The Coop!

A whopping two days before leaving for Amsterdam, we finished the coop! “We” meaning 80 percent Delia, 20 percent Eric, with huge assists from Dave and Peter.

The chix seem really happy. I’m loving just chucking cooking scraps and watching them go nuts.

And the view from above:

Any other urban chicken farmers out there? I can’t wait for the eggs, which should start coming, to the tune of 4 or 5 per chicken per week (we have four chickens), sometime in July.

More updates from Europe, so stay tuned!

Let's Kill the Recipe: Baked Eggs, Breakaway Style

When I started writing this blog, I really didn’t want it to be about recipes. There are twenty jillion recipes on the net for every conceivable dish. What I really wanted to convey, instead, were ideas and techniques, so that the reader need not fuss about quantities and ingredient lists. It’s much more valuable to think about an idea, and then, somehow — and this is the tricky part for many, but I prefer to think that everyone reading this is perfectly capable of pulling it off — to make those ideas and techniques your own. It’s much easier to remember notions as opposed to data.

With that in mind, consider the baked egg. The idea is to use a small vessel — preferably a small cast iron pot like that shown above, but you could use a ramekin or anything else that’s roughly four to six ounces in capacity — to bake a small quantity of chopped vegetables topped with a few eggs. I’ll often root around the fridge for some kind of liquid to “bind” the veggies together, typically a dollop of Greek yogurt plus some stone-ground mustard, or maybe a drizzle of leftover salad dressing, soft tofu, or, if nothing else, a drizzle of olive oil and vinegar.

Cheese may or may not be involved. Same with meat.

You then stick it in a preheated oven (375 F) for 15 or 20 minutes (check it often after 15), until the yolks are barely set.

In today’s version, it was shallots, carrots, and kale, all diced finely, that went into the bottom of the pots. I had an extra egg white sitting around, so that got whisked with some mustard, pulverized shiitake powder (for umami) and mango chutney, which then got poured/spooned over the veggies. A few tablespoons of chopped ham (from our incredible Berkshire we got a few weeks ago) were arranged along the sides of the pots, forming a nice little chute to plop in three beautiful eggs (courtesy of Lucelle). A few shavings of Dubliner cheddar on top, along with freshly ground peppercorns and a pinch of matcha salt finished it off.

Three espressos later, I was ready to take on the world!

Give it a try — let’s see what kind of wild combinations we can come up with.

Cooking with Monks

I’m just back from a multi-day cooking workshop with the monks of Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, in the Ventana Wilderness southeast of Carmel Valley. I was invited down again to help the monk-chefs who cook for the summer guest season “wake up” their summer menus with some breakaway vibrancy. The winter fare at Tassajara–a full-blown monastic training center for aspiring zen Buddhists–can be fairly simple and spartan, but they pull out the stops for the summer guest season, when they open the gates to anyone who’d like to experience the magical tranquility and great food the place has to offer.

We cooked a meal for 105 people–a personal record for me–that consisted of

soft tofu topped with fennel that had been pickled in a gorgeous pink brine of plum wine, umeboshi, rice vinegar, and honey
yaki onigiri (cooked rice crammed into triangular molds and filled with umeboshi and chopped nori and sesame, then brushed with a canola/soy sauce blend and grilled)
squash pizzettas brushed with a fresh oregano pesto and chopped roasted almonds, then baked
broccoli “rice” (finely diced broccoli sauteed in olive oil then braised in fresh orange juice and topped with orange zest)
baked soft tofu in a mint puree and dusted with crushed pistachios
strawberries infused with lavender and strained yogurt, piled on a shortcake made with lavender

We also spent a day going through old menus and thinking up ways to give them some global zip while keeping the food relatively light, an important consideration for the 100+degree heat that is common in the summers down there.

I’ve written about this before, but one of my favorite aspects of the Tassajara kitchen was its “mindfulness bell” — a bell that sits in the middle of the action, that anyone can ring at anytime. When it rings, everyone stops what they’re doing — no matter what it is — and reflects for about a minute on just what it is that that we’re trying to do when we cook. It’s not really designed as such, but one of its purposes is to pretty much eliminate stress in the kitchen. There’s no task that’s SO important that it can’t just wait for a minute while everyone takes a few deep breaths. How I would love to see the mindfulness bell incorporated not only into every restaurant in the country, but into every home kitchen, too. It’s the perfect kitchen wake-up call, to remember why we even bother cooking in the first place. It’s because we’re hungry, of course, but it’s also one of the oldest, and surest, ways of demonstrating love and care. We just have to remember this WHILE we do it.

I can’t wait to go back.

Fried Rice

Leftover rice, how I love thee! I almost never tire of taking leftover rice and making something tasty with it. And because I know this about myself, when I make rice as part of dinner I tend to make a lot of it, with the intention of having leftovers and making fried rice with it. Fried rice works best with leftover rice; cooling time in the fridge seems to reduce its starchiness and increase its ability to meld with other ingredients.The rice shown above is more or less a classic example of my favorite fried rice, using whatever I had in my fridge. Here is today’s version:

onions
fresh ginger
diced carrots
diced mushrooms
1 fresh manzano chile, de-seeded and diced
chopped up leftover roast chicken
1 egg mixed with pickled fennel juice
several cups cold cooked rice

Start off by heating a combination of olive oil and butter over medium heat. I’m liking my new nonstick wok purchased pretty much for this purpose. Then add some chopped aromatics — onions, shallots, leeks, scallions, garlic, or any combination of these. I also like to chop up whatever else is in the fridge that needs to be used: sweet peppers, fennel bulb, broccoli, winter greens, snap peas, green beans . . . virtually anything will do, but the key is to chop it finely. Feel free to add meat, too, as I did here. I like to keep everything about the size of a grain of rice or slightly larger. Liberally salt and pepper it all.

Then add the rice. Since it’s cold, you’ll need to sort of spear it with a spatula to break it up. Keep doing that until you have no more rice clumps, until all the ingredients look more or less uniform.

As that cooks, I like to crack two eggs into a coffee cup, add a splash of vinegar (pomegranate vinegar is nice, though today I happened to have fennel pickling juice on hand), whisk them with a fork, add to the rice, and mix well. Taste for salt – citrus salt is always good — and add a handful of chopped herbs (cilantro works especially well). Serve with a mound of pickled ginger, pickled fennel, some sliced avocado, and an icy Belgian beer.

Using Herbal Blasts in Your Cooking

I always chuckle when I read a recipe that asks me to use some fraction of a teaspoon of an herb. My daily cooking (and my cookbooks) lean heavily on the prodigious use of fresh herbs, often measured by the quarter-cup and half-cup, but sometimes even multiple whole cups. Using fresh herbs in these kinds of quantities produces dishes might seem counterintuitive or even nutty, but the results, more often than not, are lively, vibrant, and incredibly satisfying. The reigning heavyweight champ of the herb world is Jerry Traunfeld — do yourself a favor and check out his books sometime.

Herbs used in large quantities create taste revelations that aren’t easily forgotten; can you remember the first time you tasted basil-based pesto? I can — and I recall being stunned at how good something could taste. I couldn’t get over it. I ate nothing but pesto for about two weeks!

Have you ever tried fresh oregano leaves in quantity? Imagine the following oregano pesto:

3 cups fresh oregano leaves, stripped from their stems

1 teaspoon garlic confit

1/4 cup cashews, slightly browned in a skillet (no oil)

1/2 cup very fruity extra-virgin olive oil

2 tablespoons plain greek yogurt

plenty of freshly ground pepper and sea salt

Blend all of the above in a blender or food processor, and spoon it over hot pasta of your choice. It’s incredible! The yogurt makes the whole thing creamy and light, and the cashews give it a toasty depth.

Tarragon is another fresh herb that I love to use in large quantities. Saute some onions (or shallots, or scallions, or a combo) in olive oil until soft, then transfer to a blender. To that add at least a cup of fresh tarragon leaves and whir it around. Add this lovely green goo to chicken thighs, and bake them in a 375 oven for 45 minutes or so. Or add the same “pesto” to a head of chopped cauliflower, and bake that.

Using fresh herbs by the fistful is an easy, healthy way to inject serious flavor into your cooking. And if anyone reading this has a favorite way to use at least a cup of some fresh herb, I’d love to hear about it!

(photo credit: scoutress)

King Crab with Jicama, Avocado, and Dried Dragonfruit

I didn’t go into Monterey Fish, looking for King crab, but as soon as I entered, Tom Worthington — co-owner and raconteur extraordinaire, whose little office serves as a water-cooler of sorts for sushi chefs, restaurant owners, wine merchants, and various other food-obsessed people who enjoy each other’s company as Tom’s workers tally up the damage — pulled off a huge leg and handed it to me to gnaw on. It was unimaginably sweet and oceany. So I bought two legs and pondered what I was going to do with them.

As it happened, I had a fresh bulb of jicama and a good avocado, a promising beginning for a crab salad of some kind. It seemed to need both some color contrast and some fruitiness. I thought about the overpriced persimmon in my fruit bowl — a miracle in itself in this fourth week of March — but dismissed it as too mild and too similar to the avocado in texture. Then I remembered the curious bag of dried dragonfruit I had recently bought at Trader Joe’s — vibrant, pomegranate-red, slightly chewy texture, with some fruity pop. Julienned, it would make an excellent little last-step sprinkling. Finally, the crab needed some kind of citrus for tang, so a Meyer lemon got squeezed and spritzed. Which salt? Since crab likes citrus so much, my mind drifted to kaffir lime, so I took a few leaves out of the freezer and whirred them up with my trusty sel gris to give it yet another notch of fragrance to go with all that texture and oceany goodness.

Pickled Daikon

pickled-daikon-3-625

I’ve been trying to score a bucket of rice bran to make real takuan (Japanese pickled daikon), but the two beautiful daikon I picked up at the farmers’ market weren’t about to patiently wait around for me, so I made a quick-pickle version of them. And boy am I glad I did.

I had a big bag of Meyer lemons from a friend’s tree, a million kinds of fruit vinegar, and plenty of honey, so why not? I first benriner-ed the daikon into very thin discs, then salted them (with kosher salt) to draw out some of the water. While the salt was doing its thing, I combined some orange blossom honey, raspberry ginger vinegar (leftover from recent batch of raspberry pickled ginger), and the juice and zest of two lemons.

I then rinsed the daikon discs well and dried them as best I could with a clean tea towel, and added them to the brine.

They’re delightfully crunchy and really lemony, yet still have that radish kick. I’m serving a small mound of them with everything I eat. I think they have earned a permanent place in the fridge!

Has anyone ever tried pickled daikon?

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