Home Wreckonomics

Every cook has their own culinary RoadRunner, the goal of perfecting a certain dish, where attempt after dogged attempt, success continues to elude us. Mine has been meat. In the past several years, as I have been honing my skills, the fact is that until relatively recently, I hadn't had too much opportunity to practice cooking meat, mostly due to cohabitation with vegetarians. (While I may have limited my intake, which I believe is healthy anyway, I never swore off meat altogether. Come on, I'm Polish. I need sausages.)

The first veggie was a strict practitioner, and was more than happy to exist solely on rice and bean burritos. Still, I took this chance to plan and prepare creative and nutritious vegetarian meals that would satisfy both of our appetites. Some of my perennial favorite cookbooks, such as Deborah Madison's beautiful and inspirational Local Flavors were ideal resources at this time. My next vegetarian was (thankfully) a fish-eater, so I was able to shift gears a bit and really begin to develop a solid repertoire in the kitchen, a lot of which was documented at the beginning of this blog.

I'm not much for New Years' resolutions. Nope, I make my resolutions all year 'round- weekly, daily...hourly. Sure, a new year, or a birthday or some other personal milestone creates a great sort of punctuation mark from which to make a transition, but will we stick to it, or we will allow ourselves to ramble on until the next punctuation mark jolts us into starting all over again?

To resolve is to look at an old, or perhaps recurring challenge and to find a fresh new way to face it. Ideally, wisdom and experience are crucial components to shaping this shift in perspective, but maybe sometimes what you really need is just a good, old-fashioned kick in the rump to get you going. For me, a little of both are factored into facing the hoariest of my own challenges: finishing, or following through with what I've started, beginning with this little piece of the Internet that I've claimed as my own.

Believe me, letting this blog, and thus my writing languish has certainly not be for any lack of ideas or inspiration. In fact, more than ever, my scattered collection of notebooks is overflowing with notes, recipes, menus, snippets of stories, and the occasional drunken rambling. To this end, I'm thinking that one of the major functions of keeping these pages is really just a way to keep all these bits and pieces in one space, where they will no longer be subject to stains, burns, or simply being stashed in the pages of some book and forgotten.

Since nothing encourages an attitude adjustment like a makeover (I'm talking to you, Stacy and Clinton), I've decided to refresh and reorganize, starting by officially updating the name of this blog to Home Wreckonomics; Nigella Lawson and  Jennifer Hamilton are the rightful Domestic Goddesses out there. Next, I changed the way to navigate the different bits of content I'm posting by creating some very specific categories (i.e. Appetizers, Main Courses, etc.) to make finding recipes easier, and also by cross-linking the posts to encourage exploration. Additionally, I've created some other loosely-framed categories, mostly for myself, to spend some more time working on expository writing about food and culture and society. True, this may be a little indulgent, but eating is about so much more than the techniques that marry individual ingredients. Of course, if you're reading this, I sense you are already an individual who understands this, and who won't mind my culinary meanderings, and might even share with me some of your own. And speaking of said meanderings, let me just take a moment to explain what you might find deep in the bowels of these other categories.

- Great Good Places is based on a book of the same name by Ray Oldenburg which talks about those establishments that are the heartbeat of a community, a common ground where folks from all walks of life converge and share a gathering space. Great Good Places make you feel warm and welcome and comfortable just being yourself. Great Good Places don't have to be undiscovered gems, or off the beaten path. They can be places where you go to enjoy some alone time, or places where you know you'll always end up running into friends or meeting some interesting character to chat with. Great Good Places are homes away from home for all who go there, translating into an intimate yet unspoken relationship between individuals, where the whole is more than the sum of it's parts. In a Great Good Place, you're no more special and just as special as the next person.

- In The Polish Kitchen, you'll find, quite obviously recipes that reflect my Polish heritage. There's more to it, though, or at least I intend there to be. Beyond recipes, I hope to share more about the traditions surrounding food and eating, and to reflect upon how this has shaped my own cultural and culinary education. In short, I think that having and practicing ethnic and family traditions has a significant impact on an individual's relationship with food and eating throughout their life, and maybe by exploring and evaluating my own context, I can begin to uncover some of the causes and effects.

- Right now, we're somewhere between the Pantry and the Stewpot, which to a seasoned home cook actually makes a lot of sense. If you keep a well-stocked pantry, you can always pull together a meal using a little of everything you have available. Not only is it efficient and economical, but the results are often warmly satisfying. Metaphors aside, the items in the Pantry section are meant to inspire me (and you!) and to keep me on track on those days when I stand in front of the metaphorical (couldn't help myself) refrigerator door, staring at loads of ingredients and still feeling like there's nothing to eat. So, to kick things off, I'll imagine I've just gone on an expansive epicure's tour, nibbling at my favorite restaurants, picking up this and that at my favorite shops as I plan for an elaborate meal, and am returning to the kitchen to line my shelves, stock my fridge, and get cooking. Here's what's on the menu:

- Holiday cooking: Easter, Memorial Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas

- Roast chicken: The quest for refinement and perfection

- Ten Tables (in Jamaica Plain): Hands down my favorite restaurant in Boston

- Caneles: I think I figured them out!

This is just a start!

Note: This is not my backyard-no, mine is way better and if I get a camera, I'll prove it, but this IS my backyard dining set, purchased from Target. It's nice.

Since renewing this site a little over a week ago, I have been making lists, reviewing my notebooks, and wracking my brain in general trying to figure out what my FIRST POST IN TWO YEARS should be about. Believe me, I have loads to catch up on; some things to look forward to: outrageous multi-course menus from my first hosted Christmas dinner and from this past Easter with old pals (and about to be new parents) Holly and Tom, some warm, slow-cooked stews invented in the beautiful dutch oven my Mom gave me for Christmas this past year, a few Polish traditional dishes, straight from Grandma's recipes, and a disastrous debacle with a boneless leg of lamb. Since all of that and thensome is quite a lot to swallow at once, I say let's just start with the backyard barbeque of this past weekend, held to welcome my boyfriends' mother on her visit from Galway, and of course, to show off that rockin' patio set, which arrived about 2 days after our first barbeque of the season around Memorial Day.

The list of invitees to this little shindig just kept growing, to the point where burgers and 'dogs for all would have kept me chained to the grill far into the night. No thanks, since there was a "marinated"* watermelon to be enjoyed. So the logical solution was to toss something on the grill that A) Did not require constant attention, and B) Did not need to meet individual temperature specifications. (As a brief aside here, in that 75% of our guests were Irish folks, I suppose the temperature issue would have been null: just cook the hell out of all your meat. This is, incidentally, an ongoing "discussion." Comment away.) Anyway, I decided to go with pork tenderloins, which just happened to be on sale. I bought four, but in hindsight, I could have bought almost double and they would have all been eaten in one go. My good friend Leigh, quite a domestic goddess herself, recommended that I brine the tenderloins to ensure their tenderness lest I ignore them on the grill a bit. Since that was settled, I had only to come up with a couple of salads on the side. Leigh was also kind enough to supply us with 2 gorgeous strawberry-rhubarb pies with crumb topping- the kind of pies that would have been stolen by neighborhood kids from windowsills as they cooled, know what I mean? The party, though it had some interesting moments, not the least of which was a downpour, was still a success and all were well-fed. And well-drunk, after we broke out that watermelon...

Several months' back, when warm and sunny days were only making timid guest appearances here and there, daydreams of summertime started to take shape in my conscious mind; biking up and down Commercial Street in Provincetown, long days at the beach of alternating naps and diving into the breakers, drinking Coronas at backporch barbeques and the fried fish at Mojo's.
Ahhhh, Mojo's.
Around the same time that these daydreams were floating through my mind, I was also planning an even greater escape: quitting my job to return to school fulltime.
Wow, did these two dreams collide. Now here it is, nearing the end of August and not once have these lips tasted the tang of tartar sauce dressing a crisp, golden-battered piece of haddock. Not once have I sat on a patio, groggy from the sun, sipping a strawberry daiquiri. I only just made it to a beach a week ago, for one quick afternoon at the city beach on Nahant.
What price freedom, you ask? Well, in sacrificing all that is holy about the summertime by working 2 fulltime jobs, the price seems to even out, ironically enough, as the precise cost of my annual tuition.

Fairweather blogging is pretty typical. I mean, you go crashing through the gates: "oh wow, i have this little piece of the internet, and i'm gonna use it", etc, etc, and then, after the novelty fades, pfffht, you get lazy and complacent. Or, you get a freelance gig in addition to your restaurant job and you find yourself with an 80+ hour workweek, a shelved honors thesis proposal (well, for a few weeks), writers' block for those bylines you scored (via your clever blog, of course), and a flatlined romantic and social life. Recipes and food concepts pile up, as do all those damn issues of the New Yorker. Eating becomes a function, a necessary evil, even, as Craigslist, coffee and a multivitamin becomes your breakfast and you aspire to ingest a lunch that maybe, just maybe contains something green- gummy bears notwithstanding- that costs less than $10.

Not that I'm complaining.

All things considered, I will leave you with an old favorite; a tried and true dinner recipe that I've been meaning to post here for some time, albeit under better circumstances.

After extolling the virtues of the lobster roll from the B&G Oyster House in a (relatively) recent post, I found that I wanted to tackle this beast on my own, to see just how close I could come to the sublime, based on the memories of my taste buds. Thus, when confronted with a "bargain" on fresh-picked Maine lobster meat at $10.99 for a pound, the time was right to accomplish this lofty task.

Frankly, composing the lobster salad was really not that tough, considering that when using perfect, fresh lobster meat, less is really more. That being said, the magic happens in the variation of the taste-based proportions of lemon, mayonnaise, salt, pepper, celery and, in my version, fresh tarragon. And from there, the devil really is in the details: how finely minced is your celery, sea versus kosher salt, white versus black pepper, and good ol'fashioned Hellmann's versus homemade aioli. The bar-none non-exception, however, is the buttered and grilled hotdog bun- you know, the kind that come in packs of eight when you only have six hotdogs? They are basically just Wonderbread, and under NO other circumstances would I consume such horrifically bleached, refined awfulness, but in the case of the lobster roll, there is simply no substitute. Did I mention that it must be buttered (I added a squeeze of lemon to my melted butter for just an little something extra) and grilled just to a golden crisp? Do not forget this, do not try to skimp, else you compromise the integrity of your entire operation.

Anyway, the real challenge was fabricating side dishes. Traditionally, a lobster roll is accompanied by a hearty pile of crispy, salty french fries, as indeed it does chez B&G. Now, I am not a gal to shy away from a good french fry now and then, but I feel that the creaminess of the lobster salad and the butteriness of the roll would be better complimented by something with a nice, cool crunch. With a good hot day to get summer on the brain, I inevitably gravitated towards sweet corn on the cob and a juicy watermelon.

I recently picked up Gray Kunzes' (former chef at NYC's Lespinasse) and Peter Kaminsky's (New York Times Food Writer) conceptual cookbook, "The Elements of Taste." A fascinating yet slightly pretentious collection of recipes that include flavor and tasting notes, the ideas nonetheless inspire adventurous useage of basic ingredients...such as watermelon, for example. Using their recipe for Watermelon, Tomato and Celery root Salad as a foundation, I adjusted here and there to accommodate my own ingredients and cut a few corners. The result was a wonderfully tangy-sweet and refreshingly cool and crisp accompaniment to the creamy-tang of the lobster salad and the sweet-crisp of the corn (See, I am picking up their snobby taste and texture notes!!!). Plus, the vibrant pink hue was a nice color-compliment to the peeking pink of the lobster. I even round-molded the watermelon salad for my plating! I really have been kitchen deprived lately...

Mwah hah hah hah.

That was not a very convincing sinister laugh, was it? I'm working on it...

You can now link to Domestic Goddess via my very first, my very own URL: www.homewreckonomics.com
How cool is that?!!!

In other mind-altering news, I shall annouce to you all that I've just begun yet another foray into the restaurant business...for the time being, as a second job, to ease the financial transition into being a full-time grad student.
I now promise to bring you my tales of FOH from my new position as Maitre D'/assistant manager of a pretty well-known restaurant in the South End of Boston.

More on this a bit later, as I'm just getting my bearings over this...

Two introductory caveats:
1) The following recipe was made on Tuesday night, rather than the advertised Thursday night. The "Thursday Night Supper Club" is frequently subject to rescheduling, which does not preclude the general requirements of Holly, Tom, Jennifer and I drinking beers, making and eating dinner, engaging in over-intellectualized discussions of social policy, bitching about our twenty-something station in life and, most importantly, playing guitar and singing hackneyed versions of Simon & Garfunkel songs.

2) I just watched the final episode of 'Friends.' Yes, on purpose. But now I'm watching an independent foreign film. With subtitles. Oh stop your snickering, you watched it too, alright.

As it happens when you and your friends finally land yourselves into something called a 'career' (for often lack of a better term), and get married or otherwise attached, but before they move to the 'burbs and start (oh heavens!) procreating, it hits you that you better strike your friendship while the iron is hot. Or at least still warm. It was with this realization of on the cusp adulthood that the Thursday Night Supper Club was born a little over a year ago.

Look at the size of those things!

Ahem, the citrus.
That is, unless you are visiting this site because you've searched for Goddess Heather's Giant Grapefruits, in which case, well...you've come to the right place!
This grapefruit and lemon, yes- that is a lemon and not a Nerf football were growing on trees in the backyard of our house in Rancho Mirage (Palm Springs), California.
After a morning swim, we'd go out there and shake one of the trees and, bang, (literally!) breakfast!

I have much to share in the coming days, including a recipe for the delicious chicken saltimbocca & cauliflower/spinach gratin my pals and I threw together last night AND some pictures of the giant space citrus growing in our yard in Palm Springs, but some worky-schooly things are looming over me until Friday, so until then, I leave you with this rare gem- brought to you via my sentimental Mom.

It's a picture of me at the famous Chez Prune that I have gone on about already. You may think, oh, how nice, but what I haven't mentioned is that this picture appeared with an entire article ABOUT Prune in the newspaper Le Parisien in 2000! Leave it to me to somehow manage to end up in the paper in another country.