Toast

Three Artists in the Kitchen : A Pumpkin Gratin

Artist Toulouse Lautrec was purportedly an enthusiastic and particular cook, in addition to his other talents. A number of his favorite recipes were collected by Maurice Joyant, a friend of his, in a pretty, but largely useless volume. Either old Maurice didn't watch very closely, or Toulouse wasn't quite the genius in the kitchen that he was in the studio. Pretty much every recipe is unworkable on its face; no need to try them out.

Trust Jane Grigson to find the only gem among them, and also to notice that its vibrant colors echo those of the Vuillard painting of TL at the stove. The recipe appears in my penguin edition of her excellent Vegetable Book, but without the painting, which is reproduced in the Joyant book. This is the recipe, the garlic having been added by yours truly, who can't make a "pumpkin" tian without it. The "pumpkin" I used was butternut squash, which is a good North American substitute for the sweet little french cooking pumpkin TL would most likely have had to work with.

2 lbs pumpkin or butternut squash, peeled, and cut into thin slices, or cubes.
flour with salt and pepper, for dredging
1 lb onions, sliced thin in half moons
sugar
butter or spray olive oil
olive oil
3 cloves garlic, peeled and thinly sliced
small can of tomatoes- I use Muir glen fire-roasted, or home-canned
Homemade bread crumbs, or panko

Preheat oven to 350F. Dip the pumpkin in the seasoned flour, and fry until golden in the olive oil. Blot up any excess oilon paper towels. Cook the onion in a little oil until just transparent, but not coloring. Add the tomatoes, garlic and some salt, pepper, and a dash of sugar. Cook down until most of the liquid is gone, but it is still moist. In a shallow, gratin-type pan, layer the pumpkin and the onion mixture, ending in a layer of pumpkin. Sprinkle with breadcrumbs to cover, and either spray with olive oil, or pour a bit of melted butter over. Cook until the pumpkin is thoroughly soft. This may take an hour, or even more, depending on your oven, and the size of the squash pieces. Be sure to allow extra time. If the top has not browned nicely, run it under the broiler.

Good stuff. The "three artists" are TL, Vuillard, and Jane Grigson. Sadly, I can provide no photo of the finished dish, as my computer is on its last legs, and terribly stubborn, especially regarding downloading photos from my camera. After Christmas, I'm getting me a brandy new and shiny one, and photos and postings should resume shortly.

Wishing you all a great Festivus...'til 2008, then, gotta go practice my feats of strength.

Suvir Saran's Goan Shrimp Curry, with Vegetarian Variant

I have gone on at some length about how much I like American Masala, Suvir Saran's new cookbook. There I found this recipe, which I have now made several times, and plan to repeat often. Although I made it with the shrimp, I have also enjoyed the shrimpless leftovers with rice. And that is, essentially, the vegetarian version of this curry- just don't add the shrimp at the end. It is excellent.

It is possible, as per Mr. S., to make this recipe using a store-bought curry powder. It is very good, but much better even yet with the recommended home-made toasted spice mix instead. There is a recipe for that combo in the book. I can't be reproducing every recipe, though...and anyway, the book is well worth buying, IMO.

I have found this an excellent make-ahead company dish. You can do the sauce in the morning, or even a day ahead, leaving it in the fridge, the flavors melding happily. Then you just reheat it, and add the shrimp and chopped cilantro, cook for a few minutes until the shrimp are done, and, there you are.

I like to serve the curry to each person in a pasta bowl, big scoop of basmati rice in the middle, and a moat of shrimp and sauce all around- such as you might see a New Orleans estoufee. I think it looks nice, and it suits people who like their rice and sauce separate, as well as the mixed-together crowd. Personally, I fork or spoon a bit of each, breaking down the edge of the moat as I go. I still play with my food. It's a thing.

This is what you need, minimally adapted:

Marinade:

Juice of 1/2 lemon
coarse salt
black pepper
1/4 tsp cayenne

1 lb shrimp

Mix the marinade together, add the shrimp, and refrigerate. (Note: Even if you are making the sauce ahead, you should not marinate the shrimp fror much more than an hour- or the lemon juice will cook the shellfish. If that happens, and you have an unintended ceviche, which you then cook- it will go all rubbery, and spoil your curry. I learned this lesson long ago and far away. The ruined shrimp irked me for some time thereafter.)

Assemble the other stuff:
1 cup of water
1/4 cup canola oil
24 curry leaves (optional- lovely if you can get some. Mmm.)
4 little dried chilis- or to taste
1 tsp ground black pepper
3" piece ginger, peeled and minced
1 medium red onion, peeled and finely chopped
4 tsps coarse salt
2 minced garlic cloves
2 tsps ground coriander
1/2 tsp tumeric
14 oz can tomatoes, chopped (I love muir Glen Oven Roasted- I buy them by the case, when, as this year, I have been lazy, and failed to put up my own)
1 tsp sambhaar (or 1/4 tsp curry powder)
1 1/2 cups coconut milk
1 cup fresh cilantro, chopped

Put the water near the stove. Heat the oil, curry leaves and chilis over a medium high heat in a big sturdy pot, for just a minutes, then add the pepper, ginger, onion and salt. Cook until the onions are lovely and brown. whenever they seem like they are starting to stick, add a bit of water to loosen them. (This is a nifty cooking technique, which permits deep browning of the onions with a reasonable amount of oil. I have used this- since learning it here, to good effect in other dishes. It even helps cut down the extreme amounts oil needed for my beloved Mudjadarrah. Very clever.)

Once the onions are nice and brown, you add the garlic, coriander and tumeric, and cook for just a minute, until the garlic scent comes up, then reduce the heat, and add the tomatoes. Deglaze, and then simmer the lot at a low burble for about 5 minutes. Add the coconut milk, sambhaar or curry,and the rest of the water. . Bring to a boil. Now, you can cool and refridgerate your sauce, or continue. If you did the sauce early, bring it back to the boil. Add the shrimps, and cook until they are just done. Stir in the cilantro, and serve.

Pretty simple, no? It was, by the way, seriously assisted by a side of "Grandma Haye's skillet corn bread", which recipe, believe it or not, comes from the same cookbook. It's a new take on an old favorite, with toasted spices, and lovely fresh corn. Also, fennel slaw, which doesn't come from the book, but went down well. A keeper.

Theories About Risotto For Supper

There are any number of reasons to make a full-fledged risotto, even when you will be dining alone. These include, as I have mentioned before, anticipated leftovers in the form of croquettes and pancakes. Personally, I love a Risotto Milanese, but I do understand where Deborah Madison is coming from when she says that most risottos on their own, just do not quite make a complete meal. That is, unless they are loaded with say, shellfish and so on, which is really not my favorite thing to do. Still, there is a little bit of fiddling involved in the simplest risotto, and it all happens right before serving, so whatever you have alongside should not need last minute pyrotechnics.

When you are doing a full company kind of meal, a classic Osso Buco is the perfect, and time-honored partner. It is delicious, complex but straightforward, and the whole thing can be ready before you ladle the first broth over the rice. But I'm not going to want this extra-hearty traditional combo for an ordinary dine-alone supper. The risotto is the main attraction here, taking more than enough attention on a Sunday evening-I just need something simple to go with it.

Either of two alternate matches are available, because I made a big pot of Arlette's pea soup this weekend, to take for lunches this week, and some extra beef broth for the risotto alongside. So, I've got a few extremely boiled veg and a couple of pieces of more-or-less cooked to death beef shank on hand. I can either make a simple mironton, and stick it in the oven when I start the rice, or cut up the beef and veg, toss them in oil and vinegar, and set them on a plate of arugula, or baby greens in the fridge to pull out when ready.

I'm doing the latter today, because it's easiest. I think this goes well with the Risotto-I've done it before. A lot of pickier eaters think these broth byproducts are not worth eating, being so cooked-out, but I am not one of those people. Both beef and veg do need a little vinegar to spark them up, though. And either the mironton or the salad will provide some. A few capers are not amiss either.Somehow a plain big green salad would not seem quite enough extra-for me anyway.

In case you don't already have your own method, here's how I make Risotto Milanese. This is sufficient for one person's main course- with ample leftovers. It is enough for two who will eat it all at once, but it is better to be greedy, don't you think? I'd make up to 3 times this much in one pot, for 3 people and their leftovers. I no longer have any idea if I'm way off the classic recipe- I have a feeling the peas don't belong?But I do like them in, so never mind.

You need a cup of arborio or other suitable risotto rice, a quart of good beef stock, butter, salt, pepper , 1/4 tsp saffron, smashed in a mortar and pestle or the like, 1/4 cup of dry white wine (or fennel ratafia made with dry white wine-which I just happened to have), a small chopped red onion, 1/4 to 1/2 cup freshly grated parmesan cheese, a handful of fresh or frozen peas, and salt and pepper.

Heat some butter in a heavy saucepan of a size suitable to the quantities you are making. Meanwhile, heat the beef broth to a simmer, and keep it going. Add a little broth to the saffron in the mortar and stir, then pour the mixture back into the broth. Add the onion to the butter, and cook until just transparent. Add the rice and stir with a flat wooden spatula or a similarly shaped silicon one-no metal, no spoons. Stir until it starts to go white, then add the wine. Set timer for 12 minutes. Over a healthy heat, stir until almost all the liquid is absorbed. Now add a ladle of broth, and keep pushing the rice around the pan, until it is just wet. Add a ladle of broth at a time.

You are to use up all the broth this way. When the timer goes off, add the cheese, peas, and a bit more butter and continue. Probably all the broth will be used up in 6 more minutes. Cover the pan, and let it sit 7 to 10 minutes. Serve sprinkled, if you like, with parsley. And with a little something else, as per our early discussion. After supper I'm going to have a small glass of plum ratafia for dessert. It turned out very well, and I will tell you about that more later.

Tomorrow you can have some cute croquettes over steamed, very thinly sliced root vegetables in lime and butter, with a wedge of lime. Or a pancake . Or stuff some peppers with the leftovers. That's what I'll do next time.

Street Food for Homebodies

I am always pleased, but a tad conflicted, when I'm sent a new book or product. I say that I can't promise to write about something I haven't seen yet, but I don't like to disappoint. If I wrote a book, and sent it off, and the recipient was silent, or expressed boredom, or worse, with the product of my hard work, I might well be brokenhearted. But probably, in order to become a published writer of any sort, you have to be made of stronger stuff than yours truly. I hope, before retirement age, to reach a level of self confidence where I am not deeply grieved to discover I am disliked, even when the rejecting party is someone I have no actual interest in whatsoever. I do know this queasiness to be a character flaw- so that's a start.

Fortunately, I am pleased as punch (or is it "Punch" as in "and Judy"?) with Street Food, the second book by Tom Kime, a gifted fellow who I had not heard of before. Once a chef at the famed River Cafe, he has apparently been, inter alia, a TV Host, an award winning author, and the caterer of Jamie Oliver's wedding feast. Who knew? He has traveled four continents, sampling the street food of India, southeast Asia, north Africa, the Middle East and southern Europe, snagging recipes for the kind of goodies that make you feel you are on holiday from all culinary drudgery.

Street food, the best of it anyway, is like that. But the recipes which appear from time to time in newspapers and magazines frequently lack the on-site magic. Part of that, no doubt, is the absence of the charm of travel. I had an inkling, though, from first looking over this collection, that it was the work of an original cook. I thought he might well be one of those few with a special gift for putting simple things together in ways which enhance them, creating food which is more than the sum of its parts.(The world may be full of such wizards- professional and non-but if so, most of them don't write books.) Perhaps it is a special gift for recognizing, rather than, or in addition to creating, since these are meant to be very authentic recreations? In any event you can certainly see originality at work in the combination suggested meals put together from this widely diverse group of treats.

I think my first impression was very not wrong. I've made three things from this book, and all three were wonderful.(These are my photos, of my food, BTW; the ones in the book are far classier, but I thought you'd like to see that these things are doable at home.)They were shourba corbasi- a chard soup with rice and tumeric, shlada al falfla hamra al khizzou-a carrot and orange salad with paprika dressing, and cucur udang-Singapore prawn fritters with sweet chili sauce. The last, involving hot oil, was the only one that was the least bit of trouble. And I'm here to tell you that all three were really, truly delicious and different and easy to love.

All are pictured, I will leave you to figure out which is which. I had a bit of trouble deciding which recipe to pass along. I went with the soup in the end, as it is so seasonally on target (it was all there in my CSA farmbox, and so quick and easy.) This is how I made it, adapted from Street Food:

1 pound of swiss chard, stalks and leaves separated, very well washed
1 qt good quality chicken or veg stock
2 tbsps olive oil
2 onions, finely chopped
2 leeks, trimmed, rinsed halved and sliced
1/2 cup long grain white rice (I used basmati)
2 tbsps white wine or rice vinegar
2 cloves garlic, chopped finely
1 1/2 cups plain greek style yogurt- or drained ordinary yogurt
pinch ground tumeric
juice of a lemon
chopped fresh mint leaves
salt and pepper

Finely dice the chard stalks, and finely shred the leaves. Bring the stock to a boil in a small saucepan. Heat the oil in a soup pot with a heavy bottom, and cook the onion, leeks , and chard stems for 4-5 minutes, until just beginning to brown. Add the rice, and stir to coat thoroughly. Pour in the hot stock and vinegar. Bring to a boil, and simmer until the rice is tender- about 15 minutes. Meanwhile, chop the garlic and add to the yogurt with half of the lemon juice, the tumeric, and a bit of salt. add the chard leaves to the soup, and simmer a few minutes, until they are tender. Remove from the heat, and whisk in the yougurt combo. Taste for seasoning, and add salt, pepper, and a bit more lemon juice as needed. Top with mint leaves, and serve lukewarm or hot- but lukewarm tastes especially nice to me.

Street food at home is a luxury. This stuff is really good, I kid you not.

Dinner for One, With Book

I figure that eating as a social activity is pretty much a cornerstone of civilized family and community life. I believe it promotes the habit of rational discourse, the art of story-telling, humanitarian behaviour, and good humor in children and adults alike. It is tremendously satisfying to join a group of my favorite people sitting around a dinner table, talking, laughing. quibbling and happily consuming good food. I am fortunate, being a person who lives alone, to have regular dinners with friends twice a week, and a bunch of chatty coworkers to eat lunch with daily.

Gracie, the delightful 7 month old baby who is a recent addition to our long standing Friday night suppers, sits with us in her infant seat at the table, waving her zweiback teething biscuit and her feet, and practicing conversational noises. From time to time she grows a bit bored with us, but mostly, she appears pleased. She is, after all, kind of a guest of honor. It seems she is not so averse to the attention of a bunch of adults willing to make goofy faces, or do whatever dopey thing it takes to make her smile. She is a diner-in-training, with a natural aptitude for it..

Nonetheless, it cannot be denied that there are some real advantages, from time to time, to being on one's own. I have grown enormously spoiled in this regard, since I generally do exactly what I want, unless I am at work, and work (lucky me) is usually not too terrible anyway. When I am eating supper alone, I nearly always have real food, and mostly eat it at a set table. Often I eat eccentric, unbalanced meals, because I can, with no one to reprove me. Or I might get obsessed with some combination, and have it over again, several times. I figure, along with MFK Fisher, that as long as the diet is balanced out, more or less, over time, it is perfectly fine to eat a bunch of tomatoes and corn, and nothing else for supper, when the season is upon us.

Every once in a while, though, I make an entire semi-formal meal, just for me, and eat it slowly with some wine and a book. (Which is still a guilty pleasure- reading at the table having been verboten- quite rightly- when I was growing up.) Last night I had the fat veal chop (extravaganza of expense-and worth it) with radicchio, rosemary and white beans you see above. This is a very simple recipe from epicurious, which tastes really terrific, in a fancy restaurant sort of way. It looks a bit odd, but it was wonderful. Preceded by farmbox tomatoes with basil and buffalo mozzarella, and followed by some pineapple, it was a major league treat in (and with) my book. Which reminds me of the recent publication of the excellent Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant- a collection of essays about eating by yourself, and alot of other related stuff about people, which you should really go read now, I think.

A Couple of Not So Green Salads

I have been making a homely supper/indoor picnic for my friends, while re-perusing the classic spiral bound cookbook White Trash Cooking, and debating about what sort of potato salad to make. That's not the potato salad you see there, but another not-so- green salad, to be named later. I figure just about every body knows what a basic American potato salad looks like.

I had a big mason jar of Clem's ambrosial barbeque sauce that I brought home with me, which I do, pretty much annually, stopping at Clem's barbeque pit on the way back from our work conference in State College, PA. I also bring home half a rack of fire-pit barbequed ribs- but those disappear shortly after I make sure the cats are okay, and well before I unpack. A week or so later, I make a supper of pulled pork sandwiches, coleslaw, potato salad, and some kind of cobbler or pie. It's a thing.

The coleslaw recipe is a fixture- non-negotiable, in this context, anyhow. but I am always open to potato salad variations, from the hokiest to the haute-ist. Potato salad is a tremendously versatile dish, a blank canvas for the painting of, well whatever- I'll let this wonky metaphor fade on out- you probably know what I mean, anyway. For this meal, though, I thought something down-homey would be compatible- hence the book.

Whenever I consult WTC, I am surprised and a little embarassed to recall just how little most of the recipes appeal to me. I think of myself as a lover of plain home cooking, fried chicken, biscuits, greens, etc, but much of this stuff is pretty sickly, though intriguing. A lot of processed foodis involved- cake mix dumped on some peaches for a cobbler, canned vegetables and soups in casseroles, and the like. The book is full of strong, admirable characters, and is utterly noncondescending- so what am I, some kind of food snob? I don't know. I certainly don't scorn the use of humble, unlikely, or hokey ingredients- I make a chicken thing with coca-cola- and it's good. But a ton of these recipes-I can tell I'd hate them.

I greatly prefer, southern/country cooking-wise, most of the recipes in the books of Edna Lewis, with or without Scott Peacock, her buddy, fellow chef, and, at the end- her caretaker. There are lots of recipes with titles that are the same as those in WTC, but they are different, sound good, and taste good when you make them. You can tell they come from the same place and time- Scott Peacock even recalls the very same cake-mix cobbler recipe, as being tasty, but a bit "oversweet". He notes that while his mother used supermarket biscuits in her blackberry cobbler- he makes his from scratch. These guys are chefs, though, not home cooks like me. E.L. was from a country cooking tradition, but she was a sophisticated person, who spent many years cooking professionally, and writing about food.

I guess these two were looking to the food of the generation before S.P.'s mother's era...folks who didn't have the option of adding gratuitous doses of chemical novelties to the food they grew and raised. When all that stuff appeared for the first time- cake mix, Cool Whip, packaged biscuits, jello and pudding, it must have been irresistable, fun and magical-especially to people who did hard physical work all day, and were used to a lot of laborious cooking as well. Once considered special, and a treat, these instant gratification foods are so much a part of our culture that we may be considered annoying elitists if we avoid them .

Surprisingly, though, these two cookbooks offer virtually the same potato salad recipe, except that the Lewis/Peacock version has cider vinegar, and the WTC one uses pickle juice. So that's what I made, and it is nice. It is basically boiled potatoes, cubed, mayo, a little chopped onion, a little brown mustard, hard-boiled egg yolks, a little cider vinegar, salt and pepper. Very basic, very good. I generally add a little celery seed and some finely chopped fennel or celery.The more egg yolks you add, the better it is, no question There is no potato salad more elemental, and pretty much everyone eats it.

Which brings me to the salad you see in the photo- this is a "BLT Salad", which sounds like a refugee from WTC, but was actually found in a Lewis/Peacock book. Like the potato salad, it has an added luster when prepared mostly from fresh veg from my CSA farmbox. (The coleslaw, too- there was a crispy, beautiful cabbage this week.) This is how you make it:

Wash and dry some very crispy lettuce- we had romaine, (but even iceberg would be better than something soft or buttery), cut it up and top with chunky croutons, freshly made from good white bread; crispy bacon cut into squares; and a beautiful tomato or two, cut into smallish cubes. Add salt and pepper, and just before serving, toss with just enough good mayonaisse to coat it lightly. So very good. But how could it not be?

There is some green in this salad after all, but what with the bacon and mayo, it ain't exactly your palate-cleansing pile-o-greens. Still.

Pasta Regulare: Two By Three, Four from Two

In an early Sopranos episode, mob guy Pauly Walnuts was amusingly appalled that a Starbucks-like coffee chain had "stolen [his] culture." He particularly objected to the fancy Italianate names for drink sizes and not-so-Italian yuppy-style beverages. He ordered a coffee, and when the barista looked at him expectantly, waiting for his "vente, skim" type clarification, he snarled and said "I'll have a regulare".

Okay, my title is not so on point- I'm just stretching Pauly's "regulare" tag here to tell you about two new cookbooks devoted to making pasta casually, for family consumption, on a regular basis. One,"On Top of Spaghetti", I bought because the authors, Johanne Killeen and George Germon, who own and run Al Forno, in Providence, previously produced "Cucina Simpatica", a cookbook among my top ten all time favorites. The other, Everyday Pasta, by Giada De Laurentis, came in the mail because I had been unsuccesssful in an attempt to cancel a bookclub membership.

I decided to try a couple of recipes from Everyday Pasta, and a couple from On Top, because , well, I don't mind eating pasta for supper most any day, and now I can perform the dubious public service of telling you what I thought of both books. In its most direct form my advice is as follows: Buy On Top. Everyday Pasta? Fuggeddabouddit. In support of these assessments, I will tell you about the recipes I tried from each. Obviously this subjective analysis is deeply flawed, based on a too small sample, and for all I know, hopelessly prejudiced by the irritating way in which I acquired the De Laurentis book. I don't think so, but then I wouldn't, would I?

I suspect that the principle differences between the two books are the levels of inspiration/sensibility, and recipe testing. Which may explain why the On Top recipes I tried "worked" and the Everyday recipes did not. Those Al Forno people are brilliant and gifted, and can put simple things together and make them distinctive. And someone has also obviously actually made every recipe in their book more than once. I'm sure Ms. DeL is a reasonably good cook (though I find it hard to believe that she often eats this sort of food-she looks to be a vivid, tiny hummingbird powered by, maybe, nectar?), but her two pastas I tried missed the mark. Especially as to texture. Meh.

The one was the Baked Gnocchi, with spinach and goat cheese.. It sounded fine, though a bit overloaded with cream- the spinach and nutmeg seemed appropriate companions. I did not use homemade gnocchi ( she said it wasn't necessary to do so), but I did use some lovely prepared ones I had made before..and liked. Stodge with lumps here. The flavor was okay, but nothing thrilling to make up for the belly bomb nature of this substance. Not good.

I next tried a Rotini with Salmon and Roasted Garlic. I picked it because I had a nice bit of salmon. It had rosemary, which was strange, and quite a lot of chicken broth that never got reduced and syrupy, or mixed with scraped up crusty bits of anything. The flavor was fine..not odd, as I had feared with the rosemary, roasted garlic, and salmon. The lemon juice (more wetness) and zest kind of tied the flavors in with the fish...but the finished pasta sat damply in its seasoned chicken stock, and hence was pretty unappealing. I did eat it up though, unlike the gnocchi, which I pitched. You can see it in the picture above, though the dampness at the bottom is not visible.

On the whole, I feel as if the De Laurentis book was the result of a business plan. I wonder if some non-cook thought it would be clever to offer up a whole bunch of nifty/quirky ideas for relatively easy pasta dishes. Then, maybe, a bunch of people brain-stormed possible ideas, which were checked out in a totally cursory way, if at all, before being tied up in a little salable package. Of course, I cannot know this is true, and I may be, like my salmon supper, all wet. But I'm not impressed. These recipes strike me as both simple minded and pretentious...so maybe Pauly's ouburst is not entirely unrelated to the matter at hand after all....

From On Top of Spaghetti I tried the Spaghettini with Sauteed Chicken Livers, as seen in the other photo. If you are not among the world's large contingent of liver-haters, you will love this. If you are, my praise will be, of course, necessarily unconvincing. Recently, a friend described to me a chicken liver dish she had at a brunch at Lydia's, which sounded very much like this, except that it was served over a pancake of polenta, instead of spaghettini.. I think this sauce would be more than okay served like that as well.

To make this you need:
4 oz chicken livers, trimmed, cut into largish pieces, dried and sprinkled with coarse salt
unsalted butter
Tbsp. shallots finely chopped(I had none, and used scallions, instead)
1/2 cup dry white wine
cup chicken stock
8 oz dried spaghettini
1/4 cup cream
pepper
cayenne (a pinch)
Tbsp chopped fresh parsley
Tbsp finely chopped fresh sage (not dried, ew)
freshly grated Parm

Bring a large pot of water to the boil. Heat 3 Tbsps of butter in a saute type pan, add the livers, and saute quickenly, browning them all over, Remove from pan with a slotted spoon,and set aside. Add shallots, cooking until they begn to color, then add the wine, scrapping up any liver bits on the pan. Let it burble until syrupy, add the stock, and bring to a boil. Remove pan from heat.

Add the pasta and plenty of salt to the boiling water, and cook until it is just a bit less done than you like. Meanwhile, turn the heat on under the saute pan, and add the cream, pepper and cayenne. Bring to a boil, and add the livers.

Drain the pasta, dump it into the saute pan, and toss it around with the sauce. Cook 2 minutes, then toss in the sage and parsley. Share out into 2 bowls, and grate plenty of parm over the top. I love this with whole wheat spaghettini, but it is also very nice with the plain old everyday variety. Yes, the salmon one is prettier, but you absolutely do not care.

I also made the On Top of Spaghetti Fettucini with Venetian Chicken Sauce, which did not disappoint., but that is for another day...I'll be making it again. Many of the pastas in this book are incredibly simple...simpler even than these two, and they sound just as wonderful, and as likely to be do-able on the spot, with a reasonably well stocked pantry. I will be trying a bunch of their tomato based pastas this summer. You might well like to do the same. And this is the only one with any sort of liver, so do not be afraid.

Planning for Leftovers: Risotto

I've read some pretty depressing magazine articles about planning for leftovers-you know the sort of thing where you make say, a roast on Sunday, and by the end of the week, you're having it in bottled barbecue sauce over egg noodles, and tossing it in your salad with frozen french fries. I am, nonetheless, actually a sucker for a good plan for multiple meals, featuring economy and clever, tasty consumption of every scrap of something truly good.

Of course, many well loved, classic dishes seem to have originated with the disguising and/or stretching of leftovers, especially leftover meat: beef mironton, corned beef hash, shepherd's pie, that lot. They are good enough that people make them from scratch, on purpose, forgoing the original Big Piece of Meat dinner altogether.

Vegetable and starchy leftovers mostly appear in soup, where they are put to very good use indeed. Right now, I am having asparagus-related leftovers, under normal circumstances an oxymoron around here. But this is the second week that the asparagus has been under $2.00 a pound at the supermarket, and I'm going crazy trying to consume their entire inventory, without wasting any. One thing I made from all this bounty was Julie's Lemon/Asparagus Risotto, which I cannot recommend too highly. So delicious, and I am bound to admit, embarassing though it is, that I ate half of the recipe all by myself for supper.

It was the other half that was left which sent me looking for a vaguely remembered recipe in
Vegetarian Suppers From Deborah Madison's Kitchen. It turns out that Ms. Madison, though fond of risotto, does not fancy it, alone, as a main dish. She had a from-scratch recipe for some rice fritters/croquettes, which had a risotto-like beginning. With some trepidation and fears of crumbling croquettes-especially in light of the bumpiness of the asparagus in my rice, I decided to try something similar with the leftovers.

These are just sooo good, you're gonna love them, and they did not fall apart at all. There is, of course, nothing to say that you must use this particular risotto recipe. It could be good with all sorts- or you could make one big pancake of your risotto, and that would probably resemble the Risotto al Salto which someone so lovingly described in the travel section of the NYTimes last week, in an article about Milan.

You need:

Half of Julie's risotto recipe or thereabouts
Panko crumbs
a lemon
a beaten egg or two

julienned veg of choice and season, and compatable chopped herbs (I used leeks, asparagus, carrots, red onion, snow peas and chives.)
bit of butter
mixture of canola and olive oil for frying

Put some panko on a pie plate, and your beaten egg(s) in a shallow bowl. Line a cookie sheet or jelly roll pan with waxed paper. Using a 1/3 cup measure, scoop up some chilled risotto, and form it into a flattened egg shape. Dip in egg to coat with one hand, and the panko with the other. (This will keep the panko hand dry.) When nicely coated with crumb, set it on the lined pan. Repeat until you have used up the risotto. Chill the pan in the fridge til almost time to eat.

Put your julienned veg on a serving plate, top with a bit of butter and squirt of lemon, and cover with plastic wrap. Microwave briefly until crisp-tender, and set aside, covered, to keep warm. Meanwhile heat the oil in a heavy wide bottomed pan, until not quite smoking, and slide in the croquette things carefully. Fry 5 or 6 minutes, turning once, until golden brown and cooked through. Adjust heat if they satrt browning two fast. While they cook, throw away the waxed paper, and line the cookie sheet with paper towels. As the croquettes are finished, set them on the paper towels to blot.

When ready, arrange on the bed of veg, cut the rest of your lemon into wedges and arrange them on the serving plate with the goodies, and eat 'em up. If there are others present they will fight over them because there are not enough. Make more next time, I kid you not.

Penne My Way

Immodestly, I must tell you that I'm feeling clever. Probably someone else has already made an identical sauce, but they didn't tell me about it. I found the idea right in my own head. I actually think that this sauce is yummy in the way of an Italian-American "Sunday Gravy" or a Neopolitan Ragu: rich, soft , sweet, and full of subtle, complex flavors that meld in long cooking. Moreover, it is extremely easy to make, requiring only time (well, also, thyme), since you must start a day ahead. It is, as well, dependant on following a rule I learned, I think, from my daughter, if I'm not mistaken.

That rule is, if you are going to combine a dried legume with tomatoes, or any other acidic item, you had better let said legume get as soft as you want it before you add the acid element, 'cause once you add it, the beans ain't getting any softer. You could cook those legumes for 24 hours, in a gallon of liquid, and they would not soften an iota more. So, being as there are both tomatoes and lentils involved here, youve got to hold back on the tomatoes til the lentils are done. But then, once you add the tomato and/or lemon juice, the lentils will hold their shape, and not go too mushy. Magic.

The caveat here is that this is a lamb sauce, and it is nothing if not lamb-y, so if you just tolerate the flavor of lamb, and don't love it, skip this dish. The bonus is cheapness. It is cheapy, cheapy, cheap. I used ordinary old supermarket lentils, though it might be even better with the lovely bluey green, or caviar black ones. And the other bonus-two suppers for two people, plain pasta with sauce, and the baked one. Don't leave out the lemon, whatever you do.

This is what you need:

Day one:

One lamb shank (only one. Mine was smallish and cost $2.00)
2 tbsps olive oil
handful lentils
chopped or "baby" carots
a chopped fennel bulb (save some fronds)
small yellow onion, chopped
2 unpeeled garlic cloves
sprig thyme
sprig marjoram
2" strip lemon peel
sea salt
pepper
flour for dredging
2 cups puree made from canned tomatoes (I used my canned San Marzanos from last summer-still have a few quarts)
1/2 cup broth
1/2 cup red wine

Dredge the lamb shank in flour, and brown throughly. Put in your slow cooker/crock pot. Deglaze browing pan with wine, and pour over. Add everything else, except the tomatoes, to slow cooker. Cover, set to "low". Go to work, or about your business.

In the evening, add tomato puree. Cook a few more hours. Remove slow cooker insert, or transfer contents to bowl if your crock pot doesn't have a ceramic insert. Cool, cover, refrigerate.

Next day:

juice of lemon
freshly grated parm
fennel fronds
1 lb. penne, or other suitable sauce-grabbing pasta shape.

Before serving: Remove any solidified fat. Take out the lamb shank and shred the meat. Return meat to sauce ; discard bone. Stir juice of a whole lemon into sauce, and reheat, while preparing your penne. Make a pound of the penne, some is for later. When pasta and sauce are ready, drain pasta and stir sauce in thoroughly, coating all the pasta. Ladel into 2 shallow bowls, top with fennel fronds and freshly grated parm. Serve very hot. Reserve the rest of the pasta and sauce in fridge.

Third day:

more parm
1/2 cup fresh breadcrumbs
cream or broth
olive oil
leftover cooked greens- 1 cup (I used some yummy leftover black kale (a/k/a cavolo nero), or if you haven't any, some defrosted spinach will do, I'll bet)

Put pasta and sauce in a shallow oven proof baking dish. If it is horribly clumpy, nuke it very briefly to liquify the sauce a tad. Stir in cream or broth, which will also loosen the sauce a bit, along with 1/2 cup to 1/2 cup grated parm (which, of course, will not contribute to any loosening up-just saying) and the greens. Preheat oven very hot, at least 450F, hotter if your baking dish can take it. Grate plenty more parm all over the top of the gratin and sprinkle with breadcrumbs; spray or drizzle with olive oil. Bake for about 15 minutes, until top is all crusty. Watch closely, time is unpredictible. Consume hot. Do not drop any of this on your foot. Please.

Composed

A salad, around here, is most often an ad hoc arrangement of that which is on hand. We all know combos which work so well that they have names: Salad Nicoise, Waldorf , Caesar, Cobb,and so on. Other salads- tuna salad, egg salad, potato salad, coleslaw, have endless variations either as written recipes, or improvised within general boundaries. French cooks, in particular, seem to have a lot of named, formalized composed salads in set format, which are repeated scrupulously, with reliable results.

I don't often make a specific pre-ordained composed salad, because I'm not shopping with such things in mind. So I usually don't have all the exact stuff for any particular recipe. Besides, I like to fool around. That is, unless. of course, I'm in the middle of, say, a spinach and pear salad obsession, or something, and eat the same salad nightly for days, even weeks. I was surprised to realize, while leafing through Elizabeth David's Summer Cooking,that I actually had all the ingredients for her very specific "Chicken Salad."

Also, it appealed to me, though I wasn't up for making my own mayonaisse this time. I'm pretty much housebound this week, and not into either shopping or elaborate preparations. I'm spending most of my time on the sofa, writing up stuff for work, while bandaging and elevating the foot I cleverly deluged with boiling coffee last Thursday. I'm hoping it heals up fast, so I can avoid a skin graft. Luckily, this was an easy supper to assemble from the pantry and in-house leftovers. Also, it didn't involve dealing with anything which could be considered, well, hot.

So, I followed the directions almost exactly, except for using Hellman's, and made this for "four people":

Meat from half a roast chicken, cut into generous "filets" (I interpreted this to mean pieces of a size to serve with knife and fork), 3 oz. sliced raw mushrooms, 1/2 pound boiled new potatoes, 2 romaine lettuce hearts, 8 largish shrimp, shelled and cooked, 1/2 cup mayonaisse, with some horseradish mixed in, and the yolk of a hardboiled egg.

Slice potatoes and put them in a bowl with the chicken, mushrooms, and half the mayo. Mix them, then spread the rest of the mayo over the top. On top of that, put the shrimps, and the romaine hearts (cut in quarters).Push the egg yolk through a sieve, directly on top of the salad, to fall "lightly and decoratively" on top.

This (I did eat more than 1/4 of it, must confess) and some crusty baguette made a fine supper. E.D. is the mistress of the simple, direct, and elegant recipe. My paraphrasing detracts, for which I apologize. If you haven't read her in the original, do. You are in for a treat. Next time I make this, I will do it in a flatter , wider dish, so the pretty little new potatoes, nice chunks of chicken, and sliced mushrooms will be visible under the shrimp/romaine/egg garnish.