Yearly Archives: 2010

Abstract 4th of July Glazed 7up Cake

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Abstract glaze for a 4th of July cake

My mother is going to see family in New York City and Germany this summer.  She’ll be gone for two months and is leaving on Tuesday, so I made a couple of special things as a sort of a bon voyage last night.  This is a reason to celebrate for all of us, if you catch my drift.

The meal turned out to be a total bomb.  It was hot in the kitchen, I was rushing and trying to do too much, and my leg was bothering me.  I have osteoarthritis in my right leg, which set in, they think, because of a minor injury I had years and years ago.  Standing for long periods wreaks havoc with that leg, even with a gel mat.  I was one miserable camper even before the oyster soup overcooked and broke.  Then I undercooked the brie in puff pastry, so it was gummy.  Amateur mistakes that were my own fault.  I stewed in my own juices as my family ate the oysters I fished out of the soup with the top layer of the baked brie, telling me all the while how good everything was.  You have to love kind people.

I sought to redeem that meal via the 7up cake I made for Matthew to take to a party today, which I gave an abstract glaze in red, white and blue.

Here’s how you can do it, too.

1).  First, make a pound cake in a bundt pan of some kind and let it cool completely.  Make this 7up cake, which is a huge favorite in my home, but ignore the glaze in the recipe.  It’s buttery and dense with a lemony zing, and uses 7up as a leavening agent.  When it’s cool, set out a sheet pan, line it with foil, place a small bowl on top, and then place the cake on the bowl, right side up, so it’s elevated.  Use a bowl whose diameter is smaller than that of the cake.  Check out the photos below.

2).  Assemble blue and red food coloring (you can buy concentrated natural food colorings on the web or in baking or specialty stores), confectioners sugar, lemon juice, one medium-sized bowl and two smaller bowls.  Use bowls that won’t be ruined by the food coloring.  You’ll also need three spoons.

3).  Place three cups of confectioners sugar in the larger of the three bowls.  Add a very small amount of lemon juice — no more than three tablespoons.  Mix in to check consistency.  Add more lemon juice in tiny increments, so you wind up with a very thick glaze that runs slowly.  You will need only a small amount of lemon juice!!!  Transfer 1/3 of the glaze to each of the smaller bowls.

4).  Add a few drops of blue food coloring to one of the smaller bowls of glaze and mix it in thoroughly.  Add more, if needed, until you get the color you want.  Repeat for red.

5).  Using a spoon and holding it above the cake, apply white glaze (the one you added no color to that’s remaining in the larger bowl), allowing it to cover the top well and run down the sides and middle. Check out the photo below for an idea of how things should look.  Allow cake to sit a few minutes.

6).  Apply red next, using quite a bit of glaze with each spoonful.  Drizzle on using a looping motion.  You want plenty of red, but allow lots of the white to show.  Make sure the red glaze runs down the sides and middle.  Allow cake to sit a few minutes.

7).  With blue, swirl all over cake in small ribbons.  You want this layer thin with lots of lines so it creates an abstract design.

8).  Let cake sit for a couple of hours.  Do not touch it!  Do not cover it!

9).  Tent foil over cake gently and let it sit all night so that the glaze hardens completely.  Do not touch cake with foil!  Do not move cake!  Leave the whole contraption as-is and cover it with foil!

Coffee Can Spice Potpourri

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Outdated spices in a coffee can used as potpourri — punch holes in the lid to use

I put it off as long as I possibly could, but today I bit the bullet and cleaned out my spice cabinet.

The only other job I hate more is updating the earthquake kit – which no one else in the house ever seems to think about.  Every three years or so I unpack the clothes to see what needs to be replaced.  After about six years elastic starts to give way, and it would be bad enough to deal with an earthquake let alone walk around in underwear with elastic that’s shot.  Then I replace the food, which leaves me with outdated beef jerky and cans of tuna, chicken, coffee, dog food, milk – you name it.  Some people have those little “all in one” packets that include everything you need, supposedly, but we want to be able to eat real food and cover ourselves with actual blankets.  Then there’s the first aid kit, meds, flashlight batteries, toilet tissue, paper towels, toothpaste and the million other things you’d rather not do without for a week.  An earthquake kit needs to be packed well, too, so the bugs and moisture don’t get at it.  It’s a real drag to deal with.  When I lived on Talbot Avenue in Albany, there was a block association.  Each house was responsible for a certain item, and there were even scheduled earthquake drills.  Here on Clayton Avenue in El Cerrito, most of the neighbors either don’t talk to you or are downright unfriendly.  I don’t really care, though.  Being from New York City, I’m used to living anonymously.  That said, the unfriendly residents on my block had better make damn sure they have good earthquake kits.

This day it was all about cleaning out old spices and making a list of what I need to purchase.  I have lots of spices in various forms.  Some I buy at Smart & Final, since you can’t beat the prices, and quite a few are in little bags, having been purchased in bulk at Berkeley Bowl or Whole Foods.  Some whole spices, like cumin seed, last a long time.  Others, not so much.  You really have to sniff your stock regularly.  I also went through baking, decorating and cheese-making supplies, like meringue powder, nonpariels and citric acid.

Rather than throwing away aromatics, like cloves and allspice, I dump them into a coffee can.  This go-round I also had marjoram, dried mint, thyme, rosemary, black peppercorns, cinnamon and cumin- all of which went into the can, including those that were ground.  I then put a few holes or notches in the plastic lid and pop the can in  a place that might benefit from a spicy scent – like the sneaker closet.

If you have only whole spices to discard, stuff them in an old, clean, cotton tube sock.  Tie it closed at the top and hang it in your closet.

It feels good to recycle things, and I’m always looking for ideas, so please email me yours!

Make gravlax at home – it’s easy!

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Plate of sliced gravlax

Although I enjoy cooking in all its forms, I do have my niche – as all cooks do.

What made me love garde manger, which means, loosely, “guard of the pantry,” and involves the cold kitchen, I’ll never really know, but my Northern European roots are probably to blame.  I was fed smoked and cured proteins pretty much from birth, and knew a high-quality aspic well before Kindergarten.

When you find yourself daydreaming about the cross-hatching and radish roses on the chopped liver at the appetizing counter at Waldbaum’s during 4th grade geography, you know you have issues.  When you’re planning Christmas Eve hors d’oeuvres and it involves a trip to Fortunoff for a fondue set when you haven’t yet reached your full height, well, I think you have to face facts.

If you’re not in the cooking trade, you may not know what “the cold kitchen” is.  It’s cures, molds, terrines, pates, galantines, confits, sausages, smoked meat and fish products, salads, decorative flourishes, ice and food sculptures and cold soups and sauces.  The part that inolves all the work with pork falls under charcuterie.

While chef de garde manger is now often referred to as an entry-level cooking position – it involves the salad station and small plate prep, requiring limited experience – a true garde manger is a highly-skilled chef in a specialty with gravitas.  This profession dates back to pre-revolutionary France and is considered seriously old-school.  In high-end kitchens, this is the position responsible for numerous classical dishes and presentations.

Garde manger has evolved over the years to accommodate changing tastes, eating patterns and lifestyles.  I think most cooking school graduates will make one chaud froid for every 10,000 sides of smoked salmon they produce during their careers – unless they’re banquet chefs!

While certain things that fall under this genre are best learned in a formal cooking class,  there are some that are quite easy to make at home – but most people don’t know that.

Today I want to pass along to you my simplified recipe for gravlax, aka gravad lax, which is dill-scented cured salmon served with a mustard sauce.  Often an appetizer, it’s great as a full summer meal served with crispbread, like Wasa, and a big salad.

Gravlax is akin to lox, which is cold-smoked, in its silky smoothness and rich mouthfeel.  It looks like lox and is sliced thinly in the same manner.  Gravlax is not exposed to any heat, however, rather just cured in a salt and sugar mix.

It’s expensive and not that easy to find.  If you want to have it out, go to Ikea.  Buy a whole package of their crispbread before you go into the cafeteria, then get several gravlax plates.  You can feed 3 or 4 people gravlax this way for under $20.  This is a serious bargain.  I tell you to get the package of crispbread in advance so you don’t have to pay the per-piece price for extra in the cafeteria – which, at something like 35 cents per piece, is the only insanely-priced item in the whole store!

No need to have it out, though.  You can make it at home a couple of days before you need it.

If you want to use my traditional gravlax method, look here, but I needed to find a way to minimize the amount of refrigerator real estate I used to prep this, having been downsized from a double-wide unit recently.  Long story involving a lemon of an LG that my appliance store, Galvin, took back after two years.  It looked nice, had a bottom freezer and French doors, but the ice maker was wreaking havoc.  In exchange, I got a GE with a side freezer.  The ice maker on this one is a problem, too.  Don’t even get me started with ice makers.  I never had one.  Never wanted one.  Was convinced to get one.  Had nothing but problems since then.  Ice is all over my freezer – again.  I get ice and frost on the floor when I pull out the ice bin.  Why?  It does not stop making ice.  Ever.

Back to the fish.

A few key pieces of information:

1).  Buy fatty salmon.  Your gravlax will not work with salmon that is lean.  You have been warned.  If you can’t get wild, fatty, king/chinook salmon, buy a sustainably farmed version – of some kind of fatty salmon.  Keta salmon, which is all over the Bay Area as I write this, is too lean.  Steelhead salmons – which are actually sea-faring rainbow trout, believe it or not (or, I should say, rainbow trout are salmon that never leave home) – have a medium fat content and are OK.

2).  Buy a boneless side of salmon with the skin.  Or a piece of a boneless side with the skin.  Ask your fishmonger if the pin bones have been removed.  If not, ask that they be removed.  If you need to remove them, look here.

3).  Buy good fish from a market like Monterey Fish – or Berkeley Bowl’s fish counter.  The fish will be fresh, and these people care about sustainability.  Do not buy crappy salmon from a supermarket in a package with all kinds of goo.  You know exactly what I mean.

4).  Work clean.  You should always do this, but take extra care when you cure or preserve something.

Honestly, gravlax alone  justifies my two years of culinary school given how often I make it.

Gravlax with Mustard-Dill Sauce

1 side of salmon with high (or at least medium) fat content with no pin bones (see above)
1 lemon (a fresh lemon!!!)
1 ounce plain vodka, gin or aquavit
1/2 cup Kosher salt
1/2 cup raw sugar
2 tablespoons ground black pepper
1 large bunch of dill, washed and absolutely dry.  It must be dry!!  Reserve a small piece of dill for sauce.
Aluminum foil
Paper towels
2 pastry brushes

1).  Make cure mix.  Whisk together salt, sugar and pepper.  Set aside.
2).  On counter, lay out a double thickness of foil that is about 6 inches longer than your side of salmon.
3).  Fold about 6 paper towels in half and create a bed that is about the size of the salmon.
4).  Lay side of salmon, skin side down, on the paper towel bed.
5).  Squeeze the lemon over the flesh, and then brush it onto the entire surface.
6).  Brush the booze onto the entire surface with the other brush.
7).  Sprinkle the cure mix over the fish, making sure you cover the entire flesh, applying it more thickly to thicker parts.  Don’t touch or rub it in.  Use all the mix.
8).  Cut a couple of inches of stem off the dill and arrange the rest on top of the cure mix without disturbing it.
9).  Fold ends of foil over, then sides.  Cover the top with another large piece of foil.  You want to wind up with a rectangular foil-covered package.  Keep fish perfectly flat at all times and do not bend fish!!!
10).  Lay fish packet flat in back of fridge on a few paper towels or another piece of foil – just in case there is a little seepage.  Sometimes there is, sometimes there isn’t.
11).  Allow to cure for two days.  Three days is OK if you have a very thick fillet.
12).  Remove from fridge, open packet and move fillet to a cutting board that has a couple of paper towels on it.  Discard dill.  If cure does not come off easily, it’s OK to quickly rinse fish under cold water and then gently pat dry, bottom and top.
13.  Using a clean cutting board and a sharp, thin knife, cut long, thin slices, holding knife almost parallel to the fish.  See photo.  This takes some practice, but you’ll get the hang of it.  I use a serrated knife – even though a serrated knife is generally not the tool for this job, but it works very well because it’s so thin and holds a razor-sharp edge.  A slicer, if you have one, may be your best bet.  A good boning knife, too.  Depends upon you and the knife.
14.  Arrange slices in lovely circular pattern and serve with a cup of cold mustard-dill sauce in the center.

Mustard-Dill Sauce
Whisk 1/2 cup Dijon mustard, 1/2 cup good honey, a little chopped dill (remember that you were supposed to save a little?), and a couple dashes of sea salt and ground white pepper.  Allow to sit in fridge for a couple of hours so flavors meld.  Note that there’s no dill in the sauce in the photo because someone threw out my reserved dill.

Piece of salmon ready to be made into gravlax

gravlax with cure sprinkled on

gravlax with cure and dill ready for fridge

Gravlax foil packet ready to go into fridge

slicing gravlax

Will it go round in circles? The ice cream maker, I mean

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a scoop of raspberry swirl ices cream

Ice cream is important, nay, essential, to a quality summer – especially the homemade kind.

Why make homemade ice cream?  Because you control the sugar, which is key for me because I hate things that are so sweet.  I also don’t much like gums and chemicals, and don’t appreciate a ridiculous overrun percentage, namely the volume increase by air.  Check out Cook’s Illustrated on the matter.  There’s an ice cream talked about there that’s 97% overrun.  Manufacturers, please.

There are three ways you can make ice cream at home nowadays.  An ice and rock salt affair that gets plugged in or hand cranked, though I haven’t seen one without juice for some time, a compressor-based model like the ones used commercially, and one that has a liquid-filled drum that you freeze.

The ice and salt method produces superior ice cream, but it’s a big mess and you have to schlep a bag of ice, which I have no space to store.  Trust me, you’ll never make ice cream at the last minute with this kind of set-up.

Compressor models can cost thousands of dollars, but they have built-in freezers and you need only to plug them in.  Cuisinart came out with a home model a couple of years back (ICE-50BC) that’ll run you about $250 – at the cheapest.  As God is my witness, I will have one of these before I die.  Right now, though, I can’t spend the money.

The ones with the drum that gets frozen – which the paddle scrapes against as it goes round and round – are sketchy in my opinion.  They generally don’t get the ice cream firm enough, and you have to freeze it to the consistency of real ice cream after it comes out of the machine.  To be honest with you, I had a small Donvier 20 years ago that I hated, and it was only recently that I decided to give the dreaded drum another try – but only because I have a new freezer that is really 0 deg. F. whose temperature remains stable.  If you do not have this, I don’t suggest this method.  The zero gives you a really, really frozen drum, and the stability keeps the ice cream from becoming crystalline when it goes in there to harden.

I’d been reading about the Cuisinart ICE-20R, a little plug-in affair with drum that was getting good reviews.  Since I had a Sur La Table gift certificate on hand, I thought I’d go get a blue one there.  Matt and I had lunch at Tacubaya (4th Street shopping center in Berkeley), a great little Mexican snack/small meal place, which is owned by the folks behind Oakland’s Doña Tomás, by the way, and then plodded across the street to Sur La Table.

Cuisinart ice cream maker in blue

When I was a kid in New York City in the 1970s, there was an ad jingle that went, “I browse at Bloomingdale’s….but I buy at Alexander’s!”  Sur La Table is a little like that for me:  pricey, but a great place to peruse.  I buy gadgets and things there that I can’t find elsewhere, and run into the occasional bargain.  Very nice people at the Berkeley store.  $55 later we were back in the car with a box.

Nice, sturdy thing with only four parts and a cord that actually fits totally into the base when not in use.  I appreciate this, given the way I have to fight with my rice cooker in this regard.  Not pretty.

You can make up to 1-1/2 quarts of ice whatever, though I make a quart so I’m not pushing the drum to its outside limit.

Read the manual from start to finish.  You’ll be sorry if you don’t, because you’ll mess something up, most likely with drum handling.

scraped out vanilla bean

I’ll give you my basic (non-cooked) ice cream recipe to start off with, but know that you can make a cooked base that’ll give you very rich ice cream, if you like that.  I can’t stand custards of any kind, so ice cream with eggs is something I stay away from.  Start with this recipe first so you get the hang of the machine.  Also, note that you will be dealing with a delicate product – there are no stabilizers!  You may not be used to this.  Try to get the ice cream out of the drum/canister and into the freezer quickly.

Finally, when recipes call for only a few ingredients, make sure they are of a high quality.  Spring for organic dairy products here.

In sum, if you want to make very good homemade ice cream and don’t want to spend big bucks, you can’t do better than this Cuisinart.  Easy to set up, operate and clean, it’s hassle-free and you can make ice cream at fairly short notice if you store the drum in the freezer at all times.

Easy Raspberry Swirl Ice Cream
   Makes about a quart, give or take

1 cup whole milk
1/2 cup sugar
2 cups heavy cream (yes, that’s right)
1/3 vanilla bean, scraped of its contents (use the shell to make vanilla sugar – don’t throw it away!)
3 or 4 tablespoons raspberry preserves, pushed through a fine sieve if the seeds bother you

1).  Make sure the ice cream drum/canister goes into the freezer the day before.
2).  Whisk milk, sugar and vanilla until there are no sugar granules left.
3).  Whisk in the cream.
4).  Place mix in fridge while you quickly set up machine with the drum rotating.
5).  Pour ice cream mix into the top (there is a hole for this).
6).  Let run for 25 – 30 mins, but check now and then.
7).  When nice and thick (check my photos), get it out of there and into a plastic container with a spatula.  Work fast because the ice cream will freeze and fuse to the drum.
8).  Smooth ice cream and add a few veins of raspberry conserve.  You don’t have to be too neat about it – get it done fast.
9).  Seal container and pop in freezer for at least 2 hours.

If you want to mimic Baskin-Robbins Baseball Nut – a flavor I love – press in some chopped cashews after the raspberry swirl before the mass goes into the freezer.

The raspberry I used is not bright red because it’s Berkeley Bowl’s organic version – no colorings.

Word of warning:  don’t try to clean the drum right away.  Whatever you put in there will fuse to the surface, including your hand.

Here are some photos of the process:

1).  Ice cream mix

ice cream fixings

2).  Mix added to machine

Ice cream mix just added to machine

3).  At about the right stage

ice cream ready to come out of ice cream maker

4).  Looking like ice cream

Ice cream coming out of ice cream machine

5).  With the raspberry swirl and ready for the freezer

ice cream with raspberry swirl ready for the freezer

Roasted Peppers for Summer!

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Tricolor roated peppers in blue dish with olive oil

Hurray for June!  It’s now bell pepper season in Cali, and I can turn out roasted peppers to my heart’s content!

Roasted peppers are delicious and cut a lovely appearance.  If you stick to a recipe that’s basic, leftovers are versatile.

There are a couple of ways to go here, depending upon how much time you have and what you want to do with them.

First, red and orange bell peppers are generally sweeter than the yellow, but it’s nice to have that extra color on the plate.  You’re free to include regular old green ones, but these have bitter notes, so I leave them off.

Try to get peppers that have been allowed to ripen on the plant, because they’ll be sweeter – more caramelization in the roasting process, you see.  This is why it’s great to buy at stellar produce shops like Berkeley Bowl and Monterey Market.  If you ask them this kind of thing, they’ll know.

Roasted Tri-color Peppers with Olive Oil and Black Pepper

2 red, 2 yellow and 2 orange organic bell peppers, washed and dried well
Olive oil
Sea salt and black pepper in grinders
Optional:  Shaved or grated Parmesano Reggiano

1).  Jack up your oven to 425 F. – convection, if you have it.
2).  Place peppers on a sheet pan and slide into oven.
3).  Using long tongs, turn them over now and again (like every few minutes) so they darken and cook evenly.
4).  When they are nice and brown/black — and they don’t need to be a solid brown/black, rather they should have lots of spots that are evenly distributed — take them out with tongs ASAP and pop into a couple of large Ziploc bags and seal them.  You are harnessing moist heat here to cause the skins to pull away from the flesh.  Put the bags in bowls in case the heat causes them to break, which happens, so that you catch the natural juices.  You’ll need the juices later.
5).  After about an hour, take out the peppers, one by one, and slip the skins (which should be loose) off.  Pull the stems off and gently tear the pepper to open it and push out the seeds with your fingers.  Don’t rinse them, rather use your fingers to get all the “bad” things off.
6).  Cut or tear them into large strips and arrange on a plate.
7).  Pour the pepper juices over the top.*
8).  Crank a little sea salt and coarse black pepper over peppers.
9).  Finish with a drizzle of excellent olive oil and some Parmesano Reggiano, if you like, but they are delectable without it.

*If you prefer, you can make a vinaigrette out of the pepper juices, olive oil and a little lemon juice, and top peppers with this

Leftovers (without the parmesan) can be served on a sandwich, like my famous egg, roasted red pepper, roasted potato and turkey breast on toasted whole grain bread.   You can also use them as a base for a pureed hot or cold soup, and in a ground walnut and red pepper spread, called muhammara.  Another fun thing to make with them is a terrine, layering the colors.  There are endless uses, and they will be about a million times better than what you get in a jar or can.

Roasted red pepper, egg, cheese, turkey, potato on whole wheat

If you have no time on your hands, you can make a simple roasted pepper.  Just wash, dry, seed, and cut up.  Arrange on a sheet pan and rub with a little olive oil to coat.  Add a dash of salt to the mix if you like, and roast at 400 F. until they get a bit singed.  Take them out and transfer to a serving dish.

roasted yellow peppers in a green bowl

This version is tasty, but they still have their skins, so you’ll have to take that into consideration.