and delicious. The filling? Also delicious, and I made it up on the fly! The apples cooked down to practically nothing and the butter mixture bubbled and, where it escaped the pie shells, caramelized on the pan.

The funny thing is that these little pies tasted familiar. I couldn't place the taste immediately, but I think what I recognized was the taste of McDonald's apple pie, but without the chemical aftertaste or the gumminess. I wouldn't usually liken my own cooking to McDonald's and mean it favorably, but in this case, I'm sure you'll all agree that it's a good thing. A very tasty, buttery, sweet, very good thing.

Try making these - you won't regret it. Oh, also, buy this book and keep the ratios posted somewhere handy in your kitchen. It doesn't seem that they'll fail!Mini Apple Pies

Crust:

• 3 parts flour : 2 parts fat : 1 part water (12 oz. flour : 8 oz. butter : 4 oz water by weight)
• pinch salt
• 1T sugar

1. Using a food processor, mix sugar, salt and flour.
2. Add chilled butter, cut into chunks and process until mixture is crumbly.
3. Pulse while drizzling water. You may not need all of it.
4. Makes enough dough for 2 pies or free-form tarts or 8 mini tarts.
5. Divide and chill dough.
6. For mini pies, divide dough into 8 equal pieces. Roll each into a ball, flatten and roll out to 1/4" thick. (You can also reserve part of the dough for a later use - these mini pies were made from the leftovers from an earlier free form tart.)

Filling:

• 1 Apple, peeled, cored, quartered, and sliced thinly
• 2 T butter
• pinch salt
• 1/4 c dark brown sugar
• 1 t vanilla
• 1 t cinnamon

1. Smoosh (that is the best word for it) the butter, brown sugar, cinnamon, salt, and vanilla together in a small bowl. A fork does a good job of this.
2. Place dough rounds on a baking sheet (I used a half sheet with silpat).
3. Place 1/4 of the apple slices overlapping in the middle of the dough rounds.
4. Spoon 1/4 of the butter/sugar mixture on top of the apple slices.
5. Fold the sides of the dough into the middle, crimping all the open edges with your fingers to seal the filling in.
6. Use a knife to cut slits in the top of the dough to allow steam to escape.
7. Bake at 425 for about 20 minutes (check frequently) or until crust is golden brown. (Seriously, watch closely because I forgot to time the baking.)
8. Let cool on baking sheet for ten minutes before removing with a spatula.
9. Serve warm (optional: these would be amazing with a dollop of whipped cream or a small scoop of ice cream).

Treasure Trove

This week, my dear friend K gave me a whole pile of castoff cookbooks (how could anyone abandon so many cookbooks!) to pick through and keep what I liked. As you all know, I'm a sucker for crusty old cookbooks with odd titles and odder illustrations. The musty smell and crumbly texture of old cookbooks and the pages that have clearly been best-loved make me very, very happy.

The books ranged from the grim Tasty Cooking for Ulcer Diets wherein we learn how the ulcer patient should be able to enjoy his dinner as much as his family does......to the shameless promotion of mayonnaise (as if it needed any help to start with) seen here.From the political, Jimmy Carter themed peanut cookbook...
...to the jolly squid peeping through a porthole! How versatile!Fodder for experimentation and gentle mockery will be found in other titles such as Mushroom Recipes by one "Countess Morphy" - I need to do some biographical research before launching into that one -, The Good Housekeeping Cake Book, The Annisquam Village Cookbook, and so forth. Expect good things.

Score

A few weeks ago, Dan and I went to the Brattle Book Shop in search of cool old books and I hit the Mother Lode. (I mean, the real mother lode was upstairs in the rare book room where they had a first edition of Ulysses among many other drool-worthy items, but I liked my bargain basement find a lot.) I found the 1950 Gourmet Magazine Cookbook and the second Volume, from 1957. Since the magazine was so cruelly taken away from us, I was doubly excited to find these books intact and available to me at such a reasonable price!
Both volumes are pretty beat up, but still in good working order - I don't do a very good job of keeping my cookbooks clean, after all. This one also had a bunch of things between the pages, one magazine cutting with an apple pie recipe, a postcard with some notes on the back, and one little slip with notes about a day's worth of menus. Apparently they had oeuf au miroir for breakfast (p. 503 in Volume II) and Chinese fried rice (with either chicken or ham) for lunch. I'm also kind of obsessed with the handwriting on these notes. Relics of a kind. Was it some fifties-style optimistic and ambitious newlywed, planning menus for each menu? A man teaching himself to cook? Who owned these books before? I'm especially intrigued because there's no inscription! (This is why I always write my name in my books.)
These books are full of all sorts of old school images and recipes that I think (it's safe to say) have fallen somewhat out of favor. The chapter titles are charming and hilarious. My favorite (above) is Man's Meat. The Scottish poem just below the meaty illustration also makes me smile. More lovely chapter titles below.
And then there are the full color illustrations. Some look good (Black Bean Soup, Crêpes Suzette, Chocolate Cake Florence) and others are, well, glazed meat. In this most disgusting example, Cold Glazed Ox Tongue. It has flower shapes cut out of, I believe, ham.
In any case, expect to hear more about this book. At some point, I'm going to start cooking out of it - none of the more exotic meats and certainly no aspic in the near future - but I do want to try some of these recipes! I'll keep you posted. (More images of the books here.)I'll leave you with a favorite cookbook-reading guilty pleasure: biscuits (the kind from a can) with honey and butter.

Sigh

I've lapsed. The one-a-day plan hasn't exactly worked out, for reasons of technology, laziness, and humidity, but I have been shooting and developing lots! The spirit of the project is not lost! For today, here are a couple of photos and one recipe.

After having a lovely breakfast and trip to the airport and watermelon ice and chat with the lovely author of Sweet Amandine (who I'm going to presumptuously say is becoming a dear friend), I felt hungry and decided to steal her recipe for Sesame Noodles. Knowing, however that I, like her sister, am very particular about my Sesame (and/or Peanut) Noodles, I adapted the recipe a bit. I used Angel Hair Pasta and made the whole thing cold. I also added a glop of chunky peanut butter and a little ginger paste. Delicious.
And this is my little hot puppy. Posing nicely for the camera. She needs a haircut, but I am loath to lose her big fuzzy bear paws.
In other news, I've been doing a good deal of for-fun reading and I have two EMPHATIC recommendations for you: 1. All Over Creation, by Ruth Ozeki and 2. Commencement, by J. Courtney Sullivan.

Both of these authors are Smithies. Ozeki has a way of being very political about farming practices while weaving a really riveting story on top of it. In her first book - My Year of Meats, Ozeki takes on the beef industry and in this one she takes aim at genetically engineered vegetables, specifically potatoes. While yes, this book makes me want to eat 100% organic vegetables, the most memorable part of it was the family's story that she tells along the way. It's kind of the opposite of my experience with The Jungle, where I remember the gruesome scenes in the meat packing plant, but don't remember the personal plight of the characters at all. Sullivan plumbs her personal experience in college and writes what amounts to a nostalgic ode to Smith. Yes, it does deal with illegal sex traffic in a pretty graphic and stirring way, but the book is really all about Smithies and love and friendship. It's like Sex and the City, but real and relevant to my life.

What strikes me about both of these books (granted, I did read the two of them in the space of about three days) is that maybe Smith did really leave a lot of us with a real desire to make a difference in the world, regardless of the arena in which we choose to work. And wasn't that the idea anyway? I still haven't found a way to do this in any concrete way in my life, unless you count the dissemination of German articles and adjective endings as some sort of social change. But these women, deeply invested in writing, which so often becomes a solitary, self-indulgent activity, find a way to comment on their (and our) lives and relationships while writing an entertaining story AND raising awareness about serious social issues. Well, done Smithies.

Rather upsettingly, Sullivan graduated a year ahead of me. I haven't published a (really great) novel yet, have you?