A Cooking Life

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.

Soul Food

I was recently reminded of the power of food to soothe and heal when, earlier in the fall, I had to put down my 17-year-old cat, Miles. He'd been slowing down, and very early one morning I was wakened by his crying and found him crumpled in a heap on the laundry room floor; he'd lost power over his back end, and I knew in a heartbeat it was time to let him go.

Oops

I don't mean the turkey. It was perfect, all 21 pounds of it. Actually, all of the food was perfect except maybe the stuffing, which was tasty but a little bit dry. Nope, no family mishaps or uproar; my family is the best. My husband shopped, rearranged furniture, made pie, cleaned up after me. The kids ironed linens, set the table, peeled potatoes. And my friends: my friends saved the day.

No, “oops” because just as everybody was getting settled in and jolly, and I was about to enter the sprint for the finish that is the last hour of making Thanksgiving dinner, as I was chopping mirepoix for the brussels sprouts, being simultaneously tormented, entertained, and distracted by one of my hilarious friends, I very nearly severed the tip of my left pinky. Lucky me, I only got about halfway through.

Edible Creamed Onions

Raise your hand if you love the idea of creamed onions at Thanksgiving but find yourself disappointed by the reality of them...

I thought so. A certain amnesia always inspires me to put them on the menu, but I always end up leaving them uneaten on my plate. And I'm not alone. They seem to be the one item that routinely gets scraped from plate to compost, and the plastic tub of leftovers ends up growing a fascinating culture at the back of the fridge. Not so surprising, really. I mean, come on: boiled onions, butter, flour, milk, salt, pepper – a little nutmeg, if you're lucky. Sounds like a perfect definition of bland.

The last time I hosted Thanksgiving dinner, I tried a new approach to creamed onions. They were all eaten, and I'm quite certain the bowl was licked clean (and not by the dog). The key difference lies in roasting the onions.

Quincidence

A few weeks back, I spied a small basket of ripe yellow quinces at my local year-round farmstand. I greedily snapped up four of them, thinking I'd make a sample batch of quince jelly. If it was any good, I'd order up a quantity of the little darlings and go big.