Soup And A Tartine

The other night I wanted to cook a light French supper that my Franco-father would be proud of, in this case a simple though elegant soup and tartine. A soup au courgettes or zucchini soup with a tartine au chevre et prosciutto or open-faced goat cheese and prosciutto sandwich to be exact. Tartine is the French equivalent of bruschetta and connotes the same general principal of loading ingredients onto toasted bread. Either way you swing it linguistically toast with cheese and luxurious toppings like cured meats, grilled vegetables, or raw produce is tasty stuff. Tartines are commonly eaten at breakfast or goûter (afternoon snack) in France where crusty baguettes are lathered with butter, melted chocolate, or nutella. Cheese tartines are more of a lunch thing oft paired with rillettes, pork products, or egg. I have increasingly used tartines to open dinner parties as either a palate warmer or first course, an easy way to both sate and wow guests. For this particular incarnation I toasted country bread slices and topped them with goat cheese, prosciutto, a drizzle of honey, and a generous crack of black pepper. It was creamy, sweet, salty, and crunchy all at once which was exactly what I was hoping for.

As good as sweet or savory tartines can be, they are rarely filling enough in and of themselves, needing a partner in crime to complete a meal. I have been on a big sustainability kick in the kitchen for the past few months and a have a freezer full of stock to show for it. There is a bag in my fridge devoted to food scraps and roughly once a week, give or take if I hosted a dinner party or two, everything is sacrificed to the stockpot. I used a couple of jars of said stock to make a big bowl of zucchini soup and round out my Gallic meal. The soup could not have been simpler and had very few ingredients. I sautéed some diced onions and garlic before adding the zucchini, a fennel bulb, and a potato for thickness then added the stock. It simmered away for fifteen minutes before I ran the whole thing through a food processor. That’s it and boy was it good. It sounds like a cliché at this point but all it takes to make a delicious meal at home is a little time, patience, and some quality ingredients. If you cook them minimally with care the ingredients you use will usually speak for themselves and make you look good in the process. The homemade vegetable stock made the dish, bringing an earthy richness and deep flavor to the otherwise minimal, and lets face it, boring soup. All and all it was an excellent night at home with a savory tartine and a bowl of zucchini soup to wash it down with, a winning French combo I highly recommend. As always, I encourage you to enjoy and share delicious food and home cooked meals with yourself and others!

Dinner And A Strange Movie

The mood to cook struck me mightily this morning brought on by an inspiring meal. To celebrate my spark of inspiration I invited my friend Jessica over for dinner; a big time foodie that knows her shit in the kitchen. Last night I had dinner at Gennaro, a local cash only Italian joint that serves up incredible food with a lengthy list of evening specials that rotate constantly. By the time you have fallen in love with a seasonal dish it is off the menu and replaced by something equally intriguing. The meal was, and always is, truly memorable and I thought it would be fun to replicate some of the highlights for Jessica before we sat down to a movie. The first course we had at Gennaro was a watermelon and creamy goat cheese salad; a little treat to wet the palate served with crusty bread and peppery olive oil. I basically followed the same general idea for our first course this evening, crumbling Coach Farms goat over watermelon cubes drizzled with quality olive oil, Hawaiian pink sea salt, and thyme. This is a really tasty summer salad that is a snap to prepare and even easier to eat an entire plate of.

The second dish of the three that really blew me away at dinner last night was the grilled shrimp salad, a tasty dish that blurred the lines between hot and cold appetizer. The salad had corn, bell peppers, avocado, and plump charred shrimp all tossed in a perfectly acidic vinaigrette. It really was a triumph for a relatively minimal dish and I could not wait to try it at home. I made a simple vegetable ragout by sautéing sweet corn kernels with roasted red peppers, shallots, and olive oil. Instead of grilling my shrimp they were tossed with olive oil and sea salt then flashed in a skillet. The prize ingredient in my shrimp salad was the salad itself, the micro greens harvested upstate at my mother’s own Red Hen Farm. The prized mix was baby mesclun with chive blossoms, cilantro, and curly parsley all grown organically and driven down to the city with care by my loving mother. The sweet corn, hot shrimp, and spicy salad with herbal hints throughout really made the dish spectacular, almost but not quite as good as last night. I should have added avocado, everybody loves avocado.

The third dish I used to inspire my movie night meal with Jessica was something that I have never ordered personally but always looks and sounds amazing; baby lamb chops with broccoli rabe and roasted potatoes. The side dishes I could do without but baby lamb chops are a thing of beauty. It really is the best part of the lamb although a good leg of lamb or shoulder is hard to beat. I had wanted to grill lamb chops but the price was exorbitant to say the least and quickly swayed me in favor of a boneless leg of lamb. The piece was thick enough to sear and then roast in a hot oven with a nice layer of fat surrounding it. That is exactly how I cooked it after a quick marinade in olive oil, thyme, garlic, and salt. The meat was more tender in some places than others therefore a few thin slices layered on a plate was the ideal way to serve it. Instead of broccoli rabe and potatoes, I piled the sliced lamb on a bed of wilted chard and topped the dish with a dollop of curry-mint yogurt sauce. My dinner was very good and Jessica was happy but I don’t think I hold a shade to the fine food of Gennaro. The film we watched after we stuffed our bellies was Scottish and very weird about a teenage boy that is a voracious peeping Tom and hardcore mama’s boy. As always, I encourage you to enjoy and share delicious food and home cooked meals with yourself and others!

Grilled Shrimp With Sweet Potatoes And Chorizo

I have tried versions of this dish, or duo of principal ingredients actually a few times before. It sounds odd but shrimp and sweet potatoes have an affinity for one another and pair on the plate excellently. Shrimp’s texture and inherent marine flavor juxtaposes strikingly with the sweet, almost candy-like goodness of sweet potatoes. The last time I cooked the two together was for a dinner party with some college buddies late last December so it was high time to revisit the combo. I prepared a handsome rainy night dinner for myself this evening without exerting too much energy; everything I cooked had about four ingredients and required very little prep work or execution. First I mashed some roasted sweet potatoes with butter, maple syrup, and black pepper. I tasted the mash and thought for some silly reason that it needed minced cilantro which I had planned to garnish with. It made the whole thing taste of cilantro and its potent Latin-American aroma dominated the smell emanating from the plate. Heartbroken, I rendered some diced chorizo in a hot pan to draw the fat and crisp up the rust colored chunks. After draining the excess fat, I mixed the crispy chorizo pieces into the sweet potato mash for a texture contrast. The shrimp were even less work, tossed with olive oil, chili powder, and paprika then cooked on a cast-iron grill pan. They were spicy and nicely charred with firm yet tender pink flesh which complimented the sweet, albeit cilantro fueled sweet potatoes and salty crunch of the chorizo. Overall the match-up of incredibly disparate tastes thrown together on the same plate was not a total misadventure; I think it would be quite good in smaller portions as a hot appetizer or fish course in a lengthy multi-course menu. As always, I encourage you to enjoy and share delicious food and home cooked meals with yourself and others!

Fusilli, Mushrooms, And Radishes

The last meal I posted, inspired by the field of food anthropology and the works of Claude Levi-Strauss, lacked a pasta element with the main course. The eggplant parmesan I threw together on the fly was delicious indeed but it is traditionally eaten with some sort of carb whether crusty bread or pasta. Since I omitted a pasta sidekick in my last meal I decided to include one in this post. I got home early this evening as the whether was beginning to turn gray and dismal. It has not been much of a summer thus far with weekly thundershowers becoming routine. I wanted some good comfort food to chill and relax with, opting for some fusilli tossed with tomato sauce and mushrooms. I had some leftover tomato sauce in the fridge along with a half a ball of fresh mozzarella. The pasta was a snap needing a quick shake of the pan to sauté the sliced mushrooms and the patience to wait for the water to boil. The basil chiffonade from my very own plant outside was the highlight of the dish by far. The sauce was good and all but the fresh summery flavor of the basil, which goes excellently with anything tomato, brought a huge boost to the pasta.

The second dish was a little more experimental. I saw a menu recently, for the life of me I cannot remember where, featuring a roasted radish side dish meant to accompany grilled lamb chops. I was intrigued by the idea of cooking radishes at all, let alone roasting them, and was not entirely convinced. Radishes are a summer staple but they can get a bit boring if the only way you eat them is with butter, salt, and bread. I decided to braise the little red pebbles with shallots and lots of vinegar to both add acidity and eventually sweeten the radishes. Overall the dish was interesting to say the least, a bit strong and a bit weird. I think it would be better suited as a side dish to a substantial protein like roasted chicken or certain fish which would balance out their powerful flavor. The proposition of cooking radishes warrants further investigation and I am not ruling it out. As always, I encourage you to enjoy and share delicious food and home cooked meals with yourself and others!

Le Cru Et Le Cuit

The spontaneous and imaginative aspect of cooking when the knife blade, spoon, or pot becomes an extension of your mind and hand simultaneously is what I love most about cooking. There is also an element of reverence for both the ingredients sacrificed and overall spiritual quality of cooking itself. Levi-Strauss, the mythic French cultural anthropologist, viewed the moment of transformation from raw to cooked as the symbolic act that made us human. “…The categories of the raw and the cooked, the fresh and the decayed, the moistened and the burned – can nonetheless be used as conceptual tools with which to elaborate abstract ideas…” Responsibility, nurturance, and survival are aspects of being human intertwined in the simple yet monumental act of cooking where culture takes over and allows our species to supersede the animal realm. Levi-Strauss’s canonical work was one of the pioneering pieces that got me into the anthropology of food, the academic sub-discipline I have and will continue to work under. Other motivating forces for choosing this particular trajectory, or humoring myself with a blog, is my love of food and passion for cooking. The other day I had a craving to harness one of the most fundamental cultural traits distinguishing me from my animal cousins and cook myself an epic meal.

For some reason I was feeling eggplant parmesan and set about making it using baby eggplants, fresh mozzarella, and a quick tomato sauce. It was out of this world good especially because I had grilled and then baked the eggplant rounds, not frying them breaded, which lightened the whole thing up considerably. In honor of Levi-Strauss and his contributions to the development of food anthropology I made a French bistro standard, poireaux
vinaigrette. The translation is leeks with vinaigrette; a Gallic favorite though any fibrous vegetable can be substituted like asparagus or haricots verts. Just steam the vegetable, which I find makes them moist but not overly soggy without jeopardizing their vibrant color, and top with your favorite mustard-based vinaigrette. This meal could not have been simpler and it was mighty delicious if I do say so myself. Here’s to loving food and for letting your passions guide you. As always, I encourage you to enjoy and share delicious food and home cooked meals with yourself and others!