Category Archives: Cookbooks

Boulud’s Braise

Two braises served with rice

I made two recipes from Daniel Boulud’s Braise (2006) today, the tripe with spicy yellow peppers and watercress (pg. 100) and Southern-style black-eyed peas with bacon (pg. 181).  Let’s talk tripe.  I love it, and this dish sounded so damned good I thought I’d go through all the prep and the zillion ingredients to prepare it.  I used what he said and did what he said and it turned out good.  It was complex – a bit spicy with a sweetish backdrop – but I think I’d like a little more peanut butter and a higher PTT (potato-to-tripe) ratio.  The extra PB would make it a bit more comforting and provide more body to the sauce, and the potatoes make the dish a meal while serving as a foil for the flavor parade that is the sauce, so more of them would be a plus.  I’d also reduce the stock slightly.  I can’t see myself making this dish all that often, not so much because it is quite a bit of work, but for the same reason I only order Singapore chow fun one time for every thirty orders of “regular” chow fun:  it has a very distinctive flavor and, as a matter of personal taste, it’s not something I want more than a few times a year. 

Briased tripe dish from boulud's book Braise

I took a couple of liberties with the black-eyed peas and bacon dish:  I used canned black-eyed peas and substituted 2/3 of the slab bacon with pork belly, which is basically slab bacon that has not had anything done to it.  If you like a pronounced smokey flavor, then you should use all slab bacon, but I like it in small doses.  I also used slightly over a pound of meat, which is way more than the recipe calls for, but I had a piece of pork belly in a “use it or lose it” situation.  Finally, I substituted plain old yellow onion for the red.  This was excellent – so savory and rib-sticking.  Next time I make this pork and beans super deluxe I’ll serve it with some crusty rolls and a green salad.  I cooked it so long it was like a confit – and a little goes a long way.

pork belly braise inspired by Boulud's book Braise

Buttercup Bakes at Home

peanut butter chocolate chip cookies

I broke down and baked cookies today.  Steve had gotten me a slew of cookbooks for Christmas last year, including Buttercup Bakes at Home (2006), by Jennifer Appel, which has some enticing recipes, so I chose the peanut butter and chocolate chunk cookies.  This is an example of how important photos are in a cookbook.  I made this particular recipe because of how delectable the cookies look on the cover.  In fact, that photo made me ask Steve for this book in the first place.  Pathetic.  The only thing that went wrong was that the chocolate I had ready for piping seized up a bit while I tended to some drama involving Berry and the mail carrier, so rather than nuke really good chocolate twice, I just piped it on as it was, which resulted in big globs instead of attractive stripes.  The cookies tasted great and had the perfect texture – not too soft, not too hard and a bit chewy.  I like to put cookies in the fridge, and these worked very well toward that end, coming out kind of blondie-like.  Buttercup is a popular Manhattan bakery, and they seem to have made their recipes approachable.

Boulud’s Braise

Braised fish from Boulud's book Braise

I received Daniel Boulud’s Braise for Christmas and spent the afternoon putting together the Mackerel with Herb Curry (pg. 158), having been seduced by its glossy representation.  The Spanish Mackerel looked pretty sad at the fish store, so I substituted a small, whole, white-fleshed salmon that was on sale at 99 Ranch Market for $1.99 per pound.  $11.61 and ‘fish cleaning option #3’ later, I arrived home with a bag full of fat salmon steaks, head and tail.  Even though I did not have a Kaffir lime leaf nor tomato juice nor a red bell pepper nor the plum tomatoes, the dished turned out to be a big hit here at Chez Akitachow.  I substituted fish stock for the tomato juice (yes, there are people who have fish stock around but not tomato juice — so shoot me!), a green bell pepper for the red and beefsteak tomatoes for the plum.  To hell with substituting for the lime leaf.  I also added a whisper of Spanish paprika to make up for the loss of the red bell pepper.  Serve this baby with rice and you’ll convert even those wimps who never before looked a fish steak in the eye.