Quarantine Kitchen: Simple Things Most Important

That's what we had for supper tonight, a simple, one-bowl meal of ramen topped with chicken slow-cooked in soy sauce and a few simple vegetables -- sweet potato, broccoli rabe, and garlic. The garlic went into the pan with the chicken, in a light splash of olive oil, before soy sauce or anything else. Garlic cloves cooked in their papery skins and only squeezed out of their coats when the meal was served. Easy and completely satisfying. I have become an unapologetic evangelist for garlic, especially roasted in its skin, either in a pan or in the oven. Just thinking of roasted garlic by itself, smeared on a slice of homemade bread, makes my mouth water. Try it!

Sunday's supper took more preparation, but some of the ingredients had been served up once already. The rice, for example, I'd cooked a couple of nights before, along with cubed beef, onions, and mushrooms in sour cream. So when a neighbor delivered tortillas and beans and uttered the magic words "bean burritos," I was ready to set up an assembly line. First rice in the middle of each tortilla, then beans (to which I'd added cumin and chili powder and my cooked beef cube mixture), then cheese. 

Next I wrapped the tortillas around the filling and arranged them in a re-usable and already much-used foil oven baking container, anointed them with salsa, and added more cheese on top. I was generous with the cheese. Dollops of sour cream I added only when about ten minutes of oven time remained.

And then, did I photograph the burritos as they came out of the oven? Or even as they were served on plates? I did not! I was too hungry to think of reaching for a camera, but here is the last one in the pan before attacked by a fork. It may not look like much, but I assure you it was delicious.

I believe two simple things made these burritos the best I've ever made, and both came from the neighbor. Beans. Tortillas. The beans were pinto beans, which we have come to love so much here in the Southwest that I don't think I'll ever go back to kidney beans again. Chili with rich, creamy pinto beans? You haven't had chili until you've tried it that way. And then, the tortillas. Back in Michigan, I only buy tortillas at NJ's Grocery in Lake Leelanau. The tortillas the neighbor brought us came from South Tucson, and taking them out of the package, I could tell immediately that they were superior to anything I'd found at Safeway. They looked and felt different -- thin and delicate, not at all rubbery (which is not a good feel for a tortilla).

Of Loaves and Fishes

It was Sunday, December 6.

Sunday again. Bread day. I decided on a light rye, more unbleached white flour than rye but a full three cups of rye and then molasses in place of sugar for an extra kick. But you’ve seen my bread before, and I had posted to this blog only Sunday morning, so I wasn’t feeling pressed to put anything new together right away. Instead, resting on my (scanty) laurels seemed in order.

Moving as usual between one kitchen project and another, however, I could not resist photographing the beautiful lake trout my friend Susan had urged upon me. She had more than enough, she said, and needed space in her freezer for other things. 

Look at this fish! Would you have to be asked twice to accept it? And then, of course, I realized that I had, coincidentally on the first evening of Hannukah, a very Biblical kitchen conjunction of foodstuffs, loaves and fishes. The beginning of the holiday and the unplanned Biblical theme in my kitchen sent me to the shelves to pull out a book.

How do you use cookbooks (if at all)? I have some that are my everyday, pedestrian, basic, go-to reference works, such as Cooking for American Homemakers, first published by the Culinary Arts Institute in 1950; The Joy of Cooking; and the Fannie Farmer Cookbook. 

And then I have my Paris kitchen daydreaming-and-looking-for-inspiration cookbooks. The Frugal Gourmet on Our Immigrant Ancestors, by Jeff Smith, is one of my favorites in the latter category, the best American cookbook I know for Ethiopian recipes, as well as other surprising national, regional, and ethnic dishes from around the world, along with (gift from friends) The Philosopher’s Kitchen: Recipes from Ancient Greece and Rome for the Modern Cook, by Francine Segan. Yet another is The Complete Guide to Traditional Jewish Cooking, by Marlena Spieler, with recipes from practically every country in the world where Jews have ever lived. Spieler begins the section on bread with these introductory sentences:

At the Jewish table, a meal begins with a blessing over the bread. Bread is one of the most basic foods in the Jewish diet.

Oh, the beautiful breads! How long has it been since I made bagels? And here are recipes for kesra from Morocco, Middle Eastern lavash, pitas and flat breads, Russian potato bread, and Moroccan seed bread. Stollen – that I have made but not for many, many years. Ditto for breadsticks. A world of bread is reaching its arms toward me yearningly! -- No, no! Another time! Tonight only rye bread is on my agenda!

Meanwhile, I decide to improvise with the lake trout in an attempt to please both David and myself. To please myself, I will bake it in the oven, and for him I will devise a light breading involving Parmesan cheese, first dredging the trout in beaten egg, then coating with a mixture of flour, cornmeal and Parmesan. David thinks everything is improved by the addition of Parmesan cheese; to him, its place on the table is as basic as the presence of salt.

Bread dough rising, lake trout popped into the oven, it’s time to saute up some diced onions and mushrooms in butter and olive oil to serve as garnish for the main dish. (Capers and shallots would be good, but those got used up at Thanksgiving and are not yet replaced.) A few tossed greens on the dinner plates for salad. As to a side dish, there’s no space or time (see previous post addressing constraints) to do anything else on the stove or in the oven, so acorn squash, halved and dotted with butter and brown sugar, goes into the microwave. Was it enough? More than.

Although a Pisces, David does not carefully distinguish, as would a Frenchman, among a wide variety of fresh- and saltwater fish. They are all “fish” to him and not usually his first choice if there’s “meat” instead. But this lake trout? Caught in our own Lake Michigan and prepared, if I do say so, to perfection? Well, it raised the bar when David pronounced it “the best fish I ever ate.”

If the rye bread has half as enthusiastic a reception, I thought as I watched the clock and kept my nose tuned to aromas from the oven, it will have been a very satisfying and productive day in the kitchen.

Good bread should have a fairly crisp crust and a soft interior, generally with irregular, slightly glazed holes. Almost no bread should be served hot, and rye bread – the loaf – is best when slightly stale. ... Cool, sweet butter is the best accompaniment. – James and Kay Salter, Life Is Meals: A Food Lover’s Book of Days

Postscript: The bread surpassed my hopes and was everything I dreamed it would be. That doesn't always happen, but it's awfully satisfying when it does.

Not-French Bread, Confiture de Maison, & Good Old American Meat Loaf

Many home cooks with kitchens in Paris, France, have to deal with time constraints, along with limited space in which to work. The same is true for me in my little Paris kitchen in Leelanau County, Michigan. If I were a bookseller in the French capital, I might live above or behind my shop, but as it is, my bookshop is in the village, so I go to work “off the farm” most days.

The economic base of our township is mixed, agriculture and tourism. I try to cater to farmers and other local readers, as well as out-of-town visitors, but there is no denying that summer tourism is what makes my business survival possible at all. Summer means being open seven days a week. Hence the neglect of what I used to be able to call – when I was younger and my energy went further -- my gardens.

But when cold weather comes (not that it’s been very cold yet this year, but that’s another story) shopkeepers get to slow down. My bookshop is now closed Sundays and Mondays, and after January first I’ll start taking Tuesdays off, too. More time for writing, which is important to me. More time outdoors with Sarah! More time goofing off with David! And – more time in the kitchen!

Already Sunday is my designated bread-baking day. 

Each week I bake two loaves, using the slow, old-fashioned method (no bread machine, no food processor), and enjoy each step, from dissolving the yeast in warm water to mixing to kneading to pulling the beautiful loaves from the oven. And while the dough is rising, there's time to make, for instance, applesauce. 

Two loaves last us all week, and then some. The end of a loaf of white bread went into stuffing for our Thanksgiving bird, and leftovers from that bird made delicious sandwiches on the following Sunday’s oatmeal molasses bread. The heel of a loaf from Week #3 went into the meat loaf I’ll get to in a minute.

But what a special treat! This week I had a day off on Friday! Bruce came in to mind the store for me, and I finally had a chance to make jam from fruit picked many weeks ago. I’d picked strawberries first, then black raspberries, and finally, in September, blackberries, all of it going into the freezer whole. 

When the last of the bramble fruit season was past, I cooked raspberries and blackberries down and strained the juice, which then went back in the freezer, adding the mashed strawberries only on jam-making day.

While the jam was working itself up to a boil, there was time to cube homemade bread for meat loaf. I did not dice the onion, however, until the jam was cooling in its jars, for fear of contaminating my sweet fruit project with onion odor.

Et la voilà! Jam in jars! Confiture en boîte! Now back to the dinner meat loaf, which as you can see is not a classic pounti from the Auvergne, that delicious loaf containing Swiss chard and prunes, but the simple American throw-together loaf I learned at my mother’s knee: ground chuck, ground pork, bread cubes, rolled oats, diced onions, eggs, Worcestershire sauce, and, yes, catsup. I divided the mixture in two – one loaf for the oven, the other for the freezer.

What’s left of the cooked bramble fruits, beyond what was needed for one jam recipe, will go for berry syrup, but -- another day’s project, that.

The meat loaf was delicious. Perfect! Comforting to think there’s that second loaf in the freezer for dinner on another, busier day. And this Sunday’s bread project will be light rye, but I probably won’t photograph it. Because there’s a post I’ve been wanting to write for this blog almost since I first began it, and that is about the very first kitchen I came to know in Paris, France.

Alors, à bientôt, mes amis – et bon appetit!