Archive for the ‘Food and Wine’ Category
My great grandmother taught me how to make meatloaf. I would pull up her turquoise stepstool to the formica counter and crack each egg perfectly and measure each tablespoon out exactly as I was told because you do not mess with your great grandmother at any point in time. Sure, she chain smokes and can’t always keep track of which generation she’s talking to, but she lets you watch Solid Gold whenever you want and cook in a method that involves squishing ground meat with your bare hands and you can’t beat that with a stick.
Cooking in my family sadly involved standard canned ingredients and copious amounts of Miracle Whip. Whatever recipe we used for meatloaf did involve eggs and milk and ground meat but the similarities to the kind I make now end there. Good lord, I probably wouldn’t still have a beating heart if I lived off the kind of food my family ate in those years. Instead, we love a good old fashioned Country Meatloaf, which is decidedly healthier and absolutely Velveeta free.
I have always assumed that the Meatloaf is just a convoluted American version of a French Terrine. A terrine typically combines layered and rough-chopped meats and lard, and is pressed into a loaf pan and cooked in a water bath, thereby forming an oily sliceable “chunky pate”. I am fascinated by the way various cultures figure out ways to make cheaper cuts of meat come out tasty and of a nice consistency, and terrines and meatloaves are no exception. The French peasants of the late 1700’s and the American housewives of the 1950’s have something in common here. It’s not haute by any stretch. But to many families, it’s soul food.
I’m not a recipe-posting kind of gal, and I hope you won’t mind that. I rarely use recipes at all, and instead sort it out by feel and taste as I go. Luckily the fun thing about meatloaf is that you don’t really need a recipe. It’s probably best to follow one the first time just to get a rough idea of the ideal consistency for when you’re mixing the dry and wet ingredients BUT keep confident in the fact that you really can’t screw it up as long as you follow a basic plan. Hence, my great grandmother’s heavy reliance on the dish.
The general idea of country meatloaf is that in addition to the traditional ingredients: ground meat (pork, beef or turkey), breadcrumbs, egg, milk and a healthy dose of tomato paste (or ketchup if you’re going for authenticity), you just add sautéed mirepoix (that’s onion, carrot and celery), thereby turning a senior citizen staple into something with an actual consistency, color and flavor (not to mention a chance at nutrition). If you want to get crazy you can add fresh herbs to the sauté.
After the vegetables have cooled a bit, you’ll toss everything around in a bowl and smash it with your bare hands until combined. Then you’ll season it, form it into a loaf shape and bake until the oils are sputtering and lovely brown edges are forming on the bottom of the pan. At this point you can combine the leftover tomato paste and brown sugar and spread it over the loaf for the final 10 minutes of baking, which will form a sweet yummy glaze and cement your place in 1950’s middle America.
I’ve been cooking since 1979. That was the summer I created an awful thing called “raisin stew” while sitting on the step-stool of my family kitchen, throwing bits of Triscuit, orange segment, milk and raisins into a plastic bowl and pronouncing it revolutionary. I created a recipe card to accompany this feat, which is likely tucked away in my mother’s scrapbook papers somewhere. My sister made gagging noises just to look at it, but I was fascinated by the idea of creating something new and exciting from simple ingredients (hmm, sound familiar?).
Fast forward twenty years, and I’ve been working as a private chef for 10 years. My clients’ needs vary, from an in-home business dinner where the stakes are high and the guest is crabby, to a casually ridiculous birthday party where the guests break into the samba before the dessert course is even served. I do all the shopping, cooking, serving, table setting, mood making so they don’t have to.
Throughout this time I’ve done huge weddings, company launch parties, bachelorette parties, you name it. I catered with several high end companies and for a short time even operated my own. And what I’m getting to is this: In all these years I’ve not had a single decent fitting chef coat or mildly attractive pair of pants. And the shoes, well, let’s not even start on the shoes.
Below is a standard chef coat one would pull out of the uniform closet in a restaurant in any city. You grab your size, throw it on over your concert tee, grab a quad espresso and get to your station:
Note the complete lack of shape, awful shiny plastic buttons and all-over ill fit for any female cook (which believe me, is still a rare sight). I modified the look slightly in my early days by tightly wrapping a service apron at my natural waist to create a sort of high-waisted pencil skirt shape. This helped only slightly because the rest of the outfit was comprised of:
Green plastic gardening clogs (perhaps a crocs precursor).
and
Standard poly-blend checked chef pants with a tapered leg (oh joy). Note there are typically only men’s pants available.
Back when I started cooking, the hip chef fashion pant was Chefwear’s “Baggies” line: elastic waistband and tightly tapered, decorated with your choice of patterns- clip art-like renderings of chili peppers, koi fish, tobasco bottles, whatever. Mine were covered in green and red grape clusters- a fashion choice I still stand by considering the other options. I used to have a link to the full “look” but it has now disappeared from the internets out of embarrassment.
Not being so much in the “industry” anymore, I could afford to be progressive with my chefwear and break out into something new. I do still need to represent with a proper chef coat, and there are a few nice looking ones (with cloth covered buttons, tapered waists, or mandarin collars), but even those women-shaped options are just so predictable in style. Decent, but still uninteresting. White or black coat (or denim.. the reason for this option escapes me completely). Check pants or black pants. Dansko clogs. Blah.
So here’s the final question: how to cultivate a uniform “look” while not actually wearing a uniform? Where to find well cut pieces that will stand up to frequent washings, oil splatters and pomegranate molasses? A few pockets, some natural fibers, smart clean lines and we’re in business.
Remember that scene in Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead where Sue Ellen (Christina Applegate) turns a uniform factory into a modern and hip high fashion line?
No, you say you were three when that movie came out?
Help.
I try to orient all our meals around things that are seasonally available, and I think I mentioned this earlier, but I neglected to mention the rockstar center of the meal planning universe that is the Local Foods Wheel. It shows which foods are naturally available year-round in the Bay Area (like sardines and cauliflower) and which time of the year everything else is available. A quick dial to February, for example, (arguably the most desperate for us as our hearts are already longing for avocados and berries in the season that lies ahead), shows escarole, grapefruit and artichokes. Inspiration renewed. We will rock the escarole until the berries appear.
The Food Wheel was conceptualized by Bay Area chef Jessica Prentice, who also operates something my family relies on: the community kitchen, Three Stone Hearth in Berkeley. A former Director of Education Programs at the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture, and author of Full Moon Feast, she has done all sorts of smarty things for food and the Locavore movement (and remains, apparently, ego-free and undernoted.. this woman should be getting attention right and left in my opinion). Oh, and that term, “Locavore” that all the hip 30-somethings like to throw around casually like yesterday’s “slow food” and last year’s “organic”? It’s her word.
Anyhoo, I’ve become super dependent on the Food Wheel for all my meal planning and it occurred to me today that I would crumble into a thousand pieces without it. What if I had to actually wait until I got to the farmer’s market to see what’s available? To conceptualize an entire week’s worth of meals while standing at the farmer’s stand would take a much greater woman than me. And beyond that, what on earth would I do if I left the Bay Area and landed in New York, for instance?
Ta Daaa! The New York version is now available, thank heavens. There is a god. And she’s waiting for me with her food wheel in Brooklyn.
I've been making Alton Brown's "The Chewy" Chocolate Chip Cookie recipe for a few years now. There's no point in deviating, because it's my exact ultimate cookie- mooshy and finger-licking melted chocolate that oozes out of a freshly baked cookie, which is not puffy but caramel-like, soft and just very slightly crunchy.
With our new bistro-style of meal planning, I've tried to include one fun dessert that everyone will enjoy for the week. And wanting to use up some oats in the cupboard, I recently went a-browsing for an oatmeal cookie recipe. I found this one and cannot tell you how good it is. But I can show you:
I also altered the recipe by upping the flour and baking soda, and cutting the salt (as the comments suggest).
Our home kitchen is now a restaurant. Not the underground kind, for we don't charge a fee. And there's no health food inspector. And the maximum capacity is three. You see, after far too many dumps of organic local produce gone unused, desperately dashing to sushi to avoid cooking, or the exhaustion that comes with trying to prepare a week's worth of meals on Sunday, after finding the time to schlep to the grocery store (and we go to Berkeley Bowl, which is like going to war, another post entirely), I needed to try something different. So we've instituted a new meal planning and executing practice at home that operates like a bistro.
There are many nights in our houshold when only one parent is home. We stagger our hours so avoid sending our kid to some random Little Nosepicker Daycare before and after school, which is great, but means that whatever is going to be prepared needs to be appropriate to different skill sets. You see, my wife is fond of 70's casserole style cooking, or "assembly", as we call it, and rarely has the inclination to branch out beyond steaming broccoli and cooking a chicken leg (though she recently put to rest any doubt about her potential and made an amazing birthday meal for me). Then there's me. I would really rather shoot myself in the foot than steam broccoli and last night made a lamb tagine with preserved lemon and harissa for dinner and served it with an carrot-medjool date salad with cumin vinaigrette and orange segments.
It's all good on nights that I cook, because the family has a clear and healthy appreciation for having a private chef in the family. But on nights I work late (preparing meals for someone else's family) in the back of my mind I imagine them sitting on the dining room floor passing a can of peanuts back and forth and rummaging through the cupboards for sustenance. It's some nurturing gene that I can't shake: regardless that my wife is completely capable of cooking a basic meal, I want to be the one to feed my family, and I want to know that what they're eating is nutrient dense, flavorful and unique at all times.
Here's how it works:
On Saturday I prepare the menu for the week and get sign-off from the family. Three breakfasts, two lunches, and three dinners. I grocery shop and prepare the complex items Sunday
evening, and write the whole menu up on the board in the dining room. Then we just choose what we're having when it's nearly time to eat, and prepare it or heat it up. This way we know everything is available, and whichever cook is in the kitchen can choose the meal that suits her energy level.
The breakfasts vary from somewhat complex (blueberry pancakes) to the
obvious (cornflakes and banana) but we stick to those listed, knowing
that there is full, dependable stock for the week.
The lunches double as snacks (example greens in vinaigrette with crostini, pate and cornichons) and are catered to work best eaten at home rather than packed up (assuming if we're at work we'll just grab a burrito or something). I'm home often during the day, if only to stop by and check on the puppy, so we get fair use out of these.
The dinners are cooked in batches large enough to rotate during the
week (or the components are prepared so that assembly is simple come
dinnertime).
Here's the Bistro menu from last week:
Breakfast
Oatmeal with raisins
Vanilla yogurt with mango granola
Hard boiled egg, cranberry toast with farmstead butter
Lunch
Tortellini salad with baby peas
Spring vegetables with anchoiade and spring greens, acme sourdough
Dinner
Chicken leek pie and greens
Fava beans and Copa Cola salami, sour batard
Wild rice, steamed artichokes and garbanzo bean salad with steamed beets
I try to have at least a few things be veg only, and insert as much bean and grain as possible. It seems to be working swimmingly, though the kid perenially requests "peeled egg" for breakfast no matter what's on the board. She can't read yet, so we'll give her a pass.