Oyako Udon — A Quick and Very Tasty Soup

“Oyako” in Japanese means, literally, “parent-child.” You have to love a language that describes a dish of chicken and egg this way. Oyako-donburi is a classic Japanese homestyle dish that sautes/braises chicken slices and some veggies in dashi, to which an egg is added, and the ensuing medley is served over hot rice. But why not make a parent-child soup with udon, especially if most of the ingredients are ready to go?

This was a fun, quick soup. I had roasted some chicken thighs the night before, so instead of just chucking the bones, after dinner I put them into a pot along with a carrot, water, and some bay leaves, and simmered it all, covered, for a few hours over very low heat. The resulting stock was rich yet light, and needed no defatting (thank god).

So the next day I just simmered a few sliced carrots, some leftover chicken, and chard leaves in the stock, cooked some udon (in a separate pot — udon throws off too much starch to be cooked IN the stock) and made a very tasty, very light lunch. The coup de grace was a perfect backyard egg (from neighbor Joy) cracked into it at the last moment, and some chopped chives. The silouette in the photo is Delia slurping hers down.

The lesson, if there is one: don’t throw away random chicken bones! Just chuck them in a small pot, fill with water and maybe some bay leaves and whatever vegetable you have, and simmer away till it reduces a bit. You’ll have a light and tasty broth for soup the next day.

I’ve been liking quick soups of late. Does anyone have any favorites they’d like to share?

Thoughts on Feeding Nine Billion People — A Terrific Discussion

It’s kind of staggering to imagine that the world’s population is set to rise by 50 percent, to some nine billion people, by 2050. That’s a big enough challenge for global agriculture, but add to that the fact that incomes are rising in most places where populations are increasing the most (India, China), along with constrained supplies, processing capacities, and distribution channels, and you have some rather frightening prospects for keeping everyone reasonably fed.

Rapidly rising incomes in the behemoth developing nations also mean that people there tend to want to eat more meat, which in turn creates voracious demand for world grain. And if biofuels continue their pace of development, that will put even more strain on global grain and vegetable oil production.

All of this and much more was hashed out at the Aspen Ideas Festival a few weeks ago, at a session called “Billions to Be Served: Meeting the Needs of the People and the Planet.” I found it captivating, and you might too; it’s led by my old pal Jim Fallows.  It’s long but very much worth it. Check it out by clicking below:

Billions To Be Served

Give Poor Little Suffering Dukkah Some Champagne

I love the fact that dukkah (sometimes spelled dukkha), the classic Egyptian spice mixture made of toasted spices and nuts and taken with olive-oil moistened bread, refers to the concept of suffering in Buddhist terminology. It’s simply hard to imagine even the IDEA of suffering when one first encounters this manna; pleasure neurojuices begin to slosh, sometimes quite jarringly, especially with a bite of ultrafresh crusty bread (Tartine’s country loaf gets my vote for best bread in the the SF Bay area, if not earth) lightly dipped in a small bowl of fruity green fresh olive oil. It also makes a fantastic crust for snapper, or some other sturdy, neutral-tasting fish.You just want to inhale its aromas, and then its essence. One would be forgiven for experiencing the temptation to simply roll around in it.

There is no better party dip — make up a batch of dukkah and set it out next time you have guests over, and you’ll see what I mean.

It’s famously flexible — you can of course use any combination of nuts and spices that you like, but typically the dish will include toasted (in a cast iron pan, naturally) coriander seeds, cumin seeds, sesame seeds, salt and pepper, and a medley of nuts, usually almonds and hazlenuts, but I’ve made drooly dukkah with a heavy hand on the macadamias, walnuts, pecans, and pistachios. Quantities really don’t matter very much, but because it’s hard to get a feel for it the first time making it, use the following guidelines, graciously provided by Ana Sortun and her quite wonderful book, Spices: Flavors of the Eastern Mediterranean.

I’ve tweaked her assembly instructions a tad by eliminating a few steps in the spirit of getting it on the table at breakaway speed, with no discernible hint of subsequent suffering,  but the quantities she lists are thus:

• 1/2 cup blanched almonds
• 3 tablespoons coriander seeds
• 2 tablespoons cumin seeds
• 2 tablespoons sesame seeds
• 1/4 cup unsweetened dried shredded coconut
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

In a dry cast iron pan over medium heat toast the almonds and the coconut until golden, then transfer to a food processor. While the nuts and coconut toast, in another smallish cast iron pan, toast the coriander,  cumin, and sesame until fragrant. Watch the spices closely; a moment’s inattention can cause them to burn, forcing you to suffer, feel badly about the horrible waste, and start over.  Transfer to a spice grinder/coffee grinder and grind to a fine powder.

Process the almond/coconut mixture until it’s finely blended. Add the toasted spices, plus the s&p. That’s it.

Serve it in a beautiful smallish bowl, alongside a beautiful small saucer of olive oil and a basket of bread torn into small pieces.  Instruct your guests to take a small piece of bread, dip it into the olive oil, then dip into the dukkah. Prepare to leave suffering behind! Goes great with champagne.

Transcendent Pork, Fruity Nutty Cauliflower

Last night we had chops from our recent pork purchase. We bought half a gorgeous Berkshire that was lovingly nurtured by Mark Pasternak at Devil’s Gulch in Nicasio, who feeds his animals ridiculously high-quality fare and gives them lavish digs on some of the most beautiful farmland  in California. The difference in taste between pork like this and what’s available at supermarkets can’t be overemphasized; it’s just marvelous. I encourage everyone in the SF Bay area to try it. It’s easy — just call him up and tell him you want some pork. You may or may not need a few friends to split it with you; he’ll either sell you a whole animal or part of one, depending on what he’s got.  It’s then sent off for butchering, wrapping, and freezing. You pick up your bags of frozen/labeled cuts when it’s ready. You can order the same way with Doug Stonebreaker of Prather Ranch, whose pork has been known to make poets of mere mortals! I am a huge fan of both of these guys and their ranching philosophies. But I’m sure there are many others like them throughout the country. Check out the Eat Well Guide: just type in your zip code and watch what happens.

I also had a head of cauliflower that beckoned, so it dawned on me to make a kind of cauliflower chutney to go with the pork. Here’s how I did it:

• 1 cup of mix dried fruit; I used persimmon, crystallized ginger, fig, date, apricot, and cranberries + about a cup of plum wine
• Chop up the fruit, transfer to a shallow saucepan, and pour in the plum wine.
• Roast the olive-oil-drizzled cauliflower florets in a 400 degree oven till browned, roughly 30 minutes
• While the cauliflower cooks, heat up the fruit mixture. Add a dab of butter if you’re feeling generous.
• While the fruits heats up, roughly chop up a half cup of mixed nuts. I used pistachios, almonds, and pine nuts, but you could use anything, including macadamia, walnut, or pecan.
• Toast them in a dry cast iron skillet and set aside.
• Add the roasted cauliflower to the fruit mixture, mix well, andcontinue to cook on the stovetop for a few minutes. Top with the nuts, and maybe a tablespoon of chopped herb. I used oregano.

It’s a remarkable dish with pork; the sweetness of the fruit melds perfectly with the meat, yet the cauliflower provides savory goodness and some bite.

A keeper!

Finally — My Iron Chef Appearance

Just got an email from the folks at Iron Chef — we finally have a date! September 20, I think at 8 pm, but I’ll confirm as we get closer. A full 15 months after taping, but better late than never!

A Few Breakaway Wines

Our little wine project out in Bolinas has exceeded our wildest expectations. We started out three years ago with a plot of land and a single (used) barrel of Dry Creek merlot buried under some pine trees. We’d occasionally thief some out, taste it, have a fun day in Bolinas, and wait till the gods told us to bottle it, which we did, last year. The experiment went so well and we enjoyed it so much that, the next year, we upped it to five barrels — three of syrah and two of sauvignon blanc. Each barrel contains 60 gallons, or roughly 300 bottles (25 cases) of wine.  But don’t get too worried about my liver: I have two partners!

We bottled most of the syrah and all of the sauv blanc, and I must say: they’re really delicious.  Even more important, it’s been an absolute blast. We bought the crushed grape juice from trusted growers and just let it do its thing in the cool and groovy climate of Bobo.

There’s something wildly satisfying about popping open a bottle with our regular meals, yet one more piece of the overall food picture in place, alongside herbs and flowers from the yard,  meat from the whole animals we buy from (again) trusted farmers/ranchers, veggies and fruits from, yet again, farmers we like. It’s gratifying beyond description to be fortunate enough to eat and drink in this manner.

If anyone out there is considering making a little wine on a very small scale . . . do it!

Have a happy 4th, everyone.

Great Bread in Five Minutes? Not Quite, But Close

I often find that, after coming home from a  long trip, I want to start making a few really basic things: stock and a subsequent big batch of soup, a fresh batch of salts and toasted spices, and . . . bread. Somehow it’s important to fill the house with aromas to really let me know that I’m back.

I’ve been rather smitten with a somewhat recent cookbook purchase called Artisan Breads in Five Minutes a Day, by Hertzberg and Francois. The title refers not to the total time required to make a loaf of bread, of course; it refers to the really wonderful “nudge” of making a big batch homemade dough, refrigerating it, and slicing off a pound here and there to shape and bake whenever the fancy strikes. Once the initial labor of making the dough, letting it rise, punching it down, etc. is accomplished, great fresh bread is a short step away. It works. And the main reason it works is that pre-mixed, pre-risen, high-moisture dough keeps in the fridge for a long time. As a bonus, it’s no-knead, the yeast doesn’t need to be proofed, and you don’t need a starter or sponge. It’s about as low-fuss as it’s possible to be, yet it yields fantastic results. My kind of project!

I don’t always have bread dough in the fridge, of course; I still buy plenty of La Brea whole grain, Tartine country loaf, Brickmaiden wheat, and anything from Della Fatoria. But if I’m in the kitchen with a few extra moments and a small surplus of energy,  I make an effort to whip up a quick five-pound batch of dough. It’s really not hard at all.

My favorite bread so far in the book is the broa, or Portuguese corn bread. It has a supercrunchy exterior, yet the interior is chewy and really corny. It makes brilliant toast.

It’s rare that I bother to write out exact instructions for a dish, but since bread is notoriously hard to wing, here it is, with a few minor adjustments that have improved it for me. I don’t think Hertzberg and Francois will mind. Give it a try.

~~~

Broa (Portuguese Corn Bread)

Makes two two-pound loaves, or four one-pound loaves. The recipe is easily doubled.

• 3 cups lukewarm water

• 1.5 tablespoons granulated yeast (1.5 packets; I buy mine in bulk from the local hippie store, and just keep it in a jar in the fridge)

• 1.5 tablespoons kosher salt

• 1.5 cups stoneground cornmeal (I use fancy-ish polenta, medium grind, but regular old cornmeal probably works fine)

• 5 cups unbleached all-purpose flour (I use King Arthur, purchased at Trader Joe’s)

• Cornmeal for pizza peel and dusting the top

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1. Mixing and storing the dough: Mix the yeast and salt with the water in a 5-quart bowl, or a lidded (not airtight) food container

2. Mix in the remaining dry ingredients without kneading, using a spoon, a 14-cup capacity food processor with dough attachment, or a heavy-duty stand mixer with dough hook. If you’re not using a  machine, yo may need to use wet hands to incorporate the last bit of flour (I just use a sturdy wooden spoon).

3. Cover (not airtight), and allow to rest at room temperature until the dough rises and collapses, approximately 2 hours.

4. The dough can be used immediately after  the initial rise, though it is easier to handle when cold. Refrigerate in a lidded (not airtight)  container and use over the next 10 days.

5. On baking day, dust the surface of the refrigerated dough with flour and divide the dough into two pieces, one of which goes back in the fridge for later. Dust the piece with more flour and quickly shape it into a ball by stretching the surface of a the dough around to the bottom on al four sides, rotating the ball  a quarter-turn as you go. Allow to rest and rise on a cornmeal-covered pizza peel for 40 minutes.

6. Twenty minutes before baking time, preheat a baking stone to 450F, with the stone placed on the middle rack. Place an empty broiler tray on any other shelf that won’t interfere with the rising bread.

7. Just before baking, sprinkle the loaf liberally with cornmeal and slash a cross, “scallop,” or tic-tac-toe pattern into the top, using a serrated bread knife. Leave the cornmeal in place for baking; tap some of it off before eating.

8. Slide the loaf directly onto the hot stone. Pour 1 cup hot tap water ito the broiler tray, and quickly close the oven door. Bake for about 30 minutes, until deeply browned and firm. Smaller or larger loaves will require adjustments in baking time. Allow to cool a bit before slicing.

Jumpstarting Your Ruts

We’re saying our goodbyes to Amsterdam, surely among the most livable places I’ve ever been. There’s nothing like a month in a new place to “reset” the brain’s habitual patterns, to see the world in a totally new way.

I had quite a bit of free time to read in Amsterdam, which is my definition of pure luxury. Two books, both on the wild and woolly frontiers of contemporary neuroscience, really stood out: Rapt, by Winifred Gallagher, and The Brain That Changes Itself, by Norman Doidge. There is so much interesting news coming out of neuroscience that it makes one’s head spin (or, actually, remap!), but one common finding in both books is the brain’s ability disrupt old patterns by creating new ones, through sheer repetition. This is something that everyone knows intuitively: do something enough times, and it becomes second nature.

Think of your brain as a snowy hill, to use the metaphor of Doidge. There are lots of ways to go down the hill, but the more you follow the same path, the deeper those tracks become, and the stronger the tendency to take the same route every time. Deep ruts make it hard to go any other way after a while. If the rut is a good habit (brushing and flossing before bed, for example, or exercising regularly), that’s good — you reinforce your good habit every day. But if the rut is bad — and you can name your own bad habits here — or it’s something you want to change, it can take a monumental effort to get out of that rut. The answer, says Gallagher and Doidge, is to not try to break old unwanted habits, but simply to form new ones, which will supercede the old ones through sheer use. Plastic brains can consciously form new habits/tracks, and THEY will become dominant over time.  It’s a self-enforcing mechanism.

As I was reading I couldn’t help but think about cooking, and ruts. Forming good habits in the kitchen (keeping knives sharp, keeping your work area uncluttered and very clean, using equipment you really like, regular shopping at good markets/having good ingredients around, etc.) makes you want to cook. They are conscious nudges, habits that just make it easier. Cooking, once it becomes enjoyable and stress-free, automatically replaces bad habits like eating heavily processed foods (often because you’re too ravenous to do anything else), outsourcing your palate to industrial food concerns, eating on the run, in the car, grabbing whatever purely as fuel to brute one’s way through the chaotic and perhaps neurotic day.

DECIDING to eat better, to cook better, is, of course, the necessary beginning, but it’s the conscious use of attention to change your daily habits that counts most. It might start with deciding to have something tasty and healthy for breakfast, even if it means getting up a few minutes earlier and retraining yourself to feel hunger in the morning (if, for example, you never eat breakfast). Or it might mean prepping  something simple the night before to have for lunch the next day, something wholesome and good. Dinners, too, can be very simple affairs, starting with some good salads and some new good ways to cook vegetables.

It took me a long time for me to figure this out, but once I did, it just kept reinforcing itself. The secret to cooking well is to do it often.  And to tweak it to your own particular taste, not that of cookbook authors, tv chefs, or anyone else!

If anyone has good “nudges” that make you want to cook more, please speak up!

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(The photo is a baba ganoush (cooked and then pureed eggplant, with spices) made for us by my friend (and very talented cook) Basile at his lovely home in Amsterdam. It had a sublimely creamy texture, with plenty of smoke from the garnish of smoked paprika. )

The Green Market, Dutch Style

 The Noordermarkt in the Jordaan is essentially the Dutch version of San Francisco’s Ferry Plaza FM, with bicyles. People flock to the market, conveniently located just a leisurely five-minute stroll from our flat, from all over Amsterdam, and indeed from outlying cities and town as well. It’s a real social scene, so much so that a book (in Dutch) was just published about it. 

Highlights are the cheeses, grains, organic meats (lots of unusual cuts, including a super-pounded schnitzel; I started off cooking it the standard way, but somehow couldn’t avoid breaking away by giving it a cumin/couscous crust, and deglazing the pan with pomegranate molasses, purchased from the local friendly Turkish market), freshly made crepes (wow), and breads. Dutch bread is really quite insipid (voluminous, airy breads seem to be the standard), but these breads were exceptional, so we’ve been stocking up every Saturday.

We inevitably had a coffee and a slice of appeltaart at nearby Cafe Winkel; everyone seems to conclude it is possibly the best in the country, and I’m inclined to agree. It was our very first food in Amsterdam, thanks to the lovely Tatjana, who not only picked us up from the aiport, but who brought us there as soon as we landed at the flat.

Alas, we’ll miss it this Saturday, since we’ll be camping in Kroller-Muller (with umlauts over the o and u) and cycling around the national park there.  More on that soon, I hope!

Amsterdam Is Embedded in My Neurons

What could I possibly add to the world’s paeans to the beauty and wonders of Amsterdam? The city’s allure is almost violent; it grips you immediately and doesn’t let go. It seems to force the recollection of some deep place within my brain and body, almost on a molecular level, of some long-forgotten realities of long ago. It’s easy to imagine what life must have been like centuries ago because the Dutch prefer to keep all of that alive through the preservation of their architecture and streets, through life on the canals, and through their emphasis on the good life of time spent in cafes, lots of vacation, and in making every space as cosy and inviting as possible.

Our building is a wonder, a 1650 beauty with a sunny and inviting courtyard, where everyone seems to hang out with their books, computers, newspapers, snacks, and drinks. We’re not going to want to leave! My beverage of choice is a cold Westmalle Trappist double ale, without a doubt my favorite beer on earth. They’re cheap and dangerously available at the local market.

We’ve had one terrific meal (at a place called Divan, a Turkish place in the Jordaan) and a host of eh ones, though the organic bounty at the Saturday farmers’ market (more on this, plus some photos, in the next post, after Saturday) is everything a bay arean could hope for. I’ve been cooking regularly but focusing on things that don’t require lots of knifework; it’s amazing how attached I’ve become to comfortable, sharp knives!

Some sad chicken news, alas: all four became sashimi for a predator, most likely a fox, shortly after we left for Holland. Something dug a little tunnel and came up from underneath. We’re sad about it. All those gorgeous eggs will have to wait.