05.08.12: dinner (shrimp with tequila, orange, and garlic with black bean and avocado quinoa salad)

Shrimp with orange, tequila, and garlic

Do you have at least a few cookbooks that are actually quite good but you don’t turn to often enough, and for no good reason at that? I realized this was the case on Saturday while flipping through our copy of Gordan Ramsay’s Fast Food in search of an easy recipe for the week: it’s been ages since I cracked it open and looked through it, and I couldn’t tell you why that was the case. The layout is kind of strange–meal menus are interspersed with five recipes that fit within arbitrary categories–and some of the photos aren’t as gorgeous as one expects with food photography these days, but it hardly matters because the recipes are good and incredibly adaptable. Two are already in our regular rotation, and when the weekend rolls around and I’m planning for another Tuesday dinner, I’m going to make sure that more are at least given a proper tryout in the future.

04.29.12: dinner (drunken bucatini with poached eggs, piave, and pancetta)

Drunken Bucatini with Poached Eggs, Piave, and Pancetta.

Of the many things I miss about New York, access to the year-round greenmarkets can get really high on the list when I’m craving certain foods; namely, carbornara. It’s easy to feel confident about 99% of the foods we purchase at Fairway, but the only time a shadow of doubt crosses my mind is when I want to combine raw eggs with pasta. I was taught over our honeymoon that only the freshest eggs would do for pasta alla carbornara, so now I need to be able to know that the eggs I’m buying are fresh enough to do so–hence the need to buy directly from the farmer.

But what’s a girl to do when those greenmarkets aren’t a stone’s throw away anymore? While we aren’t horribly far from the city, it feels kind of silly to spend nearly $20 a person to go into Manhattan just to get eggs. That’s when the idea struck to add poached eggs to an otherwise simple combination of pasta, pancetta, and cheese, and that making the pasta drunken would keep things even more interesting.

4.16.12: dessert (fresh orange juice with strawberries/zumo de naranja con fresas)

Fresh orange juice with strawberries/zumo de naranjas con fresas

T.S. Eliot had it right: while April carries the promise of spring and teases us with ramps and morels and other ephemeral delights, we’re still stuck with some of the least inspiring fruits of the year as lamented recently by my friend Kitchen Witch. Yes, we still have citrus since the growing season for many of the best fruits now extend through May, but after a solid five or six months of tart acidity, I know I’m dying for something, anything, different in the fruit stand that’s in season and therefore not mealy or ludicrously expensive. And in April, usually, that seems far too much to ask.

But then, while flipping through my copy of Spanish Country Kitchen one lazy Saturday morning, a dessert I had flipped past hundreds of times stood out to me as perhaps the perfect dessert for this time of year: fresh orange juice with strawberries. While most of the seasonal citrus fruits are beyond their peaks, Valencian oranges are just getting started: first appearing in February, they are available through October, and are ideal as juicing oranges. Seeing some good-looking Californian strawberries on sale 2/$5 at Stew Leonards’ sealed the deal, and a few nights later we enjoyed this simple treat on one of the warmer spring evenings we’ve had lately.

4.21.12: El Clásico, feast-day chicken and a crazy coca.

Xavi demonstrates my mood during much of the match.

It’s been a tough week for FC Barcelona and its cules: an unexpected loss earlier in the week to Chelsea in the Champion’s League finals was bad enough, and then on Saturday we had to suffer the indignity of Real Madrid coming to Camp Nou and do the unthinkable–win. While RM has likely taken La Liga this season, it’s not over yet for my Catalans as there’s the second leg of Champion’s League yet to play this week, and in a month they’ll be fighting for the Copa del Rey and won’t have to beat Real Madrid to do so.

In other words: I have plenty of opportunities to whip up more Catalan food in support of the blaugranas.

04.03.12: chicken liver tortilla and pan con tomate/pa amb tomaquet

Chicken Liver Tortilla/Tortilla de Higaditos de Pollo

Tommy DeVito: Hey, what do you like, the leg or the wing, Henry? Or ya still go for the old hearts and lungs?
Henry Hill: [Vomiting] Oh, that’s so bad!

–Goodfellas

Despite Michael being the resident meat-lover in our household, I’m the offal enthusiast. I can’t get enough of the so-called nasty bits, and I think this has something to do with the fact that my grandmom would always let me have the various turkey giblets when she would roast a turkey, and I’d happily snack on a lung or heart with abandon. These days I naturally gravitate towards any offal tacos I find at a taqueria, but can usually only look with longing at the many recipes in our cookbooks that feature things like chicken liver or tripe because someone doesn’t like the smell/taste. (To be fair, this is how I feel about broccoli. Nasty stuff, that is.)

This means I am usually Tommy DeVito to Michael’s Henry Hill, and I’ll admit I enjoy quoting the line above with the same amount of glee that Joe Pesci does in Goodfellas. Related: that is an excellent movie.

04.14.20: pickled ramps.

 

The end of winter/beginning of spring is a rough time to have blog friends who live in places like California. They torture you with their tales of how amazing the weather is and with their gorgeous photos of Meyer lemon trees and budding strawberries, telegraphing tales of warmth to us suckers from the Rockies to the East who have to suffer through the indignities of the winter-spring transition that usually means lackluster fruits without an end in sight. Even with the relatively mild winter we had here, this can be a rather frustrating process while we wait for spring produce and weather warm enough to finally start planting things. One benefit we do get this time of year, however, is ramp season, but because we aren’t allowed nice things for very long, that season is cruelly short.

It’s been almost a year ago to the day since I’ve last had my hands on some ramps: having taken the day off to catch the Copa del Rey final between FC Barcelona and Real Madrid, I headed down to Union Square that morning to get what I figured would be the last of the ramps of the season and to finally try the pizza at Eataly. I think I ended up taking a good $12 worth home and we made salsa and pesto and all kinds of good things. (That was also the day that Michael told me that the job he wanted and eventually got was available once more, but it’s best not to get into that particular memory.) With us no longer being a mere two subway rides away from my favorite greenmarket, I had resigned myself to having a ramp-less spring this year, as Google searches came up with a lot of ways to build a ramp, but not to buy wild leeks locally. This, to be honest, didn’t surprise me all that much.

3.25.12: pizza and the return of Mad Men.

Sweet and Sour Fig Pizza with Goat Cheese, Shallots and Thyme

Do you still have “Zou Bisou Bisou” stuck in your head after last Sunday’s Mad Men? (Did I just get it back in your head after you thought you had bested that earworm? Sorry.) While it was inevitable that we were going to celebrate its return after at 17-month long hiatus with food and drink, the fact that you only rarely see any of the characters with food (with none of it looking all that appetizing to boot) meant that I wasn’t going to adhere to any strict theme, save for insisting Michael make us a round of Old Fashioneds. Certain nods to the show, after all, must be made, and cocktails have always felt far more appropriate than food.

Caprese salad and old fashioneds.

Besides: we had finally gotten a couple of new half sheet pans at Chef’s the day before, and I was in the mood for homemade pizza.

Jamon, jamon, or: the story of the sex ham.

Jamón Ibérico de Bellota

Do you have those foods that you never, ever purchase (usually due to some combination of expense, availability, and no idea what to do with it) but long for anyway? Or foods that you have reserved in your mind to only indulge in for a very specific, very celebratory reason, regardless of whether you’ve ever tasted it or not? The image of sitting down at a fine steakhouse and ordering the Wagyu ribeye along with a glass of 80-dollar scotch comes to mind, if just a tad on the extreme side. To get to my point: it’s the treat that you know you can only indulge in as a treat maybe once a  year at most, or something you’d only buy for very, very special reasons.

I have a few things on that list like mozzarella di bufala and a really good bottle of champagne, but my biggest obsession that I never indulged in was getting some jamón ibérico de bellota either from Fairway or Despaña. While no cured ham could be considered a bargain, ibérico is the platinum standard, widely considered the apex of cured ham deliciousness and usually it can only be had for, at minimum, 100 bucks a pound. When you live in a place like New York, ephemeral luxuries like this feel far too outrageous to indulge in without knowing exactly what you’re getting, so I  told myself that I would figure out a really good reason to get some eventually. I’d see the hock of it at Fairway when it would be my turn to wait in line at the deli, but I always managed to resist an impulse to purchase it.

01.01.12: brunch (kumquat-rosemary marmalade over goat cheese and toast)

Kumquat-rosemary marmalade over goat cheese and toast

Did you know that Stamford’s motto is “Stamford: the city that works?” It’s kind of prosaic until you realize how many companies have offices here: from international banks to cosmetic giants to The Maury Povich Show. (Seriously–the studio where it, Jerry Springer and the show starring one of Jerry Springer’s security guys is on the next street over from us, a factoid that delighted my father-in-law to no end when we took him on a tour of our neighborhood.) It’s a good thing because all of those workers help support the local restaurant scene, but since most of them are commuting from other places, there seems to be a dearth of weekend brunch options around here. Even though we were never big brunch people when we lived in New York, it was oddly comforting to see all of those people out and about on a Saturday or Sunday diving into steak and eggs and sipping mimosas.

Here, not so much. Maybe when spring comes I’ll do a little more research, but for now we’re on our own if we have a craving for brunch food.

Tales from the Fairway cheese counter: Moliterno laced with black truffle.

Moliterno laced with black truffle

Truffle-laced anything, if you ask me, should come under a great deal of scrutiny. There was a great article in the New York Times from a few years ago that blew the lid off of the “magic” of truffle-infused-olive oil and frankly, had me wary of anything that claimed to have anything to do with the prohibitively expensive fungus. I reluctantly got back on the truffle bandwagon when I finally tried a can of porcini and truffle sauce that reminded me of Piemonte in an instant (minus the plane fare and the two-hour drive from Malpensa). I was slightly more convinced when a small Italian import brand sampled white and black truffle mayonnaise, honeys, and butters a few times at Fairway, though the price was still a little too high for what it was. Then Steve Jenkins–the man who wrote the book on cheese and is Fairway’s cheesemonger–made an appearance at Fairway Stamford last weekend and was sampling this cheese…and now I’m firmly back on the Truffles Are Awesome But Only In Specific Situations.