09 Oct 2010 10 Comments
in Cooking Tips, Good Gadget, Bad Gadget, Recipes Tags: gadgets, margaritas, queso fundido
There’s a whole industry based on creating useless gadgets. I may have to get creative and come up with something myself. Get a piece of that business. Seems people actually buy these things.
I was embarrassed to discover some bad gadgets in my own kitchen drawers… must’ve been gifts.
A little brush to brush... uh, something off?
22 Sep 2010 13 Comments
in On the Road, Recipes, Video Tags: chicken broth, egg, Fiesole, Gertrude Stein, parmesan, Rome, soup, stracciatella
I was about 11 when it happened.
Keep in mind this was the late 1970s, a time when “Italian” in the U.S. — even in sophisticated Southern California — meant Papa Tony’s, greasy meatballs in tomato sauce, pizza and overblown Jersey-style minestrone. Here was a soup that was the antithesis of everything I’d known to be Italian.
It was also miraculously simple. A clear, resonant golden broth in which floated those little rags — shreds of egg and spinach flavored with parmesan, nutmeg and pepper. A soup that would come to illustrate perfectly my core cooking belief in highlighting simple, fresh flavors that sing like a symphony together. Beautiful to see, and memorable to taste. Make this soup — I can make no promises but it may change your life too. Especially if done properly.
As I often say on this blog in regard to the simplest recipes, success depends entirely on the quality of your ingredients. This is a soup, for example, that benefits highly from a good homemade stock. Fresh farmer’s market spinach, the best parmesan reggiano you can find, and really good eggs don’t hurt either. And there may be no experience in the kitchen as immediately gratifying as grating a pod of nutmeg directly into your food.
Stracciatella
1 quart homemade chicken stock
3 eggs
1 cup finely chopped spinach
1 tbsp semolina flour (optional)
1/4 cup parmesan reggiano
a few grates fresh nutmeg
If you don’t have chicken stock, get yourself a whole chicken. Throw it in a pot with an onion, a bay leaf, a carrot and about a gallon of water. Bring to a boil, skim off froth, turn down to a simmer and cook for about 30 minutes. Add salt to taste (you’ll need a good bit of salt here). Remove the chicken (use the meat for sandwiches or tacos). You can continue reducing the broth over medium heat for another hour if you want a stronger broth. (I would recommend doing this.) Strain through a fine sieve into another pot. Let cool. At this point, take out your quart for your soup and freeze any remaining stock in freezer back for future use. (I always keep three or four bags of chicken stock in the freezer.)
Heat your stock over medium to a simmer. Beat the eggs in a large bowl, add the spinach and the semolina and stir together. Add the parmesan, grate a little nutmeg over the top (or throw in a pinch of pre-grated nutmeg), combine thoroughly. Turn off the stock, slowly pour in the egg/spinach mixture, and cover. Let sit for five minutes. Then, gently break up to “rags” in your soup with the back side of a ladle. Serve.
16 Sep 2010 2 Comments
in Cooking Tips, Recipes Tags: fish, video
My German friend, Pirco, called me one evening.
“Sean,” he said, “I have a piece of fish. What do I do with it?”
I needed more information. What kind of fish, for example, was it?
“I don’t know. It’s sort of white.”
“Is it a fillet or a steak?” I asked.
“It’s a rectangle.”
I gave Pirco my advice on what to do with his rectangle. The video above and recipe below show you what to do with your own rectangle of fish. But first, a few words on fish in general.
Fish is one of the easiest foods to cook beautifully. It is also one of the easiest to screw up. I was giving a cooking class recently on fish, and my students were stuck in the salmon rut, and at a loss as to what to do other than throw their fillet on the grill. (i.e. “Do we marinate it in soy sauce?”) If you’ve got very fresh fish, you’ll want to do very little to it. If you’ve got not so fresh fish, you’ll want to sauce it into oblivion. In general, heat is your friend. With a few exceptions, you’ll want to cook your fish at very high heat very quickly — in a hot pan, in a hot oven, or on a hot grill. And you might experiment with some different types of fish. Branzino, black cod, halibut, Atlantic cod and John Dory are some of my favorites. Talk to the fish guy, tell him what you like.
And now, here’s your recipe:
Serves two.
Sauteed Whitefish
2 half pound fillets of whitefish (red snapper, halibut, black cod, mahi mahi, etc.)
flour
3 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp butter (not Country Crock or I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-Butter)
juice of one lemon (or 1/4 cup white wine)
Dust each fillet with flour to cover. Heat olive oil over medium high heat in a large pan. Fry the fish for about 3 minutes, until it begins to brown, and then flip. Add more olive oil if the pan seems dry. Cook for an additional 3 minutes on second side. (If fish is very thick, give it an extra minute on each side.) Remove fish from pan to a plate and keep warm in a pre-heated 200 degree oven.
Deglaze the pan — add juice of one lemon (or 1/4 cup of white wine) to pan and immediately remove pan from heat. Using a spatula, scrape up any bits of flour sticking to the pan into the sauce. Add your two tbsp of butter and stir constantly, until your pan juices and butter have emulsified into a velvety sauce. Plate fish, and drizzle sauce over the top.
(In the video above, I have sauteed some chopped swiss chard in olive oil and sea salt. I steamed arborio rice and when it was cooked, tossed in a tbsp of butter, 1/4 cup chopped Italian parsley and 1/4 cup grated parmesan reggiano. To plate, I placed some chard at the bottom of the plate, topped with the rice in a food mold [you could simply scoop some rice on top artfully], topped that with the fish, then drizzled the sauce around, and added some balsamic reduction for flair. Please note: I accidentally said “salmon” in the video, but the fish I was preparing was actually halibut. If I was a Food Network superstar, I’d re-edit that segment.)
Wine suggestion: A light, French-style chardonnay (not one of those clumsy over-oaked Napa monsters)
skinny girls & mayonnaise 