Fresh Pasta and Beach Tomato Sauce

Recently, a  loved friend who owns a house that he intentionally overstuffs at all time broke form and gave me an Atlas pasta machine, retrieving it from a high kitchen cabinet.  He explained to me that he was reducing his carbohydrate intake drastically and replacing them with protein and fats, so there wasn’t much of a need in his life for a pasta maker.  Jeff’s never eaten enough as long as I’ve known him--a sinewy man who subsisted, as far as I know, entirely on coffee, pita bread, and the odd piece of candy for years.  So there’s something heartening about seeing him cook up kettles of chicken and vegetables for himself every day. And that leaves me with the pasta machine, only slightly dented from being dropped a couple of times traveling between his house in Fredericksburg, VA and mine in Bellingham, WA.  

Making pasta is one of my earliest, revelatory memories of cooking.  When I was in first grade, my elementary school had a day of hands-on workshops taught by teachers for students.  You could sign up for four, but the only one I remember is the pasta tutorial.  It was novel to crack eggs into a bowl and to crank a handle on a pasta machine as it changed from a lump to a smooth yellow sheet.  The finished strands, fished out of the pot by one of the teachers, was tender and slippery.  Six-year-old me went home extolling the virtues of homemade pasta to my mom and dad’s perplexion.  

Making it years later, I really enjoy Alton Brown’s pasta recipe for its frugality--just two eggs rather than eight yolks--and it’s intention--a precise teaspoon of olive oil rather than a quarter cup of oil or none at all.  On thing that puts me into a state of perplexion about Brown’s pasta recipe (and most) is the suggestion that one mix the dough on the countertop--building a volcano of flour and filling its crater with eggs.  That never fails to create a wide scattering of flour and runnels of eggs stickily racing for the edge of the counter.  I recommend ignoring Alton on this and using a mixing bowl.  (I halved the pasta dough recipe and that made enough for two substantial dinner servings.)

I was all excited about using my Atlas for the first time, but if you’re patient you could successfully roll out the dough with a rolling pin on a well-floured board or counter.  Bear in mind that there’s such a thing as too-thin pasta, whether you’re rolling by machine or hand--leading to noodles that break too easily when they’re raw and somehow fuse into a gummy glob as they cook.  I aim for the thickness of a hard book cover, about an eighth of an inch thick.  This time I used the cutters on the pasta machine attachment for novelty’s sake, but next time I will just use the rollers to roll out even sheets of dough and then hand cut tagliatelle.

I am also writing this post because the sauce we had with this pasta was a wonderful and simple one.  Recently we were at the Squalicum Harbor park looking at sailboats through the huge telescope on its little knoll.  We were surrounded by thousands of ripe rose hips of Rosa rugosa, also called beach rose.  Their hips, consequently, have come to be called beach tomatoes.  The resemblance when cooked is uncanny.  I picked a bag of them while Tyler politely read on a nearby bench,  dissociating himself from my squirrel-like behavior.  Happily, beaches and seaside harbors aren’t the only places the beach rose grows.  I’ve noticed it lately in corporate and campus landscaping as well as in home gardens, planted for its sturdiness and the beauty of its single magenta flowers.

Cooking beach tomatoes, aside from the annoyance of press the pulp through a sieve, is a cinch.  You throw the hips, trimmed of their blossom ends, into a pot with about a cup of water, a big spoonful of sugar, and a pinch of salt.  Simmer til very tender and some of the hips have split (this took about 10 minutes after they came to a boil).  Then mash the hips with their liquid through a fine strainer or a food mill.  I always find that this part gets old before it’s done, but after a few minutes of dedicated work you’ll be left with a bowl of lovely deep orange-red puree that is slightly sweet, slightly floral, and complexly fruity.  The puree freezes well and would probably make an interesting sorbet or ice cream, but it turns towards savory with grace

To make the sauce, which is plenty to dress a pound of cooked pasta:

Finely chop a small onion and mince a clove of garlic.

Heat a couple tablespoons of olive oil and/or butter in a saucepan or saucier over medium.  

Fry the onion and garlic with a pinch of salt until they’re soft and just starting to brown.

Add a cup and a half to two cups of beach tomato puree and bring to a simmer.  

Add salt and pepper to taste.  If it tastes too acidic, add a dessert spoon of sugar.  

Toss with hot pasta and sprinkle with chopped parsley and cheese, if you like.  

Picnic Chicken

I’ve been house-sitting, and while here I’ve encountered Gertrude Stein with unusual frequency  First, I read The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which Stein borrows her lifelong companion Alice’s perspective in order to tell the story of their life in France up through the mid-thirties.  When I liked it most, I learned a lot of charming details and eccentricities about artists and whomever they had on their arms while they visited the atelier at 27 rue de Fleurus and gazed by gas light at the paintings hung nearly to the ceiling.  

Other times, I felt as though I was spending hours of my life reading a very long, rather mean acknowledgements page that constantly references the self-proclaimed genius of the author and celebrates her knack for inspiring loyalty among those surrounding her.  It’s telling that the speaker Alice characterizes herself as sitting with the wives of geniuses while Gertrude hobnobs with the important men.  Quarrels, with Picasso and Matisse and other notables, are referred to with blank confusion: How could anyone interesting be angry with Baby/Miss Gertrude Stein?  And yet, I still often find myself sincerely liking this egotistical and wealthy person for her impracticalities, humor, and incredibly distinctive voice.

Ambivalence!  

Not having had enough gossip and descriptions of pre-war extravagance, I jumped right into reading The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook which has been sitting, barely explored, on my shelf for a couple of years now.  Alice B. Toklas did actually write this memoir after Stein died, when she was engaged, as she would be for the remainder of her life, in devoting herself to promoting Stein’s work to the literary world and staving off destitution.  This book does both often, tracing a trajectory, for the first half, that mirrors Autobiography so closely that I kept cross referencing to check if she was “self”-plagiarizing anecdotes. She wasn’t ever quite, which was kind of disappointing.

The Cookbook is larded with recipes linked to whatever memories Toklas explores in a given chapter.  Buttered with recipes would be more accurate.  The biggest reason I’ve not cooked from this book much yet is that many of these recipes call for an untenable amount of butter, wine, fillets, cream, and truffles (which never are possible).  In other words, it’s not a very good resource when you’re looking at a half-empty fridge and trying to figure out dinner.  

But this time, I read the book straight through, not planning to make anything in particular but imagining the preparation and serving of each meal. Actually, Alice wrote this book in 1954 while convalescing from “pernicious jaundice”, unable to eat anything rich or interesting.  In “A Word with the Cook”, she supposes, “it was written as an escape from the narrow diet and monotony of illness, and I daresay nostalgia for old days and old ways and for remembered health and enjoyment lent special lustre to dishes and menus barred from an invalid table, but hovering dream-like in invalid memory.” This is a daydreamed cookbook good for a daydreaming cook.  

Even so, I marked pages of promising looking dishes as I read and came away with a surprisingly long list of makeable and adaptable recipes to try.  I plan to write about them in this space pretty often, hopefully making available again some ideas and stories from an out of print, old fashioned book that might otherwise be inaccessible to many cooks.  

First up, what Alice Toklas refers to as “First Picnic Lunch”, a meal she would prepare for Gertrude Stein and herself when they were off in their Ford, Godiva, to gather wild-flowers.  It’s not a recipe so much as an idyllic plan:

“A chicken is simmered in white wine with salt and paprika.  Ten minutes before the chicken is sufficiently cooked add ½ cup finely chopped mushrooms.  When cooked, remove chicken and drain.  Strain mushrooms.  The juice may be kept in the refrigerator to use as stock.  Put the mushrooms in a bowl, add an equal quantity of butter and work into a paste.  This is very good as a sandwich spread or may be thoroughly mixed with the yolks of 3 hard-boiled eggs and put into the hard-boiled eggs which have been cut in half.  

For dessert fill cream-puff shells with crushed sweetened strawberries.”

I love the idiosyncratic vagueness of this recipe: the precise quantity of mushrooms is specified, but how much wine, salt, and paprika are not.  We’re told to split the eggs into halves but not anything in terms of an appropriate technique for cooking the chicken besides to simmer it, no instructions appear anywhere in the book for making cream-puff shells.  There are beguiling suggestions of flavors coupled with free-rein to devise a means to them.

I made up the following recipe.  It worked very well, resulting in a tender, flavorful chicken, rich broth, and a mushroom compound butter that, truthfully, is more mushroom than butter.  I didn’t make devilled eggs with it, and have been spreading it on toast and finishing plain vegetables with it instead.  Keep in mind that the proportions and very ingredients are pretty flexible.  I used what I had on hand in the way of aromatics and wine for the broth, but it would be just as lovely if a bit different with all sorts of others.

Instead of strawberry filled cream puffs, we picked raspberries by the handful off of the canes.  Free, infinite raspberries are very much the best part of this house-sitting gig.  

Alongside, we had green beans braised in a tablespoons of broth while the chicken rested.  Also corn sticks to soak up some mushroom butter and because there was a cast-iron mold sitting out in this borrowed kitchen.  Alice B. Toklas had a thing for cornsticks.  When she and Gertrude Stein toured the US in the thirties, one of their hostesses, Miss Hockaday of Dallas, sent one of the molds along with Alice back to France, “It was my pride and delight in Paris where it was certainly unique.”  Poor Alice, the Nazis stole it when they ransacked 27 rue de Fleurus.  “What did the Germans, when they took it in 1944, expect to do with it?  And what are they doing with it now?”  She doesn’t include her recipe (oddly?) so I used this one, which is nice because it’s the perfect amount of batter for one seven-well cornstick pan.  

 

One thing to note is that this is a delicious chicken, but not a visually striking one.  I browned the outside of mine because I hadn’t really thought things through, and this might have added a bit of flavor, but it did nothing visually after the bird had simmered for two hours.  I ended up serving the chicken skinned and in pieces with a pitcher of the broth on the side, not because it needed it, but because the paprika tinged broth is so pretty.  If you were after more of a proper, away from home and away from cutlery picnic, it might be nice to slice the cooked meat and serve it with other sandwich fixings, including the mushroom butter.  

If you have time, it’s well worth it to sprinkle your chicken all over heavily with salt and let it sit covered in the fridge for one or two days. To do this, remove any giblets and the neck (make stock with ‘em or giblet/veggie tacos or something) then salt the chicken inside and out. Tamar Adler advises three times as much as you would sprinkle on a chicken if you were just about to roast it.  This sort of dry-brines your bird, adding seasoning and tenderness without as much mess as typical brining.  If you were to roast the chicken, then the skin would be prettier and crisper, but I’m afraid that doesn’t matter for this recipe.  I usually keep this process nicely contained in the dutch oven I’ll eventually cook the chicken in, but a lidded glass casserole works great to.

Picnic Chicken

1 heaping Tablespoon paprika

1 cup dry white wine or dry vermouth (what I used, I like to think it’s herbal notes lended depth)

1 to 2 cups water

1 chicken

a stalk parsley

a sprig rosemary

half an onion studded with two whole cloves

a lemon halved and juiced into the pot

a slice or two of dried porcini mushroom (optional)

½-1 cup finely chopped mushrooms

salt to taste

Pour wine, water, and paprika into a heavy pan, like a dutch oven, over medium-high heat.

Carefully place the chicken into the pot.  The liquid should come a bit more that halfway up the sides.  Arrange the herbs, onion, and lemon around the bird. Cover and let come to a simmer.

If using the porcini, soak for five minutes in a small bowl of water.  When soft, mince and add to the pot.  Strain the liquid through a fine mesh strainer or a cloth to remove the grit and add the mushroom liquid to the broth.

Baste the chicken periodically, or carefully turn it with a large spoon and a large fork.  It should take between one and two hours to finish.  (You’ll be able to tell because it will have an internal reading of at least 170 degrees and the joints will loosen)

When the chicken seems nearly done, add the remaining mushrooms and let simmer ten more minutes. Test the broth, add salt if necessary.

When the chicken is cooked, lift it carefully from the broth and let rest for a few minutes on a plate.  

Strain the broth and reserve for other uses.  It’ll be delicious.

Mix the mushrooms with an approximately equal amount of butter.  

Skin* and slice chicken however you’d like, and it’s ready to serve.

*I always save skin and bones to make an additional pot of simmered or pressure-cooked stock with herbs and a spoonful of cider vinegar to draw out some of the calcium locked in the bones.  The stock will cool with a layer of schmaltz on top.  This is good cooking fat, especially for fried potatoes.

Bun Cha

Yesterday, the co-op had packages of ground pork for a dollar off.  This was great, because I’d been meaning to make bun cha lately.  Today, along with the newly acquired meat, I could make a simple version of this dish with very little fuss: soft rice noodles, torn lettuce and herbs, fried meatballs, and a pungently sweet dressing.  Aside from mixing up the pork with a marinade earlier this morning, itself a quick task, lunch came together in about fifteen minutes.  But I could have made it in ten if I had hurried a bit.  The trick for a recipe like this is to multi-task.  I aim to boil a kettle for the noodles while I tear lettuce and herbs, make the dressing while my pan heats, and rinse the cooked noodles with cold water while the meat fries.  Then everything is ready to assemble at about the same time.

I came up with my version by heavily adapting this one from Saveur.  As written, I find that it takes twice as long and uses twice as many dishes as it really needs to.  I also ended up with twice as much rather watery nuoc cham.  My revisions reduce the number of dishes to be done after lunch and concentrate the sauce to be quite salty with fish sauce and only moderately sweet.  If it’s a bit strong for your taste, add sugar, acid, or water spoonfuls at a time until a piece of torn lettuce dipped into it tastes delicious to you. (Coincidentally, David Lebovitz also posted a Vietnamese bun recipe today.  His recipe looks lovely and crunchy with its chopped up egg rolls and fried shallots.  It’s full of vegetables and garnished with roasted peanuts, yet flexible in terms of protein.)

There’s lots of room for variety in this recipe.  Like thin rice vermicelli rather than the thicker kind?  Go for it, they’ll taste wonderful.  Have a stray cucumber or a couple of sweet carrots lying around?  Mandoline or julienne them. I tossed in some nasturtium blossoms from the garden, and they were bright here.  Prefer lemon juice (as I do) to lime?  Out of rice vinegar? As long as there’s acid in the nuoc cham, it will taste good.  

Bun Cha

[Serves four, or two who want seconds]

For the meatballs:

About 1 lb of ground pork

2 T demerara, palm, or dark brown sugar

3 T fish sauce

1 shallot (or very small, sweet onion) finely minced

¼ t or so ground black pepper

Mix up all of the above.  Refrigerate for an hour or two at least.

Heat a heavy skillet on the stovetop.  I like to use an eight inch cast iron and bring it up gradually over medium heat to near the smoking point.  

As your pan gets very hot, form the pork mixture into slightly flattened balls about two inches in diameter.

Fry them about three minutes on each side, pressing them lightly with a spatula to make the most contact between meat and and the skillet’s surface.  You want them to be a little bit charred on the outside.

For the nuoc cham

½ cup water

2 T fish sauce

1 T lime juice

1 T rice vinegar

1 tsp demerara, palm, or dark brown sugar

1 birdseye or other hot chili minced (or a heavy pinch of dried crushed red pepper)

Mix all of the above until the sugar fully dissolves.

For the bun cha

½ lb dried rice noodles (I used thicker rice sticks this time, but I also love thin vermicelli here)

torn lettuce leaves

torn herbs (mint, shiso, basil, and/or cilantro are especially nice.  So are brightly colored flowers like nasturtiums or borage.)

Soak the rice noodles in boiling water until they’re soft.  Drain and rinse with cold water, then drain very well by bouncing your colander up and down (like I do) or dumping them out onto a clean kitchen towel.  Divide among bowls.

Top with vegetables and a couple of pork meatballs.  Spoon nuoc cham over all and serve with extra dressing on the side.

Amaretti

Amaretti

A few years ago, I moved to Orono, Maine for a few months.  It was a very in between time–writing and relationships developing but still tenuous.  I was unemployed and endlessly filling out applications.  

Tyler was finishing up his masters at the University of Maine, and I was lucky enough to tag along to readings and after reading dinners with the other graduate students.  My favorite of these events surrounded James Wagner reading from his homophonic translation of Cesar Vellejo’s Trilce.

The first day we went with Wagner and a group of our grad friends to Acadia National Park to stare meaningfully into the early April ocean and clamber over rocks.  The following, Wagner gave his reading and a seminar talk.  It also started snowing, so that by the next evening, shin deep snow laid over everything as we made our way to professors Carla Billitteri’s and Ben Friedlander’s home for the dinner they held for Wagner.  

Which finally brings us around to food.  Within moments of taking off our coats, Carla handed us demitasses of moka pot espresso with a perfectly sugary amaretti perched on each saucer.  She and Ben toured us around all the bookshelves in their house as we sipped and crunched.  Salt-studded parmasen and ricotta salata, many bottles of red wine, fennel-orange salad, and a Sicilian pasta with fish followed.  I ate and drank an embarrassing amount of everything, because everything was revelatory, while listening to conversations that always looped back to the literary.

Hours later, Carla passed out another round of espresso and amaretti.  I asked about them, and she explained that her sister sent the amaretti from Italy because they’re almost impossible to make correctly at home.  Balancing the bitter and sweet almond flavors is difficult enough, not to mention figuring out how to make a crisp, finely grained cookie rather than a petrous, almondy lump.

Making sweets at home that perhaps ought to be left to professional bakers and factories is a food blog trope worth starting a blog with.  There are lots of homemade poptarts and milanos to be found.  There are also several interesting diy takes on the classicly store-bought amaretti.  But my version follows primarily from  Ann Rogers’s in The New Cookbook for Poor Poets and Others: Revised & Enlarged. The best part of her book are its notes.  She precedes her recipe for amaretti with this:

One dream is to become a very rich poet and buy a whole huge tin of Amaretti. I would crunch away with abandon.  I would make a collage from the little papers that enrobe each macaroon.  And when the great red and orange and white tin was empty, I would carry it to my loft as a storehouse for a variety of treasures.  Or I would fill it with my own Amaretti.

She goes on to call for half a pound of whole almonds to be pulverized with sugar in a food chopper before being mixed with a simple meringue and a couple of teaspoons almond extract.  She exhorts her readers to “Try to locate almond extract that is made with a syrup, not an alcohol base.  The flavor is far superior and is better retained in the baking process.”

Happily, the co-op has bulk almond flour.  I figured one and a half cups would be about right to replace half a pound of whole almonds.  I also found Frontier’s alcohol-free almond extract that suspends bitter almond oil in a syrupy water/glycerin base .  As if fate were encouraging me to try this recipe in earnest, I recently stumbled upon an empty, great red and orange and white Amarretti tin at a thrift shop.  (But, ironically for a naturally gluten-free recipe, I’ve taken to using it as canister for wheat flour.)

My method differs somewhat from Rogers’s.  It seems much easier, first of all, to use blanched almond flour instead of crushing your own almonds to a consistent powder.  I also divided the sugar so that some is added with the meringue, hoping that will lend some stability to the foam and lead to crisper, lighter cookies.  For my second try, I rolled spoonfuls of dough lightly between my palms to give them a smoother look.

These don’t end up being identical to store-bought amaretti, they’re softer and craggier, but they strike similar chords and disappear quickly with coffee.

Amaretti

[two to three dozen, depending on the size of your cookies.]

1 ½ cup almond flour

½ cup sugar

2 egg whites

big pinch of salt

2 Tbsp sugar

1 tsp almond extract (Frontier brand.)

Mix the almond flour and sugar in a small bowl.

In a separate, very clean bowl, whisk the two egg whites with the salt until foamy.  Sprinkle in the two tablespoons of sugar and continue to whisk until the meringue forms peaks when you lift the whisk.  You want it to be fluffy and for the peaks to be almost but not quite stiff.  Whisk in the almond extract.

Fold in the almond flour and sugar mixture gently.  The egg whites will deflate quite a bit.

Spoon or pinch off small bits and roll gently between your palms.  Place an inch or so apart on an ungreased cookie sheet and allow to rest while you preheat the oven to 350.

Bake about 25 minutes, or until golden.  If you like, let them cool and then pop them back in the oven for a few minutes for extra crunch.