Marco is becoming (deservedly) famous for his work on Cook Here and Now. And I'm one of the lucky few who will climb aboard his coattails all the way to the top of the San Francisco food chain.
Soon the doorman at Gary Danko will call in my drink order when he sees me slide out of a cab! Alice Waters will ring me for advice!
Well...not quite. But it's nice to see my friend reap the rewards of a project in which he's invested so much of his time.
At this weekend's food-fest, a magazine photographer will shoot the event, focusing in on a couple of participants who were asked to submit recipes that may be featured in the magazine.
I'm one of those people, so I've cooked my way through double blackberry pie (rejected because it had too many blackberries), pashka with lime marmalade (rejected because it was too complex), and finally a lime pie with a layer of blackberry jam.
I made three iterations, with the same crumb crust and blackberry jam layer: one chilled pie with whipped cream folded into lime juice and condensed milk; another souffle-like baked version with egg involvement; and a third that's a take-off of Shaker lemon pie, which uses the citrus peel.
"This looks like Slimer from Ghostbusters," I said, pouring the whisked eggs over the pale green peels.
"Your face looks like Slimer from Ghostbusters," my roommate said, which was not true, but funny.
And I was like: "Your grandma's face looks like Slimer from Ghostbusters," but I realized her grandma died and was buried last week. Sometimes things that are more true are less funny.
Tonight we're feasting on the three contenders. Each roommate gets a vote and they take the responsibility seriously.
Who will win? Who will be the next American pie-dol?
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
More True = Less Funny.
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Lard: A Brief Interlude
This morning I woke with a mission, and that mission did not include a steamy kitchen or sticky pans.
In the space of 24 hours, no fewer than three people--a chef at Pizzeria Delfina; my hairstylist Camilla; and Thy, a writer for KQED--insisted that lard is the only way to go for an expert pie crust. Because I was ramping up to bake around 50 pies for a benefit event, I was in need of solid advice.
"Lard is my mom's secret weapon," said the chef, who hails from Iowa. Camilla, also a native Iowan, can't attend but insists she'll send her husband with lard-laden pie. Thy, another Midwesterner, agreed.
So the day was spent researching recipes with lard and then hunting down a good local source. Avedano's, my friendly neighborhood butcher shop, doesn't carry lard, but said they'd find it for me. The butcher's assistant wrote "Colleen: lard for 30 pie crusts" on their special orders notepad.
Social media tools like Facebook recognize the need for connection and power of social networks. When I first considered organizing a gathering of people and pies but didn't have a location, I posted a query to my Facebook profile and responses filled my inbox.
And there's a lot of value in that connection, particularly if you move a lot, as I have. It's not until recently, when I hit my three year mark in San Francisco, that I appreciated the living, breathing networks in my everyday life: the hairdresser who bakes cookies for me, the cook who doesn't know my name but sent a pane pomodoro because I looked hungry, the vegetarian butcher I bumped into on Valencia when I walked home late last night.
Farmer's markets pulse with that same sense of connection and relationship, an acknowledgement of the forces that bind us. Each of us breathes, dreams and dies, but there's nothing so pleasurable as eating to discuss, fuss over, and pause to enjoy.
If you're in San Francisco the afternoon of July 13th and have $20 burning a hole in your pocket, come to the pie social at the Women's Building on 18th at Guerrero. It would be nice to see you.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
The Promised Day is Come
Waiting for the figs to ripen on the tree in my yard was more difficult than I supposed.
It was less like anticipating the presents under the tree on Christmas morning and more like if each present started as a pea-sized knot on the carpet and grew incrementally over the course of two months while an impatient child hissed "But WHEN WILL IT BE AN X-BOX 360?!?"
So this week I saw figs at $2 per basket, reduced from $3 because they were a bit mashed up, and I bought them, despite the fact that $0 per bushel figs will drop softly from the waxy-leafed tree in a few weeks. Mommy, I want them now.
Sean Timberlake's recipe from last year was a huge hit, so I made it again. Early season figs were a bit less sweet and more liquid, so I used the full cup of sugar and a bit less than 2 c of water.
And now in my cupboard I have three half pints of fig jam set by, which fills me with an enormous sense of well being.
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Better-Than-Apricot Apricot Jam
Blackberries, raspberries, peaches, nectarines, blueberries--no tayberries yet, but I'm looking.
Roving through the market this week, it's clear that summer produce is abundant. Admittedly, it was hard to select this week's victim. Of the concoctions I've concocted over the past year and some months, only two ran out more quickly than I'd like: apricot and fig.
Fig mostly because I made Marco's basic pizza dough with fig jam, rosemary and dolcelatte blue cheese--it's even better with the truffle salt Alison recommended. I saw a couple of early figs at one stand, but they were overly dear. Plus, in my new apartment I have a fig tree, and from the looks of things I'll have ready fruit in a few weeks.
And apricots? I don't even like them. (Record screech.) Yeah, I know. 90% of the time the texture is mealy, the flavor one note. But connect the fruit with sugar and a bit of lemon and you have something exceptional: a counterpoint to tart, creamy rugelach dough; the start of a marinade for fatty roast duck; a sauce for french toast that blows maple syrup out of the water.
So this year I'm setting more by, preparing for midwinter feasts, fresh-baked bread with a layer of butter and a spoonful of jam.
Better-than-apricot apricot jam
4 pounds apricots (makes about 2 1/4 c chopped fruit)
1 cup sugar
Juice from 2 lemons
- Shock the skins off the fruit by dropping them into a pot of boiling water, quickly fishing them out, and pulling the loosened skin off.
- Pit the skinless apricots and cut into quarters. Drop into a nonreactive pot with sugar and lemon juice.
- Run at a low boil until the texture thickens and pulls together, about 30 minutes. Process in sterilized jars.
Saturday, May 24, 2008
So Cosmo Says You're Fat? Well, I Ain't Down With That.
Strawberry jam at Marco and Allison's apartment today. We ate squash blossom-anchovy pizza and listened to Cuban hip-hop and Marco's rap mix. Amusingly, the only time he loses his Roman accent is when he's quoting rap lyrics. OH. My God, Becky? Look at her butt.
"When I think of this country, I think of 'Baby Got Back,'" he opined. "How do you sit down at a table and write this song? I can't even imagine it."
I tried to follow Mrs RC Moneymaker's (real name, I swear--check page 189) "8 Minute Strawberry Jam" recipe from Pickles and Preserves, but there were some complications. First, the sugar to fruit ratio is insane: 4 parts sugar to 1 part fruit. Maybe this is why they had wooden teeth in ye olden days.
Then the wording tripped me up. The recipe requires the addition of "4 cups heated sugar." Heated? Is that...boiled? Liquid? Tossed in a saucepan and warmed up, but solid? No clue, and I didn't want to discover a hunk of hardened candy in the center of the boiling fruit, so we freestyled a straightforward recipe that did the trick.
Straightforward Strawberry Jam
6 cups of strawberries, hulled and mashed
2 cups of sugar
Juice of 2 lemons
Toss the mashed strawberries and their juices into a nonreactive pot. Bring to a slow, even boil, then add the sugar. Taste after 30 minutes, add lemon, and adjust sugar if necessary. Boil over low heat until the color deepens to a warm rose and the texture is as you prefer--ours was workable after about 1.5 hours, but we cooked a full 2 hours to get a tighter texture.
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Cherry-Sour Plum Jam
Sour cherries, a treat of Eastern European and Russian cuisine common in East Coast and Midwest markets, do not exist in San Francisco.
At least that's what I hear from two friends who tried to find them here and then reported that sour cherries aren't grown anywhere in California.
Sweet red cherries made a triumphant return last week. I tasted samples of wildly divergent quality at three or four stalls before I arrived at the DeSantis stand, where I noticed women in headscarves handing over $20 in exchange for covered boxes. If there's one thing I love at the market, it's the air of insider knowledge.
"What's in there?" I asked.
"Leaves," Mrs DeSantis answered. She pointed to the women in the scarves. "That culture likes them."
"It's the Mediterraneans: I'm one of them," one of her helpers said. "Grape leaves for dolmas. Try the sour plums. We like them, too."
I had noticed the plums: pale green and hard, with a waxy skin. The tart flavor hits your tongue like acid as you crunch through the skin, then fades a bit, as if your taste buds deciphered some code. I decided to try them with cherries as a mock 'sour cherry' jam.
The rub? Now I had to pit over 100 individual fruits, with a mild hangover on a Sunday morning. And I had to do it early because swing dancing lessons in the park started at noon.
The most efficient way to do this is probably with a cherry pitter, which I don't own. The plums I slit open and scraped around the pits. In contrast, the soft, pulpy cherries were easy to pit by hand, pressing the pit through the flesh.
Time-consuming, yes. First I was annoyed with my lack of foresight. Then I got into the rhythm and thought--wait, isn't this the best part of cooking? Up early on a foggy Sunday morning, drinking tea, listening to This American Life, and making headway on a mountain of fruit?
The jam was pretty good. Not as sour as a true sour cherry jam, but with a pleasant tartness and depth of flavor.
Cherry-Sour Plum Jam
3 cups cherries, washed and pitted
2 cups sour plums, washed and pitted
1 1/4 cups sugar
A bit of water
Pit fruit and toss in a nonreactive pot. I added about a tablespoon of water because the cherries weren't particularly juicy and I didn't want them to stick to the pan, but if your chopped fruit yields a decent amount of liquid you need add no water.
Heat slowly and bring up to boil, then add sugar. I tasted the fruit first and determined that 1 1/4 cups of sugar worked well. Cook gently until the fruit falls apart and pulls back together.
All in all, the pitting took over an hour and the cooking about an hour and a half.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Straw-ber-eeee!
If you were at Alemany this morning, you heard the hams from Rodriguez Farms singing out their strawberry song: two men, three long notes, sustained for a few minutes: Straw-ber-eeee!
In 2008 I swore I’d improve on last year’s cooking strategy by rejecting the impulse toward innovation (in the guise of boredom).
I’d make some particular fruit into jam once, then forgo it for the rest of the season, because I considered myself “done” with whatever ingredient: tayberries, strawberries, green gage plums.
But you know what? In December, when the wind spit frigid rain at every turn, and my cabinet revealed only one half-pint of tayberry jam, I cursed my poor planning.
So again this week it’s strawberry, this time mixed with loquat, a fruit indigenous to
At the loquat stand, a man in a leather jacket asked us about the fruit. Suddenly loquat experts, Maria compared it to a kumquat ("Well, they both end in -quat.'") We encouraged him to sample one, after which he dropped his pit into my hand, so that I could grow my own.
“Wow,” Maria said. “When’s the last time a grown man spit into your hand?”
Approximately never. But he did tell us the location of a meyer lemon tree in a public park in
Photos courtesy of the fantastically talented Maria