Menu planning for the last of this years' holiday revels, finally celebrating with my parents and sis on Saturday...snowstorm notwithstanding.
They're arriving in the early afternoon and leaving in the early evening, so a full-on dinner menu would've been too much, a bunch of snacks and hors d'oeuvres too little.
Here's what I think will be just right (and will save me grocery shopping strife by tapping into my pantry and root-cellar...)
Snacks to set out on arrival:
- Caramelized onion dip with crudités
- Trio of crostini: fresh ricotta and fig jam with wild aromatics (pantry!); marinated chickpea (pantry!!); pork rillettes and pickled onion (freezer! pantry!!!)
Light meal, late afternoon:
- (Cups of) Butternut squash soup with brown butter and creme fraiche (root cellar!);
- (3 each) Diver scallops with chanterelles, sherry and parsley breadcrumbs;
- Blood orange, date and almond salad with Parmesan;
- Chocolate mousse cake with raspberry coulis (frozen, leftover from Christmas!)
Simple, and a good use of the well-stocked kitchen left over from holiday indulgences. But on Sunday night, that tree is hitting the curb...
My latest culinary obsession has been Southeast Asian tastes: the freshness of mint, cilantro, basil and cucumbers meshed with puckery lime and pungent fish sauce. I never get tired of these flavors, from fresh summer rolls with crisp shrimp in delicate rice paper rolls to a cool and slurpy bowl of noodles with some Sriracha and crunchy peanuts. Yum.
Now that I have a little postage-stamp of a backyard again, I'm excited to kick off the grilling season with a little afternoon get-together inspired by the super cool little postage-stamp yard joint, Pok Pok in super cool Portland, Oregon. I'm going to be riffing on bits and bobs of this menu that appeared in last June's Food and Wine, with a few add-ons, like Spicy Cold Peanut Noodles and Cherry-Bourbon Ice Cream Floats (a la Pok Pok's Whiskysoda Lounge)...Hopefully, I'll have the good sense to take some pix and maybe, just maybe capture my recipes.
“The table is very important,” Mr. Marzovilla explained as we sat around
one at his restaurant early Sunday evening with our five collective
children. “It’s about nutrition, it’s about family; you go right down
the line. And the children’s menu is about the opposite — it’s about
making it quick, making it easy, and moving on.”
Every day, I find a new reason to be grateful for my upbringing, particularly in matters of the table. While both of my parents worked full-time, my sister and I spent our after-school hours (and countless others) at my grandparents' house. There, the kitchen was the center of all activity; literally, it was the center of their first-floor apartment in the double-decker house they shared with my great-aunt, and before they passed, my great-grandparents. The entire day was more or less coordinated around all the phases of meal preparation, and when we were afoot, my grandma and aunt would be sure to put us to work in some capacity, peeling veggies, making salads, or mixing doughs. By being involved in the cooking process, we were already connected to what we were going to eat, so "no" wasn't even really an answer when it came to what was put in front of us.
"No" wasn't really an option, either, for that matter. Much like Marzovilla's own mealtime principles, we had to try everything at least once before we were allowed (barely, if ever) to refuse anything. If we snubbed our noses at something, there was no back-up plan, no mini-pizzas in the freezer to be "kid-friendly". Every night, we were lucky enough to sit down as a family for dinner, which my mom prepped after a long day at work, uncompromisingly. We ate simply and nutritiously, squarely balanced meals that always included salad and dessert. And we all ate the same thing; there were no special preparations: "You'll eat it and you'll like it" was the rule and the philosophy. Were there nights when one of us would be left alone at the table, contemplating our chewy steak, long after the kitchen had been cleaned and everyone was relaxing? Oh yes there were. But we eventually ate it, we liked it (ok, well, maybe we just ate it) and we moved on.
Sometimes I feel that I may be stepping out of bounds making any manner
of commentary on child-rearing, not yet being a parent myself. I've
witnessed plenty of dinner table meltdowns though, and occasionally
there comes a point where in order to simply make sure your child has
actually consumed something of some nutritional value, you have to give
in and break out the chicken fingers. It happens. But chicken fingers
should be the end of the line, rather than the beginning. When was it decided that children will only voluntarily consume "meat" cut into dinosaur shapes or neon-pink yogurt in a tube? I'm concerned that focusing on so-called "kid-friendliness" enables future refusals to eat non-dinosaur-shaped foods and ultimately kicks off a lifetime of pickyness, or worse, a lack of an adventurous palate. Take advantage of kids' blank-slatedness in matters of taste. Their palate is pure and their mind is free of those blocks of experience that say "I'm never eating mussels again after that horrible experience in Brussels".
I'm not saying everyone (especially a six-year old) will or should love
briny sea urchin or succulent blood sausage, but how will you ever know
unless you try?
Hmm. Ok. Well, I've just added the newly ubiquitous Facebook "Like" button to my blog posts here. I suppose that means I'll have to shift some attention toward food-related matters once again, since I have of late, been bombarding your social streams with my blather about strategy and culture and stuff I shouldn't bother my friends about.
Knowing that the theoretical benefit of adding this little social widget is an increase of traffic and viewership, I'm ever-so-subtly motivating myself back into more active engagement with things culinary. Admittedly, ever since I halted my Winter CSA pick-up, my cooking habits have waned to an all-time low. But I just bought a shiny new Weber grill, and green things are poking out of the ground again, so hope springs eternal. Hope you're hungry, friends.
*Lovely hopeful image of an heirloom tomato seedling care of: You Grow Girl
Just a few months back, when I got this here blog kicked into gear, all I really set out to do was to write about food. I assumed, based primarily on my previous food-blogging endeavor, "Home Wreckonomics" (in case you're wondering, one of the reasons I didn't bring HW back is because some robo-jerk is squatting on my sweet URL) that I'd wax on about my kitchen adventures. I didn't necessarily expect that I'd have so much to say about food politics and whatnot.
Anyway, I bring up this point only because as an astute metrics-tracking digi-dork, I noticed that my page views shoot waaaaayyyyy up when I actually write about what I'm cooking, and they sort of hover meagerly when I write about, say, composting. Does this mean that I shall re-orient my focus and begin to pander to your desires, my teeny handful of reading friends? Nope! But the holiday season has me all aflutter, and despite the fact that I'm moving house in precisely one week, my kitchen is as full and frenzied as usual, if not moreso.
This coming Sunday afternoon will be the annual Holiday Open House Spectacular, an event of awesome proportions that my pal Miss BadApple and I have co-hosted for the past four years. In general, I truly and deeply relish this season. I love the smell, I love the air, I love the lights, I love when Linus tells the story of the nativity in "A Charlie Brown Christmas". Putting on this party every year, though, has taken my holiday joy to another level. I can't imagine a better way to celebrate the season than to bring all sorts of friends and family together to eat and drink and you know, to be merry. The planning and coordinating is something I look forward when Fall rolls around- the way we refine, the way we adapt, the way we divide and conquer. It's a tradition I see taking many shapes over the years to come, but holding fast just the same.
The framework of the menu tends to stay the same, allowing me and BadApple to maintain our little personal traditions (I make the gougeres and truffles, she's got the hunka roasty meat and delicate cookies), and to divvy up the rest, adding our own touches here and there. And let's not forget Mr. BadApple's annual piece de resistance: the punch bowl. Seeing as how this year I've been putting so much food in jars, I've got the corner on the pickle and relish tray. I've also been tasked with hooking up the condiments for the hunka roasty meat: a big ol' country ham! After some mustard experiments that probably won't make the party cut, I settled on a sweet-sour-spicy Apricot Chutney.
This may have seemed like an epic lead-in to a sort of hum-drum recipe revelation, but let me tell you: this is some damn good chutney. So far, I'd say it's the best of my preserving endeavors. I used the recipe from the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving, which was straightforward and simple:
Finely chop the following:
- 2 Granny Smith apples (I happened to have 2 quince lying around, so I used these instead)
- 2 onions
- 4 cloves of garlic
- 1 or 2 tbsp fresh ginger (I didn't have any, oops. Used ground ginger instead.)
- 3 cups of dried apricots
Throw all of the above ingredients in a big pot, add 1 cup of white sugar, 1 cup of brown sugar and 1 cup of cider vinegar. Add 1/2 cup of raising- I used sultana. Stir to dissolve.
- Add 3 cups of boiling water, mix it all up, and bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Reduce heat and boil gently to thicken and reduce. Keep an eye on it and keep stirring. The book says about 30 minutes, I let it go a bit longer. The chutney should thickly mound on a spoon.
- Add in your spices: I am a bad, bad measurer of spices. I used something like 1 tbsp dry mustard, 1.5 tsp of ground cinnamon, 1.5 tsp salt (I maybe added a touch more), 1 tsp ground ginger, 1/4 tsp ground cloves and cayenne pepper. Give it a good stir, and keep cooking for about another 15 or so minutes until you've achieved the texture and thickness you desire. Adjust spices to taste.
You'll be pleasantly surprised at the complexity of flavors that develop. There's a subtle heat, but it's very well-balanced with the bright sweet and sour notes of plumped up apricots and tangy vinegar. I ate some right away with a couple of nibbles of a fantastic cloth-bound cheddar leftover from Thanksgiving. I'm psyched to plop this on a ham-filled biscuit, and excited to create some gift baskets with a jar of chutney, a nice piece of cheese and some homemade crackers.
So this is just one little detail of the spread we'll be offering on Sunday. But if there's one thing we've learned about throwing a great party over the past few years, it's that the details really do make the difference. Our first year was an outrageous and complex extravaganza of food and drink. It was a ton of work and a ton of money. Yes, it was worth it, but we know better now. If you keep your cocktail party menu pretty basic: crudite, some cheeses and charcuterie, and one "star" (like a hunka roasty meat), then you have a lot of room to make those items shine in different ways for smaller and more manageable bursts of effort. Of course, it sure helps if you happen to already have a penchant for stocking your pantry with pickles and jams and mustards...
There's still plenty to do before the big day. I'll look forward to sharing some pictures and our menu next week. In the meantime, I'll leave you with a little something to get you in the spirit:
After plenty of research and about a week of deliberation, I decided today to sign up for the Winter/Spring farm share from Enterprise Farms. Running from December through March, the Enterprise share does things a little differently than you'd expect. In addition to providing local (and obviously seasonal, or stored) farm goods, they have also partnered with organic farmers within what they refer to as the "Atlantic Foodshed". This includes produce (all organic) from growers up in Quebec all the way down in Florida.
Now I know that all those die-hard locavores have been up in arms about this approach, but after finishing up "Plenty" last week, I've been giving this a lot of thought, trying to establish a fundamental set of consumption practices and principles that I can both promote and adhere to. Yes, I believe that the "100-mile diet" perspective is unnecessarily narrow, but mostly in the respect of considering imported goods, like coffee, tea, chocolate and olive oil. Since there's no way in holy hell I'm living without French cheese and wine, Spanish piquillos, and so on, what's an acceptable range for gathering "fresh" foods, including produce, meat and dairy?
Drawing a 100, 250, or even 500 mile radius seems somewhat arbitrary to me. What I keep coming back to is simply making the effort to have some knowledge of the source of my food, limiting the degrees of separation as much as possible, ensuring traceability. Proximity seems at least to be a basic part of that equation. Could I make it until May without eating a pepper? If my only option was to purchase a greenhouse variety from Holland or a field variety from Mexico, then yes. Will I last through the winter without a lemon or an orange? Nope. Sorry. But now I will have access to both, direct from organic farmers to my door. In February.
I can't guarantee that the 700-odd miles from Florida or the Carolinas offers a materially reduced carbon footprint than travel from California. (Well it can't hurt.) But I can guarantee that the items haven't been jockeyed between various distribution centers before reaching my grocery store. I can guarantee that Enterprise has cultivated relationships with farmers whose growing methods are organic and sustainable and by no means industrial. And I can guarantee that I'll be eating a diverse and healthy diet of whole foods over the course of the New England winter.
Stumbled upon this article in The Atlantic Monthly's online food channel *just after* composing my post about composting. Can you believe that typical Americans waste around $600 of food per year? That's crazy!
While planning my move over to Somerville (yay!), I started nosing around the city website to learn about parking permits, trash pick-up and all that sort of new neighborhood stuff.
In small print, at the bottom of a Department of Public Works Environmental Services PDF, I came across this gem: Somerville offers a subsidized purchase (only $40!) of an Earth Machine home composting system to residents! How awesome is that? When I was growing up, my grandparents kept a compost pile (started by my great-grandparents)in the way back of their yard, behind the garden and with a few lilac shrubs conveniently surrounding it.
One of my summer jobs was to get out there with a shovel or pitchfork and turn that rich black soil once a week. I know that sounds kind of awful, but I really dug it (ha!), and even dedicated a whole science fair project to the benefits of growing in composted soil. (The project was called "Let it Rot!" and it took me all the way to the state science fair! Yeehaw!)
As an urban transient, hopping from one apartment to the next, and only once really having the benefit of a yard, I haven't really had the right opportunity to start my own compost. Not to mention the challenges of keeping an organic trash heap in a city setting. Alas, my time has come!
I've been thinking about composting a lot lately, or waste in general. For all of the home cooking I do, I generate a whole lot of food waste. After peeling and coring pound upon pound of apples, I stare at the pile of curly, fragrant peels and with a heavy heart drop them into the trashbin, or down the disposal. What a waste of rich organic material! Recycling is a critical component of managing and maximizing our food system. Knowing where your food goes is equally as important as knowing where it comes from.
A few weeks ago, I picked up this book, "Plenty: One Man, One Woman and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally" from the Remainders pile at my very favorite local bookstore. I'd heard of it only vaguely, but for $4.99, I was interested enough to buy it. I've got about 40ish pages left for tonight.
Of course deriving one's diet from local food sources is as appealing as it is occasionally challenging; personally, it's a challenge that I try to live up to with every meal. But honestly, I'm feeling conflicted about the premise of a 100-mile radius. It's not that I don't believe it's possible. The authors have certainly proved their point, and as a New Englander, I can also vouch for the wealth and diversity of local sources available with each season. I just don't believe it's the right solution.
What's bugging me is more about the importance, if not criticality of the global market in our food system. I'll be honest: I am not thoroughly educated in the economics of agribusiness. I can't necessarily speak to this point with clear and definitive rationale for my perspective. But I can say with some confidence that buying bananas, coffee, chocolate and so on is crucial to supporting the economies of developing nations and in kind, the livelihoods of their peoples. I don't need to make the obvious point about fair trade practice and principle here, but I do think that the notion of a 100-mile diet is somewhat short-sighted.
I understand that eating locally is more fundamentally meant to turn away from supporting the creation of industrial monocultures, such as big corn and bigger soy, or to conscientiously object to abhorrent living and slaughter conditions on factory farms and ranches and to resist the strawberry in February with a carbon footprint that traces a path to New Zealand. I can get behind those principles pretty easily. But am I going to feel a twinge of guilt for every pinch of delicate fleur-de-sel from Brittany? I am not.
Just for fun, map out your own 100 miles on the website. From Cambridge, MA, I can reach a pretty wide swath of New England that would ensure a rich and robust diet year-round...but my hometown in Connecticut is just out of range.
