mediterranean shrimp cocktail

Hello. It's been a while, I know. This will likely be short, as I have a million other things I'm supposed to be doing this week. I just wanted to share a recipe and reminisce a little, and that's not always possible in the stuff I'm writing over on my poem-a-day blog. 

Yesterday I ran a beautiful sunset nine-miler and knew I needed a high-protein dinner afterwards, so I decided to fix something that I invented a couple of years ago. I always want to eat this dish in the springtime; I think it must be because it tastes really fresh and makes me think of warmer weather. At any rate, I was on my own for the evening, and whenever that happens, it's kind of a delicious thing to say to myself, "What would you like to eat tonight, since you don't have anyone else's tastes but your own to cater to?" 

an unreliable narrator

Trust the tale, not the teller.     
                   - D. H. Lawrence

There's something you should know about me: I am miserable at bullshit. Both giving and receiving. Mine is no kind of poker face. And I'll believe anything.

One day when I was in college, my mother gave me a ride to campus. We were listening to a CD of the Impressions' greatest hits, and I spontaneously exclaimed, "Their music is so uplifting! It always makes me feel inspired." Mom looked serious and said soberly, "In reality, some very depressed people. Alcoholics."

My face fell. "Really?"

"No," she said with a smirk, as she glanced at me sideways.

Because that is how this little song-and-dance goes. Deceiving me is easy and also, apparently, funny as hell. Just ask my friends and family. At one point during a trip to D.C., my mother told me that our country's first president was buried under the Washington Monument, and when I cried afterwards in embarrassment, she felt bad because she never meant to be cruel. The fibs are always pointless, harmless things she doesn't really think I'll believe, anyway, and she doesn't let me sit in ignorance for more than a couple of seconds before revealing the trick. I think part of the fun is hearing me bellow, "Damn it!" as I do most of the time when I find out I've been had.

a crack in everything

I was not always the enthusiastic, vocal advocate of Metamucil that I am now. Years ago, the things I liked to eat were largely also the dishes most likely to stop you up. That changed when I was in my twenties.

It was the summer of 1997, six months after my sister had died. We were at the KOA in Flagstaff, Arizona. I had been beset with recurrent butt problems for over a year at that point. Because of a lack of fiber in my diet, I suffered from something technically called a "fissure," which is a small muscle tear that is difficult to recover from once it originally happens because—no way to put this delicately—the sphincter tends to spasm continually and involuntarily, causing it to bleed and preventing the muscle from healing. That June, my parents had loaded my brother and me and my spasming anus into our rigged-up conversion van (which my mom had nicknamed Vincent, as in "Van Go") and traveled out west. I went willingly, but Jeff, who had a very active social life that had just cranked up for the summer, dragged his heels. By the time we got to Arizona, Mom and Dad were desperate to wean my eighteen-year-old brother from his cigarettes, so, as I wrote in my journal, "they kept plying him with beers instead," to keep him in a good mood. One afternoon, Jeff and I sat at the picnic table at our campsite in the blessed cool of northern Arizona, drinking Coronas and playing gin rummy. I lost to him several times in a row and finally muttered to no one in particular, "Damn it! I don't know my ass from a hole in the ground today." Without missing a beat or looking up from reshuffling the deck, Jeff deadpanned, "Yours is the one with the tear in it."

the mess was delicious

A few years ago, when my girlfriends and I went on our annual beach trip, we ended up having dinner at the house of a friend of my Florida pal Stacy's. The friend was newly divorced man with a small toddler. At one point someone spilled a glass of red wine on the floor, and the adults began cleaning it up. The little boy, meanwhile, stood a couple of feet away, riveted by the dark splotch on the carpet, repeating as if mesmerized, "It's a mess. It's a mess. IT'S A MESS." Watching his rapt incantation, all of us shot a wide-eyed look at each other: Dang. A mess really upsets that kid. Bless his heart, and Lord help the person he marries. 

I really shouldn't make fun, though, because messes make me nervous, too. Recently, I brought in one of my recent dreams to talk over with my analyst. In the dream, I had assigned my first-year writing students to prepare homemade mushroom soup. Each student had to make his or her own version and turn it in. I would taste it, evaluate it, and give it a grade. On the due date, the students showed up, each with a pot containing his or her batch. Some of the soups had whole mushroom caps in them, and others had been completely pureed, but it was clear that each of them had gotten the broth base right, because they were all various shades of dark, rich brown. I walked down the line of pots, ladling a scoop of soup from each into my bowl. Then I realized that I was putting all the students' versions in the same bowl, and I felt foolish and a little panicked: there was no way I was ever going to be able to distinguish among the batches in order to assign a grade to each one.

six hundred dollars' worth

Poems I keep thinking about lately: Kay Ryan's "That Will to Divest" and Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art." That section in Robert Hass's "Regalia for a Black Hat Dancer" where he talks about his divorce from his first wife, how during the whole process he imagined the moment when he would finally, deliberately, and ceremonially declare it finished. He visits a Buddhist shrine in Korea and considers leaving his wedding ring there but then decides not to.

In the months we were apart, I had endless fantasies
about when I'd finally take it off and how. And then one day,
I was moving, lugging cardboard boxes, I looked down
and it wasn't there. I looked in the grass of the driveway strip.
Sowbugs, an earwig. So strange.
............................................................
I was searching in the rosebed of a rented house
inch by inch, looking under the carseat where the paper clips
and Roosevelt dimes and unresolved scum-shapes of once
vegetal stuff accumulate in abject little villages
where matter hides while it transforms itself. Nothing there.
I never found it.

He ends with a statement of baffled resignation: "Apparently I was supposed to wait / until it disappeared." In her poem, Bishop is similarly breezy, but of course she's whistling through the graveyard as she names things she's lost, from little to big: "And look! my last, or / next-to-last, of three loved houses went."

Well, Elizabeth, by summer, I too will have lost three loved houses.

haint tales

Today many in the Western Hemisphere are celebrating the Day of the Dead, All Souls' Day, or both. It is a day when they remember dead friends and relatives by visiting their graves and leaving food for them. For Catholics in particular, it is a day to pray for the souls of those believers who died un-sanctified of their venial sins and thus linger in purgatory, waiting for the intercessory appeals of their loved ones to help them gain entrance into heaven's visio beatifica.

Speaking of lingering spirits, I have a confession to make: if the show Ghost Whisperer is on TV, I will watch it. (The same is true of Sleeping with the Enemy, but that's a subject for a different post.) While I'm always interested to see Jennifer Love Hewitt's latest lingerie-inspired outfit or fairytale hair extensions, I know that's not the whole reason why it's so mesmerizing. When I confessed my weakness for the show to D, he laughed at me. Until one day when it came on while we were hanging out. He watched the hokey opening credits and said disdainfully, "I don't get it. What's the appeal?" I replied, "You just wait. This show is a black hole. By dinnertime you will have watched several episodes and you'll wonder where the afternoon went." Three hours later I asked him, "So? It's compelling, right?"  D just shook his head slowly and said, "How did that happen?"

the anger muscle

I've said this before: in high school, when I was upset, I would smoke, curse, and play the piano. I wrote that in my journal when I was seventeen. Imagine my stunned recognition years later, when I read about Lucy Honeychurch, the apparently prim heroine of A Room with a View, who also deals with her choleric tendencies by losing herself at the piano.

Over the course of the story, Lucy transforms from a docile, conventional girl into a woman capable of various kinds of passion. Her anger plays an important role in this shift. During one conversation with her mother and her priggish fiancé Cecil, she moves rapidly from voicing a casual dislike of Reverend Eager to declaring: "I hate him. I've heard him lecture on Giotto. I hate him. Nothing can hide a petty nature. I HATE him." Mrs. Honeychurch responds, "My goodness gracious me, child! You'll blow my head off! Whatever is there to shout over?" For his part, dismayed by the vulgarity of Lucy's outburst, Cecil yearns to tell her "that a woman's power and charm reside in mystery, not in muscular rant." (We understand implicitly that this comment points to his unsuitability as a match for her.) Later, Cecil is taken aback when she directs her ire at him. As a joke on the local snob, he deliberately engages unsuitable tenants for a neighborhood villa in Lucy's hometown of Summer Street.  She responds like "a peevish virago," snapping at him that his little dig at Sir Harry has made her look foolish instead, and that she considers him "most disloyal." Never mind that the tenants he has found include the same young man who impetuously kissed her on a violet-strewn hillside in Fiesole during her trip to Italy. 

Happily for us readers, she doesn't attempt to curb her turbulent impulses for very long.

sage + sausage gravy

Years ago, I took the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and tested off-the-charts INFJ: introverted-intuitive-feeling-judging. It always felt like an apt description of me, both the good and the bad of the type. Some people think the MBTI, a personality indicator with sixteen possible types, is the equivalent of silly horoscopes or tarot readings, just a fun little parlor game, because it's based on a self-reported questionnaire and not a "scientifically objective" measure of personality. Still, I've found it useful over the years. Because it is non-judgmental - it describes a neutral set of preferences - it has helped me to better understand, anticipate, and accept what motivates others and even myself, and how we view and navigate the world differently. According to the seminal text Please Understand Me II, the sixteen personality types are evenly classified into four temperament groups, each of which has a completely different aspiration. SJs want to be Donald Trump. SPs want to be Jimi Hendrix. NTs want to be Albus Dumbledore.

According to this book, like the three other "Idealist" NF types, an INFJ like me aspires to be Confucius:

The Sage is the most revered role model for the Idealists—that man or woman who strives to overcome worldly, temporal concerns, and who aspires to the philosophic view of life. Plato, perhaps the greatest of all Idealist philosophers, characterized the sage by saying that the "true lover of wisdom" is on a metaphysical journey [...] To transcend the material world (and thus gain insight into the essence of things), to transcend the senses (and thus gain knowledge of the soul), to transcend the ego (and thus feel united with all creation), to transcend even time (and thus feel the force of past lives and prophecies): these are the lofty goals of the sage, and in their heart of hearts all Idealists honor this quest.  (145)

But what's funny about this description of the sage is how loftily abstract it is, with its language of rising above the earthly world to a place of transcendence—especially when you look up the word in the OED and read how pragmatically the grandaddy of dictionaries defines the quality of being sage: "Practically wise, rendered prudent or judicious by experience." And also: "Characterized by profound wisdom; based on sound judgment." According to the OED, any transcendence the sage has achieved comes, paradoxically, directly from having kept both feet on the ground, having lived through an experience, and having returned with practical wisdom to dispense humbly to those who solicit it. Sages are sage because they've been there.

teenie sardini

Esme's favorite toy.

Sardines are good for you. Everyone says so. Unlike tuna, sardines have almost no mercury in them, and they have more Omega-3 fats (the kind that make your heart happy) than tuna or salmon. Plus, they are one of the most sustainable types of fish. Win-win-win.

Yet most people think of them disparagingly as hobo food. When I was a teenager and discovered how good they were, my mom used to send me out to the garage to eat them because they smelled up the kitchen. This is the same woman, by the way, who used to tell us to "go outside and run a couple of laps around the house" if we were too hyper before Dad got home and we all sat down to dinner. Honestly, I suspect I was all wound up because of how much I always looked forward to my dad coming home from work.

So let me back up a little and start this post in a more logical place. It will take a bit of a story to get back around to the sardines.

bram stoker's pot roast

Happy Belated Halloween!

So, I was talking with my friend Valerie recently about my fascination with maps. This love affair with cartography began when I was in elementary school: my favorite subject next to English was social studies. Later, as a thirteen-year-old, I kept a journal; in it, there's a notebook page filled with the names of ten U.S. cities, chosen during a couple of summer days I spent poring over an atlas, where I'd decided I might want to live when I grew up. One example: the intriguingly named Snowflake, Arizona. When I got my driver's license, I became an avid railfan, so I have a box full of paper maps in the basement from my days of chasing trains on zigzagging back country roads. (Those days are far from over, actually.)   

In our current technological age, with the advent of Google Maps, I can freely explore new places, revisit old ones, and find all of the railroad tracks I want, anywhere on earth. Google's Street View makes this even better, because not only can I see a bird's-eye satellite view of a location, but I can virtually walk past it and see what it looks like from a Heather's-eye view. I do this a lot more often than I'm guessing the average person does. Over the past few months especially, it hasn't been unusual for D to come home and ask me what I did that day, and for me to answer, "Well, I walked past our old apartment on E. 101st and then I went to that little place in midtown where I used to buy jump rings," or "I was trying to find the restaurant where my parents and I ate one evening in Cañon City, Colorado, back in 1999," or "I spent the afternoon revisiting Paris/Venice/Seattle/Lenoir City."

So, last week when Valerie and I were talking, I told her that a couple of days before, I had been strolling through the real Dracula's hometown—Sighișoara, Romania—via Google Street View. I also confided to her that my new mission is to spot a train passing by on Google Street View. The idea hit me after I happened to look "up" on a particular Tuscan freeway at dusk and see a beautiful waxing crescent moon, and I suddenly realized that these pictures were taken at random moments by a camera on a Google Maps car traveling through the region. Surely, these cameras might serendipitously catch other cool things, too?

noodle bowl with green curry broth

Every semester in English 102, I teach a unit on food. Every semester I assign Perri Klass's delightful article, "How to Invent a Family Recipe," for my students to read. And every semester, when we discuss the article in class, my mouth starts watering so much I can hardly talk, at the thought of spicy broth and noodles.

As I often do, yesterday I was craving some noodles in broth with maybe some chicken and vegetables. To put it another way, I was hankering for what I've recently nicknamed "slurpy pasta" (as distinguished from, say, "cheesy pasta").

For the broth, I took my inspiration from Heidi Swanson's vegetarian recipe blog, 101 Cookbooks, which I've followed since late 2007, when I had just moved to Manhattan and was trying to cook more adventurously. Swanson takes the most alluring photos of her food, and the woman loves interestingly flavored broths and vividly colored vegetables - also some of my favorite things to eat. She often does slurpy curries, and they always look so prettily yellow or red or green in the pictures that I've long wanted to try my hand at one of my own.

shrimp + cheese grits

I love carbs. Pasta is my Achilles' heel.  Potatoes... heck, I'm Irish. Rice: yes, please, and make it jasmine or basmati.  And grits?  Grits are a Southern staple. I admit that I quite frequently make these cheese grits for breakfast, so it almost feels like cheating, including them in a fancy dinner recipe, because they're completely simple to make.

The last time I made shrimp and grits, I used one of those pre-done trays of steamed shrimp from Costco, pulled the tails off and stirred them into the sauce at the last minute, and used water instead of shrimp stock in the sauce. It was still delicious, but nothing like the wonder it was this time. Cooking the shrimp in the sauce just adds a whole new layer of shrimpishness to the whole thing, to say nothing of the yummy brightness of the lemon and wine in the stock. However, if you don't want to take the extra step, I don't blame you. And it'll still be good, trust me.

Bought at Whole Foods.
Grown in Athens, GA!

So, last week I was in Louisville for the annual AP English Literature Exam reading, scoring essays for seven days. (And yes, I went back to the sublime Proof on Main twice while I was there, though the Gold Rush was unfortunately gone from the cocktail menu this year.) While it's tons of fun in the evenings to socialize with old grad school friends, drink bourbon (and complete the Urban Bourbon Trail—for which I got a t-shirt, thankyouverymuch), and eat Kentucky Hot Brown (best version: the English Grill at the Brown Hotel), the icky part of the week tends to be the food in the cafeteria, which, while I'm sure it's pretty much the best thing they can offer two thousand people who all have to eat in a centralized location thrice daily, starts to wear on you around the second day. Even I was sick of salads, and you all know I LOVE SALADS—I was born in a Year of the Rabbit, after all. All week, I craved a bowl of pasta that I had made: fettuccini with a tiny bit of sauce mixed with some starchy pasta water, butter and wine, and a ton of Parmesan. I wanted to cook something with lemon thyme in it.

When I got home, the first thing I did was buy a ball of mozzarella, fresh basil, and some vine-ripened tomatoes. That's the closest I'm gonna get to a salad for the moment. In addition, for the last couple of days, I've been dreaming of making something home-cooked that would involve lots of chopping and simmering fresh ingredients. Luckily, last week I also rediscovered how much I love to run outdoors, so I might just manage to avoid gaining weight in my current state of gustatory enthusiasm. :)

plz ignore dirty dishes in the sink

Anyway, I invented this recipe a couple of months ago, after D got home from what he said was the worst day he had ever had at work. For me, food always makes coming home from a hard day (or week) feel even better. Here's hoping this recipe does the same for you...


shrimp and cheese grits
for the grits:
1 cup water
1 cup skim milk
generous 1/4 cup shredded cheese (any kind)
generous 1/4 cup shredded Parmesan
2 tbsp. grated Parmesan
1 tbsp. butter
6 tbsp. quick grits

for the shrimp:
1 lb. fresh, raw shrimp (peeled and de-veined, shells reserved)
1 to 2 tbsp. unsalted butter
1 to 2 tbsp. canola oil
3 vine-ripe tomatoes, seeds and pulp removed, and diced
half of a medium yellow or orange bell pepper, finely diced
half of a red onion, finely diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
1/3 cup dry white wine
1/2 to 3/4 cup shrimp stock (see below) or water
6 sprigs of fresh thyme, stripped and chopped
5 leaves of fresh basil, chopped

black pepper and kosher sea salt

for the shrimp stock:

reserved raw shrimp shells

1/4 cup dry white wine

lemon wedge (or two)

1 tbsp. unsalted butter

2 sprigs of fresh thyme

1 tbsp. whole black peppercorns

1/2 tsp. Old Bay seasoning (or more, if you like)

1/2 tsp. kosher sea salt

stocky... yet delicate

Prepare the shrimp and stock: Peel and de-vein the shrimp, reserving the shells and discarding the veins. Place shrimp shells, wine, lemon wedge(s), butter, thyme, peppercorns, Old Bay, and salt in a small saucepan and add just enough water to cover it all. Boil gently until reduced and concentrated, about 15 or 20 minutes. Let the stock cool, and then strain it into a bowl or measuring cup. (Bonus: there should be more stock left over than you will use for this recipe, which means you can freeze the extra cup or two and use it later in a soup or another sauce.)

Make cheese grits: Add water, skim milk, grits, and a little salt and pepper to a saucepan over medium heat. Bring to a boil and cook until grits are thick, about three to five minutes. Remove from heat and add butter, a sprinkling of fresh thyme, and cheeses. Stir until the cheese is melted. Cover and set aside. (If the grits thicken too much while they sit, you can always stir in a few tablespoons of leftover shrimp broth, milk, or half-and-half to thin them a bit later, as well as re-warming them before serving if needed.)

Now for the shrimp: Heat the canola oil and 1 tablespoon of the butter in a large skillet over medium heat. Add onion and pepper and cook until it is beginning to soften, several minutes. Melt a tiny pat of additional butter and add the garlic. Cook just until fragrant, about 30 to 45 seconds.

This right here is a good moment.

Stir in tomatoes and thyme, turn up the heat a little, and cook for 3 to 5 minutes, until they are incorporated into the sauce and beginning to caramelize, but not brown. Add wine and cook until reduced a bit. Add shrimp stock (or water) in small amounts and let it evaporate—this will concentrate the sauce and add flavor.

During the last few minutes, while you still have some liquid in the pan, stir in the shrimp and saute for 2 to 3 minutes, tossing occasionally so that they cook on all sides. Reduce heat to low and add basil and remaining tablespoon of butter. Heat through. Spoon shrimp and sauce over cheese grits, and garnish with chopped fresh basil or Italian parsley.

Enjoy!
H.

chicken with olives + pine nuts

This is my favorite dish on earth. ON EARTH. I dream about it. In fact, I find myself counting the weeks since I made it last, wondering whether enough time has elapsed for me to suggest making it again, or whether D will think I'm totally crazy and obsessed.

I watched Lidia Bastianich make Pollo con Olive e Pignoli on her show back in 2009, and as soon as she raised the lid on this pot full of browned chicken and salty-buttery-winey-nutty goodness, I knew I had to try it myself. It was the first thing I ever made in the gorgeous, tomato-red Le Creuset Dutch oven that was D's Christmas present to me that year, so every time I pull it out of the cabinet, my mouth starts watering because it associates that pot with this dish.

Though the best batches of this recipe by far have been the ones using bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs, I often amend Lidia's original recipe by using boneless, skinless chicken breasts instead. I like chicken breasts just fine, but only when they're cooked the right way. In order to keep the meat from drying out and becoming tough, which can happen very easily with chicken breasts, it's worth taking the extra step to brine the chicken for at least a couple of hours so that it stays juicy and tender. (Brining is super simple: in a large bowl with a lid, whisk together 4 cups water and 3 tablespoons each of sugar and salt until it's dissolved. Add chicken breasts, cover, and refrigerate for 1 to 4 hours. When you're ready to cook, remove chicken from brine, rinse it with cold water, and pat it dry with paper towels.) Using chicken breasts also cuts a bit of the fat in the dish - though in all honesty, this is absolutely not a diet recipe. It's something I only bring out when I'm feeling kind of what-the-hell about being healthy.

Me want.

This is a great recipe for a dinner party. It's super rustic, makes your house smell fantastic, and - bonus! - is a one-pot, one-bowl meal. Put a bottle of wine, a big bowl of salad, and a basket of crusty baguette chunks with it, and you're done.

Recipe notes: For the olives, I feel pretty strongly about Cerignolas because I think they have a really distinctive flavor that makes this dish, but I have read the reader comments on Lidia's recipe, and apparently other cooks have used regular green olives and loved how their batches came out. I increased the amount of pine nuts in the recipe because, let's be honest, I am never mad at more pine nuts. I have also called for more wine so that it makes more pan sauce, which is like crack. My friends, there are no words strong enough to express how I feel about it. (I might also venture so far as to say that I view the chicken, which is ostensibly the "star" of this dish, as almost ancillary to the sauce.) And P.S.: the soft garlic chunks are maybe the best part of eating this. Getting one on your plate is a bit like finding the toy baby in the king cake—except better, because you can eat the garlic...

chicken with olives + pine nuts

(adapted from Lidia Bastianich's Pollo con Olive e Pignoli)

3½ to 4 lbs. chicken pieces ("happy chicken" if possible)
1 tbsp. extra-virgin olive oil
2 tbsp. plus 1 tbsp. unsalted butter
3 to 4 plump garlic cloves, peeled and smashed
2 bay leaves
1 c. pitted Cerignola olives

7 to 8 small, oil-cured black olives (just a few will do - they're really salty and a little bitter)
3/4 c. white wine
1/2 c. toasted pine nuts
at least one crusty baguette

Pit olives by smashing each one under the side of a large, wide chef's knife and removing pits. Leave them in large chunks; it's so rustic and pretty that way! You might also go ahead and toast your pine nuts at this point. Heat a dry skillet over medium heat. Add nuts and stir occasionally. Keep a close watch on them; they burn very easily. When they're lightly browned, take them off the heat and put them in a small bowl. Let them cool and set them aside, along with the olives.

If you have brined the chicken, rinse it and pat it dry. Pepper it but don't salt it—the brine and the olives will add plenty of salt. If not, pat it dry, and a light dusting of salt and pepper on both sides is fine. Remove to a plate.

Melt 2 tbsp. of the butter and all of the olive oil in a large, heavy Dutch oven over medium-low heat. Let it turn into a bit of a beurre noisette if you want—a little light browning will actually make it taste even yummier.

Add the chicken pieces to the pot and flip them back and forth once so that both sides get a coating of oil and butter. Arrange the pieces so that there’s as much space between them as possible. Scatter the smashed garlic chunks and bay leaves in the oil/butter, in the spaces between the chicken breasts. Cover and let the pieces gently brown for around 10 minutes—you might cut that time a little shorter, depending on how quickly the pieces are browning. The less cooking you have to do, the more tender the chicken will be.

Uncover and flip the chicken pieces, moving them around a bit in the pan so that they all get the same amount of heat and oil. Cover again and cook for 5 to 10 minutes on gentle heat.

After around 15 to 20 minutes total, scatter olives around the pan and pour in the wine. Raise heat just enough so that it starts bubbling again, and then immediately reduce it as low as it will go. Cover and gently simmer for about 10 minutes, turning chicken pieces periodically so that they stay covered with the pan juices. Sometimes I also pile a couple of olives on top of the chicken so that they stay moist.

Finally, stir in pine nuts and cover tightly again. Turn off the heat and let the whole thing sit for about 5 or 10 minutes. At the end, melt an additional tablespoon of butter into the sauce.

Serve with rice or torn chunks of baguette. Depending on which you choose, take my advice and think about not serving this on a plate. I recommend either putting the chicken and rice in shallow bowls so that you can pour lots of pan juice over it, or if not, then at least pouring the sauce into little ramekins so that you can dip hunks of bread in it.

Cheers,
H.

Tender! Juicy! Salty! Buttery! Mmmmmm.

creamy curried shrimp + brown rice + vegetables

This week in my world literature class, I taught an excerpt from Marcel Proust's seven-volume novel, Remembrance of Things Past. I had been looking forward to it because a couple of months ago for my birthday D made me a present of Alain de Botton's book, How Proust Can Change Your Life. I have loved taking my time, reading it a chapter at a time, because de Botton so skillfully distills the wisdom and insight of Proust into this wonderfully wry, nerdy self-help manual for how to live, and I like to digest its lessons slowly.


So, I was excited to get to discuss an excerpt from Proust's actual work. In one section of the novel, the narrator Marcel recalls one evening when he experienced his usual overwhelming longing for his mother to come up to his room and kiss him goodnight, but also felt a simultaneous panic at the knowledge that this would not happen: he had been sent to bed early because the family friend Swann had come to dinner, and Marcel's parents were busy entertaining their guest. At the end of the excerpt, the narrator abruptly transitions to a recollection of having come home with a cold several years earlier. Though at the time he was a little too old for it, his mother coddled him by giving him a cup of lime-blossom tea and a madeleine to make him feel better. As he describes it, at the moment when he dipped the cookie into his drink and tasted it, his entire childhood world at Combray suddenly reappeared in his memory and, "taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea." In a flash of insight, he comes to the realization that he associates the taste with Sunday mornings as a child, when his Aunt Léonie would offer him a bite of a madeleine that had been dipped in her tea.


Olfactory and gustatory memories, I would argue, are some of the most underestimated of all sensory recollections. They can overcome us so suddenly and powerfully when we bite into, sip, or smell something that makes us remember being children. These "involuntary memories," as Proust calls them, are far more potent than our voluntary attempts to remember things, precisely because they are so deeply buried and so often take us completely by surprise.


Back to the recipe at hand. One evening this week, making a quick stop at Publix on my hour-long commute home from teaching in Tuscaloosa, I was trying to come up with some plan for dinner on the fly as I wheeled my cart efficiently (read: get out of my way) up and down the aisles, grabbing stuff left and right as I went. We hadn't had shrimp in a while, so I ordered some, pre-cooked and peeled, from the seafood counter. But what to go with it? Suddenly I had an idea.

      

My mom used to make a version of this recipe when I was a little girl, and it was one of my very favorite dishes. It was pretty plain the way she made it, but that was exactly the way I liked it: tiny salad shrimp, white rice, almonds, and a mild, creamy curry sauce. Often she would use diced chicken instead of shrimp, which was equally wonderful. I used to dream about eating a big plate of it all by myself.


Since it was kind of exotic, she usually only made it for company, so we didn't have it very often. Hence, the taste of curry powder is forever linked in my mind with the mingled excitement and dread I felt, as a painfully shy kid, whenever guests came to the house for dinner. Guests also meant, of course, that there would be fewer leftovers, since there were extra mouths to feed besides the five of us and it wasn't always easy for my mother to judge beforehand how much food would be sufficient. Therefore, I also associate the taste of shrimp curry with a sinking suspicion that there might not be enough left for me to have a second helping, either that evening or at lunch the next day - as well as a selfish fear that even if there were enough, I would probably have to share, which would likewise mean a smaller portion.


Don't we all have some dish like this? One of the great things about being an adult is that you can do what you couldn't when you were a kid: make a big batch of something that you used to have to share with everyone else and eat as much of it as you like, and then get up in the middle of the night, warm it up, and eat the rest of it. You can bake a whole package of cookies and eat them yourself, or even, hell, omit the baking entirely and just sit there all evening surfing on your computer, eating blobs of cookie dough, and drinking a glass of wine, instead of sitting down at the table and having a proper dinner. (Whoa. Grad school flashback.) But a childhood dish never seems to taste quite as satisfying as you remember - there's a kind of melancholy about it because it reminds you of a time and of relationships that, if they aren't forever gone, have at the very least been irrevocably transformed into something more adult. Which is, in itself, not entirely a bad thing - just a bittersweet one.


At any rate, on Tuesday evening I made this tribute to a favorite childhood dish, and D ate it and thought it was delicious, too. As everyone knows, this doesn't always happen when you enthusiastically try to introduce a loved one to some food that you thought was sublime when you were a kid (I'm looking at you, Vienna sausages), so when he said I should post it, I figured it meant that others might like it, as well.


What's funny about this is that it also reminds me of my brother Jeff, who has the opposite response to curry powder: he despises not only the taste but also the smell of it. Maybe it's linked in his mind with some unpleasant memory, or maybe he ate it and later got sick. I'm not sure. All I can say is that my parents won't even cook with it in their own house if there's a possibility that he might be coming over in a day or two. It's a joke in our family that usually involves one of us facetiously saying something along these lines: "Hey, Jeffy, want some dinner? You'll like it! I put a big scoop of curry powder in it." (To be fair, these days he does actually like other kinds of Thai and Indian curries.)


All of that's to say: I hope you enjoy this dish, which tastes like all the fears and desires of my childhood. ;)


creamy curried shrimp + brown rice and vegetables
for the sauce:
1/4 c. olive oil mayonnaise
1 small (5 or 6-oz.) container nonfat Greek yogurt
1 tbsp. curry powder
1 tsp. ground ginger powder
1/2 tsp. ground mustard powder
1/2 tsp. garlic powder
1/2 tsp. onion powder
1/4 tsp. ground black pepper
juice of a couple of lemon wedges


1 tsp. olive oil
1 tsp. butter
1/2 c. frozen peas, thawed
1 small zucchini, quartered or sixthed and then sliced
1 small carrot, finely diced
1/2 c. celery, finely diced
3 green onions, finely chopped (white parts and green tops kept separate)
3/4 lb. cooked shrimp, shelled, deveined, and de-tailed
2 small containers pre-cooked brown rice, warmed in microwave for 60 seconds
2 tbsp. slivered blanched almonds


Whisk together mayonnaise, yogurt, curry, ginger, mustard, garlic, onion, black pepper, and lemon juice in a bowl. Mix in green onion tops. Allow it to sit at room temperature for at least 10 or 15 minutes so that the flavors blend.


Heat olive oil and butter in a large skillet over medium heat. Add vegetables and sauté for a couple of minutes, just until a little soft but still crisp and green. Crank heat down to low. Stir in shrimp, dressing, brown rice, and almonds. Heat until it’s all warmed through. Serve with a sprinkling of Parmesan on top.


Note: When I made this, there was a bit too much sauce for the amount of rice, shrimp, and veggies I had, so I stirred in a little at a time at the end and ended up having some left over. Feel free to use as much or as little as you like. It would also be fine to thin the sauce with a little water or lemon juice, if you like it less dense. Also, I sprinkle Parmesan on well nigh everything, so you are welcome to omit it if you're not as crazy for cheese as I am.

clam chowder

I love soups and sauces, as the disproportionate number of them on this blog attests. If I go to a restaurant, I usually gravitate towards them first on the menu. Some of the more memorable ones I've tasted include a spicy green tomato and applewood smoked bacon soup with shrimp on top from G Restaurant (r.i.p.) in Birmingham, a creamy leek bisque I had at a fancy, last-evening-of-the-trip gala dinner at One Whitehall Place when I went to London with my parents back in 1997, and finally, that marvelous cream of mushroom soup I ordered at Mythos Restaurant in the Universal Studios Theme Park last summer, which I mentioned in a post earlier this fall. I used to feel simultaneously delighted and frustrated when I would eat these delicious bowls of awesomeness, completely mystified as to how chefs (and even canned food companies) managed to cram all kinds of flavor into a simple soup, until I watched enough cooking shows to learn about reducing broths in order to concentrate their taste. That's the secret to this chowder: lots of reducing and cooking things in clammy liquid.


However, I should begin by admitting that this dish has not been entirely perfected yet. It has come out differently both times that I've made it, in terms of its consistency (crazily thick the first time, a little too soupy the second), and a thick chowder is one of D.'s must-haves. This time when we made it, it required straining out the potatoes and clams, returning the broth to the pot, and boiling it for a while longer until it reduced and thickened some. I think the current proportions of liquid and solid in the soup are finally just about right, but you can tinker with it a bit in the same way we did, depending on whether you like your chowder thinner or thicker.

Regardless, trust me when I say that the flavor has not been problem in either batch of the soup. It's such a nice combo: it tastes ocean-y like clams, with a little freshness from the onion and celery, richness from the potatoes and half-and-half, and faint smokiness from the bacon. As a last note, I guess I should also confess that I had never even tried clam chowder up until several years ago, when D. let me taste a bite of his at a restaurant, so I allow the distinct possibility that my recipe might offend the palates of some chowder connoisseurs. Still, I suspect at this point that I may have joined their ranks. :) 

Hope you enjoy...

alabama clam chowder


2 small cans minced clams, drained and juices reserved
2 bottles clam juice
2 large potatoes, peeled and cut into a half-inch dice
1 large garlic clove, minced
half a large white onion, minced
1 large rib of celery with leaves, minced
2 small bay leaves
2 slices of bacon, chopped
1 tbsp. olive oil
2 tbsp. flour
1 generous cup fat free half-and-half, warmed (but not boiled)
2 cups chicken broth


Add one bottle of clam juice to a large, heavy Dutch oven and bring to a boil. Reduce liquid by half. Add one cup of chicken broth and the reserved juices from one can of the drained clams. Boil diced potatoes uncovered in broth and clam juice mixture, just until tender. Remove to a bowl with any remaining liquid.


In the same unwashed pot, heat olive oil. Add bacon and sauté for a couple of minutes until it's a bit browned. Add bay leaf, onion, garlic, and celery, and cook over medium heat for several minutes until they have softened.


Add flour and stir until it's completely coated with the oil and drippings. Cook for a minute or two, just until the floury taste goes away.


Add the second cup of chicken broth, the second bottle of clam juice, and the drained liquid from the second can of clams to the pot. Let it come up to a boil, and then reduce heat to low. Simmer until slightly thickened and reduced.


Add half-and-half to the pot. Simmer for a couple of minutes until thickened and heated through. Finally, add canned clams and potatoes back to the pot. Heat through. Remove bay leaves.


Serve with baguette halves brushed with olive oil and toasted under the broiler for a couple of minutes.

turkey tetrazzini (or thanksgiving, part II)

Today's posts are earmarked from last month, but somehow it seemed appropriate to post them now. Hope your holidays are merry and bright!


November 26, 2010


Yesterday marked one of my favorite days of the year. I worked out early so that I could veg out for the rest of the day with D and Esme in front of the TV, drinking beer, napping, eating, and watching football. I took two naps yesterday. It was heaven.


Anyway, while D was cleaning up after his evening workout, I threw together this recipe from some of the ingredients we had leftover from the big meal on Thursday: turkey breast, half a bottle of white wine, some half-and-half, a can of mushrooms, a couple of shallots, and some fresh herbs. I always keep homemade sourdough breadcrumbs in the refrigerator because they're so much better for you than the kind you buy ready-made (lots of hydrogenated oil in those), and well nigh anything tastes good breaded with them.


I once made a version of turkey tetrazzini for my family during the holidays, and when we ate this batch, D and I agreed that it should become a tradition for the day after Thanksgiving.


turkey tetrazzini

1 package angel hair, cooked and drained
1/2 stick of butter
1 medium to large shallot, finely diced
3 tbsp. flour
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
1/2 tsp. dry mustard powder
1 1/2 cups chicken stock, warmed
1 cup chardonnay (or other dry white wine)
1 1/2 cups half-and-half, warmed (I used a combo of fat-free & regular)
a couple of cups of diced leftover turkey
1 large can mushrooms, drained
1 tbsp. chopped fresh chives 
1 tbsp. stripped thyme leaves, chopped
1/4 cup (plus reserved 2 tbsp.) grated Parmesan cheese
1/2 cup fresh breadcrumbs
1 tbsp. chopped Italian parsley
2 tbsp. olive oil

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Cook pasta to a couple of minutes shy of the package directions - it will cook the rest of the way in the oven. Drain and reserve.

In a large, heavy pot, melt butter over medium heat. Add shallot and cook for 3 to 4 minutes, until it’s beginning to brown. Add flour and cook 1 to 2 minutes, until floury taste is gone. Whisk in hot chicken stock. Bring to a boil and add wine. Boil for a minute or so to let it thicken. Reduce heat, add half-and-half, and heat through. Turn off the heat. Add mushrooms, turkey, herbs, 1/4 cup of Parmesan, and pasta. Stir gently until everything is incorporated.

Spoon pasta mixture into a buttered 9-x-13 pan. In a small bowl, mix together bread crumbs, reserved 2 tbsp. Parmesan, Italian parsley, and olive oil. Scatter over the top.

Bake at 350 degrees for 15 to 20 minutes, until bubbly. Crank the heat up to broil for the last couple of minutes so that the breadcrumbs get a bit browned on top.

Finally, here's to you: with a beer in my hand, wearing PJs with a cat asleep at my feet, I'm toasting the efforts of every Thanksgiving cook who made it to the finish line this year, no matter how many mishaps you had in the kitchen. Hope you enjoy your leftovers as much as we did ours.


Mmmmmmm... Zzzzzzz...

happy (belated) thanksgiving!

the spread

I love Thanksgiving. To be frank, ever since my sister died on the day after Christmas fourteen years ago, my family has always, to some extent, tended to limp a little through the holidays. You have to admit that even without those memories, Christmas is already a bit loaded: if you look forward solely to the presents, the holiday always tends to be anticlimactic. If you focus on being with your family, things turn out much better, but you still can't really avoid the profound case of the blues that sets in the day after. These days, I'm practicing being in the moment more, something that my brother Jeff has always been good at; that tends to pan out more happily than borrowing trouble, which I'm excellent at doing. :)  Anyway, Thanksgiving is so different from Christmas. It's about the food, sure, but it's also a time when all you have to do is hang out with your family and friends, eat, and feel grateful. I can get behind a holiday like that.


This was the first year I ever cooked for more than just D and me. We invited my parents, Jeff, D's parents, and his Grandma down for Thanksgiving dinner so that they could all see the new house, some of them for the first time.


The first Thanksgiving meal I ever cooked was three years ago when we lived in NYC, and I made a whole feast for just D and me in our tiny studio apartment kitchen, which was so small that I had to open the refrigerator door in order to get the oven door open. We were both terribly homesick, knowing that we wouldn't be able to go home until Christmas. D's parents were kind enough to transfer some funds over to his account so that we could go out to eat for our Thanksgiving. We got dressed up and went to Orsay, a French restaurant on the Upper East Side that had a prix fixe menu. The plates that arrived at the table had beautiful, harvest-colored daubs of turkey and vegetable on them in various combinations - very French and fancy. While we were walking home, we stopped in a little newsstand and petted a skinny, elegant black cat with a heart-shaped charm on her collar that, appropriately, had "Paris" engraved on it.


Still, it didn't seem quite right not to have some of the specific dishes we associated with our families - sage-heavy cornbread dressing, standard roast turkey, broccoli casserole, pumpkin pie, et cetera - so I made a meal for us, too. And I wheeled our 13-pound turkey home to our apartment, a dozen blocks down Fifth Avenue, in my "bag lady" cart.


That was a great Thanksgiving, if a bit lonely. This one was bittersweet in its own way: we've lost some important people this year, but I'm so happy that we got to spend Thanksgiving with our families.

just look at that pretty bird!

As for food, this year we decided to do Alton Brown's recipe for turkey because I'd been seeing commercials for it all month. Apparently, it's the most popular Thanksgiving recipe on the Food Network website, and when I looked it up, it had over 2500 reviews and ratings. That's a crazy number of people all making the same kind of turkey.

So, it's wonderful. If you have the time, energy, a few obscure ingredients like candied ginger and allspice berries (plus the extra refrigerator space for a brine-and-turkey-laden 10-gallon bucket), it is so worth it to make this turkey. The guy has figured out how to cook an entire bird so that it hits its various recommended internal temperatures simultaneously and thus stays moist, not to mention making sure the skin gets beautifully fried and golden brown. 

Anyway, here is the rest of the menu from Thanksgiving:

      Paula Deen's Mushroom Canapes (also delightful with some artichoke hearts thrown in)
      Alton Brown's Roast Turkey and gravy
      Claire Robinson's Add Thyme for Whipped Potatoes
      classic Campbell's Soup green bean casserole
      my Nana's broccoli casserole
      Sîan Griffiths's sweet potato soufflé
      my great-grandmother's cornbread dressing

      D's Granddad's cornbread dressing

      roasted brussels sprouts with bacon and balsamic reduction

      D's mom's pecan pie

      apple stack cake

      pecan pie


Happy holidays, y'all.


Cheers,
H.

barramundi with noodles in miso broth + caramelized shallots + steamed bok choy

D and I did P90X in the fall of 2007 while we were living in Manhattan. All of the workouts. And the meal plan. In our 450-square-foot studio apartment. And survived. Without destroying furniture, windows, bones, or each other. Oh, how I grew to despise Tony Horton's voice. I still have nightmares about him chanting ominously, just towards the end of the warm-up for the Plyometrics workout, "Get reeeady... 'cause it's comin'...!"

I lost around 15 pounds in those three months. That sounds like a modest amount, so let me clarify. I got very slim and cut, my physique completely changed, and my net weight loss didn't exceed 15 pounds because so much of my body turned to muscle, which is heavier than fat.





Anyway, lately - and I admit that it's largely my fault because I've been cooking so much decadent food - we've been talking about how we should do P90X again. It can be a little tricky making time for the workouts - and the excruciatingly sore muscles you have for the next several days - but the meal plan isn't so difficult or weird. So here's a less indulgent recipe that I think even Tony Horton would approve of: big protein, high fiber, low fat and carbs, and a pile of greens. The only potentially iffy aspects are the pasta and the sodium content contributed by the soup mix, but you can leave the noodles out, and if you spoon less of the broth into your bowl at the end, you can cut the salt, too. (And to be fair, given their menus, P90X doesn't worry overly much about your sodium intake.)

Two notes about ingredients: I want to say outright that I made a version of this with sea bass when we were living in NYC that actually used authentic miso paste from Gourmet Garage, and it was fabulous. However, if you're working on a schedule and/or a budget, know that Kikkoman makes a lovely, cheap powdered miso soup mix that tastes exactly like what you'd get in a sushi bar, complete with rehydrated tofu cubes, seaweed, and green onion tops. I get it at Wal-Mart (I know, I know - if I could quit it, I would), and I keep packets of it in my office so I can make myself a cup of soup on particularly long days when I need something on my stomach to tide me over until dinner. This tastes much nicer than a plain glass of water - and requires almost as little caloric commitment.

Secondly, Dreamfields pasta is a recent Publix discovery that I highly recommend, while simultaneously divulging that it has lots of questionable (i.e. possibly genetically-engineered) "indigestible" carbs, as well as tons of fiber, along with - ahem! - the digestive consequences of that extra insoluble material.

Thirdly, we also recently discovered barramundi ("Australia's favorite fish!" declares the package) because Whole Foods carries it in their frozen seafood cooler. It's excellent, inexpensive, easily thawed in cold water, and not watery and wimpy textured like flounder or cod. In fact, it actually reminds me a little of sea bass (or a Real Housewife, I guess): rich and thin.

As a final note, let me just add: this dish would probably taste obscenely delicious just after a grueling round of Legs and Back followed by Ab Ripper X.

barramundi with noodles in miso broth + caramelized shallots + bok choy

3 thawed barramundi fillets
2 envelopes Kikkoman miso soup mix
1 cup water

2 green onions, green tops chopped and white parts cut into thirds
1 small piece of fresh ginger, peeled and cut in half
1 garlic clove, smashed and peeled
1 head bok choy, washed well and sliced into one-inch ribbons

2 good-sized shallots, halved and sliced into rings
2 tbsp. dry white wine
1 tsp. unsalted butter
3 tsp. olive oil, divided

4 oz. Dreamfields linguine

Cook linguine according to package directions. Drain, rinse, keep in water, and set aside.

Heat one teaspoon each of butter and olive oil over medium-high heat. Add shallots and cook until they are beginning to brown. Add wine and cook until almost all liquid has evaporated. Set aside.

Boil water in microwave and combine it with miso soup packets in a bowl. Let it reconstitute. (It will be twice the usual concentration of mix to water.)

Grind some black pepper over the patted-dry barramundi fillets. Heat a teaspoon of olive oil in a heavy skillet over medium-high. Add fish to pan and sear on both sides until lightly browned. Add miso soup concentrate to the skillet and turn fish gently to coat. Cover tightly and cook over the lowest heat setting for 10 minutes, carefully turning fish again halfway through.

Heat the last teaspoon of oil over medium. Add green onion white pieces, ginger, and garlic and cook for a few seconds. Add bok choy and 1/4 cup water. Cover and steam for 4 to 6 minutes. Uncover and let water evaporate. Add chopped green onion tops and stir. Remove ginger pieces.

Mound pasta in a shallow bowl, followed by bok choy. Perch fish on top of the pile, and pour broth over it. Garnish with a teaspoon or two of the caramelized shallots.