“Reach out your arms, as far apart as possible – one high, one low – then just bend your wrist, but do not look!”, instructed the waitress. “Oh, and beginners like you must stand over the barrel,” she added. I followed her advice exactly but still ended up with a soggy shirt-front and damp shoes, wasting half a bottle.

Even though the cider was cheap, learning to pour it like a local wouldn’t be and accepting I could be thirsty for a long while before I acquired the knack, I invited my hostess to demonstrate proper form. Sure enough, her aim was perfect and my glass was soon two inches deep without the loss of a drop. “Now, drink it! Fast!” she cajoled. “Before it goes flat!”

I hadn’t counted on necking shots of cider at lunchtime, and wondered if I was playing the straight guy in a game of haze the foreigner, but as foamy, appley goodness cascaded down my gullet it started to make sense. Then, after taking my order for broiled razor clams and hake in cider, the waitress turned on her heel for the kitchen, leaving my glass empty. Now eager to drink some more, but reluctant to soak myself further, I reached for the bottle. “No lo mueva!” warned a finger-wagging old guy to my left. “She will pour for you when she returns. And, you should leave a drop in the bottom of the glass. It’s good luck.”

Thanking him for his advice, I sat back and looked around the white-washed room from my seat against the wall. Cut-off barrels half-filled with sawdust littered the blue-tiled floor between tables, along with the usual jumble of crumpled napkins, discarded toothpicks and cigarette ends. Through the open window, small gaily-painted fishing boats bobbed up and down, and their creak and bump as they nagged at their moorings offered a pleasant counterpoint to the hoarse cries of seabirds.

Luarca, on the Asturian coast of northern Spain is still a working port and, the tasca where I sat, the place to enjoy the morning’s catch. From the ruddy faces surrounding me, it was entirely possible that my hake had been landed earlier in the day by a fellow diner. The globe is so well traveled these days that it’s virtually impossible to find anywhere you’re the only foreigner, but in this place, during the off-season, I had managed it. In fact, I was the only guest at the only open hotel in town. An anomaly I was quick to appreciate, because it allowed me to slip into the natural rhythms of local life and prompted me to assume the most humble status, that of being nobody at all. Sure, it removed me from many things, but there’s an advantage to that when all you want to absorb is atmosphere – the feeling that five hundred years could pass in this place and the faces wouldn’t change. What Cees Nooteboom described as “the feeling that everything except time has stopped.“

My razor clams arrived, redolent of garlic and spicy with piperade, followed by tender hake with softened apples, their acidity perfectly balancing the sweetness of the reduced cider sauce. A side of fried potatoes appeared as another two inches of cider found its way neatly into my glass. Lazily enjoying it, happy and relaxed, I barely noticed when it was all gone and the waitress returned. “Postre?” she asked. “Hay queso de cabrales, flan, y frutas frescas, o si usted prefiere, un poco de cada uno.” I opted greedily for the latter, along with a nip of orujo, she returned quickly with a little of each – blue cheese, stick to your teeth caramel pudding, and a pear. “Ningunas manzanas?” I smiled. “Haven’t you had enough apples yet?” she joked back.

Chicken in cider is not necessarily a traditional Asturian preparation, though it might as well be, so while this dish is modeled on the hake in cider I had that day, it is cooked for much longer. Asturian cider is produced from small, tart crabapple type fruit that are no good for eating, the juice of which is fermented for up to six months in oak barrels. It typically registers only 5% alcohol, compared to the seven or eight degrees common in French and English ciders and is rarely carbonated, hence the habit of pouring from a great height to aerate, followed by swift consumption before the froth disappears. Spanish ciders can be found in the US, but domestic varieties like Woodchuck are perfectly acceptable for cooking with. The chanterelles were added to balance out the sweetness of the sauce with an earthy, autumnal boskiness and some slices of eating apple dropped in with five minutes to go offered some crunch and acid to what is a very satisfying dish.

It rarely gives me any satisfaction to work so close to Penn Station, especially in the summer when the areas less salubrious residents are at their most pungent, and, dare I say, because of the heat, most crazed. It is at this time of year that the legion of stupefied zombies, fiending smackheads and other unfortunates, leaning precariously outwards from urine-stained walls or slumped droolingly over mailboxes as they await the opening of the methadone clinic, seem to be at their most numerous, and the sight of two filthy, toothless skags scrapping over a trodden cigarette-butt is as common as blue sky days in the desert. However, contrary to conventional New York wisdom, even in this charming setting good food can be found. In fact, this part of the city – at the southern end of the area traditionally known as Hell’s Kitchen – is rather better than the several blocks further east, where it is just as ugly and congested, but, most importantly, where there is a dearth of reasonable lunch spots.

Like another of my favorite communities, Carroll Gardens, the block of Ninth Ave between 36th and 37th streets is an old Italian-American neighborhood and features two special New York institutions – Manganaro Grosseria and Esposito Pork Shop. The former is my preferred lunch spot – where courtesy of the owner and in keeping the general spirit of the area, you get a fascinating window into an unbalanced (but, in this case, non-threatening) mind, and a touch of crazy with your giant sandwich – the latter is one of the finest butcher’s shops in the five boroughs, and it was here that I recently stopped to score a handful of duck legs, 2lbs of ground veal and a pair of porterhouses that must have been cut from a hippo.

The veal went into a Torinese sugo that we’ll post when it gets cool enough to eat that kind of food without engaging cooling systems, the steaks await the celebration of our son’s baptism this weekend, and the duck legs were simply sprinkled with salt, pepper and ground coriander and roasted in a hot oven for an hour. Served with a potato-celeriac mash and some shitake mushrooms in a butter-moscato sauce, this wasn’t exactly a light, seasonal meal either, but given the urban assault-course I endure everyday just to put a roof over our heads, it provided a calming and centering sensation, not unlike, so I am led to believe, the effects of a certain heroine-substitute.

Classic French cooking doesn’t get much more classic than chicken in tarragon cream sauce. This bistro menu stalwart has all the unctious elements you instinctively associate with Gallic gastronomy: butter, cream, wine and mild herbs. Likely originating in that blessed triangle just north of Lyon where the famous blue-footed chickens of Bresse neighbor the Cotes de Beaune wine region and abut the renowned mustard-producing region of Dijon, this dish can also be given a Norman twist simply by substituting the white wine for a dry cider.

Loosely based on a recipe I read here, but one that I’ve made countless times, we enjoyed this one with our friends Matt and Joanna this past weekend. There’s something about French classics that almost guarantees happiness among your dinner party guests. It’s as if the way we live today and nervousness about cream and butter rules out eating this kind of food in the home, but that when they do appear together some kind of Pavlovian, slightly hysterical, response is provoked that results in over-indulgence and an ability to somehow accommodate a four-course meal, including cheese, multiple bottles of wine, and after dinner drinks.

Happily, this dish is so easy to prepare and faultlessly scalable to the number you’re catering for that it’s as perfect for a dinner party as it is for a casual weeknight meal when you’re feeling in need of a little self-soothing. You can make it ahead and warm it for service or make it while your guests swarm around you in the kitchen soaking up the hum of the garlic. Serve with roasted, mashed or boiled potatoes, or just with a crusty baguette to wipe your plates of all the creamy, buttery goodness.

There’s a show on public television here in America called “Moment of Luxury” in which the host very generously enjoys all manner of fine things on our behalf and then shares his collected pensees about the experience. Traveling around the food blogosphere lately has felt like a surprisingly similar experience for us since our three month old prevents us from experiencing any luxury ourselves.

Tough titty, I hear you cry. Fair enough, we have lived rather high on the hog these last several years and have been blessed with several unforgettable moments of luxury along the way, but like the princess and the pea, we are finding our current rather straightened circumstances somewhat uncomfortable.

Turning over a new (year’s) leaf, determined to gripe no longer and return to being active participants in our (gastronomic) lives, we had a deuce of a time this past weekend putting together some foie gras and wild mushroom ravioli, in the hope we would be able to enjoy at least one or two moments of luxury. Inspired by ZenChef’s oxtail and foie gras ravioli and our experience eating escargot-stuffed ravioli in France (both) around this time last year (when we bought the can of foie gras we used), we took a brief flight of fancy in the accompanying sauce, combining porcini stock, balsamic vinegar and red currants into a sort of impromptu agrodolce. Some dry roasted wild mushrooms completed this, quite frankly, sublime dish.

Savoring these rich and blissful parcels certainly felt like a moment of luxury. Indeed, when we were roused moments later from this temporary reverie by infantile caterwails echoing from the nursery, these few seconds of pleasure were all the more significant providing much-needed encouragement for us to gird our loins once more for our nightly skirmishes with our darling offspring.

There’s an awful conceit abroad the interwebs these days that seems to be encouraging more people than it should to title themselves “freelance food writers”. Perhaps you’ve seen it in the “About” section of a variety of the blogs you frequent? Coincidentally, there is an expression, “facebook hot”, in use among the youth (I know this because I snuck a peak into my sister-in-law’s Cosmopolitan the other day) to describe someone whose picture they have seen on said social networking site but found to be disappointing in the flesh. I flag both these things in order to highlight the little-known fact that the internet is full of charlatans, liars, and duplicity.

However, while it might be pretty straightforward to make oneself look good in a photo, masquerading as an accomplished writer is rather more of a feat. It strikes me that in order to be a food writer, the first pre-requisite is an ability to write well, not, as is apparently the common misapprehension, an interest or knowledge of food. Secondly, in order to be a freelance writer one must earn at least some portion of one’s living from writing, and, therefore, have a track record of getting published by others, instead of just self-publishing. Without both of these (and the former must come ahead of the latter), one is simply a blogger or hobbyist. [It's important to note that there is absolutely nothing wrong with being a hobbyist blogger. We are definitely and contentedly hobbyists, deriving a good deal more expendable income from fluff-encrusted nickels and dimes found down the back of our couch than from our blog.] The point is that, even though most of us would love to get paid for doing stuff we do during our spare time, just because I might know how to use a lawn-mower and an edge-trimmer, exercising this knowledge in my back yard does not make me a “freelance landscaper”.

Those of you familiar with our body of work on this blog may recall previous references to Jim Harrison. Author of such novellas and books as Legends of the Fall, Sun Dog, and Dalva, Harrison has been compared in style and sensibility to such greats as Hemingway and Faulkner. In spite of these comparisons and the adaption of his work into high profile movies, like most successful writers he is modest about his work, and declares, in his often-hilarious collection of essays about food, The Raw & The Cooked, that, apart from his daughter, the only thing he has created that he is truly proud of is an annual spring-time dish of roasted quails stuffed with foie gras and leeks. Immediately, he avers that this does not make him a recipe writer, let alone a cookbook author.

If such an abundantly talented man can be so modest, might not we all be able to learn something from him about humility? We are all prone to attacks of hubris (take this early example of such from yours truly), and there are no real consequences other than self-delusion, but there is something rather saddening about declaring yourself a “food writer” on your blog and then immediately failing to demonstrate any of the requisite literary abilities in inept ramblings. Just because he was told he could be whatever he wanted, Jim Harrison didn’t automatically become 135lbs – except in his mind, and there are many things in our all minds best kept to ourselves.

It might be generational, or, perhaps, philosophical, but there are, on the one hand, those who enjoy and appreciate handmade things, and the art and craft they require to make, and, on the other, those who prefer their things machine-made, reliable, and standard. The ‘things’ here could be quite literally anything. My father, who, to me, is the quintessential scientist and pragmatist, believes that most, if not all, advances for the betterment of mankind have come as a result of the increased use and application of machines, technology and science. In fact, he would argue, I’m sure, that this blog is evidence of the fact that even something as Luddite as cooking can be improved through the application of technology, though regular readers – with good reason – may not agree.

My mother was cut from very different cloth however, and, though a nurse who believed sincerely in the power of modern medicine, sanitation and inoculation, she was a true amateuse of a hand-turned chair-leg, a cut-glass goblet, and, much to the detriment of my appearance during my tender years, a hand-knitted sweater.  She was also a great lover of gardening, baking bread and, despite the fact that it rarely worked, yogurt-making. I think it’s from her that I get most of my culinary instincts, as the very notion of spending three or four hours in the kitchen doing anything would horrify my dad.

Pasta-rollers, like all machines, were invented for three main reasons: (1) to produce more quickly what used to take a long time (2) as a uniform-quality product, and (3) so that the resulting free time could be spent either more enjoyably or industriously. The assumption behind it seems to be that it makes it easier to make something that is typically quite tricky, and that the making of it by hand was a laborious pain in the ass. Those who have used a pasta roller, whether the hand-crank variety or the KitchenAid attachment, know, as we do, that it is a fabulous invention and enables even the busiest gastronome to home-make great fresh pasta in a relatively short time. They might also have found that it is actually fun to use because it combines the joy of mixing a dough by hand with the ease and convenience of not having to roll it out and cut it yourself.

Taking this notion of fun to its logical extreme this past weekend, I decided to devote my entire Sunday to doing the whole thing – the mixing, the rolling and the cutting – by hand. In spite of the recipe book’s warning that it was a painstaking exercise, I had little idea of what I was getting into. I now have a profound appreciation both for labor-saving machines, and the unique taste, texture and satisfaction derived from hand-rolled pasta.

But it is more than that. I learned something about myself on Sunday. In some ways, it was a revelation. I had always thought that I appreciated handmade things, particularly food and wine, with the all patience, care and skills that their creation implies, but I had never actually tested myself to see if I could enjoy hand-making something that required real patience and physical effort.  And, while there certainly were moments in which I did not enjoy being patient or the physical effort, on the whole, I really did find the process to be incredibly rewarding – relaxing almost. Not only did I (eventually, and with several abortive attempts) make some absolutely first-class pasta, but I learned a new technique and was, in the end, able to enjoy the fruits of my labor in a way I never have before.

Pici Keen

Famous for the lavish displays of wealth and the beautiful arts of the Renaissance found in Florence, Siena, Lucca and Pisa, Tuscans are, by contrast, rather austere in their culinary inclinations with their love of simple grilled meats, stewed beans and saltless bread. Such austerity requires the freshest and best ingredients in order to be delicious, and, fortuitously, Tuscany offers these up in great bounty. Similarly, it often requires great effort and technique.

So it is with Pici (also known as pinci — hand-rolled, eggless Tuscan thick spaghetti — perhaps the best example of this cucina povera (poor man’s cuisine) — utilizing only 00 flour, water, green Tuscan olive oil and a lot of time and effort. Indeed, it is my belief that what the poor, historically, lacked in wealth they more than make up for in patience, and disposable time. Originating from the Val d’Orcia region (the area between Montalcino and Montepulciano), pici are usually eaten with a rich meat sauce, often containing porcini mushrooms, but any hearty meat or game ragu would be a good choice.

The duck ragu recipe below is typical of the region of Arezzo which is the area where we got married in June 2007, and making it engendered all those kinds of warm feelings one gets from a house filled with delicious smells and the wonderful memories of the time of our lives.

Learning a new skill, and in this case, a new recipe, is a matter of managing to overcome self-doubt. Before you attempt making pici, I would highly recommend you try making a regular long pasta with an egg dough, so that you understand how it should feel and look. It will also allow you to develop a sense about the right elasticity of a good dough which will be useful even though Pici dough is a very different creature altogether.

If you follow the exact instructions below, you’ll probably find that your dough feels too dry and too heavy. Do not be afraid to add more water and more oil as you see fit because eggless doughs can easily become brittle when allowed to be too dry. However, do not abandon hope. I urge you to stick with the basis of the recipe (allowing for various seasonal, regional, altitudinal and indoor-outdoor climactic conditions) and overcome your fears of impending culinary disaster, as they will not materialize. If it feels too dry, add more water. Too wet, add flour until it feels right. One word of caution, though: be sparing in any additions of liquid or lipids because at the hand-rolling stage you will be adding extra olive oil to reduce friction and facilitate the rolling process, and you don’t want to find at that stage that you have to start all over again.

Also, do give yourself plenty of time. An otherwise lazy Sunday afternoon is perfect for this, as not only does the pasta make a perfect Sunday night dinner, but, more importantly, it gives you time to rest as you go along. Making enough pici for four people can be a tiring business, even if there are two of you on the job. One final proviso, do not treat pici like regular fresh pasta — i.e. sprinkle it liberally with flour and allow to set-up and dry for a while prior to cooking. I refer to my earlier comments when I say that pici can dry out and become brittle very quickly, so when you make them, plan to eat them within, at most, a couple of hours. This might appear like a disadvantage but it’s not because once cooked they are probably more robust than regular pastas and even reheat remarkably well.

So, please try making this dish. The sauce is easy and indescribably good (I know everyone says that about their food, but, really, this is very special), and the pasta is a great reward for some hard graft both corporeally and in that it offers a real sense of achievement. By the time you’re done, you’ll have sore shoulders but will have mastered the rolling technique perfectly. As a result, pasta-making will have transcended the bland uniformity of the machine-age and become what all good food should be: absolutely unique and deeply personal.

New Jersey, it’s like a cross-section of the entire United States stuffed into a very small area — fenced-in by heavy industry, ugly sub-divisions, peaceful tidal bays and relaxing shore towns — but with its own very distinct character. And, if you drive around it long enough, you’re bound to see some pretty interesting stuff. This goes for the social and the edible, as well as the geographic and architectural.

For example, every spring, you’ll find aged Italian-Americans risking the wrath of New Jersey State Troopers as they harvest dandelions from the banks and verges of Jersey’s myriad highways and parkways. The first time I saw this I thought it must be part of a program to get the elderly outside and active by having them weed public areas. Then, when I’d learned what they were really doing, I marveled at the genetic lottery these robust octogenarians were winning in spite of eating greens picked from the sides of some of the most heavily trafficked roads in the country. So, even though I was apprehensive — for that reason, as well as only having ingested dandelions previously in the form of the disgusting traditional British beverage Dandelion & Burdock (something my grandparents used to trick me into drinking by telling me it was Coke. Its taste is somewhere between sarsaparilla and rust.)— I figured I should give it a go myself.

Now, I haven’t yet had the privelige of picking my own weeds for dinner as cars and trucks whizz by on the NJ Turnpike, and when I do, you can sure you’ll hear about it right here, but I have experimented with eating dandelions a couple of times. The first was an unmitigated disaster, as their unbelievable bitterness ruined an entire meal: leaching acrid chemicals into the sauce and turning my mouth so far inside-out from the first bite that I spent the rest of the evening scrubbing the insides of my cheeks almost raw with a toothbrush.

But recently, I decided that they deserved a second chance. So, arming ourselves with a little research, as well as a precautionary array of tongue scrubbing devices, we set about turning a large bunch of sandy weeds into a delicious side dish. Happily, after a sound preliminary blanching, the outcome was an enormous improvement on our first, rash experiment. And, as part of a scrumptious early fall dinner of veal chop, rich buttery rosemary-brandy cream sauce, and a frankly beautiful (if I do say so myself) roast turnip, I was delighted to concede that eating weeds can, in fact, be very enjoyable.

Of course, the world needs another basic veal chop recipe like Williamsburg, Brooklyn, needs more frickin’ hipsters, but we have been on kind of a veal chop kick since we returned from Argentina in the spring. It’s an expensive habit for sure now we’re back, but in Buenos Aires, as with all kinds of cattle products, veal is very reasonably priced and is treated with a similar degree of skill as the more famous beef.

One particular veal dish stands out. At the rather trendy-looking Grappa restaurant in the Palermo “Hollywood’ district of BA, Amy had a spectacular grilled veal chop slathered with one of the most mushroomy sauces imaginable. It was as if entire sacks of porcini mushrooms had been somehow liquefied on her plate. The menu described it simply as a chuleta de ternera con crema de hongos and our pathetic (certainly for food and menus) dictionary couldn’t tell us what hongos are.

Still, we knew that we liked them and they were delicious, not to mention that hongos is just a fun word to say, so a couple of days after eating said dish, perusing the shelves of a local almacen, we were excited to find large bags of dried Chilean hongos at rock-bottom prices. It was only after we returned to Brooklyn that we learned that hongos translates as “fungus”, but even with a couple of bags of hongos in our pantry, we’re still not exactly sure what kind of fungus we are the owners of. They look and taste very similar to porcini, so we’re assuming that they are a related species, but research into the differences between hongos and setas (wild mushrooms in Spanish) returns no categorical answer except that taxonomically, mushrooms are fungi and fungi are mushrooms. However, one almost helpful Argentine website informed us that, fungus usually refers either to inedible mushrooms, or to the large (usually subterranean) organism of which the mushroom is but the visible, and gatherable, part. To turn the example above ground, the fungus is the apple tree, the mushroom is the apple.

Anyway, though we, like the fungus, might still be in the dark about many micological issues, we can assure you that should you find hongos on the menu anywhere in the Spanish speaking world, you should eat them, especially if paired with veal and a delicious buttery sauce.

Grappa
El Salvador 5802 – Palermo Hollywood, Buenos Aires
T: 4899-2577
E: grappacantina@fibertel.com.ar
Every day 12noon to 1.30 a.m.

We’ve had such a cruddy spring here in NYC and it’s hard to believe the summer solstice is just a week and a half away. Luckily, it’s been chilly and wet during the work week and sunny and warm at the weekends. It doesn’t make you feel that much better, though. You can’t fully get into the swing of summer because the weather just isn’t matching up. It feels like early April and we’re two weeks into June. Sadness. I want to wear my freaking sandals again and eat dinner outside and not wear a COAT ANYMORE!

Venting over. The one way we’re finding we can brighten our rainy, cool day is by cooking meals like this one. Fish (and our Black Cod is sustainable… double happiness) reminds me of the beach, which reminds me of sunny days. Morels and peas remind me of spring which (usually) remind me of flowers and sunny days. Mint reminds me of my garden in the summer which, say it with me, reminds me of sunny days. It was cool enough outside to use my oven, but we could just as easily have done this on the grill. The minty pea puree was fabulous and could have been eaten with a spoon alone. We paired this dish with some sliced Yukon Gold potatoes in their skin, sprinkled with olive oil and some herbs de Provence and crispily roasted in a hot oven. While these are cooling down, you can finish your fish.

Here’s to warmer, sunnier days ahead wherever you are!

Once he’s managed to obtain said lucre though, Mayle is remarkably restrained in his descriptions of how best to prepare them. Of course, he says, you can stuff a pigeon with them, or combine them with cream and mushrooms as a sauce over beef or veal medallions, but the way to enjoy them at their best, most pungent, earthy and flavorful, is to do as little to them as possible. His preferred recipe is to grate a generous amount of black truffle into and over a simple, loose, French-style omelette, and enjoy with a glass of champagne, for breakfast.

Well, since our good friend Nuria at Spanish Recipes challenged us to submit our favorite omelette recipe to her Blog Your Omelet contest, we felt that we had to produce something pretty grand if we were to compete with her amazing range of eggy treats. So, here it is, both simple and sophisticated at the same time, not to mention being about the best breakfast imaginable, especially with the champagne!

The key to a good omelet, the great Jacques Pepin reminds us, is to keep it a bit “wet” or “loose” by not overcooking it (which Americans seem to hate, for some reason) and to never complicate the flavor of what should be the star of the show – the egg.  Americans know how to do this best – kind of similar to how we can complicate the simplicity of a pizza by weighing it down with a million toppings.  Look at the average diner omelet in America – it’s often stuffed with a lot of veggies and/or meat and oozing with cheese – perhaps the only way of saving the old diet “egg white omelet” from being boring and tasteless, however.

Regardless of how you usually make your omelet, and whether or not you have truffles, we urge you to try a simple and loose one next time. For ours we simply added butter to the warm pan and poured in our whisked egg and dash of cream, salt and pepper mixture.  Stir or whisk the egg while it’s cooking in the warm pan until it begins to come together. Then, stop stirring and let it sit and cook. When it looks mostly cooked but still nicely moist and with a bit of looseness on the top layer, you’re done. (Remember, eggs continue to cook in their own heat, so you can undercook it and it should still be good within a minute or so.)  If you so choose to, add some chopped chives and sliced mushrooms sauteed in some truffle oil (if you’ve got it) to the middle and then slice some black truffle (again, if you’ve got it) on top. No ketchup or hot sauce necessary, we promise.