Have a heart

Or five or six.

[Warning for the faint of -- ahem: scores of undoubtedly cute little chickens, ducks, and guinea fowl gave their lives for this post.]

For the last edition of Choice Cuts, we screened the Jules Dassin short of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” So obviously, I had to cook some hearts.

My favorite meatmongers at Dickson’s Farmstand Meats (now permanently brick-and-mortared at Chelsea Market) happened to have three bags of various bird hearts for me. However, they were also mixed in with gizzards and livers, so I spent an hour or two picking through the sacks, rinsing and sorting.

I fried them in butter, as per Fergus Henderson, deglazed with a little vincotto, and put those chewy, saucy little hearts on toast. Sprinkle with parsley, serve, rinse, repeat.

Fish in flavor

Our most recent edition of Choice Cuts was all about La Serenissima, and in that city of canals, one eats a lot of fish.

I somehow failed to get any pictures of the baccalà mantecato, but our token Venetian confirms that it holds up to the standard. Eating whipped salt cod on grilled polenta is like wrapping your tongue in a Snuggie (that’s a good thing), and the dish is actually pretty easy to put together. It just requires a little forethought — the cod needs a few days of soaking so you can keep all your teeth (and your mixer can keep its motor intact).

Sarde in saor, on the other hand, is a giant pain in the ass. Not only because the dish requires several days to complete, but because it turns out filleting sardines is not really as easy as the internet would make it seem. (Corollary: Filleting sardines to feed 20 is no fun.) But I love this dish, whose name is Venetian for “sardines in flavor” or “sardines in tastiness” and very apt.

Filleted sardines get a roll in some flour and then are deep fried.

Meanwhile, onions get stewed for a while in vinegar with raisins and pine nuts.

Alternate layers of onions with sardines in a big (ideally ceramic) vessel. Cover it and leave it in the fridge for two or three days.

Mangia. And then hunt down a fishmonger or friend skilled in filleting for next time.

Nobel Surprise

Dear readers, let’s collaborate on a timely recipe.

All I have right now is a name. It’s called Nobel Surprise.
What is it? And what’s the surprise?
It’s probably based on something Norwegian and famous.
An autumn dish, like cardamom cake with pear baked inside.

Perhaps there is a touch of Kenya? Cloudberry wienerbrød, served with changaa-spiked whipped cream?

Maybe it’s not a dessert.

Maybe it’s an appetizer. It’s a teaser, suggesting magical things could happen later in the meal. It’s tasty, sure, but like a dish at El Bulli, the hype about Nobel Surprise sometimes gets out of control, and stratospheric expectations can’t always be met.

What do you think Nobel Surprise is?

UPDATE 10/17/09:
So that you know I’m serious about Nobel Surprise, I’m throwing out the first (and maybe the only) serious option: I made some cardamom milk cake last night and drizzled dark chocolate on it. The dark chocolate is the surprise, of course. Maybe it should’ve been milk chocolate, but I don’t like milk chocolate (and I hope you don’t think I’m bi-racist for saying it).

OK, I admit it. This whole thing was just an excuse for me to make dessert…

7,000 foot chocolate buttermilk cake

I can’t remember the last time I made a layer cake with icing. Maybe never. I prefer to leave these things to the experts. Cakes are not a cakewalk. Especially not in Santa Fe, at 7,000 feet above sea level. So when called upon to bake one for a dinner party, I refused at first.

water-based soups

Soup season is officially open, and I’ve been exploring water-based soups this year. Mostly because I don’t have the time and energy to make stock (not that it requires much), and I’m not buying stock at the supermarket because it isn’t very good, it’s expensive, I think it’s a waste of food transportation energy, and the supermarket I’m shopping at doesn’t sell meat anyway, so my choices are mushroom, vegetable, or nothing.

It’s amazing how flavorful nothing can be. With a little added fat and umami of course. You see, you can’t just salt your way to success with water-based soup. You need some kind of base, probably some variant of a mirepoix along with a bunch of fat. I don’t know where I heard this recently, but fat is flavor. So, preferably you’ll want a couple kinds.

Plus you’ll want a balance of umami (which, really, is what stock is all about), salt, and acid. Example one: this delicious west african peanut soup from Bittman. Fattened up with grapeseed oil, chicken fat, peanut butter, and peanuts. Tomatoes lend the umami and acid. Sweet potatoes and kale make for a good textural balance. Wow, it’s so damn good.

Example two: red lentil soup with lemon, which has graced this blog in the past, perhaps more than once. The recipe calls for stock, but this one works well with water. You need another flavor dimension beyond the olive oil/tomato paste/lemon troika to drive it home, though. A cup of grated parmesan at the end works well, in lieu of salt. And a dollop of yogurt upon serving takes it to the top.

So, that’s what I’ve got. If you have any other water-based soup secrets, I’d love to hear them…

BLT 2009: Double the bacon, double the fun

That was 2008.

This was 2009:

Santa Fe

So I’ve been in Santa Fe for a couple weeks. According to the American Lung Association, this area has some of the cleanest air in the country. It’s right up there with Duluth, and the difference in palpable. First, smells seem to carry much further around here. I smell piñon and ponderosa pines, I smell desert sage and honeysuckle and russian olives. And this time of year, there’s the smell of roasting Hatch green chiles all around town.

brunch in cambridge

on the offhand chance that anyone’s interested, i thought i’d put up a link to a post i wrote about brunch in central square. feel free to send me suggestions of places i’ve egregiously overlooked.

Deceptively simple

I have a tendency to make the most unassuming dishes in the most time-consuming, overwrought way. I figure that the more attention you pay to every step and aspect of making a dish, the better it’s going to be ultimately.

You look familiar

Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?

At my CSA pickup on Saturday, I was psyched to see that not only were we getting six pounds of peaches, pears, and plums, but that the plums were just like the ones that grow in the Langhe, where I used to live in Italy. Called ramassin there and Italian prune plums here, they’re especially good for putting up or for turning into a pie with the last few peaches from the previous week’s CSA share.