time out.

I'm in love with my bed. This is awesome.
Unrelatedly, I'm finally taking 4 months' worth of cellphone pics off my phone. Let's catch up, shall we?

Here's the truffled egg salad/beef burger from Burgermeester:

Here's me about ready to go all Office Space on this FAX machine that WOULD NOT FAX my Italian bureaucracy back in October.

Here's a sunny afternoon at Stork.

Here's a very foggy night about two weeks ago, it was great.

Here's the tosti maker from the Grand in Groningen. One morning when the kitchen staff came in it was missing and there was near hysteria. It is everyone's favorite appliance.

Here's Mara testing the skeleton/Tele rig.

The next four pictures are one night. Mara and I started at De Prael, which was very pleasant until we got kicked out for crashing a private party. So we went to In De Wildeman, where we planned our attack on the Burger Bar.

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This recipe exists elsewhere on this site, but this is the updated version so yeah.

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carrot-ginger soup with creme fraiche.

1 medium onion
5 large carrots
2 inches of ginger, grated
4 cloves garlic
1 granny smith apple
1 red apple
1 can mandarin oranges with liquid
2 tsp cumin seed, ground
1 T ground coriander seed
1 tsp cayenne
2 cups vegetable broth

Chop ingredients where necessary, saute a bit, add liquid, then simmer until tender. Blend with hand
blender or alternatively, a food processor until smooth. Adjust seasoning if necessary.

Garnish with cilantro, croutons and creme fraiche/sour cream.

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prod ass.

Prod Ass (aka production assistant aka Mara) cooked her first dinner at the Grand last night: warm goat cheese salad with blueberries and candied pecans + a lovely carrot and coriander soup with creme fraiche, cilantro, and homemade croutons. Meanwhile, I just took a (dirt) nap downstairs.

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slapicon.

I can never find this when I need it, mostly because I don't own the cookbook. So here's Marcella's onion frittata recipe. There's going to be an adaptation that involves some southwestern elements. Haven't quite figured out the deets, but I think it will include rosemary, basil, bacon, Parmesan, caramelized onions, roasted red pepper, poblanos, and...somehow corn.

Let's give the ingredients a shot.

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bacon + green chile frittata bites.

4 cups onions
butter

3/4 cup cooked bacon
1 tsp roasted garlic
5 eggs
1/2 cup green chiles, chopped
2/3 cup cheese
rosemary
fresh basil

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We'll see. And this here's the new shrimpless version of our fvorite slpicon. One of my keys is not working properly. Salpicon.

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salpicón di panga.

4 panga filets
thyme
powdered bay leaf
1/4 cup olive oil
4 tsp capers
4 tbsp pickles
1/4 cup sherry vinegar
juice of a lemon
1 egg, hard-boiled
salt
pepper

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midnight cowboy.

We're trying a new twist on things around here: I've turned over the kitchen to Mara for a while, and she's cooking from My Recipe Box (MRB from now on) on Epicurious.

If you're not a dork like myself, then you don't know that MRB is a place where you can save any Epicurious recipe so that you don't always have to sift through their 142 salmon recipes when you're looking for the two useful ones.

The slightly interesting thing about my own MRB (VDuck's) is that I started using it all the time pretty much the day Epicurious implemented it, which must be 12 or 13 years ago. I filled it with say 300 or 400 recipes, and then I stopped using it in around 2003 or so, probably around the time Mara recovered from her thyroid explosion thing and our cooking started to become what it is today.

So it's a snapshot of a specific window in my/our development as a food geek(s), as well as a reminder of pre-celebrity chef/foodblog food trends, which is revealing in terms of some of the wrongheaded messes produced by late 1990s fusion cooking in America.

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I re-engaged with MRB over the 2010 holidays b/c it's invaluable for highlighting the promising candidates in each year's glut of Thanksgiving/Christmas/Kwanzaa/etc recipes. Frankly I couldn't believe they still had all my old recipes...who does that on the internet, keeps your personalized shit for 12 years? Hell, those fuckers at Hotmail used to delete your email account if you didn't sign in for a couple months.  Your EMAIL.

Anyway, I weeded out some shit I knew we'd never cook, and added some new things, and now Mara's using it as a source of inspiration. Tonight's score was 1-1. Above, the thoroughly repeatable Mango and Radicchio Caprese with Basil Vinaigrette from 2008.

A pretty genius winter salad, the mango is amazingly at home here, and so much better than a January tomato. Mara also threw arugula in there for some midrange bitterness, and I think it rounded everything out. Everyone should make this: a useful example of practical, understated fusion. Plus, it's pretty: you know that if a salad looks OK under our dining table lights and with my food styling/photography skills, in real life it must be gorgeous.

The unsuccessful recipe was 1995's Grilled Sirloin with Anise-Basil Butter, an example of ill-conceived fusion. I think the idea was maybe to bring in some of the flavors from Asian cooking (five spice + basil?). Although the anise-basil butter was really good, we wouldn't make the steak again as written. The butter plus the pepper-anise crust was a simply anise overload (snicker). And then they recommend you serve it with grilled fennel. Ah, the 1990s.

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Looking towards the future. Peepin at the "highest-rated" recipes in my MRB, this selection could make a pretty stimulacious little winter dinner party menu itself, couldn't it. If we ignore my current dietary/budgetary requirements I mean.

Parsnip and Pear Latkes.
Ribeye Steaks with Arugula Oil w/Ricotta Whipped Potatoes (using a different recipe for the potatoes).
Rosemary and Brown Butter Applesauce.
Endive and Gorgonzola Salad.
Grand Marnier Souffles with Creme Anglaise.

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Below: our new pets, plastic jellyfish.

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nokey.

I mentioned that we're making gnocchi today, I may have misspoke: I am not making gnocchi. They are making gnocchi, they being mostly Dennis and then Mara. He's been making gnocchi this way for about 20 years by his estimate, ever since he saw some cold mashed potatoes in the fridge one day and thought, "hey, I wonder if I can make gnocchi out of those."

He and his mom had been making them with warm mashed potatoes, but were having problems because you could keep adding flour and adding flour and they wouldn't firm up (because they were warm), and then all of the sudden WHAMO they were like superballs.

So now, he boils 5 pounds of potatoes, mashes them til they're completely lump-free, and refrigerates them overnight. Then, the next day you get them out and they look like this.

You add flour.

Then you keep adding flour a couple tablespoons at a time, until you think they're "about ready", which means that the dough isn't sticky, but it's still very pliable.

Then you cook a few to see how they are.

Based on their consistency here, you add flour until they "should be perfect". Then you taste some more. Then! You call in the troops. One person is the snake station:

One person is the flipper.














Sometimes the tasks and stations overlap.

And one person takes the results and boils them until they float. And then they go on trays to cool and be frozen.

Sweet potato gnocchi details up next.

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two-times.

Above, bruschette with goat cheese, half-dried and marinated tomatoes, and fresh basil. Below, a healthy corn chowder.

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corn chowder with smoked trout and chipotle.

3 tbsp butter
1 onion
1 chipotle chile, whole
1/2 tsp powdered cumin

1 cup milk
300gr corn kernels
black pepper

4 tbsp smoked trout filet, shredded finely with a fork
1/2 cup cilantro, chopped fine

possibly 8 half-dried tomatoes, diced fine

Saute onion, cumin, and chipotle in butter over low heat for 10 minutes or so. Add milk and corn, reduce heat to low and simmer for 30 minutes. Season with black pepper to taste. Turn off heat. Remove chipotle and set aside, then puree the soup with a staff mixer: I went for a medium puree, not totally smooth, but not many whole kernels either. Add trout, stir to incorporate, and let sit for 5 minutes. Stir, and taste for saltiness, then adjust seasoning to taste. Rewarm if necessary, desired, etc. Garnish with cilantro and possibly a teaspoon of tinily diced tomatoes. These quantities serve 2.

the holy trinity + 1.

In our little red well-intentioned but ultimately unfinishable homemade cookbook, there's a page titled THE HOLY TRINITY. This refers to three courses that, if served in succession, will almost definitely make you feel better about everything except your diet and your breath.

They are: caesar salad, tortellini alfredo, and shrimp dijon. Three classic examples of Ohio River mining country Italian-American home cooking that my spellchecker wants me to capitalize in order to make them sound fancy (Caesar, Alfredo, Dijon).

But capitalization would make it seem like they're supposed to be an implementation of some "authentic" dish, while in reality these are very much their own pretty classic Americanized things that just happen to be saddled with some Europeanized monikers.

Here's also where we'll put the TNC recipe, though it's not officially part of the trinity. As I pointed out earlier, of course you could sex this up with fancy cheese and other modifications, but the one below is the version that provides the expected and necessary comfort.

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LENGTHY ASIDE

THE HOLY TRINITY recipes are all from the Mara side of the family, which is why I mention the Ohio River Valley, but to be honest I haven't yet tried to track down the exact provenance of these versions. I don't mean provenance like the legend of Caesar salad or fettuccine Alfredo: I mean, more like when did people start making this specific version and exactly where does it still get made like this. 

I'm curious b/c I suspect that there are some things about these recipes that are specific to Italian immigrant cooking in mining country (specifically in our cases Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania). And I suspect this simply because so many of Mara's family recipes have turned out to be highly geographically specific, such as pepperoni buns (this whole NYT article has lots of good Italian miner background) and fiadone.

Fiadone are especially interesting in this regard because, the last time I looked, I could find almost nothing about them online. Of course, I was spelling them "fiadune" because that's the spelling I somehow came up with from Alverta's recipe card, and it was highly probable that my spelling was incorrect.

Oh, right: what are they....as I know them, made by Alverta, they are little ricotta-filled baked raviolis. Not very sweet, not very savory, just niiice. Googling around here in 2010, my first hit is Clotilde describing fiadone as a Corsican cheesecake, sounds like a promising avenue, especially if you consider that up in northern Ohio there used to be a town called Corsica. And that the food of the "real" Corsica is pretty Italian-influenced. 

But all of this turned out to be a Googhole smokescreen or cheesescreen or some kind of screen. Some further careful Googling reveals that fiadone con ricotta are a well-known specialty of Molise, which is next to Abruzzo, which is where Mara's family is from, so yes. They brought them with them. So did other Abruzzini, it looks like.

And I just wasted about an hour learning all kinds of things about Corsica.

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the caesar salad.

1/4 cup good olive oil

1/8 cup good red wine vinegar

1 tsp Dijon mustard

2 cloves garlic, pressed

2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce

1 tbsp anchovy paste, or 2 mashed anchovies

1 tsp lemon juice

salt and pepper to taste

1 head romaine lettuce

1 cup (just to be safe) pecorino or parmesan cheese, grated coarsely

Combine first 8 ingredients, dress lettuce leaves, top with cheese and possibly more black pepper. Serves 4.

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the tortellini alfredo.

1 cup crème fraîche

1 cup pecorino, grated fine

2 tbsp butter, softened

2-3 cloves good fresh garlic, pressed

salt and pepper to taste

enough tortellini for 2 people

Put pasta in salted boiling water, combine sauce ingredients in a bowl. When pasta is done, drain, and put back in saucepan, add sauce, serve. Serves 2.

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the shrimp d'jo3n.

24 shrimp, peeled and deveined

1/4 cup clarified butter

4 cloves garlic, pressed

1/4 cup bread crumbs or crushed toasted almonds

1/4 cup pecorino or other hard cheese, grated

paprika for dustimg

Melt butter in saucepan and divide between two round shallow baking vessels. Add 2 cloves of garlic to each vessel, let's say it's a ramekin because vessel sounds weird. Divide shrimp among ramekins, turning once to coat with butter/garlic. Top with bread crumbs and pecorino, and a sprinkle of paprika. Place under broiler until attractively browned. Commence to placing of teeth upon said shrimpuses. Serves 2.

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the tuna noodle casserole.

1 can tuna packed in water, drained (if packed in decent oil, reserve)

1/2 cup mayonnaise

1 cup celery, chopped

1 cup red onion, chopped

1 tbsp olive oil (if tuna didn't come packed in oil)

1 cup pecorino, grated fine

3 cups noodles, cooked

Saute celery and onion in olive oil, or 1 tbsp oil from the tuna can. Combine celery and onion with rest of ingredients in a baking pan, maybe sprinkle some more cheese on top. Bake at 170C for 30 minutes. Serves 2 or 3.

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paneer jalfrezi.

Indian food is not easy. In fact, I can't think of a cuisine whose dishes are consistently more time-intensive and just generally difficult to reproduce accurately in one's home kitchen when cooking from scratch. At least in this home kitchen, with these cooks.

We just made paneer jalfrezi with raita, cardamom/clove basmati, and faux-peshwari naan, and though it really only took 90 minutes or so, it felt like a considerable effort, maybe because we were really insecure about the results until we took the first everything-combined bite. Which was pretty much tasting gorgeous like the real thing.

Thus: we try to document. Recipe in progress.

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paneer jalfrezi.

2 medium onions, roughly chopped
4 garlic cloves, chopped
2 green Holland chiles, chopped
2 cans plum tomatoes
1 cup water
2 tbsp ground coriander
2 tbsp ground cumin

1 tsp cumin seed
2 tsp turmeric

5 tbsp ghee

300 grams paneer, sliced (recipe to come)
2 red bell peppers, chopped

1 tbsp garam masala, or another masala...we used a Surinamese masala that worked really well

1 male adult big toe-sized knob ginger, peeled

salt to taste (very important, as always)

freshly ground black pepper to taste ( a couple of grinds at least)

In a food processor, chop onions, garlic, green chile. Saute over low heat in 1 tbsp of ghee until browned, 10 minutes or so. Add 1/2 cup water and simmer for 10 minutes.

Elsewhere, zhoom up the tomatoes until smooth. Heat another pan, gently fry the coriander, cumin, and turmeric in a splash of oil for about a minute, then add the pureed tomatoes and simmer for 10 minutes or so. Add onion mixture from Step One and get that good and goin'. You might need to add the rest of the water here. Simmer for 20 minutes or so.

This is the part of the recipe I'm unsure of. It seems like the ginger should be added with the garlic. But here's what we did. Zhoom up the red bell pepper and the ginger, and add to the pan along with the remaining ghee and the masala. Simmer for 10 minutes. Salt and pepper to taste.

Then, eventually, you shallow-fry the paneer in yet another skillet, with coriander and cumin and salt and ghee, ingredients which are probably not in the ingredient list yet, and then add the finished sauce from above. Garnish with fresh coriander and sliced green chiles (if you like heat), serve with raita and cardamom/clove-scented basmati rice, recipe to come.

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raita.

1 cup yoghurt

2 cloves garlic

1/2 tsp kalonji/nigella seed

1/2 tsp cumin seed

1 tbsp fresh mint, chopped

shredded carrot

1/4 cup grated cucumber

salt

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It's a pretty gross picture, but:

are my breasts too small for you?

"Sometimes..."

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You're out, you're trying to have a good time, and you innocently order a cup of tea. And what else do you get? Grim reminders.

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Somewhere around here I've written about ricciarelli before: the very Sienese cookies made from almond flour and egg whites.

When we lived in Siena, there was a baker right around the corner from us who made them fresh every day--well, wait. This was Italy, remember, so it wasn't every day of course, it was Tuesday mornings between 10:20 and 11am, Thursday afternoon from 2:30 to 4:15, and Saturday morning before 5am, or something like that.

About every two weeks or so I'd manage to stop by when they were open, and I'd buy a little box of these guys. They were kind of not like anything else I'd ever eaten at the time, although the more experienced me would now say that they're quite a bit like the cookie part of a French macaron. Not quite as light, and firmer on the outside, but with a similar taste and chew.

Since we left Siena, I'd pretty much given up on ever tasting them again outside of Siena's city walls: we run into quite a few Italians these days, and almost none of them (Tuscans included) have ever heard of them.

But one of the best things about having a chronic masterbaker in the house is that it's difficult to predict what will come out of your oven. While I was making chili con carne and pozole de pollo verde (pozole of green chicken? I don't really have time to look up the name), Ze Mara was, incredibly, making ricciarelli.

And even more incredibly, they tasted almost exactly like my memory of the Sienese version. That never happens!

Here's a recipe adaptation in progress, currently plagiarizing this unusually well-written recipe, but I hope to finish my ever-so-cheap-and-flimsy modifications soon. We found almond flour at our local Turkish/Moroccan market, much cheaper than than at the BioMarkt or Natuurwinkel.

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ricciarelli.

3 cups almond flour
1 1/3 cups fine raw sugar (the original recipe specifies superfine)
1 1/4 cups powdered sugar
1 tsp baking powder
zest of 1 orange, minced
2 egg whites
2 tsp vanilla extract

Line a baking sheet with baking or parchment paper. In a good-sized bowl, mix the almonds with the sugar, 2/3 of the powdered sugar, the baking powder and the orange zest. In another bowl, beat the egg whites to soft peaks, then stir them into the almond mixture. Using a hefty wooden spoon, mash the mixture to a wet, sticky mass and then stir in the vanilla extract.

Sometimes I find that when I don't really have it in me to totally re-write a recipe from scratch, it can be almost good enough to use my bad German accent, like so. Vis ze dough you are forming ovalish shapes about 2 inches long, rolling zem in ze remaining powdered sugar, and flattening zem slightly until ze are 1/2 inch thick or zo. Zen you are putting zem onto ze parchment-lined baking sheet from our first sentence, leaving enough room for zem to be expanding ever zo zlightly.

OK, all those Zs are murder on tiny_a's tiny keyboard. Ctrl-Z is "Undo", and the Ctrl key is just underneath the Shift key, so half the time I'm trying to make a capital Z, I accidentally Undo the last sentence I typed, a sequence of events which has just now officially gotten old.

Sift the remaining powdered sugar over top of everything. While the really authentic recipes have you leave the uncooked batter alone 24 hours (or longer) before baking, we found that an hour or two is enough: leave the cookies at room temperature for as long as you can manage so that they dry a little before baking.

Eventually: preheat the oven to 140C. Bake cookies for about 30 minutes, or until they are barely golden and a little firm on the outside. This is very important: the insides should still be soft. Cool completely and store in an airtight container. Makes 25-30 cookies.

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As a bonus, here are a couple of photos for your entertainment. The first is for those of you who might find some hilarity in my Y2K fashion sense. Below that is an irrelevant photo of Mara in Bologna that I've always liked.

baked shrimp and sage risotto.

As I've said before, this is really just a genius recipe, I can't think of anything more comforting I've eaten recently. We have the Mara to thank for this. Well, and a name you don't hear much anymore: Martha Stewart.

I know it breaks some rules: seafood and cheese for one, Parmesan and olive oil for another, hell even sage and shrimp is pushing it. But trust in the Mooperbird.

ETA: As usual, better pictures of the same dish here.

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baked shrimp and sage risotto.

3 tbsp olive oil
3 shallots, or one small red onion, finely chopped
1 cup Arborio rice
pinch crumbled saffron threads
1/2 cup dry white wine
2 cups chicken or vegetable stock
4 fresh sage leaves, coarsely chopped, or 1 tbsp or so dried sage, maybe a little more
up to 1 tsp salt, depending on saltiness of your broth

16-20 medium shrimp, deveined and halved lengthwise
1-2 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
1 tsp freshly ground black pepper

up to 1 cup grated parmigiano-reggiano (can also use pecorino romano sometimes)
chopped Italian parsley, for garnish

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Heat oven to 190°C.

Put shrimp in a small bowl to marinate with the garlic, 1 tbsp of olive oil, and black pepper.

In a medium ovenproof saucepan, heat the rest of the olive oil over medium heat. Add shallots and cook, stirring until translucent, 2 to 3 minutes. Add rice, and stir until grains are shiny and well coated with oil, about 2 minutes more. Add saffron and wine, and continue cooking and stirring until liquid is absorbed, 3 to 5 minutes.

Add stock, sage, salt, and pepper. Cover saucepan; transfer to oven. Bake until almost all of the stock is absorbed, about 20 minutes. Remove pan from oven and stir shrimp into rice, replace back in oven for 6-8 minutes to cook shrimp. Your goal is to leave the shrimp in long enough to mellow the garlic but not overcook the shrimp. Also check the salt level here: if you're not pushing the too-salty boundary, it's possible to stir some of the grated cheese into the rice at this point, that's what the Mara does.

After 6-8 minutes, remove from oven, check salt level again and adjust if necessary. Serve immediately, topped with grated cheese and parsley.

Serves 4, or sometimes less.

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turf and surf.

This is Mara in Bergen, summer 2007, with a bratworst, a freshly opened jar of The Best Mustard in the World, sautéed peppers, and a cold bottle of rosé. To the trained eye, it's obvious that Mara is approaching a state of maximum happiness in this photo. Experts in Marawatching call this stage "pre-Jimmy". I'll have to post a photo of full-blown "Jimmy stage" for comparison's sake.



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I was wandering around in the vast, dimly-lit halls of the Vegetarian Duck archives down on the 3rd floor, when I came across this abandoned recipe languishing in the stacks. I do have a piece of marlin in the freezer that I've been avoiding because I didn't feel like being disappointed, but maybe it's time to see if the below actually generates something edible.

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marlin in tarragon-madeira broth with fennel and pistachios.

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2 marlin filets.
juice of 1 orange.
1 tbsp dried tarragon.
1/2 stick + 1 tbsp butter.
1 cup lobster stock.
1 tiny bottle madeira wine maybe 2/3 cup or so.
1-2 tbsp tabasco sauce.
3 tbsp cream.
olive oil.
1/2 cup pistachios, smashed once.
1 fennel bulb, diced small.

Combine lobster stock, madiera, 1/2 stick butter, and orange juice in a saucepan and reduce for 20 minutes.

Coat marlin with olive oil and bake for 20 minutes in a 200C oven.

Meanwhile, saute fennel over med-low heat in 1 tbsp butter for 10 minutes, until lightly browned.

Affter 20 minutes, add tarragon, fennel, tabasco, cream, and pistachios to saucepan, and simmer while you broil the fish for 5 minutes to brown.

To serve: ladle some broth into a bowl, place marlin in broth, then with a slotted spoon grab fennel and pistachios and strew over top.

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jamie remover.

So there I was in front of the sink today, holding a shiny clean butter knife in each hand. I turned around to face the kitchen island bar thingie, which I knew was the next thing I’d wanted to do, but once facing the island I was at a bit of a loss as to why I had not one but two butter knives, since I was the only one there. I looked down and saw the two pieces of fresh toast I'd just toasted. Ah, right, of course: one knife for buttering each piece of toast.

Welcome to temazepam. Luckily Thursday night’s dose was my last, and hopefully by tomorrow I will begin to return to Logic Land. And being able to type all of the letters in a word in the right order.

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So I bet you’re wondering what that has to do with the hellish carnage pictured above, aren’t you? Nothing. But I’ll give you five whole U.S. dollars (equivalent to approximately 1 euro these days if I'm not mistaken) if you can tell me what book that photo is from (with a prerequisite being that you don’t already own the book).

Give up? Good, I can't spare the cash. It’s a photo from Jamie Oliver’s new cookbook, which is actually………pretty good. Entertaining, beautifully laid out and interestingly photographed, and pretty honestly Italian (for example, they're using the kid's plastic wading pool to catch the draining bloody entrails of a freshly killed animal...we saw that all the time in Italy). I’m borrowing somebody’s copy, and the reason I am is because when we were in Bergen last month:

















Kenny made some very very good Sicilian polpette di tonno (tuna meatballs to me and you) based on a recipe from the book. He didn’t have the book with him in Bergen (which says several good things about Kenny), and couldn’t remember all of the ingredients because he was so fucking wasted (not really, he's a dad now), but what he did do was both attractive (though this picture does it no justice):

















And really really fresh and delicious. Actually I think he did end up remembering all of the ingredients now that I've got the recipe in front of me: tuna, pine nuts, cinnamon, oregano, parsley, breadcrumbs, parmigiano-reggiano, eggs, and a lemon.

I’ve wanted to make polpette di tonno for a long time, I don’t know why I never got around to it. Sicilian food would probably have become my current cooking focus if I hadn’t gotten all goo-goo eyed over Surinamese food. I think it’s actually ga-ga eyed that I mean. Can it be either. Both? Is there a Dutch equivalent he wonders.

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Anyway, my point was, Jamie Oliver, new cookbook, not bad…but for the love of baby jesus up in heaven, does Mr. Oliver have to be in so many of the pictures. Aaaaaaahh! Every other page, his faux-surfer mug is all proudly and goofily offending most of my sensibilities. Usually: I can stand a picture of the chef on the inside flap, plus one or two “action shots” either in the kitchen or “at the market” picking up something and pretending to smell it--that usually does the trick for me. Unless it's Tom Colicchio, then, well...the more photos the better, baby.

I may just need a Jamie Remover if I'm to look at this book any more. Or maybe someone give me another Crazy Drug an I just go all Hollywood psycho and slowly cut that bitch out of every picture in the book with my favorite childhood scissors, rocking back and forth and crying/mumbling (or mubling, as I just typed) all the while. Hmm, yes. But I think maybe I should wait until I buy my own copy of the book. Muble.

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Hey, know how you can tell you’re a kick-ass cook? When you can make a rockin’, reasonably authentic-tastin’ (are pep-feignin', informality-indicatin' apostrophes another side effect of the medication, perchance?) tomato pasta sauce when your kitchen contains: no olive oil, no tomatoes, and no usable onions.

But you do have: canned mushrooms; canned black olives; tomato paste (not sounding very promising yet is it); dried oregano and rosemary; a lot of garlic; a nice jar of anchovies packed in oil; lots of fresh basil and celery leaf (ok there you go); and a substantial wedge of pecorino-romano cheese. And fresh ground black pepper and red pepper flakes.

OK, maybe not so impressive after all….but I thought it was a pretty tough challenge texturally. The sauce came out remarkably edible: I used an immersion blender to brutally impose a ragu state. And a long simmer mellowed the tomato paste-only problem. And I only used the oil from the anchovies. And I only re-bit my swollen lip once while eating it.

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By the way, there's a point to Jamie's grisly-ness, and probly a valid one too...I was just "taking the piss," as those hooligans off to the immediate west like to say.


polpetti di tonno.

400g/14oz high-quality tuna
olive oil
55g/2oz pinenuts
1 level teaspoon ground cinnamon
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 teaspoon dried oregano
a handful of fresh flat-leaf parsley, chopped
100g/3½oz stale breadcrumbs
55g/2oz freshly grated Parmesan
2 eggs
zest and juice of 1 lemon

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is that thing loaded?

When Mara was traveling in Scotland this summer, she had a good long soak in the bog of contradictions that define British-American culture clash.

Or something. Perhaps an example would be more illustrative: Mara is on a 12-hour ferry ride from Aberdeen to Lerwick. The seas are rough. Her stomach is desperately in need of some comfort food, so she heads to the cafeteria to see what she can find. She spies baked potato on the menu and her spirits lift....that sounds perfect, a nice fluffy baked potato with a little butter and sour cream. She orders it, becoming very hungry now that she is potentially in the same room with an actual baked potato. In preparation, her tiny mind conjures up a steaming image of The Perfect Baked Potato.

The counterperson turns and opens an oven, in which there are several naked baked potatoes slowly dying a shriveled death. Mara is so suddenly hungry at this point that she doesn't care that it's a gnarled old dried-up tuber....it'll be fine fluffed up and buttered, right? The counterperson then gets ready to pass Mara the plate, but before he does so he grabs a huge meat cleaver and brutally quarters the potato into unfluffable, smashed wedges and hands it to her.

Frown. Sigh. OK, where is the butter? She turns to the "potato topping area" and is a bit mystified by the contents. Tuna salad, coleslaw, cottage cheese, corn....no butter. In fact, not only no butter, but no scallions, no sour cream, no bacon. No potato toppings at all. She asks the counterman for butter and grumpily trudges off to configure her potato into something that might resemble her mind's potato.

Mara survives the ferry ride (the potato does not), and eventually makes her way to Hillswick in the Shetland Islands. At some point, she is relating this story to some nice English chaps who are staying there. And she's saying, "You know how sometimes you have something in your mind that you want to eat, and there's just this ideal version of it you're picturing....for example, there are certain things that have to be on your baked potato for it to be a satisfying baked potato." Before Mara has even finished this sentence, the English blokes are agreeing in unison: "Oh yeah...tuna salad, cottage cheese, corn...."

This hilarity would continue just about every time Mara would have a craving for an old standby.

Mara: Hey guys, let's get a pizza. I really need a pizza.
Englishman: Jolly good, spot on. I'll just pop round and pick it up. Em...right, then: what toppings do you fancy?
Mara: Um...just the most basic ingredients, you know, the things that are supposed to be on a pizza.
Englishman: Oh, right, so....crab, corn, tuna salad, cottage cheese...
Mara: You fucking Limey bastards.

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mara's nuts.

Wintry Sunday. We're having a "Dutch study day", basically spending all day reading about two pages worth of the newspaper (this is my speed, not mara's)...and after that, you need some serious sustenance. Reading a pair of interesting articles, though, about the successes + disillusionments of Dutch-Surinamers returning to Surinam to make a new life/find their roots/try to make a difference there. Good stuff.

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salmon a la mara. 

salmon filets
grated pecorino-romano
olive oil
pine nuts
spinach
roasted red pepper

serve with: caramelized leeks with apple cider + balsamic; zucchini with almond pesto.

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