I recently made some salts for the school auction of a friend. From the left: matcha, dried tangerine, smoked paprika, lavender, and umami. Now, if I only had some good labels! Any designers out there who want to give it a shot?

Has anyone outside the SF bay area heard of a hangtown fry? It’s an oddly compelling yet not very intuitive dish loaded with the richness of eggs, cream, oysters, and bacon. It’s a somewhat bizarre combination, one that cries out for, in this humble cook’s opinion, a more vibrant, breakaway interpretation.

“Hangtown”: former name for Placerville, in gold country, roughly halfway between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe. Legend has it that this camp, near the mother lode, held the first recorded hanging of, presumably, rogue miners. The name quickly caught on, until some early chamber of commerce or another decided Placerville sounded better.

The dish was allegedly the request of a prosperous miner who was tired of eating beans, and demanded the chef to make him a dish of the most expensive ingredients he had; the chef looked around and found canned oysters, hard-to-come-by bacon, and eggs, which I imagine would have been plentiful – getting hens to lay isn’t THAT hard – but apparently they were indeed rare. So the chef just threw it all together and declared victory.

I had eight or so small oysters from Kevin Lunny’s operation, and they needed to be used up. I still haven’t tasted a cooked oyster I’ve liked more than a raw one, but it seemed prudent to cook them, so a hangtown fry it was. With tweaks, naturally!

I started by cooking two pieces of bacon in a cast iron pan. Removed, blotted, and roughly chopped the bacon. I then opened the oysters, let them drain a bit, dredged them in a combo of flour, freshly ground coriander seed, and black pepper, and fried them in the bacon fat.

While they cooked, I combined three eggs, several tablespoons of greek yogurt (it really is better than cream — which the original calls for — in scrambled eggs, caloric considerations aside), and plenty of chives.

I removed the cooked oysters and set them on a plate while the eggs cooked in the same pan. It seems odd to cook three separate dishes in the same pan, only to combine them at the end, but that’s exactly what happened. Cooked the egg/yogurt mixture on low heat, made some toast, and when the eggs were two-thirds done I added the oysters and bacon and folded them in. Topped with more chives, good salt, and more black pepper.

It was good. But it didn’t make a lot of sense. Eggs and bacon certainly belong together, but the texture goes weird when the bacon gets folded in with the eggs. One bite of each yields far more pleasure than the mixture. And the oysters? If I had billions of oysters in my backyard, I might say what the hell, throw them in some eggs, but … again, weird texture with the eggs, and the triple-rich hit of oyster, bacon, egg is more confusing than dopamine-inducing/pleasure-giving.

I’m thinking that the next time I try this, I’m going all separate. Large oysters with a proper spice or herb or citrus treatment, with some kind of crust, fried in ghee, plated next to the egg-herb combo, plated next to the bacon. The troika has an odd unity, but it needs some work!

Chicken is a lot like tofu: one can just keep dreaming up new ways to cook it.  My typical modus operandi — perusing the pantry and fridge and pulling out whatever needs using up — was in full play on this tangy, zingy interpretation. I started off by seasoning chicken thighs with plenty of s&p, and sauteeing them gently to render off some of the fat. While they cooked, I soaked a handful of dried cranberries and dried tomatoes in hot chicken stock until they softened a bit, then blended them with plenty of fresh thyme and olive oil. The chicken then got brushed with this mixture, and finished off in the oven until deeply browned and crispy. It had tons of umami.

You can imagine a million substitutes for my ingredients — what’s of interest here is the technique: gently render fat in cast iron, pour off, brush on flavoring, and finish in hot oven. For the ultralazy  but hungry (that’s me most of the time), use an extra-large cast iron pan and toss in some chopped vegetables to roast alongside the chicken, and fire up a pot of rice at the same time.

The good folks at the Monterey Bay Aquarium have performed a great service to people out shopping for fish who don’t have all the unsustainable fish memorized.  From your smartphone just log on to seafoodwatch.org and you’ll be directed to the latest list, optimized for phones. Very useful!

I’m happy to announce that I’ll be partnering with the Marin Farmers Market — to my mind the best green market in the Bay Area by a wide margin — this coming week at the Marin County Fair, dubbed “the greenest county fair on earth.”  Wednesday through Sunday, I’ll be teamed with various farmers, who will provide me with their tasty yields. I’ll then cook and demonstrate some breakaway-style dishes based on those ingredients. Here’s the lineup of farmers and demo times:

Wednesday July 2: David Retsky, County Line Harvest. They tell me they’ve got great Costada Romanesca squash, so definitely something with that.

Thursday July 3: Steven Kashiwase, Kashiwase Farms.  Stonefruit is peaking, and that’s what I’m getting. I’m thinking a nice ginger-laced chutney.

Friday, July 4: Albert Strauss, Strauss Dairy. Perhaps a yogurt based summer fruit salad with sauteed ginger, shallot, and mint

Saturday, July 5: Kevin Lunny, Drake’s Bay Family Farms — clams! I’ll likely give them some kind of umeboshi treatment.

Sunday, July 6: Doug Stonebreaker, Prather Ranch. Pork loins. Toasted spices and chutney will almost certainly be involved…..

Daily cooking times are 1, 2:30, 4, and 5 pm. PLEASE come by and say hello! It should be a pretty great fair this year. Lots of info here.

Apartment Therapy’s The Kitchn has another nice story on breakaway cooking, please check it out!

South Asians have long known about the magic that occurs when yogurt meets spices meets chicken. Classic chicken tandoori, though, contains no skin—it’s stripped off by the cook prior to marinating and roasting. But I LIKE skin. So I came up with this recipe of stuffing the spicy yogurt under the skin, and roasting it the usual way, using the bulletproof technique of increasing temperature as the bird cooks, till the skin crisps up as bronzed as you like (and, if you’re like me, you like it very bronzed and supercrisp).

Gently separate the skin and the meat with your fingers. Mix yogurt, star anise, coriander, fennel seed, and tumeric, and spoon it in there. I’m betting this would be even better if left to marinate in the fridge overnight, but it was still marvelous with no marination. Crazy moist.

I put this post on the heels of the breakaway meatballs post because . . . it’s really the same idea! My mystery box included a few pounds of Yukon Golds, and I thought it might be fun to simply boil them, add some stuff, form balls, coat with spiced breadcrumbs, and bake. The “stuff” was Greek yogurt, a plantain that needed to be used up, fresh thyme, s&p, and an egg to bind it all. Breadcrumbs were old ciabatta, toasted coriander seeds, and s&p. Spray with olive oil and voila! They’re surprisingly light; one expects the blast of cream and cheese in such a concoction, but the only fat in them was the yogurt (ok, it was full-fat yogurt), so they had a springy, jaunty feel to them, and they perfectly complemented a rib-eye steak and some sauteed carrots.

The variations on this dish are endless: you could do pesto-yogurt combo, or just throw in tons of chopped herbs. You could add spinach that’s been cooked and wrung dry and finely chopped, or you could give it an Indian ride and saute onions in fennel, coriander, and cumin. I’m tempted to mix cooked potatoes with miso and go that route. Or, for real nirvana, mix in some rendered duck fat and plenty of salt!

It’s a good formula — if anyone tries any variations, please report back!

]]> http://www.breakawaycook.com/blog/?p=150 2008-06-16T23:04:17Z 2008-06-12T17:00:44Z Eric eric@breakawaycook.com http://www.breakawaycook.com

Well I have another 40 or so one-pound packages of what is surely some of the area’s greatest ground beef, since the quarter-cow was delivered a few weeks ago, and am dreaming up crap to do with it. I haven’t made meatballs in quite a while, and had some Mexican-ish touches conveniently lying around, so the pound of ground beef got mixed with:

• sauteed onions
• garlic confit
• minced jalapenos
• minced pickled carrots
• an egg
• chopped dried cranberries
• fresh coriander
• Mexican oregano
• ground chipotles
• breadcrumbs soaked in milk, then squeezed

I then made about 10 extra large balls out of all that, and whirred up a crust for them: toasted coriander seeds, cumin, peppercorns, sel gris, and a few crusts of old bread. The balls got rolled in it, placed on a silpat, and baked in the oven till crispy and well-done. They were quite spicy, and served simply with a baked potato and a good salad. Couldn’t photograph them in their just-cooked state — it got too dark outside! But you can imagine — deeply browned and yummy-looking.

There is something useful about looking at food pre-cooked, too, though; it sometimes gives you just enough hint to let you know you’re on the right track.

Just one of these was enough — well ok two — to feel happy and sated, so we had plenty for leftover lunches. Today I made a meatball sandwich with some homemade bread, chutney, and avocado, and plan on doing the exact same thing tomorrow, which is when I know I’ve hit upon a winner!

Any meatball makers out there? Got any tips I should know about?

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I’m honored to be a guest panelist in the upcoming Asian culinary forum, to be held on July 21 at the Ferry Plaza, where we’ll be talking about global influences in Asian food, Asian influences in global food, and plenty of other interesting stuff. Please come if you can and introduce yourself if you do!

Tomorrow evening I’ll be emceeing the national sushi championships in Sacramento, an event known as “Sushi Masters.” Several hundred maestros have already competed in various regional events, and now it’s time to crown a winner among the six chefs left standing tomorrow night. I’ll be doing Phil Donohue-style mike reporting, live in the middle of the action. If we get any video out of it, I’ll be sure to link it here!

UPDATE

Lots of fun! The chefs were very nervous, though I did my best to try to get them to relax. A raucous crowd, much more so than one would expect, with a local chef packing in an entire section of hooting supporters. Grand winner was Tomaharu Nakamura, veteran chef at the Sanraku Four Seasons in SF. His “signature roll” was a truly stunning display of creativity and daring — it was vegetarian, and he used BROWN RICE! I’m hoping I can find some photographs to link to ; it was a marvel to behold, and utterly delicious. I’m doubly impressed that the judges — a hardcore group of grizzled and traditional Japanese men involved in the food world in various capacities — could recognize that the top prize in sushi could go to someone this unorthodox. The entire world would stop eating meat if food tasted one-tenth as good as Nakamura’s wild-eyed creations.

]]> http://www.breakawaycook.com/blog/?p=147 2008-06-05T00:01:41Z 2008-06-04T23:15:51Z Eric eric@breakawaycook.com http://www.breakawaycook.com

The other day I roasted a huge batch of beef bones, since they came with my recent purchase of the amazing meat raised by Mike Gale at Chileno Valley ranch (four of us split an entire cow, yielding roughly 110 pounds of meat each — more on this later if anyone’s interested). In they went at 400, and out they came an hour later, browned and marrow a-bubble. After making a tasty little snack of toasted Tartine country loaf schmeared with marrow, avocado, and lavender salt, I threw them in two big stockpots, covered with water, and simmered for about six hours. I let it sit overnight, and in the morning each pot had a solid inch of fat on top. That got skimmed and used to make some seriously good French fries, and the stock was poured into eight ziplock bags and frozen.

Today I pulled a bag out and let it thaw. Meanwhile I chopped up a yellow zucchini, some de-backboned collard greens, a bunch of green onions, and sprinkled in plenty of smoked paprika salt and freshly ground pepper. The stock was added to that, then everything got blended in the VitaPrep. It was good, possibly even ethereally good. Another excellent quickie soup for the lunch repertoire.

It’s a rare treat for me to make beef stock — I wouldn’t really seek out 10 pounds of bones, roast them, do all the icky de-fatting (it gets *everywhere*), but when they’re presented to me in a bag, I certainly will. I normally use, and am happy with, the organic beef stock sold at TJs and Whole Foods in the tetrabox. I have a hunch my homemade would prevail in a blind taste test, but not by that much — maybe not enough to make it worthwhile on a regular basis. But then again, I did get eight quarts out of it . . . .

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If anyone’s curious about what the microscopic breakaway kitchen looks like, there’s a cool little feature on breakaway cooking in The Kitchn, a wonderful little site “for those who want to cook more, but are shy in the kitchen. It’s a place to dive in deep, and embrace the joy of one of our basic needs: food.” The Kitchn is the food/kitchen section of Apartment Therapy. Many thanks to Dana Velden for doing such a fine job with both the prose and the photos.

I’ve been hooked on crusts for a while now, and am on constant alert for new ones. My latest infatuation is with herb crusts, made simply by combining fresh herbs with small amounts of crusty bread, salt, and pepper. The crust above is just thyme leaves, pain au levain, and s&p.

What do you do with a crust? You sprinkle/pack them on to foods you want to become crunchy or crispy. The crunch of food is a severely underrated aspect of great food, I think. It lets you know that something very special is coming. It’s the first thing you taste, the first sound you hear, a precursor of good things to come. They are a crucial part of breakaway cooking.

So what gets a crust? Anything baked — a casserole, baked tofu, roasting vegetables — and anything fried — a burger, a steak, a fish fillet, a cake of tofu. The other night I had a small quantity of tofu, and a small quantity of ground beef. I mixed those two together, and stuffed a little bleu cheese and thyme leaves in the middle, and gave it the thyme crust. (The top patty is about to get flipped in the photo). An herby deeply browned and crispy crust was the result, with all kinds of floral notes and umami goodness from the blue cheese. On top went some carmelized onions, tomato chutney and a small swirl of dijon, sandwiched between slices of Acme herb slab. It was a fine, fine sandwich.

It’s weird but the older I get the more I crave carrots. I beeline for the salsa counter in Mexican restaurants, where I pile up a plate of the pickled spicy ones alongside the pickled jalapenos. Carrot salad, carrot cake, roasted carrots, I’ll eat them wherever I find them.

I’ve cooked them a billion ways, and this one is the current fave — I’ve tried tweaking this approach in various ways, but I keep coming back to it. There are two secrets/tricks to making this addicting side dish: cutting them in the right shape, and judicious quantities of freshly ground cardamom. Here’s how it’s done:

Peel six or seven fat carrots, and cut off the ends. Slice them down the middle, lengthwise, and put the halves flat-side down so they rest flat on the cutting board. Then slice it again four times lengthwise, leaving four long strips/planks. Then slice those on the diagonal. I don’t worry about uniformity, I just follow this basic guideline; there is beauty in irregularity! Throw those into the wok or chef’s pan.

Then mince a few tablespoons of ginger and one medium onion, and throw those in. Heat the pan on high, add some ghee/butter/olive oil (or any combo of these three), and start to cook over high heat. Add plenty of salt and pepper. While it’s cooking, grind up enough cardamom seeds to yield about a tablespoon. It seems like a lot, which it is, but go for it. Continue to cook until everything is soft, and taste for salt. Top with chives, or other herb of choice (the purple in the photo is from a chive blossom). Prepare for addiction!

Well some very intriguing news came in the form of a phone call from the executive producer of Iron Chef America, who asked if I’d be interested in being a judge for the upcoming season. And the answer was, “Yes!” We tape in NYC in late June — more updates as developments unfold, but for now, woohoo!

My local Chinese market was selling two trays of the fat rice noodles often used in chow fun (which is now apparently called shenen fen) for the price of one, so I picked up a duo-pack and set about making dinner. These noodles are nice because they don’t require any boiling: just make a stirfry of choice, and incorporate the noodles. This round got fresh ginger, carrots, a leek, a few diced anchovies, half a bunch of kale, and a handful of goji berries, all sauted in macadamia oil blend (which I’m liking very much lately — it’s made by the good folks at Jungle Products, in Sonoma). The noodles kind of broke up a bit (they’re quite delicate), resulting in tender blobs (in a good way) that reminded me of gnocchi, a nice countertexture agains the snappy, crisp veggies. A dash of umami salt really set the entire dish spinning with umami (boosted by the anchovies). Do this in a nonstick pan; if it starts to stick (the noodles get sticky), just add a little chicken stock, carrot juice, or water. A quick and very tasty dinner.

I couldn’t believe how many products with goji berries I saw at the Fancy Food Show this year. We seem to require a new superfood every year (blueberries and pomegranate have dominated this category over the past two to three years), and I think it might be goji’s turn. In a perfect mirroring of this trend, I’ve seen them for sale in fancy health food stores and, heaven forbid, farmers’ markets, anywhere from $12 to $25/pound, but I was able to pick them up in my local market in Chinatown for $2.39/pound. Chinese just eat them, probably oblivious to the trend’s current status (and the Chinese merchants, miraculously, must be unaware of how much they could actually charge per pound, with the right marketing), whereas we “better health through better food” people seek some kind of nutritional botox effect from them.

They’re sort of like a cross between a dried cranberry and a rasin. Sort of! They are in any case the perfect fruity chewy foil for a large bunch of hyperfresh kale, trimmed of its stems. Dice and saute a red onion in fat of choice (I used macadamia oil, which was delicious, but this could be done with olive oil, butter, ghee, or a combo of these). While the onion softens, rinse the trimmed kale and chop into 1-inch segments, and add to the onions once they’re nice and soft. Add plenty of salt (of choice) and pepper. I also tossed in some ground fennel seed, which seemed to add some complexity to it, but this could easily be omitted. Then a big handful of goji berries. Just saute for a few more minutes, and you’ll soon see what a delightful combination this is; it also has the added bonus of being extremely pretty, not to mention about as healthful as it gets. Try a big bowl of it, and notice how you feel afterward–completely sated yet happy and light enough to want to go for a nice long walk.

I once asked a vegetarian friend why she avoided meat.

“Oh, I have nothing against meat,” she said, then squinted a little. “It’s just that I HATE vegetables.”

But seriously: why do so many people dislike vegetables? I think the widespread distaste for vegetables is more or less a rational decision, since so few people know how to prepare them in any way save boiling or steaming, and the results are often fairly disgusting. When I was a kid, pretty much all our veggies came from a can. It was my job to pick which can to open (I usually went for canned corn, which I still kinda like, though frozen has pretty much replaced it). On the rare occasions we did have fresh vegetables, they might get a pat of margarine and a dusting of some iodized table salt and pepper that had been ground literally years before. Blech!

Kids are notorious for not liking fresh veggies, but I know quite a few adults, too, who look at the forlorn broccoli floret on their plate as the price they have to pay for their meat entree.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Ninety percent of eating a delicious, vegetable-heavy diet is shopping. Start with great vegetables, and it’s VERY difficult to screw them up. Conversely, it’s very hard to make crappy industrial vegetables taste great, no matter what you do to them.

I’ve had my vegetable world turned upside down recently by the fine folks at Mariquita Farm out of Watsonville. Julia Wiley and Andy Griffin have long been sought out at farmers’ markets around the Bay Area (though they no longer do any at all), and the list of Bay Area restaurants that buy their spectacular produce is a who’s who of the very best. Their CSA is filled to capacity/booked solid, so no hope of getting on that, but they do offer the intriguing “Mysterious Thursday,” when Julia drives up to SF and unloads, for $25, what has to be the best-looking box of vegetables to be found anywhere.

The photo above is a portion of the box I got last week. I’ve never had, let alone cooked, agretti before, but man is it good. I made a terrific breakaway mapo dofu out of it by sauteing onions, ground beef and Chinese plum sauce, then adding harissa, half cake of soft tofu, and four or five cups of chopped agretti. The agretti made the dish sing by providing green tangy notes and a most pleasing popping texture.

Also in the box were lamb’s quarter’s (a delightful green), baby purple artichokes, dino kale, asparagus, baby turnips, tons of leeks, deliciously sweet salad greens, fancy carrots, favas, herbs, and plenty else. We managed to eat the entire box in four days!

But the point is: with vegetables this good, you WANT to eat them. You can’t help it. So that, it seems, is the trick — to find a supply of incredibly inspiring produce. Farmers’ markets are a great place to look, but I’m liking the box from Mariquita very, very much. If any of you have a favorite CSA, let’s hear about it!

Peak beet season is coming to a close, though they miraculously seem to stay around for most of the year in many places. I’ve eaten a huge quantity this year, but I’m still buying them every time I see them.

I was feeling lazy about doing beet tartare (if any of you reading this have not tried this recipe from The Breakaway Cook, it’s one of my favorites in the book), so just decided to drain the boiled golden beets and toss them in the blender along with some milk, chicken stock, and tangerine juice, along with plenty of s&p (the salt was dried tangerine salt). Victory declared! If I was feeling fancier, I probably would have sieved it once, to give a smoother texture, but I was so hungry and it tasted so good that I pretty much wolfed it down (with plenty of leftovers). And just for fun I had the last remnants of some Thai basil, so pureed that in blender along with some olive oil and drizzled the green goo on top. A keeper! Served with a dollop of full-fat Greek yogurt and a hunk of La Brea whole grain, barely toasted.

I think I’m one of those cooks who isn’t hugely influenced by the weather: I often make big salads for dinner on cold days, and braise a pork shoulder in the middle of the summer (then again, I have the excuse that SF summers are freezing). If I I see that I’ve got a ham hock that is requesting my attention, I , like many others, automatically think “pea soup,” even on warm days like today. I did indeed have a bag of dried peas (I try always to keep a bag in my pantry), so we were off to the races. I’m almost never without carrots and onions, so I chopped them up fairly finely, threw them in the soup pot with a few strips of bacon, and gently sauteed until the fat released and everything started getting soft.

From there, I put in a pound of dried peas and the ham hock (chopped up a bit). Everything was looking so nice that I couldn’t help but snap this picture of it, before even adding any liquid, knowing that the army-green color it would eventually take on wouldn’t be quite as photogenic. From the state in the photo, it was just a matter of adding a quart of chicken stock, and about another quart of water, bringing to a boil, and simmering for about two hours. Thick, porky, meaty pea soup emerged. I used smoked paprika salt at the end to add even more smoky goodness (it had both smoke and umami from the bacon and from the hock). I’m in a bit of a rut with this soup, because the flavors are so good together, but I’m always looking for different ways to eat pea soup, so if anyone’s got a good one, please speak up!

]]> http://www.breakawaycook.com/blog/?p=120 2008-04-30T04:04:00Z 2008-04-29T15:54:01Z Eric eric@breakawaycook.com http://www.breakawaycook.com

A few months ago I was due to give a talk at Diesel bookstore, in Rockridge, along with Molly Katzen, Elizabeth Falkner, and a few other cookbook writers. I showed up on time, and met the bookstore manager. She looked both surprised and very worried, and asked me if I was okay, and to step into her office.

It wasn’t good, whatever it was.

It turns out that someone identifying themselves as Eric Gower had called the bookstore several hours before, claiming that a thief had broken into his car. His computer, which contained his only pictures of his mother (!) was stolen, and he had no way to get to the bookstore on time. He needed the bookstore to wire him $150, pronto, in order to make the event.

In one sense the story was so preposterous that it was amusing, and I got through the event ok, but in another, it was scary. Why in the world would *I* be chosen?? Jesus, couldn’t they find someone a little, I dunno, more well-known than an obscure cookbook writer? But maybe, in an odd way, it might be more plausible for that very reason.

I then brushed off the event as just another wacky manifestation of the times we live in, and forgot all about it. Until this morning, when the LA Times ran a story on how this “bookstore author scam” is gaining momentum. For any bookstore owners reading this, beware!

Well, at least I’m good company, with Nick Hornby.

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I don’t know what it is about pestos that keeps me coming back. I fully realize that pestos are fraught with the danger of cliche, given their role in some of the not-so-successful early-stage fusion, with well-meaning chefs and their attempts at edginess to establish market-leading trends. But I think that, as always, by keeping things extremely simple, pestos are real boons to breakaway cooks.

As many of you know, I’m a huge fan of frozen peas. I find them in some sense vastly superior to fresh peas — which in any case are only available for a few weeks out of the year — the now-high-tech freezing processes ensure that supervibrant garden-y pea flavor. And lordy, is it convenient to just have a stash in the freezer at all times. For this pesto, I had the last part of a fresh bag of spinach to use up, plus the classic breakaway ingredients of frozen peas, carrot juice, umami salt, and a little milk. I didn’t even bother thawing the peas, just a few cups directly into the blender with the following:

• 2 cups frozen peas
• 2 cups fresh spinach
• umami salt, pepper
• ¼ cup evoo
• 2 tablespoons carrot juice
• 2 tablespoons milk

I could have eaten and really enjoyed the udon with just this — and in warmer weather, this is excellent served cold — but I also had some crimini mushrooms on deck, ready for use, along with a piece of a yam that I decided to cut into thin, matchstick strips, and a leek. I decided to saute these together to create a quick little topping:that would give the dish some good texture and give it even more umami goodness (criminis, like all mushroooms, are jam-packed with umami, as are yams, as are leeks when they melt):

• 2 cups minced mushrooms
• 1 cup matchstick yam
• 1 large leek, minced

Into the saute pan they went, along with some ghee, as I waited for the water to heat up to cook the udon. And lo and behold, out of the deep-freeze came a salmon filet, bless its rare flesh, purchased long before this year’s ban — it was time for this to end its frozen isolation. It got a quick crust of my standard coriander, fennel, black pepper, and plenty of salt and pan fried in cast iron.

More ambitious than I had originally planned, but well worth the tiny extra effort involved.

Make frozen peas your friend! And let me know if you know any innovative or favorite use of them.

This thing was truly a bottom-of-the-barrel dish that came out way better than I had imagined it would, so much so that I thought I’d share it. It had been almost two weeks since I’d gone shopping, and there was, seemingly, NOTHING in the fridge. But, it’s amazing what can happen when you have a few stray carrots, onions, and mushrooms if you mince the hell out of them and throw enough umami at it. The shrooms were not at their peak, shall we say, but oddly, this seemed to add to their deliciousness. This thing just popped with flavor, and I’ll be making it again and again, of that I’m sure.

Here’s what I put into my claypot:

• 1 onion, minced
• 2 carrots, peeled and minced
• 3 cups crimini mushrooms, minced
• 1/2 cup dried tomatoes, sliced
• 1 tablespoon freshly ground star anise
• about a quarter pound of (grass-fed) ground beef, though this could easily be omitted)
• 2 eggs
• some frozen persimmon puree I found deep in the freezer, thawed
• freshly made bread crumbs

Saute onion, carrots, shrooms, tomatoes, and star anise in olive oil for about five minutes, until they soften. Add the beef, if using, and plenty of s&p. While that cooks, whisk together the eggs and persimmon puree (not everyone has persimmon puree in their freezer, including me most of the time. An excellent substitute would be dried fruit — apricot, figs, plums, maybe papaya — softened in boiling water, then blended to a puree). Add that to the pot, mix well, and liberally toss on some seasoned breadcrumbs, made in the spice grinder by blending a small piece of stale bread, some optional freshly ground coriander, black pepper, and salt. Bake at 400 (no lid) for about 20 minutes. If the breadcrumbs aren’t toasty-crispy on top — though they should be — put it under the broiler for a minute or two, which will definitely crisp it up. Really nice with a glass of ancient vine zin.

A few weeks ago a charming writer and editor named Kim Carlson from Culinate contacted me and asked if I would write up a few general rules or tips to make cooking at home more rewarding. The piece is finally up, so please check it out! (along with the rest of the site–there’s a lot of good stuff there)

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.

I’ve always had a thing for fermented foods of all kinds — pickles, miso, yogurt, vinegars, olives, cured meats, beer and wine, even coffee, tea, cheese, and chocolate — but recently I got all fired up about making my own after hearing a talk by the hyperarticulate and hyperzealous Sandor Katz, author of a book I like a lot called Wild Fermentation, a paean to the yeasts and microorganisms that naturally surround us and to the things they can do for us. For Katz, fermentation is a “a health regimen, a gourmet art, a multicultural adventure, a form of activism, and a spiritual path, all rolled into one.”

Fermented foods are the opposite of industrial, processed food, whose processes either deaden or downright destroy the complex bacterial life so prevalent in fermented foods. We’re so paranoid about bacteria: we have antibacterial soaps, antibiotic drugs — and in Japan they have antibacterial underwear! — but there’s really no escaping microscopic bacteria and fungi. We breathe them, and eat billions of them every time we take a bite of something. Every culture on earth makes use of them. They help us digest and they boost our immune systems. We are, quite literally, the descendants of bacteria.

Happily, fermented foods are also chuck full umami, and bring us gripping and varied flavors.
There is much to say about Katz’s book; I’ll try to get around to a full review of it soon.

This sauerkraut couldn’t have been simpler to make. Seven heads of cabbage (4 green and 3 red, all of which turned red in the end), shredded with a Benriner (Japanese mandoline) and a bowlful of tangerine salt were the only ingredients. The only hard part about it is the constant pressing down of the cabbage with your fist; you add a layer of cabbage, salt it about as much as you would normally salt something, make a fist, and press down, which breaks down the cellular structure a bit and allows the salt to draw out the considerable water content of the cabbage. Add another layer, more salt, and press down some more, till you have no more cabbage.

The crock I’m using is a German one called a Harsch. It’s 20 liters — I was probably a little too optimistic in calculating my kraut-eating capacity when I bought it, so you might want to get a smaller one if you want to join me on this adventure. It has a brilliant design: two stone weights weigh down the food, which quickly becomes submerged in its own juices, brought out by the salt and by the pressing action. The brim has a moat, in which water is poured, thus preventing insects or anything else from getting into the crock. Fermenting time so far has been about three weeks, and the kraut is stunning — tangy and lively and a little sweet, nothing remotely like the canned/jarred kraut served on hot dogs at ball games. It’s really more like a slaw that’s fermented, with just the right notes of complex sour. I can imagine making this with a different salt, perhaps a saffron salt for a new layer of savory goodness, or maybe even adding some julienned young ginger to it. More experiments to come.

Kim chee is on deck for the crock, but I’ve got a few gallons of sauerkraut to get through first. If any of you in the Bay Area would like some, drop me a note and come on over with a container.

I know that I’m lucky to be surrounded by a few Korean-run corner markets, all of which offer big bags (more than 100 cloves) of peeled, hyperfresh garlic for just a dollar or two. It is vastly superior to the great majority of skin-still-on, dried-up or even sprouted garlic available at most supermarkets. These of course can be used as is, in all the typical ways cooks use garlic, but since I learned to poach garlic in canola or olive oil at very low temperatures, I’ve never looked back. Poached garlic, or garlic confit (“confit” refers to some cooked food that is then covered in fat of some kind, which works both as a seal and a preservative) is mellower than raw garlic, yet still provides plenty of garlic-y goodness. I keep a Mason jar of it in the fridge, barely covered with oil. Whenever I need garlic, I simply open the jar and spoon a few (or more) out. I often use a spoonful of the garlic-infused oil, too. Use them as you would normal garlic.

At this point in life, I can’t imagine going back to using garlic the old way. Be sure to make your confit as soon as you buy your bag of unpeeled garlic, because the window of freshness on peeled garlic is short. Don’t buy peeled garlic that has brown spots, or that looks even slightly slimy—only buy the plump, vibrant, healthy-looking garlic for your confit. It lasts in the refrigerator, covered and in oil, for at least a month, but I seem to keep mine for up to six months without any problem. Some people worry about botulism with any confit, since the anaerobic environment can allow bacteria to develop, but I never worry about it — it doesn’t sit around long enough. If you’re at all worried, simply add a tablespoon of vinegar of choice to it.

I’m also very curious to see how others use it — please do report!

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• About 50 cloves of garlic, peeled

• Enough olive oil (or canola oil) to cover them in a shallow pan (about 1 cup, depending on the shape of your pan)

Slice off the brown root end of each clove, and place the cloves in a skillet. Cover them completely with the oil. Heat the pan very, very gently – you want bubbles to rise, but ideally not break the surface. Slow and gentle is the key here. Cook them for about 40 minutes, stirring occasionally. Let them cool in the oil, then transfer to a Mason jar, and refrigerate.

I somehow forgot to mention here that a month or so ago the surreally talented Heidi Swanson of 101 Cookbooks ran a short piece on a handful of the cookbooks that have had an unusually strong influence on my cooking. The full article can be read here, but let me paste the main part below for quick reference. There are in fact many more cookbooks I cherish and use, and one day I’ll get around to cataloging them, but for now here are a few. As an exercise I would love to expand on each one, and may do that if I hear from you that that would be a worthwhile endeavor.

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• Gray Kunz (with Peter Kaminsky), The Elements of Taste. My vote for the most creative, interesting, and ground-breaking cookbook of all time. Kunz considers thinking about taste in the traditional five ways – sweet, sour, salt, bitter, and umami ­– to be a pathetically primitive way to understand great food, especially the preparation of it. He has about 15 ways to think about taste, complete with groupings like Tastes that Pull (tangy, vinted, bulby, floral/herbal, spice aromatic, funky), Tastes that Push (salty, sweet, picante), Tastes that Punctuate (sharp, bitter), and Taste Platforms (garden, meaty, oceanic, starchy).

• Deborah Madison and Ed Brown, The Greens Cookbook. I cut my teeth on zen cooking, and really recommend it. I grew up in a meat-centric (actually wild-game-centric) household, and when I learned about how zen monks cook and eat vegetables and grains, it changed everything for me. I consider this book the best of the lot, which would include all the Tassajara books and other zen cuisine books.

• Jeremiah Tower, Jeremiah Tower Cooks — It’s not so much the recipes in this collection that inspire, it’s Tower’s utter conviction in absolutely everything he does and says. There is no falliblism with Tower; it’s unthinkable to him to cook a dish in any way but the way he has devised, tinkered with, and thought about. There is a great deal of information for people who really want to learn how to cook well, all infused with Tower’s considerable panache.

• Robert Wemischner, The Vivid Flavors Cookbook. This guy has broken away so far he’s coming out the other side! A wildly creative, boundary-smashing, bold and daring book full dishes that pop, pop, and pop some more. His writing style (not to mention recipe titles) can be cloying, and many of the recipes are very labor-intensive, but my hat is off to his originality and sheer nerve.

• Jerry Traunfeld, The Herbfarm Cookbook, and the The Herbal Kitchen. Traunfeld is the undisputed King of Herbs — he uses them, usually in large quantities, in everything, and everything seems to taste better as a result. The main influence in my own heavy reliance on herbs to deliver flavor and to keep things on the lighter side.

• Michael Field, All Manner of Food. The fussiness and sheer arrogance of Field’s books make Tower look like a wilting wallflower, but there is so much to learn from him that it’s like a complete culinary school education wrapped in one volume. Long out of print but easily found on the net.

I think I’ve happened upon another flavor blast that will become a permanent staple in my fridge. I recently found a gigantic (more than a pound) bag of dried tomatoes — a truly excellent source of umami — for a song, so I bought them, and wondered how far I would get with them before they molded or otherwise went bad on me. Determined not to let this happen, I just started cooking, with no idea of what was to come other than I would be using a large quantity of dried tomatoes. I had a large onion, so I chopped that up, and began sauteeing it in butter and olive oil, then added a big handful of dried tomatoes. At this point I thought it might turn out to be a super-potent pasta sauce, or at least the base of one, but that’s not what happened.

After the onion softened a bit, I transferred the mixture to the VitaPrep, and let it rip. In went a clove of garlic confit (which will be covered in my next post), a few big spoonful of greek yogurt, and some olive oil, plus some salt and pepper, of course. It was delicious, just as it was. I immediately spread some on a lightly toasted slice of Tartine’s country bread (which gets my vote for best bread in the universe) and knew that it had earned a permanent place in the fridge, spooned into a little crock that used to house sweet butter. It’s creamy from the yogurt, tart and umami-laden from the tomatoes. I’ve since used it on sandwiches, in scrambled eggs (unbelievable), between a piece of halibut and the crust that I gave it, on baked tofu, in salad dressings, on baked potatoes. You can imagine a hundred other uses for it. Let me know some new ones if you try it, please.

• 1 tablespoon each of butter and extra virgin olive oil

• half cup onions

• half cup dried tomatoes (not the ones packed in oil), sliced

• 1 clove garlic confit

• quarter cup yogurt

• 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

Melt the butter and oil in a heavy pan, add the onions, and saute over medium heat for a few minutes. Add the tomatoes and some salt and pepper, and continue to saute for another few minutes. Transfer to a blender, add the garlic, yogurt, and extra oil, and puree. Keeps for several weeks in a covered jar in the fridge.

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.

I thought it might be fun to start a new review section of this blog, in which I sketch some thoughts on certain cookbooks that have caught my attention for whatever reason. Because this blog is all about breakaway cooking — that is, getting innovative, lively, and above all tasty dinners on the table with as little fuss as possible using flavors and ingredients from around the world — I will definitely look toward how well the books I choose to review fit into the breakaway scheme of things, but I’ll also look for ideas, techniques, gear, anything at all that might lead us down prominent-looking alleys.

So let’s kick it off with Michel Richard’s extraordinary Happy in the Kitchen, published by Artisan, surely the handsomest cookbook publisher in the world .

If we’re looking for a book for casual home cooks who just want to get dinner on the table with a minimum of hassle and time, it’s hard to imagine a more inappropriate book. Many, and possibly most, of the recipes in the book are almost ludicrously complicated, and are often comprised of nested recipes within recipes that ask the reader to prepare three or even four recipes found in the book as part of another recipe! Meta-recipes, if you will. Richard, chef-owner of DC’s Citronelle (among other restaurants) and one of the more innovative and prominent chefs working today, is obviously quite used to having an army of 20-year-olds perform the dozens of labor and time-intensive prep work required to make these fine and no-doubt delicious dishes. And, with many recipes calling for 4 to 16 tablespoons of butter, plenty of heavy cream, bacon, bacon fat, and melted cheese, this is not a book the American Heart Association is going to get behind.

So why do I like this book so much, and why bother with a review? Because Richard is an utter maniac in the kitchen, where he is quite clearly deliriously happy. The book