Early summer dinner party

My 2 year old GE Profile fridge broke down about 3 weeks ago. Getting a repairman in the Hamptons the week after Memorial Day was impossible! Everybody’s opening up their houses and discovering appliance problems, and the repair services were overwhelmed. Bad timing for a local.  Over a week later, the GE man finally showed up, worked on the fridge for two hours, charged me $108 for a new “freezer computer board,” and left, promising it was fixed. But by that evening both the freezer and the fridge had reached an internal temperature of 84 degrees farenheit. I lost patience entirely with my GE fridge (which I never liked very much anyway) and bought a new fridge: a Bosch. It’s terriffic.

Living for three weeks with the CSA veggies from Sang Lee coming fast and furious but no fridge in which to put them was frustrating.  Tragic, even.  Some fell victim to the situation.  Others I managed to preserve in our little wine fridge, which was mostly taken up with milk and a few other highly perishable items.

With the new Bosch fridge in place, I got back into my groove this past weekend and put together a small dinner party to use up a few backlogged items. I had beets, as ever. I had something totally new to me called garlic scapes. I had Sang Lee cilantro.  I had lettuce.  Tons of lettuce.  Beautiful, delicate, fresh lettuce.  (Lettuce that needs to be refrigerated!) I developed a menu for a small dinner party using these items plus a few more from the supermarket.

This blog could be called 1000 ways to use your beets. I wanted something different, and I felt like smoked salmon.  I googled around and alighted upon a Mark Bittman recipe for rosti made with beets.  The recipe called for rosemary as a seasoning but I decided to use the garlic scapes instead and top it with crème fraîche and smoked salmon. 

My guests asked me what garlic scapes were and I didn’t know the answer.  I still don’t.  I think they have something to do with thinning out the garlic crop, but I’m not sure.  I really didn’t know what to do with these garlic scapes but I suspected they needed to be well cooked to mellow their flavor.  That may or may not be true — I really have no idea, but I didn’t want to take chances.  So I diced them and sauteed them in some butter.

Then I added them to the grated beets, which I mixed with a little salt and flour to make the batter. 

I fried this mixture up like a big cake in more butter in the same garlic-scape-infused skillet, flipped it splendidly onto a plate, slid it back into the skillet with a little more butter, divided it between our plates, topped it with crème fraîche and smoked salmon, whereupon it was devoured.  The garlic scapes were a lovely addition.  They were garlicky in the best possible way, with an extra freshness and absolutely no bitterness.  No fear of garlic scapes!

I intentionally made a fairly rich starter because the main course was very light.  For years I’ve been wanting to master the art of Thai/Vietnamese noodle salads, which I love to eat in restaurants.  My husband and I will never forget a Thai beef salad we once shared in a restaurant in Manhattan in Chinatown down near the courthouses.  It was so spicy, we both started crying while we ate it.  Yet, at the same time, it was incredibly delicious, and we couldn’t stop eating it.  We sat there, shoveling this salad into our mouths as fast as we could, with tears streaming down our faces. 

We don’t really have any Thai or Vietnamese restaurants on the East End, except for an outrageously expensive and mediocre one in Sag Harbor.  That is one big problem with living in the Hamptons:  good cheap ethnic food is almost non-existent.   If you crave something like a Thai beef salad, you’ve got to learn to make it yourself.

That’s what I’ve been trying to do for years, without success.   I didn’t know what I was doing wrong until recently.  I figured it out by reading Mark Bittman’s recipe for the dressing.  (Bittman again!)  He mixes the fish sauce with lime juice and sugar.  Ok, I had been doing that.  But here is the secret:  he tells you to add a tablespoon of water!  It turns out that makes all the difference between a dressing that is unplesantly strong and one that is perfect.  Who knew? 

So here is my take on a Thai beef salad.  Sang Lee boston lettuce, topped with cooked, chopped thin rice noodles, topped with cucumber, grated carrots, copious amounts of cilantro and mint, and chopped dry -roasted peanuts.

I topped it with slices of marinated, grilled flank steak and Bittman’s watered-down dressing, and served it. 

I can’t say it made us cry, but it did satiate (temporarily) my cravings for Thai food.

Baking with the Boy

I wish I could report that having so many high-quality vegetables in the house has turned my five-year old son into a great veggie eater.  It hasn’t.  I am probably largely to blame because I have let him get away with turning up his nose at the good stuff too much.  I’m working on that.  But research shows there also may be a genetic element.  My husband refused almost all veggies when he was growing up and used to heat up a can of baked beans with his meals instead.  Now he eats them all (with one strange exception: asparagus!)  And I don’t remember being a great lover of veggies either.  Salad in particular I never touched as a kid but adore as an adult.  So I have hope that the Boy’s aversion to vegetables represents an immaturity of the palate and with time, lots of exposure, and gentle coaxing (but never forcing!) his diet will broaden.

In the meantime, we bake together.  And one of our favorite things to bake together is blueberry muffins.  Those, he will eat.  And they’re pretty healthy — for a skinny, super-active kid, at least.  (If not for his mom who has a few pounds to lose.)

A quick word on names:  I’m not using his (or mine, for different reasons).  The reason I’m not using his is that he has a right to privacy which I don’t want to infringe.  At age five, he is way too young to decide whether he wants to expose himself to the world.  I (with his father) am making that decision on his behalf, and we are ok with me writing about him but not using his name or his face. 

As for my name, I’m also not ready to expose myself — at least not yet.  I haven’t figured out how my professional life and my blogging life work together.   Even though my blogging is harmless to all, and done purely for my own pleasure, my professional life is complicated and sensitive, and I’m not sure how people involved in that life will feel about it.  That’s all I can say right now.  I hope to “come out” sometime in the future, when I figure the whole thing out . . . .

Now, for the baking.  While recipes are not the main focus of this blog, I will give this one at the end, because it’s good, so scroll down if you want it. 

The Boy knows the basic rule of muffins (and a lot baking, actually).  You mix the dry ingredients and the wet ingredients separately, and then you combine them quickly without over-mixing.  Here he is mixing the dry ingredients.  I always include whole-wheat flour when I bake with the Boy, because it helps assuage my guilt that he is not a better veggie-eater.

Then the wet ingredients, which in this case include a generous amount of melted butter and plenty of vanilla extract.  The addition of lots of high-quality vanilla improves almost all baking.

Then we combine the wet and dry ingredients and add two cups of frozen wild blueberries.  We have good blueberries on the East End too but that season has not started yet and the wild blueberries from Maine are very different.  They are much smaller and have a very intense flavor.  They are really so delicious and healthy. 

Then we put them into the well-used, ugly but functional, blue silicone muffin pans.

Sorry folks.  This ain’t no Smitten Kitchen.  No food porn here.  I would do it if I could — I just don’t know how!

Pop them into the oven (Gaggenau steam-combi, sans steam.)

And voila!

The Boy’s Blueberry Muffins (adapted from Gourmet, September, 2003)

The wet ingredients:

6 tablespoons melted butter
1/3 cup milk
1 whole large egg
1 large egg yolk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

The dry ingredients:
1 cup white flour
1/2 cup whole-wheat flour
3/4 cup sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt (less if you’re using salted butter)

And finally:

2 cups blueberries (preferably Wyman’s frozen wild blueberries)

Method:

Mix together the wet ingredients.  (I find that you don’t really have to let the melted butter cool much before mixing it with the milk and eggs.)  Mix together the dry ingredients.  Combine briefly just until the dry ingredients are incorporated.  Fold in the blueberries.

Spoon into muffin pans to make twelve regular-sized muffins.  Bake about 25 minutes at 375 degrees.

Salad for tea

My husband grew up in Ireland and he has mixed feelings about the food he ate growing up.  The main meal was “dinner,” which was eaten in the middle of the day, and was usually a piece of overcooked meat with criminally overcooked vegetables and the ubiquitous (but justly beloved) spuds.  His worst horror stories concern something called “celery in cream sauce.”  I myself once experienced this dish.   It consists of huge, stringy pieces of boiled celery drenched in a white sauce (probably from a packet), which curdles with the fluids leaching out of the boiled celery.   While I enjoy almost all foods (with the exception of beef liver and uni), I understand how celery in cream sauce could be traumatic. 

He does speak with great fondness, however, of “tea,” the lighter evening meal served with — you guessed it — tea as the accompanying beverage.  This would sometimes be sandwiches made with “doorstops” of fresh bread and “lashings” of butter, sometimes a “mixed grill” of sausages and eggs, or sometimes — in the summertime — a salad.   Their salad would contain soft butter lettuce, beets, boiled eggs, and leftover meat or “tinned” (canned) salmon.  It would be drizzled with “salad cream” — a bottled salad dressing that is essentially a looser, sharper, more vinegary mayonnaise.

I’ve tried to use my husband’s descriptions of his tea-time salads as an inspiration for informal composed salads, which we both love.  Canned salmon, very popular in Ireland, is an under-appreciated pantry item in the U.S.  The salmon that they can is wild salmon, and the canning process softens the bones so that you can eat them, making it an excellent source of calcium as well as the famed omega-3 fatty acids. 

This evening, he wanted salmon, but I felt like eating my leftover steak from Bobby Van’s.  So I made two different variations of the salad.  My ingredients included some delicious Country Hen eggs (from Sang Lee’s farmstand), boiled that morning, Catapano goat cheese, Sang Lee mesclun (from my CSA), North Fork greenhouse tomatoes (from Sang Lee’s farmstand), red scallions (from my CSA), and my own marinated local beets.

I tossed the mesclun together with the scallions, tomatoes, some goat cheese and mint, and dressed it with oil, vinegar, fleur de sel, and pepper.

Then I plated it all up.

And served it.

The perfect summer weeknight dinner.

I don’t think I would ever have made a lovely composed salad like this if my husband hadn’t inspired me with his descriptions of his childhood salad teas.  How has your cooking been changed by the people you cook for?

Party shopping on the North Fork: Better than Mrs. Dalloway

We have a barbecue party every year in early June to celebrate my husband’s birthday.  It is such a beautiful time of year out here.  The weather is usually great, but I do remember one year when it was in the 50s, and another year when it was in the 90s.  This year they were predicting thunderstorms and there was even a tornado warning, but they spared us and the spectacular weather we have been having this season held out all afternoon.

One of the many great pleasures of my life is driving out Sound Avenue (the northerly of the North Fork’s two main arteries) with party planning in my head.  It takes me past Briermere, past horse farms, vineyards and innumerable planted fields with avenues of sight down their crop rows opening up for a split-second as I drive by. 

I love to cook for parties but I’m careful not to overdo it.  It’s no fun to be so exhausted and stressed from cooking and preparations that you can’t enjoy talking with your guests.  Believe me, I’ve been “in the weeds” (as they say in the restaurant biz) at many of my own parties.  This time I managed to stay out of the weeds by planning a menu that combined a few homemade items with some prepared foods from local institutions.

My first stop was Sang Lee.  We’ve been devouring every bit of our CSA items (mainly in the form of salads, salads, salads), but for a party I needed extra provisions. 

I picked up some exquisite little baby squash to grill along with several bunches of asparagus.  Perfect multicolor carrots, sugar-snap peas and cucumbers to serve as crudites with dips.  Two bunches of beets to steam-roast and marinate, and local Catapano Farm goat cheese to top them.  Also three 8-ounce bags of their pre-washed baby spinach with a bottle of Sang Lee’s own Asian Dressing to make a quick, easy salad.  (Pretty much the only time I allow myself to use a bottled dressing is Sang Lee’s Asian Dressing, which everybody loves, for a party when I don’t want to take the time to dress it my usual way.)

My next stop was for vino.

There are so many wonderful vineyards on the North Fork, we are literally spoiled for choice.  I swung into Lieb on my way back west and picked up a mixed case of Bridge Lane chardonnay (unoaked), Pinot Blanc (a Lieb specialty and a personal favorite grape) and Cabernet Franc (my favorite of the local red wine varietals).

In the old days, before I had my son, I was deeply into wine and bought all kinds of local vintages to age in my basement.  I don’t do that any more.  But for a party featuring local foods, it only makes sense to serve local wines.

For hors d’oeuvres, I made beets with goat cheese (marinated beets with a dollop of goat cheese and a sprinkling of fleur de sel.  This was the opening spread.

The beet hors d’oeuvres were a big hit, as always. 

Here are the veggies before they went onto the grill:

The rest of the menu included barbecued spare ribs (homemade, yummy), Sang Lee spinach salad with their Asian Dressing, and, from another North Fork institution — the Modern Snack Bar, in Aquebogue — delicious potato salad, cole slaw and fried chicken. 

As my cousin once remarked:  “any place with ‘modern’ in the title is certain not to be.”   So it is with the Modern Snack Bar:  it has not changed since 1960 at the latest, thank god.  It still has the same businesslike waitresses in uniform dresses and a classic, limited, home-cooked menu that is totally unaffected by any food trend of the last fifty years.  In fact, while a large part of its clientele comes from the retirement home across the street, I could imagine the place becoming trendy these days simply by virtue of its immunity to trends.

Dessert was two fresh strawberry-cream pies from Briermere.  They were devoured before I could snap any pictures, but I can describe this pie for you:   a sweet, flaky crust, piled with not-too-sweet mixture of whipped cream cheese and whipped heavy cream, and on top, a huge pile of fresh strawberries and a light glaze.  Some of our repeat guests at this barbecue dream about this pie all year (myself included).  It’s only available for a few weeks, when strawberries are in season, and it’s a perfect way to celebrate a birthday at the beginning of summer.

Drinking vicariously

My favorite book about food is The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway.  Of course, that book is about a lot of things — the lost generation, the impact of war, bullfighting, impotence — but most importantly, to me, it’s about the experience of an American eating and drinking in Europe. 

Jake Barnes is the type of narrator I like.  He doesn’t tell you much about what he’s thinking, and he never judges anyone.  But he does give you all the facts so you can draw your own conclusions.  He tells you how much money is in his bank account, everything that everybody says, no matter how drunk and obnoxious they get, and everything he eats and drinks.

The book proceeds in phases which to me feel a lot like the courses of a meal, as Jake and his coterie of expatriate Americans and low-level English nobility make their way around Europe, partying.  They start with a strong apperitif in Paris, proceed on to a bracing fishing trip on the Irati River in the Basque country of Spain (oysters?  ceviche?), then down to Pamplona for the bullfights (the pièce de résistance), then briefly to Biarritz for a bracing Atlantic swim (coffee) and, finally, a bittersweet reunion in Madrid with his brilliant, classy, uninhibited leading lady Brett Ashley (petit fours).

This being Hemingway, there’s minimal description of the food and drink, but he makes every word count.  When he and his fishing buddy, Bill, leave two bottles of wine in a cold spring in the hills near the Iraty River and retrieve it at lunchtime, Bill takes a swig and says:  “Whew!  That makes my eyes ache!”

The greatest meal comes at the end of the book, in Madrid, at a restaurant that apparently still exists:

“We lunched up-stairs at Botin’s.  It is one of the best restaurants in the world.  We had roast young suckling pig and drank rioja alta.  Brett did not eat much.  She never ate much.  I ate a very big meal and drank three bottles of rioja alta.”

Yes, you read right.  Three bottles of wine at lunch.  For one person.  Ok, perhaps the rioja alta was fairly low in alcohol (maybe), but he also had two martinis at the bar before lunch!  Is that even physically possible?  How much does he weigh?  How can he stand up and go about his business? 

I love to read about people drinking in books, because it feels like getting  drunk vicariously, without the hangover or liver damage.  One of my favorite characters for drinking vicariously is Tom Ripley, the sociopathic anti-hero of the Patricia Highsmith series (another American eating and drinking his way through Europe).  But Jake Barnes’s three bottles of wine strain even my imagination. 

On a recent visit to Key West, Florida, I picked up a Hemingway novel written there much later in his career:  To Have and Have Not.  It’s crap!  (The movie version, by Howard Hawks with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, is very loosely based on the novel, and is excellent.) 

John Irving, in a Paris Review interview, opined that Hemingway and Fitzgerald got worse as writers as they aged, rather than better (as they should have), because their excessive drinking took a toll on their synapses.  Comparing The Sun Also Rises to To Have and Have Not, I think Irving may have a point.  What do you think?