The Best Friends You’ll Ever Have

A quick and simple way to add complexity of flavor to your cooking is to always start with a few humble ingredients: sharp onions, firm carrots and crisp celery. Peel the onions and carrots, being careful not to trim away too much. Rinse them under cold water and pat dry. Rinse a stalk of celery, trim the ends, and place all three vegetables on your cutting board. Now chop them very fine. When you go to cook something like spaghetti sauce, a piece of chicken, a pot of beans, or, if you are adventurous, a soup from scratch, begin by cooking these three vegetables. In French cuisine they form a kind of holy trinity, and are used to add depth of flavor to hundreds of dishes. You can almost begin by sauteeing these three vegetables in some fat before you have even decided what it is you want to make!

To experience one of life's countless little joys, take a healthy pat of very fresh butter, heat it slowly, add these three vegetables, stir, and close your eyes. If the whole world could inhale such things collectively, there would be no need for war. Sprinkle in some salt and fresh-ground pepper and then try to contain your animal passions; remind yourself that the good life includes both indulgence and modesty.

Onions, carrots and celery will become your faithful friends if you call on them often, treat them with respect, and don't let them wither away in the reaches of your refrigerator. They will greet you when you come home cold and tired from a long day of work. If you have no work to go to, they will not judge you for it. And, best of all, your dining companions will begin to notice that your food is more pleasant, that it seems somehow different, perhaps a touch more soulful. If someone should inquire directly as to the changes you and your food seem to have undergone, you need not say anything in response. Shrug, smile, and continue quietly on your path to perfection.

Feed Yourself: Bake Bread

If you are unemployed, underemployed, or just hungry, there is a simple and satisfying way to nourish your soul and your belly. Bake your own bread. It requires nothing you don't own already. Sure, there are lots of ways to complicate it, to make it more expensive, but they are not necessary. First take about four cups of any old flour. Mix it with about two cups of lukewarm water. Sprinkle in a couple teaspoons of large-grain salt and a packet of yeast. Now knead. Knead like you have never done anything before. Knead like you are making love for the last time. Turn and press the dough until your muscles ache with soreness, muscles you might not have known you had. Now knead some more. Don't even think of using a machine to do this unless you have kneaded bread by hand at least one-hundred times before. And remember, later, what it felt like to make something so special, all by yourself. Cooking should always be a solitary pleasure. After your dough is kneaded, form it into a ball and place in a bowl, covered with a fresh kitchen towel. Allow it to double in volume. Knead it gently once or twice, and allow it to double in volume again. There is a delicate gas structure that has developed in your risen dough, and overhandling at this point will ruin it. Form it into the desired shape- round and rustic, long and narrow, or individual rolls. Crank your oven up to five-hundred- so much good cooking happens at high heat! While the oven is warming, let the dough continue to rise, covered lightly with the towel. When your oven is good and hot, take a very sharp blade and put a half-inch gash or two in the top of your loaf, scarring it irrevocably but allowing it to expand further in the oven. Before you slide it in the oven, get a spray bottle of water handy. Slide the dough and its parchment onto your baking sheet, and place in the oven. Close the oven door almost all the way, and spray water on the loaf and into the oven itself (but not the light) before closing the door. Let it bake about a half an hour. While your bread quietly goes about the business of driving you insane with its wonderful aroma, think about all the things you want to do to it. If, upon its completion, you find yourself tearing it apart, piece by piece, ravishing it to mere crumbs while still warm, you would not be the first. But try to stretch it out, make it last. It will be incomparable toasted, buttered, and dipped in hot coffee. A humble sandwich can be elevated to the greatest heights. Should it become stale, all is not lost. Simple things like croutons for a salad, or French toast with syrup, will never be the same. A kind warning: your friends may call you impracticle, whimsical, irresponsible, or worse, for baking your own bread. If you like, keep your little secret to yourself. Rush home for no other reason than to bake bread. One thing is certain. You will be better for it.

Recession-Proof Roast Chicken

One of the best ways to replicate the flavor and quality of restaurant food at home is to roast a chicken. There are a couple of things you can do to make it truly special. First, buy yourself a humble bird- it need not come from the local farmer's market. Take it home, open it up in your sink, and remove any body parts found in the cavity. Wrap these in plastic and place them in your freezer (more on that later). Now rinse the bird inside and out under the ice-cold water that runs from the Cascades into our taps. Refresh it like your rinsing an infant. Then pat it dry with paper towel, every last crease and crevice. Here comes the important part. Pour a healthy amount of salt into a little bowl. For those who want to measure: your bird should be about 4 to 5 pounds, so measure about 3 tablespoons of large grain salt, less if its iodized or fine sea salt. This is an unseemly amount of salt. Welcome to restaurant cooking! Into your salt grind some black peppercorns, about twenty turns of the mill. If you don't own a mill, go to Goodwill and buy one. Preground pepper is utterly useless. Stir these together well. Now take your pristine chicken and season it inside and out, rubbing your salt and pepper over every last inch of it, even the wings. When your bird is seasoned, place it on a plate lined with fresh paper towel, and set it uncovered in the fridge overnight. This is essential. Sleep poorly while you dream of your chicken. Let hunger gnaw at your sanity the whole next day (but don't starve yourself completely!). Instead of longing for an expensive tryst at How to Cook a Wolf, think of How to Cook a Wolf, M.F.K. Fisher's World War Two meditation on how to "keep the wolf at bay", the wolf of hunger, that is. When you think you are ready, remove the chicken from the fridge and place it on the counter. Look at it one last time before its transformation. Turn up your oven to 450, 500 if you are courageous. Set your cast-iron skillet in the oven to heat up. If you don't own one, go back to Goodwill. It is cheap and worth its weight in gold. When it's hot, pour a little oil in the bottom, tilt the pan to spread it around, and place your chicken in the pan. Truss it first if you know how. Cook it for one hour at high heat, then lower the temperature to 350 or maybe 325 if you are cautious, and bring the chicken home. After a second hour of pure torture, remove it from the oven, let it rest in the pan for 5 minutes, then remove the chicken and let it rest on a plate or board for another 5. Your skillet should be filled with half an inch of liquid gold. Pour this into a small bowl and let it cool. You can relive your roast chicken ten times or more by using this fat to cook your next meals. Try it for scrambled eggs on the weekend! After you devour your bird, freeze the carcass, to be used later with the innards, to make chicken stock. That's the problem with cooking. It never really ends.

Tuesdays with Market

For this trip to our friendly Pike Place Market, the quirky culinary epicenter of the Emerald City, we visited Café Campagne for their incomparably affordable happy hour. I've always had an affection for French cuisine, starting back in my first kitchen class in culinary school, Skills Development. I'm sure my face took on a glazed look as the chef, Anthony Natale, began to talk about something called fond de veau. That was over ten years ago, and French cuisine is no less interesting to me today, in spite of the way it is sometimes disparaged as overly fussy or old-fashioned. If you go to France you realize it is the food (maybe not veal stock!) that ordinary citizens, working class folks, eat. One of my favorite stories to tell my students is how fascinated I was by reading the school lunch menus posted outside a grammar school in this or that nameless French city, during the two years I spent abroad in Europe after culinary school, chasing the ghostly dishes I was indoctrinated by in culinary school.. "What kind of food do French schoolchildren eat?" I always ask. The entire class always gets that faraway look that is or should be a message to the teacher that what they are saying is not readily apparent. "French food!" I exclaim, to only slightly more recognition. Oh well. It's still funny to me.

Anyways, Café Campagne's happy hour is the cheapest in town. $1 mini lamburgers exploding with juice and perfectly cooked- unlike the raw-in-the-middle burgers I forced my friends to eat last weekend after misreading their doneness while grilling them in the dark after a beer or two. There are also $1 pate sandwiches. Both are served on gougeres, which are the same thing as a cream puff, minus all the sweet stuff. Fantastic. There are also decent pommes frites served with garlicky aioli. Perhaps the highlight was the tarte flambee, which in this case is a flatbread smothered with a thick layer of melted onions, a dab of crème fraiche and a healthy smattering of crisp bacon strips.

Maybe the best part about this happy hour is that there is a selection of a dozen or so French wines of moderate quality offered for $2/3 oz pour! What a great way to sample several regional wines in one sitting for not much money. Granted these are not the prime examples of French wines, but they are tasty and pretty much as they should be. White Burgundy is a touch flinty and utterly lacking in oakiness. Bordeaux is grapey and tannic. There are also two sparkling wines offered.

Just to put things in perspective, when we went to Il Bistro two weeks ago, the happy hour bill came to $50. This time it was $30 and the food was better, the server infinitely more skilled. Campagne is a fancy, top-notch restaurant. Their happy hour is an absolute steal. Go for it.

Food Allergies

Seattle food blogger Herbivoracious has some helpful advice, and a harrowing tale to boot, about the importance of educating oneself about food allergies.

http://www.herbivoracious.com/2009/02/understanding-deadly-food-allergies-this-post-could-save-a-life.html

Tuesdays with Market

Il Bistro is quintessential Market - dimly lit, hidden, and cheap at happy hour. We gorged ourselves in style at this classic Market haunt beneath the pig and steps from the gum wall. For a mere $50 (including tax and tip) you can get crostini with goat cheese and roasted garlic, crostini with sausage and peppers, seared calamari in a rich tomato broth, mixed antipasti (cheese, olives, salumi), mushroom ravioli, rigatoni with meat sauce, a couple of beers, two glasses of wine, and some bread to sop up the sauces and soak up your drinks. All of the food was better than good. Not amazing, but certainly tasty. The dry spice garnish used for the ravioli was slightly off-putting, but the cream sauce made up for it. The pasta was almost too al dente. I personally wouldn't be bold enough to serve it that way, for fear I would be accused of under-cooking, but we enjoyed it. And, Let's face it, you don't go to a candlelit Italian restaurant in an out-of-the-way corner of the Market for the food. You go there for the atmosphere. Il Bistro has atmosphere in spades. From its warm red glow, to its marble table tops, to its wood bar, this is someplace you bring a date. Plus, from 5-6:30 p.m., it's some place you can afford to bring a date, even during a recession. The are going to be at least a few more months of cold weather and bad economic news. Find yourself someone special, take the steps just past the pig, and indulge.

Date Night - an occasional series

Yes, we here at the wine wall realize that we've been slacking off. What can we say? You've heard our excuses before (holidays, snow, our "real" jobs getting in the way, etc). But we've made a resolution (better late than never) to begin again. Yes, despite our best intentions, you will never hear about our adventures in Little Rhody (Johnny cakes, both East and West Bay style, latkes, or the exact right cheese and wine to pair with Scrabble), our trip to Mexico, our Christmas party, our Election Night party, or even our most recent dinner at The Herbfarm (although it was amazing and we took lots of pictures). But the future is bright . . .

We are bringing back an old favorite - Tuesdays with Market - a weekly exploration of Pike Place Market's bounty (ie our quest to eat everywhere in the Market that sells prepared foods). And we are starting a new tradition - Date Night - aka "I worked late, got stuck in a parking lot on I-5, and we realized we had better set our sites a little closer to home." That's what happened tonight and it was the perfect excuse for us to hit one of our favorite Greenwood haunts . . .

Gorditos claims to be "Healthy Mexican" but the only thing healthy about it is the portions. They have a burrito there the size of a baby. Seriously, there is a side by side comparison photo on the wall and the burrito actually appears to be slightly larger than the baby. We usually get that burrito's slightly-less-large-but-still-too-big-to-ever-be-eaten (even by the likes of us)-in-one-sitting cousin. I like the veggie one, not because I'm trying to save the planet but because it comes with free guacamole inside, and Paul usually gets a meatier version. We also like them "wet," meaning smothered in cheese, salsa, and sour cream. While, like all Seattle burritos, they suffer from a distinct lack of cohesion and must be eaten with fork and knife, these are certainly some of the most satisfying efforts at Mission-style burritos around. And, after one of these and a Pacifico and some chips, a healthy food coma will wipe out the stress of that meeting that ran over and even the I-5 commute.

The Holiday Season

One of the strangest parts about going to Mexico for a week during Thanksgiving (yes, it was wonderful!) was coming back to the U.S. to find that the holiday season was upon us. It was strange, like going outside to get the mail and coming back to find a different house waiting for you.

I don't know if it's that or the sense that due to the economy this season will be less jubilant and joyous (code for commercial) than other holiday seasons, but I am getting the sense that we are off to a slow start this year. It could also be because Seattle just had one of the balmier Novembers on record, apparently.

I for one have always loved this time of year. Not that I go in for all the crap that goes along with it, but this is the one time of the year when we can overeat and overdrink with impunity:) Therefore, allow me to kick off the season here at the Wine Wall with a hearty Ho, Ho, Ho. Let's have some fun people. Let's enjoy our friends and family, be thankful, and, yes, let's have a good time and eat lots of stuff that's not good for us.

The ability to self-correct

In the wake of a recent dining experience at Frasca Food and Wine, perhaps the finest Italian restaurant in North America, located in Boulder, Colorado, I have come to a conclusion about one aspect of great restaurant service: the ability to self correct is of paramount importance.

We were eating a multi-course meal and pairing glasses of wine with each course. On one of the first courses, we were served our food (hot) but not the accompanying wine. We took a few bites before I decided to set down my fork and wait for the wine to arrive. It was a tasting menu, the portions were small, and I decided that if the name of the game is tasting the food with the wine in your mouth at the same time, I wasn't going to waste another bite. It had the potential to be a fairly substantial wrinkle in an otherwise out-of-this-world dining experience. I glanced around for a server, sent out my best something's wrong here vibes, and then the our wine was brought over after only a couple of minutes in the wilderness. We never directly spoke with the server about the missing glasses of wine, but on every subsequent course our wine was delivered before the previous glass was emptied- long before the next plate of food hit the white tablecloth. What it represented to me was a professional institution in which employees are constantly recalibrating their actions on the fly, which is perhaps one definition of five-star hospitality.

Upon reflection, perhaps there is a deeper, more personal reason for my animosity towards a wine- or a plate of food- served after its time, so to speak. While in culinary school I had to do rotations through the school's four restaurants, which, because of the time of my final term in school, which was the holiday period, roughly from Thanksgiving through New Year's, was the busiest time of the year and every table was full from open to close, every night of the week. As a captain, or front waiter one night in the Escoffier Room, the school's classical French restaurant and easily the one with the fussiest service (and some of the most expensive wines), I oversaw a service failure which still haunts me to this day. I was serving a four top, two couples, well-heeled types who came up from the Manhattan area- the bread and butter of the CIA restaurants' clientele, one could argue (tour buses of seniors being another major contigent!)- and they were ordering some serious wines. For the main course, which was rack of lamb, they dropped a bombshell and ordered one of the more expensive wines on the list, a Bordeaux whose exact provenance escapes my memory- and easily the most expensive bottle of wine I sold in a season of expensive bottles of wine during my short career as a server at the CIA.

To make a long story short, since the bottle of wine was stored in the school's vast wine cellars, not in the dining room where most of the wine was stored, it was a twenty minute walk and a pain in the ass to retrieve it. I had to ask the dining room fellow, who was doing an actual fellowship under the tutelage of Bernard, who was the instructor/maitre d'hotel type dude (formerly the captain of the dining room at Daniel in Manhattan). The meal progressed, the food was served, and the fellow and I promptly forgot all about going to get the $200 bottle that needed to be decanted and give time to breath in order to fully open up.

The four guests were served their racks of lamb, and I stood off to the side watching them eat, when, like an idiot staring blankly off into space, I wondered why the person who had ordered the wine had set down his utensils and started looking right at me. I realized my mistake, the fellow went to grab the bottle, it was hastily opened and poured, and the meal carried on without so much as a mild rebuke from the customer- a sign of true good taste and manners.

Now this could be chalked up to me- and the fellow, technically- being students. It was a school, a learning environment, and I certainly learned from my experiences there. But nonetheless. The customer paid market price for his wine but was given less than a great service which is included- and expected- in the price of said bottle, and that's what buggers me.

I haven't spent any time in the ten years since this incident working in a dining room, but I like to think that if I ever do, I will have the ability to self-correct- no matter how much time has past in between.

Gardening Update

just a quick post to say that we have been working feverishly to put our garden to bed for the winter, and will put up some posts with pictures soon. Part of our problem is that Sunday is the only day (I am currently teaching on Saturdays as well) we have to garden, except that there is lots of other stuff to do on Sundays too- not the least of which is sit in front of a roaring fire drinking red wine or sherry! That's right. We do live some kind of bourgeois life that is over packed with activities. How I long for the simple life of my student days, when I could read for hours and hours a day. Oh well. Now I read a book for a few hours a week and feel lucky to do so. But back to our food life. In addition to winterizing our p-patch, we have been growing several varieties of lettuces (and some feral spinach that popped up out of nowhere) in our front yard. That in its own right deserves a post and some pictures. Wine wall readers, if you are out there, sit tight. We will have more examples of the mixed success that is our eating and gardening life coming soon.

Dahlia

In addition to our mastery of fruit and vegetable husbandry, we are expert flower growers (cue term for that). Hah. Hardly. Actually, the people who lived in our house before us were flower people par excellence. In addition to all the roses that we knew about, there are tons of various flowers blooming all the time around here. Dahlia, we don't know ye well, but oh do we love thy sexy purple flowers. Baby.

Potato Detective

The Potato Detective, no relation to Cakespy, has come across a nefarious case of rotten homegrown potato. This is the first one we've encountered, so it's not quite time to cry outbreak, but this is nonetheless disheartening. We don't know what this defection is, but we do know that we will serve no unhealthy potato, homegrown or not. We will hunt you down where you live. We will follow you to the gates-- okay, enough already. We all know who the staff of the wine wall is voting for. That's company policy.

Candy-Striped Beets

Perhaps the defining characteristic of the chiogga beet is that the interior of the beet is candy-striped. Quite striking to look at and fun to eat, though they are absolutely the same as a red or a yellow beet in terms of flavor and such. Party! As to why some of our beets are mostly white, I have no earthly idea. They still taste the same.

Peche, Je t'aime

Really. You are my favorite fruit, by far.

We have two peach trees and one nectarine tree, and they have finally ripened. So far they have been juicy, sweet, tart and floral. Wow. What a treat.

Dude That Is So Beet

hehe. We take'm where we can get'm around here, especially after a long week. Seriously, we are like maniacal about beets around here at the wine wall. One of our favorite vegetables. Sweet, earthy, versatile- and despised by many. Remember the litte beets we pulled a while back? Well these are what the big guys look like now. They seem to love the black as night soil down at the P-Patch. They are the size of baseballs. Behind the basket in the last picture is the winter kale, which we will explain in a future post. Suffice it to say that the winter garden is already going strong here in Seattle!

BTW, these are the appropriately bourgeois heirloom Italian variety known as chiogga.

When you can't make pie . . .

So we had 3 pie apples. That's right just 3. When we bought the house, we were provided with a map of our trees and the first tree when you enter the garden was labled "Gravenstein - pie apples." It's a young dwarf tree, shorter than my husband. So we were excited that it managed to produce even 3 apples. But the thing is . . . 3 apples are not enough for pie. And then we realized that 3 apples would be plenty for a dutch baby pancake. Have you ever had a dutch baby? Have you tasted it's puffy, buttery, skillet-baked deliciousness? No? Then you are missing out. The dutch baby goes by many names, but it's basically a puffy pancake baked in a cast iron skillet in the oven in more butter than most folks want to know about. I adapted a recipe off epicurious.com for the Big Apple Pancake, substituting our Gravensteins and almond extract for vanilla (which made it fantastically, subtly, almondy). The result? Probably the best damn pancake we've ever had. Try it. Try it soon. Apple season is upon us.

Cooking Technique: Searing Meat for Stew

If you plan to make a stew, assuming it's not something unusual in which the meat should not be browned, as in a blanquette de veau, follow these steps to ensure the best flavor:

-season meat with salt and fresh ground pepper and then dredge the meat in flour
-shake off excess flour piece by piece (not doing this diligently guarantees poor results)
-get healthy amount of oil very hot in skillet (choose the right pan: very low and outward sloping sides to give steam a direct route into the atmosphere so as not to steam meat)
-set pieces of meat in hot fat so that there is ample space between each piece and brown on all sides

Note: the pan you make the stew in does not and should not be the same pan you brown the meat in, since the shapes are so different they could never serve the same purpose.

Turn and Burn

This is a hot compost bin we maintain at the P-Patch. It's filled with weeds and other stuff pulled from the garden, green grass clippings and brown leaves. The deal is, if you mix green and brown you get compost (nitrogen plus carbon equals humus). The beauty of hot composting, which is what this is, is that you can put things like weeds in and the heat will cook the seeds, not to mention that all of it breaks down faster. Compost is about the best plant food you can use. This bin has been hot for over a week, meaning that steam rises from it and it's warm when you stick your hand in it. To keep it hot, it needs oxygen, so I turn it every few days or so from one bin to the other. How do we have brown leaves since it's the end of summer still? They are saved from last year!

Tomato Envy

These belong to a fellow P-Patch gardener. They are about the size of baseballs. Then again, since fall has already arrived in Seattle, who knows if they will all ripen?

Sauteed Salmon

One of my favorite ways to cook salmon is to saute it in olive oil with salt and pepper. It's one of those challenging techniques that doesn't involve lots of time or ingredients. Here are the steps:

-Make sure salmon is nice and dry. Sprinkle on both sides with salt and fresh ground pepper (only one side if thin, such as tail piece).
-Heat skillet over medium flame. The best kind of skillets are either cast iron or low-carbon steel. Not only do they function properly, they feel good to use.
-Add oil to skillet. It should become hot very quickly. You know it's hot when it ripples in the pan. If pan is too hot oil will smoke. If it smokes, it's too hot. Let it cool off the flame or dump it out and start over.
-Lay fish into oil. It should not stick. Test it by sliding the pan to see if the fish is loose.
-The best part: let the fish sizzle in the pan and see how long you can go on one side. Check the underside to make sure it's not burning. One of the most beautiful things is a piece of salmon that is becoming golden brown on its underside as the salmon cooks its way up the fillet. Cook it to your doneness. If you want both sides seared, flip it over and let the top side cook briefly, what Thomas Keller calls "kissing". Voila.

p.s. The ultimate tool for cooking fish is what professionals call a fish spatula, shown by yours truly in the picture. I have seen these marketed as "batter stirrers" and other such nonsense. Who needs a batter stirrer? Anyway, if you like to cook fish, buy one. They are anywhere from $8 to $20. Although I as a rule hate overpriced items, I do love that I have a wood-handled fish spatula that cost, if I remember correctly, around $17 at a restaurant supply shop in New Orleans. It has held up well, and every time I pick it up I am transported back to the thousands of other pieces of fish I have cooked with it.