Lessons in Greens April 7, 2008

One of my favorite food experiences of all time was cooking at Hacienda las Trancas outside San Miguel de Allende in Mexico. The hacienda’s gardens are lush and verdant and Yolanda, head chef there, made great use of the plentiful greens—lacinato kale, Brussels greens, baby lettuce, and chard. Greens are plentiful producers, and sometimes their overwhelming abundance leads to a certain apathy. Of course, straightforward preparations can be wonderful if the greens are good. In fact, we would often go out at sunset, just before dinner and clip a variety of leaves, toss quickly with a simple lemon vinaigrette and serve, the just-picked grassy, peppery flavor needing little to enhance it. Yolanda also showed me how to “cook” kale cut in the thinnest ribbons with a squeeze of lemon and a sprinkling of olive oil and sea salt. Macerated briefly, the flavor mellows and the greens lose their leathery bite and attain a mellow softness. Simplicity and restraint were truly the hallmarks of Yolanda’s cooking, but she had several more elaborate tricks with greens up her sleeve as well. One day she explained that she was going to show me how to make “tamales verdes.” These, I discovered to my unending delight, were shredded chicken, queso fresco and tomatillo salsa enclosed by feather-light masa and wrapped in a chard leaf. If you have a favorite tamale recipe, give this a try by replacing the corn husk with a chard leaf.

So, inspired by Yolanda and her ways with greens, I offer you this stuffed chard recipe—feel free to adjust the recipe according to any meat or vegetables you have on hand. It’s definitely that kind of recipe!

Stuffed Swiss Chard with Moroccan Flavors

1 onion, minced

4 cloves garlic, minced

2 lg. cans crushed tomatoes

2 Tbs golden raisins or currants

½ cinnamon stick

1 TBS paprika (use sweet Hungarian, hot or smoked or a combination)

2 tsp cumin

1 TBS honey

¼ c. minced flat-leaf parsley

Salt & pepper to taste

2 c. browned ground beef (any cooked meat, crumbled tofu or sautéed mushrooms will work too)

1 c. cooked texmati brown rice

1 c. cooked and drained chickpeas

1 bunch chard—any variety (other greens will work well too)

¼ c. crumbled feta cheese

Saute onions and garlic in olive oil until soft but not browned. Add crushed tomatoes, raisins, cinnamon stick, paprika, cumin, honey, parsley, salt & pepper. Simmer about 30 minutes. Reserve 1 c. sauce and add meat and chickpeas to remaining sauce. Simmer about 20 minutes. Stir in rice. Roll filling up in chard leaves and place in baking pan. Cover with reserved sauce and top with feta. Bake covered with foil at 350 until hot throughout.

143 Million Pounds of Love February 21, 2008

“Did you watch the video?”  Thomas asked after all the recent news coverage surrounding the recall of 143 million pounds of beef.  Of course I didn’t watch it . . . it would have made me feel about as dirty as watching a snuff film, which I guess it was.  Everyone knows my stance on conventionally raised feedlot beef, and everyone agrees they would not want to participate in such atrocities, yet this is what we feed our nation’s children, and this is what we perpetuate when we proclaim, “This roast was on sale for $1.99 a pound!”  Well, I am not here to preach (yea, right, I’m so great at withholding my opinions . . . ).  Since we seem to be caught in the disconnect between what we know is wrong and the dollar menu at McDonalds, let us imagine 143 million pounds of love and accept nothing else on our tables.

 

Food is love, or it should be.  That love is not always reciprocated, especially when one is cooking for children.  It can at times be a sort of one-sided affair.  Like, I pour my heart and soul into making something tasty and nourishing, and they say, “yuck.”  Dinner at our house often involves lots of strategic planning and the orchestration of “flexitarian” meals that can be adapted to everyone’s taste and maturity level.  And my kids are not even particularly picky.  There is, however, one meal I can make that effortlessly makes every last one of us happy, is incredibly simple and straightforward to prepare, and makes any mundane evening a party.  

 

Hamburgers at our house are never a thoughtlessly slapped-together patty of meat between a tasteless, starchy bun.  Every step of creation, while essentially simple, must be treated with the utmost respect.  The magic is truly in the simplicity, so the ritual must be carefully followed, and we have honed the process to a science.  Here’s how:

 

• Start fire—not chemical-laden briquettes or gas.  Must use B & B 100% natural hardwood lumb charcoal.
• Make patties—1/2 pound per person of one part Thunderheart bison to one part local, grass-fed beef.  Of course you must not compromise here.  Whole Foods now carries local grass-fed beef at the Lamar location & perhaps others too.  Do not add any other seasoning except a little salt on the outside of the patties.  Do not mix too vigorously, or pack patties too tightly.  After making them, press down in the center of each patty with the heel of your hand to create a little indention—this will keep the burgers flat when they grill & let them cook evenly.
• Slice a yellow onion pretty thick.
• Slice a juicy tomato—there are local greenhouse tomatoes at the farmers market & local heirloom tomatoes at Central Market—both are picked ripe and are juicy and yummy even before tomato season.
• Central Market makes really good hamburger buns—split open & butter both halves with some softened butter.
• Slice thinly some good white cheddar (Full Quiver)—something pretty sharp is best.
• Grill patties, onions and hamburger buns.  When you flip burgers over for the last time, place cheese on top & let it melt.  I like burgers medium rare—when you get good, local beef and know where it’s coming from, you can do this.

 

This is a hamburger that goes great with a good bottle of red wine.  We usually don’t mess around with potato salad, French fries, or any other silly, detracting frippery.  Although I must admit that the other night, we did precede them with some icy, briny, just-shucked oysters.  And corn on the cob when it’s in season is certainly appropriate.

 

This is what American food should be about.  This is a cuisine we can be proud of, food worth waiting for, food worth the splurge, food that has value.  When my children come to the table for these burgers, there is always the usual noisy chattering and jostling, then . . . silence.  Total silence.  Sometimes they even close their eyes when they take the first bite.

Deep Chocolate Love February 15, 2008

All the food magazines have blasted us this past week with articles about chocolate.  I must say, as someone loyal to chocolate year round, I am a little annoyed by these yearly Johnny-come-latelies who come out of the woodwork every Valentine’s Day.  And white chocolate–puh-leeze!  Where are you, “oh great-chocolate-lovers” on January 4^th or September 21^st or May 13^th?  I can tell you where I am—on my way to the “chocolate basket” in the pantry, to get my daily fix.

 Even loyal chocolate-lovers have a favorite, though, and I will tell you mine.  There is a little café across from one of the cathedrals in San Miguel de Allende that serves Spanish hot chocolate and churros.  Do not order anything else, do not bring a magazine or book to read, and only go with someone who does not require any of your attention, and who will not chatter needlessly in the background as you tune them out. 

 The chocolate comes in a cup that is really a bowl with a handle on the side.  It is thick,  It is dark.  It is barely sweet.  On the side are 3 sugar and cinnamon crusted churros.  Take a sip of chocolate.  Bite into a churro.  There is alchemy in the combination of bitter, rich dark chocolate, a little salt, sugar, spices, and fried yeast dough.  I’m really amazed I didn’t faint.  Not then, and not all the other times I’ve been either.

 (Note: The hot chocolate and churros at Hugo’s in Houston is a reasonable, although not completely accurate, replication of the above experience.)    

Home Cooking February 15, 2008

As you can probably tell from my menu, I’ve had a craving lately for Southern food.  My repertoire at home and at work usually tends towards Italian influences—perhaps because this cuisine is adaptable to so many different vegetables, always goes good with wine, and usually involves parmesan cheese, one of the greatest creations of human kind.  There are times, though, when I am drawn back to my roots. 

The span of my life has essentially been a bridge between two worlds.  Before me was a long line of cooks who made things themselves, using what was in season and local, usually things they had grown themselves.  I was born in 1968, long after the “advances” that created “freedom” from the tyranny of the kitchen—jell-o, cake mixes, packaged bread with preservatives, cool-whip, powdered gravy, Crisco, margarine, instant coffee, coffeemate, etc, etc.  My “country” grandmother relied on all these items heavily.  She cooked for a man who demanded three big cooked meals a day plus a homemade dessert—every day.  I can imagine how exciting it must have been to have a little break, although I can’t say that it really allowed her to get it out of the kitchen.  Those habits, those grooves in the linoleum were just too deep.  Most of the time, though, she still cooked the same way she always had, so I was able to taste homemade yeast rolls, huckleberry pie, chicken pot pie, venison in gravy, long-simmered peas, fried catfish, refrigerator pickles, and occasionally some windfall like squirrels or duck, and always the bounty from the kitchen garden.

So, I hold these memories in my DNA—I know when I taste meat from the feedlot or farmed catfish that it’s not supposed to taste that way.  I know that Luby’s and Cracker Barrel are corporate jokes played on Americans lonesome for their long-dead mother’s cooking.  But how will my children know?  What will “home cooking” mean to them? 

This is why it is so important for me to buy a pork shoulder or bacon from a farmer, here where my children live—they will know how pork is supposed to taste.  When I make them scrambled eggs in the morning, I open the carton to Becky & Kevin Ottmer’s eggs—some small, some huge, and all colors—white, pale blue, mint green, brown.  The eggs Liam ate this morning were brilliant yellow and creamy, with not a whiff of that yucky sulfurous smell that made me hate scrambled eggs as a kid.  This is why it is so important to me also, when I offer Southern food to my customers, that it not be a sad imitation, but the real thing.  And there’s no reason it shouldn’t be.  Southern food grew out of a desire to nourish the soul, not just the bodies, of the hardworking people it fed.  It was a response to the joys of the seasons from people closely connected to the earth.  It is communal food—easy to cook in huge batches, as it so often was after harvest, barn-raising or Sunday baptism.  So, there’s no need for me to adulterate this food with “convenience” items like chicken bouillon—this is food that only requires time, love, and tradition to be transcendent.  We’ve got all that.   

Valentine’s Day Fiasco February 8, 2008

Everyone who has ever worked in a restaurant has a horror story to tell. Some of my happiest times and proudest moments have been in a restaurant kitchen, but so has the absolute worst day of my entire life, which in the midst of the season of hearts, flowers, ribbons, and chocolates, I will now share with you.

 

Flashback to 2003. My restaurant, Liberty Market and Café, was one of the few independently-owned restaurants in Beaumont—we had a reputation for great service, great wine, innovative food and a beautiful atmosphere in a gorgeous historic building in downtown. We were a destination restaurant—a great place for a romantic dinner or a special night out. I also struggled with a “front of the house” manager who was less than ideal. She informed me towards the end of January that she would be going to Seattle to visit a friend to see “The Vagina Monologues” for Valentine’s Day. Not a request, a statement. Fine, I thought—we’ll deal with that later. Right now, I’m too busy crafting a seven course prix fixe Valentine’s menu to worry about it.

 

One of my biggest weaknesses is the inability to say no (actually the events I am about to relate to you went a long way to curing me of this malady). As the phone calls came pouring in for Valentine’s Day reservations, we reveled in the busy night we were going to have—everyone in a restaurant loves the adrenaline rush of being “slammed.” I had decided on two seatings, and the reservation book quickly filled up for both the early and the late seating. One of the logistical issues is that on Valentine’s Day, all the reservations are for two . . . with the exception of a few large tables of young people or girls’ night out tables of 6 or 8. All our tables were square four-tops that could be pushed together to make larger tables, but there were several huge architectural columns throughout the dining room that made reconfiguring the space very difficult. Fine, I thought—we’ll deal with that later. Right now, I’m too busy crafting a seven course prix fixe Valentine’s menu to worry about it.

 

Plates and glasses became another issue. Running everything on an extremely tight budget meant that I could only have a limited amount of the beautiful, oversized white bistro plates and bowls that I wanted. A seven course dinner in a packed restaurant meant that I essentially needed seven plates per person or a platoon of dishwashers. Fine, I thought—we’ll deal with that later. Right now, I’m too busy crafting a seven course prix fixe Valentine’s menu to worry about it.

 

One of the first things I vowed when opening a restaurant was that my children would never be put on the back burner. I must be supermom and a successful business woman. Martha Stewart could do it, so why couldn’t I? Valentine’s Day was on Friday that year, and as soon as the restaurant closed on Wednesday, we started prepping. We cooked until about 3:00 am, I went home, fell into bed and got up again Thursday to get the kids to school and back to the restaurant to open for lunch. In between lunch and dinner shifts on Thursday, I ran to pick up the kids, make rice krispie treats with pink & red m & ms in them and homemade Valentines with glue and glitter. The glue caused the valentines to stick together, so Tess & I laid them out on the driveway to dry, weighted down with small stones. Then, dinner, baths, bed for the children, and back to the restaurant for the dinner shift.

After closing the restaurant on Thursday night, we began hard-core prep. There was no walk-in in our gorgeous historic space, so the cooler quickly piled up. We still had to have what we needed for regular lunch service on Friday, so it was a real trick to open any refrigerator door. As it got later and later, I finally conceded that I would only be going home on Thusday night/Friday morning for a quick shower, feed the children breakfast and take them to school. By the time I rolled in to the driveway around 5:30 in the morning, the valentines we left out to dry had been covered in morning dew, so I ran inside to dry them with the hairdryer while the children ate breakfast. I dressed them both in their cute valentines t-shirts, dropped them at school with party treats and valentines and ran back to open for lunch.

 

Lunch service was uneventful, but we were not able to set up or take delivery of the extra tables chairs, tablecloths, dishes, wineglasses, and ice we needed to get through the night until after lunch, as there was no place to put anything. As all the deliveries began arriving, I had to turn set-up duties over to the hostess, as I headed into the kitchen to prepare our extremely complicated, fussy, and convoluted mise en place for dinner service. I knew that I still had not created an ordering system for the waitstaff (which included several new people brought in for the special occasion), but thought, ok, it can wait, let me just get ready.

 

About 30 minutes before the first seating, I came out into the dining room to discover that the large round tables we brought in had been set up blocking the back way into the scullery where dirty dishes were brought directly to the dishwasher. To remedy this, the entire dining room would have to be reconfigured. Oh well, I thought, at least people won’t be tripping over the waitress whose job it was that night to tie ribbon onto the spoon handles of the spoons holding the crème brulee bites (one of the six components of the dessert tasting plate). At this point, I had to slip into “knuckle down and deal with it mode,” as I was operating on three hours of sleep out of about 58 hours and my trouble-shooting skills were dwindling.

 

The first hordes of people showed up all at once, as they do for a set-time seating. Of course this means that the kitchen receives about 80 orders at once. No problem—we miraculously got that out. And then everything fell completely apart. Half the orders were wrong and came back to the kitchen to be “re-fired.” As dirty dishes came back, they came through the kitchen, as the back way was blocked. So the kitchen was a mess of waiters (who traditionally NEVER, NEVER go beyond the expo window), dishes, returned food and a waitress sitting on the floor tying ribbon onto spoon handles. I must say, in my defense, that I knew all this was my fault and did not raise my voice once throughout this entire ordeal. Probably only because I knew that if I unleashed, it would end with me setting my hair on fire and running through the dining room naked.

 

Of course the customer response to this was predictable—disgruntled men seeing their romantic hopes for the evening dwindling by the minute. It wasn’t pretty. Somehow we staggered to our feet again in the kitchen and plugged on. Food was coming out, but not fast enough—not nearly fast enough. The second wave of customers came in when the seated ones were on about course three. So, the entire restaurant was filled to about three times its capacity. Everyone was waiting, no one was getting what they wanted. When you are in charge of piloting such a vessel, the temptation to crumple to the floor is immense. The bartender might as well have yelled out, “Iceberg, straight ahead!!!!”

 

Somehow, we got though it and only had to comp a few tickets. Most everyone got into the spirit and pulled through, but not without a few pointed “$0.00” tips (which I of course covered, as none of this was the waitstaff’s fault), a small kitchen fire, and many broken dishes. At the end of the night, I crawled home and collapsed.

 

Beaumont is a town where, as a native daughter, everyone wants to tell you the harsh truth because they “care about you.” The worst part of the ordeal was when a “friend” called to tell me, because she “thought I should know,” that so-and so was unhappy with their experience that night. Finally, I broke down and cried so hard I sounded like a dog barking. And I am not a cryer. As wounded as I was, it was a fantastic experience—it truly changed me. I have no problem saying no when I know the consequences will affect others, and I would never again have an employee who would take advantage of me. I am a planner now, not just a dreamer—and we lived to have many more wonderful, romantic, gourmet Valentine’s dinners. Even the most well-run restaurants can get over-stressed on those nights and days where EVERYONE eats out.  Expect to wait and remember to tip your server even if things don’t go well–it’s probably not their fault!  I can tell you where I won’t be this coming Thursday. I’ll be snug at home with a great glass of wine and a romantic dinner for two!

A Local Food Library February 1, 2008

Plenty, Alisa Smith & J.B. MacKinnon

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Brabara Kingsolver

The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan

In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan

Moveable Feasts, Sarah Murray

“Rethinking the Meat Guzzler” The New York Times Mark Bittman

I would love to hear your thoughts . . .

A Chef’s Guide to Healthy Eating February 1, 2008

“How do you stay so thin?” is a question chefs and restaurant people hear all the time. In my case “so thin” would be quite an exaggeration, but I understand the question. The truth is that the more I cook and engage with food, the healthier I am. I love food, obviously, and after a couple of misadventures with the rice, grapefruit, and cabbage soup diets in the 80’s, I vowed never to diet again. The very idea of counting food, calculating it, weighing it, treating it as chemistry rather than joy is simply too distressing to contemplate. If I am miserable, bereft of food, how is being thin going to console me? So, over the years I have found that learning to love food and increasing my activity level have been the best strategies for maintaining health and balance. Insistence on eating the best of everything helps too.

 

Being a chef in America means that I will always have customers who diet, however. I was a big fan of The Sonoma Diet when it came out—it at least advocated pleasure and balance (which is probably why it was never the craze the Atkins diet was). My new favorite book is Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food. His advice is pretty simple: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” The simple word “food” belies a more complex issue—so much of what is available in our world isn’t really food but edible, manufactured food-like products. Read the book, follow his advice, and order from Dishalicious—you can be sure that everything you get from us will most assuredly be real food. Healthy, very real, very local, not too much & mostly plants.

Dishalicious on KEYE January 24, 2008

Elizabeth Dannheim on KEYE did a great story on Monday about locally grown and organic food, featuring Boggy Creek Farm & Dishalicious. If you missed it, you can watch the video here: click here for KEYE story.

Culinary Beginnings January 24, 2008

“Where did you go to cooking school?” This is the question I hear perhaps most often from people curious about what it’s like to cook for a living. They are always disappointed to hear that I have a master’s degree in medieval literature, although probably not quite as disappointed as the folks who financed that education. I always say I can answer any of the brown questions on Trivial Pursuit with about 95% accuracy, so the expensive education was not a complete waste.

The truth is that I began working in restaurants the summer between my sophomore and junior years in high school, and have been hooked ever since. I went to undergrad at LSU, working my way through some really great restaurants under the guidance of chefs cooking creole and Cajun food using classic French techniques. While I might have slept through biology class, I never missed a shift at work or an opportunity to learn from these great cooks. From the first time I stepped into a restaurant kitchen, I knew that I would never feel more comfortable anywhere else. There are “front of the house” people and “back of the house” people. I’m married to a FOH, and I’ve worked hard to overcome my true BOH nature to build businesses and make my way in the world, but the truth is that I love the tiny bubble world of the kitchen, which has its own rhythm, its own language, its own inside jokes, and its own clearly defined culture and code of conduct. It’s . . . well, it’s really medieval in there. Rough, loud, hot, smoky, but when everything goes right, it’s like hearing the music of the spheres.

My mother and my grandmother taught me to love food. My grandmother was from north Louisiana and was the living embodiment of comfort food. She herself was large and soft, and she made food that was too—fluffy, heavenly biscuits and rolls; pastry that shattered with the edge of your fork, revealing creamy chicken potpie underneath or the dark purple mystery of huckleberry pie. From her I learned the pleasures of catching, growing and gathering your food, setting aside stores, and practicing the craft of cooking enough to achieve an intimate knowledge of the science behind it—to recognize the weight in your hand of the correct measure of flour or salt. My mother too knows how to feed a person’s soul. “Putting on a pot of beans” is her shorthand for offering hospitality to anyone in the vicinity. These are not women who plated food and garnished it, but cooked in huge pots for whoever might be tempted by the aroma of smoked pork, garlic, and above all, that great healer of lost souls, that mysterious liquor so much greater than anything that goes into it . . . gravy. No one can make gravy like my mother, and poor thing, I made her take a pain pill and make it on Thanksgiving, just several days after having both shoulders operated on. She could have stood there and told me exactly what to do, but magic requires the touch of the wizard . . .

My father, while a great cook only in certain, highly controlled circumstances, influenced me too. He is a great lover of brunch, and the repertoire of his kitchen successes includes all the New Orleans standards—eggs Benedict, brandy milk punch, and perhaps most important, bananas Foster. A successful trial lawyer in the 70s, he styled himself a Renaissance man and bon vivant, with a pilot’s license and 4-seater airplane. We often flew to New Orleans from Beaumont for brunch—I remember being there one snowy morning and making snowmen in the courtyard with the bartender, using olives and cherries for eyes and mouth. An only child (in the 70s), I was free to wander into the kitchen, where I would entertain the staff with my favorite song, “Let me Entertain You,” from Gypsy Rose Lee by way of Ethel Merman. No one in our house, or in that decade really, believed in censorship, or, obviously, the obsessive oversight of children. We traveled farther afield as well—to Delmonico’s in Mexico City, to “21” in New York. The 70s and early 80s culinary scene was marked by two elements that strongly influenced my choice of career—“tableside” service and the art of flambé. Menu items then were named classically—Caesar salad, cherries jubilee, bananas Foster, steak Diane. There was no poetry to the menu, just the names of dishes that everyone recognized. You looked at the menu (no prices on the ladies’ menus), ordered what you wanted, and a waiter would appear with a cart, and toss or carve your food, and if you were lucky, hopefully set it on fire. And that, ultimately, is why I do what I do. I recognized then that, as well as comfort and sustenance, food could be theater and spectacle. It can be anything you need it to be—it provides a means of connecting with other people that nothing else on this earth can match—intimate, formal, homey or dramatic, from the farmer planting the seed to the waiter flaming it tableside. Who wouldn’t develop a lifelong passion for studying that?

Field Trip Ideas??? January 18, 2008

Several of you have asked about cooking classes . . . I would love more thoughts on ways we could get together. I would be happy to host free cooking classes, field trips to the farms that feed us, or tours of the farmers market. Please offer feedback and ideas, either by posting a reply to the blog or by emailing me directly & we’ll get some events on the calendar!