A Cooking Life

Chicken Salad with an Asian Bent

I'm trying to cook and eat lighter now that spring is here and I may be forced any day now to squeeze into a pair of shorts. This is a quick chicken salad I improvised the other evening. Its pedigree is distinctly southeast Asian, with ginger, lime, peanuts, cilantro, and fish sauce building its flavor profile. The salad is mostly composed of fresh vegetables, with no oil in the ‘dressing’, so the caloric impact is cheerfully low. It is, however, so addictively delicious that you may find yourself eating more than intended.

Recipe after the jump...

A Ragged Dal

Dal. It refers both to the wide variety of lentils, peas, and beans used in Indian cooking (also known as pulses), and to the seemingly endless array of dishes you can prepare with them. Cooked simply with spices and aromatics, served with rice or bread, dal is a staple of the Indian diet.

I'm hardly an expert on Indian cooking, but I imagine dal is a malleable genre, where a cook's creativity is given expression in his or her unique amalgam of ingredients. There must be regional variations, with different spicing based on local preference, different lentils or peas or combinations thereof driven by local harvests. I call my own a 'ragged' dal, pieced together from a few different recipes, with a combination of pulses driven by happenstance.

It's a simple enough thing to make, although it may feel fussy the first time through, and while it's nourishing, satisfying, and healthy – it's an excellent source of high-quality protein – it's also quite economical. I like to make a triple batch, as the leftovers reheat beautifully for a quick, easy lunch.

Dish of My Dreams

Eight years ago on Labor Day I threw what was probably the most significant dinner party of my life. The universe had pointed out the guy I would spend the rest of my life with, but I was at a loss as to how to secure his attention. That night, I hosted a Mexican feast and invited the fellow in question along with a number of friends we happened to have in common. He was about to move into a house a mile up the road from me, and inviting him to dinner seemed like the neighborly thing to do. He stayed after everyone else had left, and we sat and talked long into the night. We've hardly been apart since – we were married 5 months later and live happily in the house a mile up the road.

When I mentioned last week that I'd invited guests for dinner over the weekend, my wise husband suggested that I cook Mexican.

Soup Weather

Our early spring seems reluctant to let go. I know summer doesn't officially start until the 21st of June, but it's not unreasonable to expect some hot sunny weather from the end of May forward. It's been mostly in the 60s, even on sunny days, with temps in the low 40s or even 30s overnight – not even warm enough to sleep with the windows open (to my mind, one of the great joys of spring). And then we keep getting days like today: grey, dark, rainy, blustery, and COLD, hovering somewhere in the low 50s. It's the kind of day that forces you into a sweater and wool socks, demands a fire in the woodstove, and marches you into the kitchen to make a pot of soup.

Sweet Corn and Chanterelle Risotto

Mushrooms and corn seem to have a natural culinary affinity. This may help to explain how the fungus that causes hideous tumors (‘smut’) to grow on corn ears came to be considered a delicacy – what the Mexicans call huitlacoche. It's caught on in this country, too; I had my first taste at Francine Bistro in Camden, Maine. Chef Brian Hill had found a local grower with smutty corn, and paired the huitlacoche with sweet corn and crème fraîche in a tender crepe. While the huitlacoche may be monstrously ugly, its flavor is gentle and mushroomy and was well balanced by the flavor of the corn.

I've learned to love them together, corn and fungi. Last fall's sweet corn bisque got a garnish of crispy fried shiitakes. And yesterday's chanterelles just begged for some of this season's kernels.

Country Fâté

Last weekend was our friends' annual Lily Party, which I wrote about in this post last year. I suppose I was still feeling guilty about showing up with naught but a pile of nuts, so I put in a little extra effort this year and made pâté. I used the recipe and instructions for a Country Pâté from Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn's excellent Charcuterie.

The result was nearly impeccable – the flavor was complex and satisfying, but it wasn't quite fatty enough, owing to a dearth of pork shoulder at the market. I used a roast, and supplemented with salt pork (holding back half the salt called for in the recipe to compensate), but failed to meet the requirement for 25 – 30% fat. Even so, all 2 or so pounds of pâté were eaten with gusto and appreciation. I served it on a long platter, sliced just over 1/8" thick, laid on a bed of psychedelic Savoy cabbage from the garden, with thinly sliced baguette, pickled sour cherries, and whole grain mustard. Several celebrants hunted me down to compliment my effort.

I have to say, though, that I found this pâté a little too...pristine? Poised? Finished? The last time I made a country pâté was about 20 years ago, and I used Julia's recipe from The Way to Cook. It was terrific, if a little...I don't know, naughty? More rustic, funky, idiosyncratic (and fatty). I'd made it for a similar sort of affair, and one of the guests happened to be Warren Picower, then Managing Editor of Food & Wine Magazine. He sought me out to let me know just how impressed he was with my pâté.

Some Serious Baked Beans

Yeah, I know it's been a while (uhhh...looks like three months to the day). I'd like to be able to say it's been all fun and games. We did get away for two glorious weeks on a deserted beach in the Bahamas. And I had Lasik surgery on my eyes. And I turned 50. Beyond that, it just hasn't been that interesting. I sent out an invoice last Friday for the draft I put together in June; I averaged 71 billable hours a week at the computer. That's really all you need to know.

So, beans. Baked beans. I love them. When I was a kid, one of my favorite dinners was franks and beans and brown bread. As a young bachelorette, when I could afford to be less cautious about my caloric intake, I would occasionally make my entire dinner of a can of baked beans – B&M, heavily doctored with chopped onion and strong mustard. Then one day, I learned to make them from scratch.

Pig Fat Follies

My quest for real lard began about 7 years ago, when I decided to learn myself some Mexican cooking. I'd spent a few days eating my way around Chicago with a bunch of girlfriends, and a raucous dinner at Frontera Grill pointed up a glaring gap in my culinary repertoire (I'd wanted to cruise the Maxwell Street Market for the real deal, but our travel schedule got us into town too late on Sunday).

So I did what any reasonable cooking obsessive would do. I bought a cookbook on the subject (Rick Bayless's Mexico: One Plate at a Time) and invited a bunch of people to dinner. Finding ingredients wasn't too hard. For one thing, it was early September and I had a surplus of tomatoes, hot peppers, cilantro, and tomatillos growing in my garden. And I was able to order corn husks, dried chiles, and masa harina online (from the late, lamented CMC Company). The one thing I couldn't lay hands on was the lard required for the tamales and refried beans.

Sure, even the groceria up the road had turquoise boxes of Sno-Cap “Manteca”, but oh, my brothers and sisters, that crap bears about as much resemblance to home-rendered pig fat as Bud Light® does to a cask-conditioned bitter ale. It's an exemplar of the processed, sanitized, hydrogenated, industrialized “food” that's overtaken this country.

I thought I could just buy some pork fat from the butcher counter and render it myself, but at every grocery store in a 30-mile radius (and there are at least 3) my request for pork fat was met with laughter or incredulity or both. You think we actually butcher pigs here?

In the end, I stooped to the industrial lard and baked some country-style spare ribs in it to impart some flavor. The dinner was a huge success, and I even scored a husband out of it (a story for another time). But finding pig fat became my Quest.

Happy Anniversary, My Sweet

Six years ago, on a cold Monday night in February, TJ and I stood in front of the woodstove in our living room and, certified by a local Justice of the Peace and witnessed by my best friend, pledged to one another our troth. We were both wearing jeans. Afterwards (and after signing the required documents) we shared a bottle of champagne with the JP and my friend. When they left, I made a simple risotto for our dinner.

The following weekend, when the kids were down, we invited about 20 friends over and TJ cooked up a paella and we all drank and toasted. Later, that summer, when family and friends were freer to travel, we rented a big white tent and had about 100 of our nearest and dearest here for tapas, paella (3 of them, tag-teamed by TJ and his Dad and uncle), and wedding cake (and lots of beer, wine, and sangria). I've never in my life understood the mania surrounding weddings and luckily, neither had TJ. So we married in a way that was simple and true to ourselves. To all the women who insisted I would forever regret not wearing a dress: I haven't yet and surely never will.

Yesterday was our anniversary. We usually go out to dinner, but I was in a cooking mood.

Building a Better Chicken Pot Pie

My schedule has calmed down, some – not as much as I'd hoped, but at least I'm finding time to cook. For a variety of reasons, my workload is going to be fairly heavy for the foreseeable future. Not a bad thing in this down economy.

Back around and before the holidays, when TJ and I were both flat out and nobody had time to cook, we relied heavily on a number of local prepared food outlets, and ate through many pots of beans – Rancho Gordo's, of course. Fior D'Italia in Manchester makes a variety of excellent frozen ravioli – quick to cook and easily sauced, even if it's just with garlic, butter, and Parmesan. Al Ducci's Italian pantry (also in Manchester) makes a number of heat & eat dinner items – lasagna, eggplant parmigiana, chicken Florentine – all of them delicious.

And then there were the chicken pot pies from Grandma Miller's – not half a mile down the road. Good as homemade. Or...are they? It occurred to me midway through a slice one dinnertime that I've never made a chicken pot pie. I found myself with some free time on Saturday, and a hankering for chicken pot pie got me busy.