A Meal That Tastes Real

The cooking never stops. Every day I am chopping and slicing, sauteing and braising and boiling, baking and burning. And the cleaning - oh the cleaning that must come after the cooking. How often is the phrase "cooking and cleaning" uttered? The "cooking" is inevitably followed by the cleaning. It's not "cooking and lamenting" nor "cooking and relaxing". No, it is NOT EVEN "cooking and eating".

Which is just a damn shame.

And so every night, after the boiling and the braising and the peeling and the roasting AND the eating, I have a sink full of dirty dishes waiting for me, taunting me on the road to relaxation. Some nights I ignore them. It's okay, I live alone and if I ignore a dish it will not take revenge, except perhaps in the emission of odors (it's bad to ignore any dish that once held fish). Eventually though, I must face the music of the dishwasher - and yes, I do have a dishwasher so it may seem unfair to complain, but everything still needs to be detached from the caked on food. I do not have a garbage disposal, so my sink also requires a good cleaning now and then.

Tonight I decided to take a break. Although I am averse to frozen meals, Trader Joe's has some good food items (salsa verde, lox, olive tapenade, and double chocolate cookies are my favorites) and the short ribs looked good to me. But I remembered why I don't buy frozen meals when I ate the dish - the mealy vegetables and strange tasting sauce were not the best. And that is why I like to cook it myself.

I like having a meal that tastes real, like a sun tan not a fake bake. Like a documentary, not reality TV. Like real love instead of lust. It lasts longer, it's more satisfying, and it's more memorable. And sometimes it tastes so good, it makes me want to tell everyone about it, even if it's as common as oatmeal chocolate chip cookies or pasta with shrimp. Because even when real love is so common with all the couples that I know, I bet all of them think they're pretty special. And that the cooking is totally worth all the cleaning.


Pasta with Shrimp and Herbed Cream Sauce (from Giada's Kitchen)
4 to 6 servings

With recipes like this, you end up with leftovers of an ingredient like bottled clam juice, which you're never going to use up. My solution, because I liked it so much, was to make this dish again a few days later.

1 pound penne pasta
1/4 cup olive oil
1 pound medium shrimp, peeled and deveined
4 garlic cloves, minced
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt, plus more to taste
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper, plus more to taste
1 15 oz can chopped tomatoes
1/2 cup chopped fresh basil
1/2 cup chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
1 cup dry white wine
1/3 cup bottled clam juice
1/2 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese

Bring a large pot of salted water to boil over high heat. Add the pasta and cook until tender but still firm to the bite, stirring occasionally, 8 to 10 minutes. Drain the pasta and set aside.

In a large skillet, heat the oil over medium high heat. Add the shrimp, garlic, 1/2 teaspoon of salt and 1/2 teaspoon of pepper. Cook, stirring frequently, until the shrimp turn pink and are cooked through, about 3 minutes. Using a slotted spoon, remove the shrimp from the pan and set aside.

Add the tomatoes, 1/4 cup of the basil, 1/4 cup of the parsley, and the red pepper flakes to the skillet and cook for 2 minutes, stirring constantly. Add the wine and simmer for another 2 minutes. Add the clam juice and cream. Bring the mixture to a boil. Reduce the heat to medium-low and simmer for 7 to 8 minutes until the sauce thickens.

Add 1/4 cup of the Parmesan cheese, the cooked shrimp, the drained pasta, and the remaining basil and parsley. Toss together until all ingredients are coated with the sauce. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Sprinkle with remaining cheese and serve.

Summer Comfort

Winter is the time for comfort food. It’s the time for thick stews and spicy chili and roasts resting in their juices. It’s the time for wrapping yourself in a blanket, flipping on the tv, and eating holiday cookies in a gnarly sweater. Some people do this all year long, but they are probably very depressed.

Summer is supposed to be the time to shed all that extra clothing, baggage, or weight. We eat light foods like salads and seafood and fruit desserts. But what about when you have a car accident on a sunny day, or your summer fling breaks your heart, or the A/C stops working during a heat wave? Life is frustrating all the time, with no concern for the season. It’s not only the weather we seek comfort from in our food.

But food is not my primary source of comfort. My first love is reading. When I’m tired, when I’m stressed, when I’m lonely, there’s no better cure than to curl up in bed with a book. But I also realize that reading and eating are closely linked in my mind. Some people can’t use the bathroom without a magazine in hand, but I can’t enjoy my dinner or even a five minute breakfast without some reading material on the table. I used to read a book at the dinner table as a child, baffling and annoying my parents who love to talk. It was meant to be a compliment to the food. The better my mom’s cooking, the more I wanted to read while I ate it.

Seeking comfort on a cold, rainy day in June, I went to a used book sale. Wandering through stacks of books under a giant tent, I remembered long summer days in grade school where I had nothing to do all day but watch The Price is Right and I Love Lucy, and read piles of books – mysteries mostly. Now I was more interested in the cookbook section. Typically at these things you’ll find a variety of diet cookbooks, microwave cookbooks, and issues of Bon Appetit from 1983. Occasionally you’ll find something unique - like an African cookbook.

For $3, I bought a cookbook with recipes like beef tripe soup and clam and peanut stew, neither of which I plan to make. But I also came across a recipe for a cold cucumber soup. It was nothing more than a potato soup cooked, then pureed and chilled with some chopped cucumber stirred in, and a dash of pepper sauce. Summer is the only time of year I would want to eat cold soup.

When I made the soup, I was expecting something as simple as the recipe sounded, and I was a bit skeptical about chunks of cucumber in my potato soup. So I was surprised when I found myself licking my bowl (I don’t do this in public, I promise). The crunchy cucumber played off nicely against the creamy potato, and the cold soup was well heated by the pepper sauce.

This, then, is summer comfort. A good book, or a good cookbook, a cold, spicy, hearty soup, and the ability to lick your bowl clean without anyone watching.

Cold Cucumber Soup
Yields 2 quarts

Ingredients:
1 cup white onions, chopped finely
2 oz. butter
1 cup peeled and cubed white potatoes (1/2 inch cubes)
1 tablespoon salt
1/4 teaspoon white pepper
a few drops Tabasco (more if you like it spicy)
2 quarts chicken stock
1 cup fat free plain yogurt
2 cups peeled and diced cucumbers

In a 3 quart saucepan, saute the onions in butter. Add potatoes, salt, white pepper, tabasco, and chicken stock. Cook until potatoes are soft, about 20 minutes. Puree with immersion blender, or transfer to blender or food processor to puree until smooth. Return soup to pan. Add yogurt and cucumbers and stir to combine. Check the seasoning and adjust if needed. Chill 2 to 3 hours before serving.

Certain Key Qualities

Every once in a while, you may get it into your head that you want to do something with phyllo dough. You'll think of flaky pastry stuffed with savory meat and cheese. You'll think of layers of phyllo and honey and nuts in baklava. You'll think of Greek themed meals with olives and flaming cheese doused in lemon, leading up to a large pan of spanikopita. Your ambition will get ahead of you and you'll buy not one but multiple boxes of phyllo dough, carefully follow the thawing instructions, and roll it out onto the table.

Think very carefully before you get to this point, because it takes cerain key qualities to work well with phyllo. Can you be patient, or do you skip the resting stage and cut right into your meat? Are you persistent, or did you give up making falafel because they disintegrated in the hot oil? Can you be graceful or do you constantly bump your knee against the table leg – the same knee and the same table leg every time you sit down for dinner? Maybe you can be. Maybe your patience is solid as a cheesy spinach filling. Maybe you have endless layers of persistence. Maybe your grace shines like an egg wash.

Or maybe you’re like me.

I can barely persist through this blog entry. I eat appetizers while making dinner. I bump my knee on the table leg – the same knee and the same table leg – every single day. And I struggle with phyllo dough.

But I must have some quality that takes me back to phyllo every now and then. Is it optimism, in believing that this time the process will go more smoothly? No, not even close. You see, no matter the messiness, no matter the trouble, at the end of the day phyllo wrapped packages with their tasty and varied fillings always receive praise and admiration. It's my ego that takes me back to phyllo again and again. Trying to impress by appearing cool and collected while presenting a platter of spinach and feta stuffed phyllo triangles to my guests, I anticipate their oohs and aahs. In reality, they must be thinking how crazy I am to work with phyllo when I could have just as easily impressed them with chips and dip.

Already, the dried out sheets crumbling to pieces and the sticky layers that wouldn't come apart are forgotten because the ego is satisfied. Phyllo, it muses, why that's nothing. But you'll notice, I never make such things when I'm eating alone.

Spanikopita

Ingredients:
2 pounds washed spinach, wilted
½ cup finely chopped parsley
½ cup finely chopped scallions
1½ cup finely chopped onion, browned
½ pound crumbled feta
2 T olive oil
1 package phyllo dough
5 beaten eggs
1 T dill weed
1 tsp oregano
1 T garlic
1 T lemon juice
½ cup salted butter
Salt and pepper

Preheat oven to 350° F.
Mix all ingredients except for phyllo dough. Grease a 9X12X3 inch baking pan. Layer phyllo dough then mixture, in twelve layers. Cut into squares. Bake at 350° F for 1 hour.

To make this spanikopita into phyllo triangles:
Brush a sheet of phyllo with melted butter and place a second sheet on top of it. Use a sharp knife to cut the sheets lengthwise into thirds. Place a mound of filling at one end of each strip. Fold dough over filling, forming a triangle. Continue folding, like a flag, until you come to the end of each strip. Bake at 350° F for 15-20 minutes.

Cheese Whore

For as much as I love cheese, I’ve written very little about it here. Maybe that’s because I love cheese most in its purest untouched form. I love a creamy brie on crackers, goat cheese tossed onto salad, a slice of manchego with some prosciutto. When cooked into a lasagna it's hardly worth mentioning. But it’s often an ingredient in a recipe I want to try, so that around my apartment you'll find a magazine open to a page with feta chile dip or a cookbook bookmarked at a recipe for asiago cheese bread. In my fridge right now I have 8 types of cheese: cream, asiago, parmigiano reggiano, it’s weaker second cousin parmesan, boursin, feta, cottage and monterey pepper jack. This stock won’t stop me from wandering around Whole Foods' impressive cheese counter picking up and contemplating every kind of triple cream brie. That's the kind of woman I am. I'm a cheese whore.

I mean, just look at those jalapeno poppers, stuffed with cream cheese and scallions and topped with pepper jack, broiled to elicit a golden brown crispy cover. I'm salivating just looking at the picture, remembering the heat of the pepper tempered by the silken cream cheese that gushed out when I bit into it. I won't lie. I pulled crusted cheese off the foil and ate it. That crispy caramelized cheese is the best part.

In fact, this crispy cheese makes the perfect snack by itself.

To make these Cheese Crisps, take a hard cheese like Asiago or Parm and shred a couple ounces of it. Sprinkle with some black pepper or cayenne for a little kick. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and heap little mounds of the shredded cheese on it. Make sure to leave space between them because they will spread out when they melt. Heat the oven to 350 degrees and bake for about 7 minutes. When you pull them out they will still be soft for a few seconds. If you want to shape them into little cups, you may be able to do so but mine hardened up almost immediately. Ideally you would have time to drape them over a shot glass so they form cups which can be filled with something like a tomato cucumber salad or a chicken salad with grapes. And then you could serve them as a cute hors d'oeuvre at your next cocktail party.

I ate my cheese crisps unaccompanied, enjoying them in their purest form. But maybe they'd be good dipped in something, like the aforementioned feta chile dip. Cheese on cheese? Why not? That's the kind of woman I am.