I’ve been baking a bunch recently, which is something I did way more when I was a teenager, but for which I still have a very big soft spot in my heart. I am easily intimidated by the type of person who is very serious about baking and who bakes delicious and technically perfect things all the time. Actually I am easily intimidated by anyone whose anything is technically perfect. I think I stopped baking for a while because I felt that I wasn’t doing a very good job, or because I needed to follow recipes more closely, which isn’t interesting to me. And of course baking is more science than anything, and sticking to the recipe is a necessity. So maybe I just got bored. I also have noticed that my sweet tooth is definitely not as hyperactive as it once was, and that I’d much rather make and eat savory treats than sweet ones.
All of that said, I have been baking more than usual recently, and these are photos of a recent diversion in banana muffins. The final product included walnuts and chocolate chips. I used a Martha Stewart recipe because it was the first one to come up on a google search for Banana Cupcakes. These were not cupcakes, but they were buttery and sugary enough to pretend. I normally would steer clear of a Martha Stewart-directed activity, and this experience did not change my mind. Instead of creaming the butter and sugar together, she has you melt the butter and treat it as a wet ingredient, which is a technique I feel scandalized by but am too lazy to scorn.
In the end, they were good, and they finished off those browning bananas that had been sitting in the fruit bowl for a tad too long. In that, they accomplished the goals I set out to complete. But the next time I find myself in a baking mood, I will try and find a more inventive thing to do.
BLÅ DÖRREN (Södermalmstorg 6, Stockholm)
When I was 19, I spent three weeks in Stockholm working on a research project with my brother-in-law. One afternoon, faced with a couple of hours of rare downtime, I took Benny’s advice and had lunch at Prinsen, a famous Stockholm landmark. He recommended the Wallenburgare, which is what I ordered, along with a small glass of wine. I think that was the first (or, at least, the dearest) meal I’d taken, and paid for, by myself. It felt truly adult, to be savoring the food, and partaking of something to traditional and celebrated. It’s not often, living in a country so young and of such mixed origin, that I get the chance to experience meals so much a part of a cultural fabric.
So when Benny suggested that we go out to eat at Blå Dörren on a hot evening last summer, I gladly agreed that that was where we should go. He’s the Stockholm native, after all, and I know enough to know that his recommendations are always top-notch.
Blå Dörren’s food is classic Swedish- hearty meat and potatoes in various incarnations, gravad lax, and herring, cod and pike make up the heart of a menu that is rounded out by the inclusion of some robust salads and hardy starters.
The food is not light, nor is it subtle or understated. But why should it be? This is life-sustaining fare, made for the duplicitous extremity of Swedish sunlessness and everlasting daylight. And it’s made from substantial ingredients-the humble meatball here is made of Moose. The pepper on my pepper steak held its own under the velvety red wine sauce, and the spinach and greenbeans accompanying it were cooked to their greenest: perfection.
The selection of beers on tap here is great; try the Nils Oskar IPA: a good Swedish ale for a great Swedish meal.
This bit of writing doesn’t really capture the meal here. It was the perfect dinner after a day of swimming in the Baltic and sunning ourselves on an island in the archipelago.The restaurant is warm, and welcoming; there are few things as satisfying as such a rich meal after such an active day. Not to be repeated too often, and not to be taken for granted. If you’re in Stockholm, and have been walking between Gamla Stan and Söder Malm all afternoon, this is the place to rest up. In fact, if you’re in Stockholm I implore you to spend all afternoon taking in that beautiful city on foot before heading over to Södermalmstorg to eat here.
I just made a big pot of chicken tortilla soup, and I haven’t posted in a while, so. Here we are.
I roasted a chicken for dinner on Monday night, which is my new favorite thing to do for dinner these days. It’s the easiest thing, you just have to have patience. I’ve posted about that here before, and I haven’t been experimenting with methods or recipes at all. A chicken can yield days and days worth of food, and is way more economical than buying individual packages of meat.
The soup I made is one I’ve made before. I followed the recipe in the Joy of Cooking for the first iteration of this meal, but I’m not a huge fan of recipe-following in general. I think that comes from years of watching my mother improvising delicious meals, which is yet another gift she’s given me: the confidence to play around with the way that I cook. I know how to tell when things are going to turn out, and when they’re not I know how to turn it around.
So, this soup. Chicken stock, shredded chicken breast, and finely chopped tomato, cilantro, onion, garlic and jalapeno, with tortilla chips broken up and put in at the last minute. I roasted the garlic (skin on) and jalapeno (whole) in a dry and very hot skillet, to blacken their skins and remove some of their bitterness before chopping them. That is a trick from the Joy’s recipe, and I would never have thought of it on my own. But the sweet earthiness of the garlic after its been blackened on all sides is so warming, and releases so many of the deeper garlicky flavors you won’t otherwise taste, I’m going to start using this method in more of my dishes.
I haven’t yet figured out how to get the tortilla chips to stay crunchy once they go in the soup, so I’m serving them in a bowl on the side, to be added at our discretion.
I’m finally publishing this, now that they’ve closed their doors and I can never have it ever again.
Spork (1058 Valencia St at 22nd, San Francisco)
On a Friday, having just finished our first long week back from vacation, Russell and I decided it would be more than appropriate to treat ourselves to a meal out. It’s not like we don’t do that 80% of the time, anyway…
So, I invited a friend to meet us at Spork. I’d been here before, years ago it feels like, with my family, and remembered it as being a meaty and unapologetic place. I looked it up online, made a hasty reservation, and headed out the door.
Russell was sitting down already when I got there, drinking a beer and playing a game on his phone. When I opened the menu, I realized that those two dollar signs ($$ out of $$$$) on Yelp don’t mean what I think they should mean. That Hitochino white ale was, apparently, worth a hefty sum. We were in for a good, expensive evening. As I let that sink in I perused my meal options, and realized that either none of it sounded appealing or all of it did. I was so hungry, I couldn’t tell.
The friend I’d invited to dinner was running late, and while we waited for her we ordered a plate of calamari and cauliflower. I’m not the biggest fan of cauliflower (do you guys know that it’s a hybrid of cabbage and broccoli? Whose idea was that??) but I do love squid, thanks to a youth dedicated to keeping up with my father whose one true love in this world is eating delicacies of various origin. This appetizer was a dream come true- the main ingredients came resting in a soft, salty lemon aoli; the squid was cooked to a light springy perfection; the cauliflower wasn’t left to perform on its own but rather served as a surprisingly competent vehicle for the other flavors on the plate. If, as the menu indicated, there were any mint present I could not detect it. I didn’t miss it. The flavors were light and airy— which made the fact that I instantly felt full after eating just my half of the dish all the more confounding.
We waited patiently for a while longer before giving up on my friend’s timely arrival and ordering our main courses. Russell got the inside-out burger with bacon, and I couldn’t decide what I wanted. I asked our waitress what her favorite dish is, and for a second I thought she would waffle on about how they’re all great, leaving me to make up my own mind. Luckily she could tell that I needed some direction, and she told me in a firm voice to order the house sausage pasta.
Thank god! It was one of the best pasta dishes I’ve ever had. The sauce was fragrant and very light; more white whine than cream, and not very thick at all, but with a deeply savory and satisfying taste. The pasta- one sheet of smooth and bouncy paper-thin fresh pasta. I’ve never had anything like it- the noodle folded in on and over itself, creating a platform for the fennel-studded sausage and sauce. And the whole thing was topped with fresh spicy arugula. But, man, was it filling! By the end I was practically wimpering as I tried to finish the plate, enjoying it too much to simply let it sit unfinished.
Russell’s burger was, of course, incredible. I guess Spork is known for that burger, and for good reason. It’s incredibly generously portioned, and the quality of the meat is pretty obvious. The novelty of the inside-outness of it is great, too. I may or may not have discussed this here before, but I have a bad habit of discarding the bun of any burger I eat when I’m about halfway through. I only do it when the meat is particularly high quality, and I think it has to do mostly with a thought process of, Why waste the space on some bread and lettuce? So, clearly, an inside-out burger appeals to me on a very pragmatic level. And that bacon! I don’t know what they do to it, but it has some real character. It could have been crispier, but overall, what an entree.
Nora, the friend in question, did finally arrive. She ordered the same pasta dish I had, and also gave it rave reviews. She and I, upon completion of our meal, followed it up with fancy drinks down at Luna Park- the perfect end to a gastronomically delightful evening.
Breadmaking.
For some reason I think making one’s own bread it really appealing. I love the smell of the dough rising, and the smell of the loaf baking. I’ve never been particularly good at it, or very prolific. It can be a very daunting exercise in patience and strength. I’m not fond of kneading dough (or am I? something satisfying in it, but tiring, too). And my loaves never come out of the oven the way I want to imagine they will. I want something thick and crusty, something that makes a solid hollow knocking sound. What I get is a dense loaf with crumbly flesh.
In college, I made bread quite a few times for my roommates during my sophomore year. But those loaves were so sweet and yellow, they’d disappear within the hour as if I’d made a kind of cake and not a bread. But they were good hot out of the oven and doused in butter, sliced and shared in our tiny kitchen. I miss that. I miss feeling like I’m producing a staple food, a sustaining food.
A few weeks ago I cam across this recipe for a “no work” bread, shared by the contributors to an Art blog I follow. The “no work” part sounded mighty enticing, and it looked easy enough— all in all, a safe and comfortable return to baking. So I decided to make it.
I’ll let you check out the specifics of the recipe if you’re so inclined. The gist of it is that instead of spending upwards of ten minutes kneading the dough between rises, you let it rise for 18 hours, then fold it a few times, let it rise again for 2 more hours, then bake it in a casserole dish. It’s as simple as that. And the photos above can attest to its viability. I have done it once so far, and I did make a couple of mistakes along the way. As I write this, I have a second loaf in a bowl, about 12 hours into its 18-hour gestation, and already I think I’m doing a better job. The first time around I used too much olive oil to coat the dough before its first rising, and then too much flour to curb stickiness during its second rising. I’m also going to use a much hotter over this time around, to improve crust quality. I had the oven at about 320 the first time around, out of fear for the lid of my precious Le Creuset dish, which I’ve now read is rater safe to 375. Impatience also read me to remove it before it had really reached golden brown, so I vow to be less antsy this time. But overall, it was a good bread! Russell’s the one who’s really eating it, because he has a sandwich every day for lunch, and he hasn’t complained once. So I score that as a success, and I’m going to keep making it— improving every time.
I made this chicken by putting in the oven.
Okay first I washed it with cold water, and dried it all over (even inside of it! which even thinking about that right now is making me feel like crawling into a hole in the ground! it isn’t that I don’t like the thought of eating meat, it’s that I don’t like touching it inside of its body), and then I put it in the little brownies pan my mother bought me when I moved into this apartment (the brownies pan was empty of brownies). And then I put salt on it, and pepper, and then like a half a stick of butter. Then I put it in the oven. At 450, I think. And about two hours later, I took it out.
The skin was very crispy and browned. This is a huge triumph for me, because usually when I cook I am so impatient. I mean, I will literally take bread out of the oven while it’s still dough and I’ll sit and look at it and prod it and be like, fuck you!!!, all while all of the heat leeches out of my oven and into my kitchen and makes me sweaty and frustrated because I left the G D oven door open so I could prod at some dough. I’m very impatient. This chicken? I only took it out of the oven prematurely twice! The first was to check if the juices were running clear, which is a trick I learned from my mom (just like every other trick I know!), the second was when the timer actually went off and to look at the bottom part of it which Russell correctly predicted would be pink and therefore not ready to eat yet. Finally when I took it out for real, it was great!
I think I was supposed to “truss” the bird before cooking it, but the only string I had was this really absurdly thick twine, which I did not want to fuck around with. So I MacGuivered and tied the legs together with a strip of tin foil. I also tucked the wings under the bird like the trussing instructions said to, but I don’t think it was actually useful to do so. The tips of the wings, and the ends of the drumsticks, became extremely dried out. But the rest of the bird was pretty moist! And, most importantly, cooked all the way through. And pretty.
So this was great, and way more delicious/wonderful than the turkey I made at Thanksgiving.
Also, I think I mentioned in that last post that basically read the entire soup chapter in the Joy of Cooking. Well, a huge part of that chapter is devoted to Stock and Broth, so. I had to try it. Also, back to that thanksgiving turkey— I tried to turn that carcass into stock, but man I got really disgusted and sickened when I broke it down and de-meated it. I had waited a few days before tackling it, and just ended up throwing the whole everything away. However! This time, I stripped the chicken of all its meat right after we had finished eating. I set all the meat aside and refrigerated it, then added the bones to some roughly-chopped onion, carrots, celery and enough water to cover. Four hours later, I had a beautiful stock to work with.
As luck would have it, I also got a horrible cold that night! When I woke up, I was pretty upset, but when I realized that I was going to get to have homemade chicken soup for dinner, I got pretty glad. I made the soup by heating up the stock, adding some lightly-sautéed carrots, onion, garlic and celery, and the reserved chicken pieces. Oh and because I grew up on Sendak, I also added rice. I was imagining the chicken soup with rice from my childhood. The one my mom would make, where some of the chicken pieces would have a terrible chunk of gristle attached and I would get really upset by it!
But I added wayyyyyyyyy too much rice.
So I inadvertently made chicken porridge.
BUT IT WAS AMAZING. Oh god. With some Chalulua hot sauce! And oh man. Russell didn’t like it as much as I did because he “doesn’t like mush”. It was mush!!! Most of the meals that I make most often are mush! Russell’s a texture kind of guy, and doesn’t appreciate mush the way I do. Russell claims not to taste but to only feel the food he eats. WELL. I DUNNO. This was such a delicious meal and way healthier and more wholesome than most other things I’ve made in the pat year. And cost effective! The whole chicken, out of which we got two full meals and a lunch of leftovers (not to mention the stock I froze!), cost like $11. That’s what I normally pay for a package of chicken breasts, which I never even ENJOY. But that’s for another time. OKAY, bye.
A++++++ Will Cook Again
Last night we had stuffed cabbage leaves for dinner. This was inspired, in part, by a post over at Safest Helicopter, which now that I look at it was made like, months ago. Which I think says a lot about how I make decisions (slowly). In any case, I have been thinking about what a stuffed cabbage leaf would be like. I don’t think I got what I was expecting. But I am a huge fan of stuffed things. In college I made this gross/delicious thing a lot, which was a whole green pepper, cored and seeded, filled with sausage and equal parts uncooked couscous and water and baked in the oven, covered, for like 30 minutes.
I haven’t been cooking hardly at all, except for the basic staples which I have discussed a thousand times on this blog. But last week, the first issue of my new subscription to Bon Apetit (Thank You Ellen!) arrived, and I surprised myself by reading it COVER TO COVER in a matter of hours. And while I was reading it, I was taking all these mental notes about what I wanted to cook, and what I would need to buy for the recipes. And then another thing happened, which was that our bananas turned black and instead of throwing them away I opened up the Joy of Cooking for the first time in too long for a recipe for banana bread. And guess what. While that bread was cooking, I went through and read, like, the entire soup chapter. Just the recipes. Weird, right? So then of course I had to make soup. That’s a separate post, though.
So. The stuffed cabbage. Was pretty easy to make, but very time consuming. Also, WARNING: you WILL use the entire cabbage, and this recipe calls for TWO whole onions. The Joy of Cooking is that it has been around since the beginning of recorded time. The edition I have was a gift from my mother when I moved into my first apartment, and it’s (I think) the most recent. Which means that it is the updated version, with recipes curated and re-worked by original author Irma Rombauer’s daughter and son-in-law. The best part about it is that, as you go through it, you can tell which recipes were added by the new generation (some of them bear the son-in-law’s name, Becker, which I can barely abide), and which are classics. Usually the only thing that’s been changed in those is that they tell you to use vegetable oil and not lard. Jerks.
The stuffed cabbage recipe, I think we can all agree without even looking it up or doing a single second of cross-referencing, is MOST DEFINITELY one of Irma’s. I’m not even going to list all the crazy things she expects me to be using in my family’s meals, but suffice it to say that I had to look up “sour salt” more than once before I really believed that Ms. Rombauer was asking me to buy and subsequently use pure citric acid in this meal. She also requested that I spend time crushing eight 2-inch gingersnaps into crumbs to add to the sauce. Needless to say, I exercised my basic chef’s right of substitution (lime for the sour salt and ground cinnamon for the gingersnaps).
In ANY CASE, this was a success. The cabbage smells kind of farty after the hour and a half of cooking, but the seasoning in the sauce and in the filling more than covers that up. After dinner we went for a walk and when we came back, a half hour later, we were not met with a waft of fart-cabbage smell as I was expecting we would be. Rather, the apartment smelled really fragrant and cinnamon/tomato-y. I served the little dumplings with leftover mashed potatoes (revived from their disgusting gluey state in their tupperware with some gentle heating and a bath of butter), and it was waaay too much food. I even had to freeze some of the stuffed leaved because not all of them would even fit in my huge cast-iron skillet.
Basically, let me break this down for you. A stuffed cabbage leaf is a slightly wilty cabbage leaf filled with a delicious, garlicky, sweet hamburger and rice, covered with tomato-cabbage sauce. YEAH. It was crazy good, I ate way too much of them, we’re gonna have leftovers for years. This is probably the most Germanest recipe I’ve made since that one time Caroline gave me 5kg of potatoes and I made potato dumplings with bacon and cheese inside them and ate that with a side of sauerkraut.
A++ Would Eat Again.
