Ohio always breaks my heart

Tuesdays, I generally work from home, which meant that instead of obsessively reading every scrap of information coming out of the primaries in Ohio and Texas (and Rhode Island and Vermont), I tried to calm my nerves by making a very slow-cooked chickpea, celery, and porcini soup with pecorino cheese, from Paula Wolfert's “The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen: Recipes for the Passionate Cook.” I must be the kind of person Paula Wolfert thinks is “passionate,” even all by my lonesome, because I love this book.

It was a very slow soup, even when I halved the following ingredients:

1 cups dried chickpeas
¼ t. baking soda
salt
½ oz. dried porcini
pinch of sugar
3 imported bay leaves
½ cup extra virgin olive oil
1 medium onion, grated in a food processor
2 garlic cloves
2 cups thinly sliced celery ribs
1/8 t. Italian or Greek oregano
freshly ground pepper
pinch of hot pepper flakes
curls of pecorino or manchego cheese

It had to be started the night before, with the dried chickpeas soaking in water with a little bit of baking soda, and the dried porcini mushrooms soaking in its own water with a pinch of sugar in the fridge. I followed the directions very precisely.

The next morning, I grated a small onion in my food processor and placed it with the chickpeas, 2 bay leaves, 3 T. of olive oil, a pinch of salt, and water to cover the chickpeas by an inch in my small two-quart dutch oven. Paula Wolfert says you’re supposed to use a clay pot like the Italian peasants, though you can buy a sand pot that works just as well in Chinatown. I figured a French-made Staub was good enough.

This part was freaky—I put it in a cold oven, cranked the heat to 450 degrees, and then let it sit for 30 minutes. Then I turned it down to 250 degrees and let it cook for three hours. Yes, three hours.

When the three hours had almost expired, I heated a garlic clove in a pan of hot olive oil for a little bit, then tossed in the celery and oregano for about 2 minutes. I added the drained, chopped porcini mushrooms with the soaking liquid, then the chickpeas and its cooking liquid, and a little more water. I also added a cup of homemade chicken stock, even if the recipe didn’t call for it. It bubbled away on medium heat for 20 more minutes. How easy is that?

And then it was done. Just a good amount of salt, generous amounts of freshly ground pepper, a pinch of hot pepper flakes, and curls of pecorino cheese.



The soup was wonderful. It was warming and satisfying, so much more than you would imagine chickpeas, celery, and mushrooms to be. The chickpeas had an honest texture you never get in canned beans, the mushroom flavor was silky smooth, and the cheese added an intense salty sharpness. I loved it. I love even more that like so many Paula Wolfert recipes, it comes from peasants who can't be bothered by complicated steps, resulting in directions so simple I could more or less recite them to you by heart.

So there was one bright spot that Tuesday.

Another Korean disappointment

My last night in Madrid, I ended up tapas-hopping with a fellow chowhound from the New York region. He had seen my blog and was very complimentary. I was particularly flattered when a week or so later, he suggested that I submit my blog to the James Beard Foundation awards, in the category of new media. He even offered to pay the $100 application fee. I turned him down, partly because the previous winners were real food journalists, but mostly because I don’t really want to be a food writer. I don’t think food is really that important.

I write about food, in a world where every schmuck has a blog, because right now, I don’t know how else to talk about the things I care about. I don’t know how else to show and not tell that I love my mother, that I miss my friends who’ve moved away, that I value things made with care and by hand, that I love traditions that are proud but alive with change. It’s like the most over-used MFK Fisher quote, “It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and intertwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it…and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied…and it is all one.” Such a poor example of her writing. It’s so much better to read the rest of “Gastronomical Me,” and see what a filter and prism food is for the things that really matter to her. And it’s so much better for me to stop this paragraph now and tell you what I ate in Koreatown last Friday.

I asked my friend to meet at Gam Mee Ok on 32nd Street because I’ve been craving Korean food like a pregnant woman since I left Seoul. Even if I don’t eat a Korean meal everyday, I dip into the kimchi in my fridge almost everyday, the way I used to snack on olives or bits of cheese. I’m sitting here now with a glass of wine and a bowl of my homemade radish kimchi.



Everything looked fine. There was their famous kimchi, fiery red-orange, with cabbage all mixed in with the giant chunks of radish. There was the clay jar of sliced scallions, the little pot of salt to add to the sullongtang, or beef stew, the specialty of the house.




But the soup tasted flat. The rice in it clumped unappetizingly together. The broth had no body, and no amount of sharp scallions or salt or pepper was going to save it. The noodles were mushy. I ate nearly all of it anyway, beggars can’t be choosers, but I was so disappointed. Even the kimchi was bad, sour and not in a good way. Gam Mee Ok had always been one of my favorites, the best place to go if your Korean friends have kept you out till 4 a.m. in a seedy karaoke room. Clearly, those memories of fabulous hot beef soup are very, very old.

It may be that the place has gone downhill, or it may be that I am too fresh from memories of my mother’s superlative cooking. But it’s definitely another spur to make Korean food happen for myself.

What about naengmyon?

“What about naengmyon? Such a wonderful commingling of parts -- chewy gray noodles! Cold savory broth! Sweet grainy pear! Salty pickled radish! Vinegar, mustard! Pretty boiled egg!”



This is how my sister feels about mul naengmyon, the Korean dish of chewy buckwheat noodles in a very clear, very fine cold beef broth. She feels pretty strongly about bibim naengmyon, too, which are the same noodles also served cold, but in a sweet, spicy red pepper sauce, rather than the beef broth.

I’ve never shared Mona’s passion for naengmyon. There’s nothing like a cool bowl of naengmyon on a hot summer day, but there is also so much mediocre naengmyon out there, I had forgotten how good it could it be. But yesterday, having lunch at Hanwoori, I had a naengmyon epiphany. It is one of “The Top Five Noodle Dishes of Asia”.

It was easy to forget because unlike some of the other contenders, naengmyon is a difficult food. Nine times out of ten, a bowl of pho or ramen will be perfectly tasty, if not sublime. Naengmyon, on the other hand, will be utterly forgettable nine times out of ten. The tenth time, it will be sublime.

The biggest challenge with mul naengmyon is the broth. If the idea of a cold meat broth turns you off, there’s a reason. It has to be carefully clarified, skimmed of all fat, rich in flavor and yet still clear and light, without the heavy gelatinous mouth-feel of most meaty stocks. The broth and the noodles are the main players, so they must not be overwhelmed with garnishes, but a few thin slices of pickled cucumber and radish, sweet Asian pear, cold sliced beef, and half a “pretty boiled egg” add just the right amount of contrast in texture, crunch, and flavor. Even if a perfect bowl comes out of the kitchen, you the eater have to be careful with the last-minute condiments of a spicy mustard and vinegar. The perfect proportion will make the broth sing; too much of either will muddy the broth and no amount of adding the other will ever restore the balance.

Bibim naengmyon is not much easier. There’s no cold beef broth to deal with, but the sweet, spicy sauce is surprisingly hard to get right. I’ve had so many bowls of bibim naengmyon that were too spicy, too sweet, or too much of both, as if the cook hoped to simply overwhelm my tastebuds to hide his lack of skill. At Hanwoori, only a small amount to just coat the noodles was sufficient to make the noodles perfect. It was just spicy, sweet, and tart enough to tease you into wanting more.

Naengmyon is a culinary lodestar. It reminds me that the best food is made with balance, restraint, and care. The best food can’t be eaten everyday or wherever you want—there is no good naengmyon in Manhattan. Most of the time, I will still choose what is more easily satisfying—like ramen during a layover at the Tokyo airport—because warm satisfaction is good for the soul. But it’s equally good for the soul to occasionally eat and know there are foods like Hanwoori naengmyon out there.

The best galbi-tang in the world

Sometimes, I wonder if I am just another victim of the American trend for slow food, organic food, localism, and food obsession in general. And then I have a day like last Wednesday, when my mother hustled me out of the house at 10:40 a.m. so we would be sure to arrive at 버드나무집, Budnamujip to have a bowl of short rib soup before they all sold out by 11:10. I’m a victim of heredity.



Budnamujip is a grand old dame of a restaurant. It’s famous for its galbi, or barbecued short ribs, both marinated and unmarinated, with the unmarinated ones being even more expensive because the quality of the meat is that much higher. (You generally have to reserve orders of the unmarinated galbi before you get there.) One order of unmarinated meat costs about 68,000 won, about $70, and many people order more than one order per person, plus stew or cold noodles after the grilling is done. Filled with smoke, fronted with a glass butchering shop, and waitresses in ugly uniforms running around, it’s the Korean equivalent of a glorious, old-school steakhouse.



But we weren’t there to eat grilled short ribs. Its lunchtime 갈비탕, galbi-tang, or short rib soup, for 12,000 won a bowl, has its own following. As my mother puts it, for some people, eating this soup once a week is their joy in life. We actually ran into one of those people and his wife, family friends who come every Sunday and holiday, when he can close his doctor’s office. Today was Election Day, so they came with plans to eat and then to vote.

We were the first car to pull into the parking lot at 10:50, and the restaurant wasn’t open yet, so we went for a walk around the block. By the time we got back 5 minutes later, there were already 10-15 people waiting in line. When the restaurant finally opened its inner doors to the downstairs dining room, the crowd moved expertly inside and quickly spread out, claiming their tables, one, two, three.



Once everyone was seated, a waiter came by and handed out little laminated tickets with numbers on them. Four orders of galbi-tang at our table, so four tickets. There are 100 tickets. If you don’t get one of them, tough luck, no galbi-tang for you!

Once the restaurant knew who was getting a bowl of galbi-tang, no other questions were asked. Every table got the same side dishes, cubed radish kimchi, garlic scape kimchi, white water radish kimchi, and a spicy lettuce salad. Then everyone just sat there patiently for 45 minutes, secure in their possession of one of the precious galbi-tang tickets.

They arrived. Huge, steaming bowls of chopped up short ribs in a broth with chopped scallions and glistening drops of fat on the surface. The ribs crowded the stainless steel bowl that was almost as big as my head. As they say in Korean, it was time to “rip the meat off with our teeth.”



This is the kind of experience I would heartily recommend to any chowhound, but with a major caveat. You must, you must be okay with ripping meat off the bone with your teeth. You must be okay with tendon and meat and fat all crowded together on the same bit of rib, the way it grows on a cow. It is socially acceptable to eat around the parts you don’t like, but there is no way to eat this meat without picking the bone up with your hands and gnawing on it.

For about 30 minutes, there was no conversation, just the sound of us chewing and discarding our bones in the bowls left on the table for just this purpose. When there was no meat left, there was the beautiful broth to concentrate on. Like liquid gold, so rich, so smooth. I drowned the rice in my soup like a little kid, loving the way the rice grains soaked up broth, too. Whenever the richness got almost too overwhelming, there was the excellent kimchi to cut through the fat on your tongue.

Our family friends, Mr. and Mrs. Kim, asked if there were restaurants in New York where people lined up to eat even before the restaurant opened. “Oh yes,” I said, thinking of Prune. “But not for food like this!”

(Merry Christmas! I'm off to Guam for a few days with my family. If I eat anything noteworthy on Guam, I'll let you know.)

Noodles forever

My sister and I invented a game a few years ago in which one person gives the other two foods (or ingredients or flavors), and that person then has to say which one she would give up for the rest of her life if she had to choose. Chocolate or vanilla? Salt or sugar? Basil or mint? There are no other rules, but we both get mad when someone says something like, “Bacon or pumpkin?” Only people who don’t care what they eat make this kind of error. Sure, there’s no winner, but it’s a lot of fun to play while you’re waiting for the bus, and if you’re playing with someone like my friend Leslie, you can torture her by asking, “Noodles or rice?”

It’s shocking how hard this question is for a girl who grew up in Rome, but even putting aside the category of Italian pasta, the mere existence of a dish like Korean handmade knife-cut noodles should make the answer clear. And 칼국수, kalguksu, doesn’t even belong in the "Top Five Noodles Dishes of Asia" pantheon! That is how deep that field is.

This is another dish I didn’t appreciate until I ended up in the impoverished Korean-food land of New York City. (This is one area in which Los Angeles beats New York’s ass.) My family’s favorite place to eat these noodles in Seoul is at 산동칼국수, Sandong Sone Kalguksu, which translates into Sandong Handmade Knife-Cut Noodles, located close to the Yangjae subway station. On its business card, it lists right under its name the following three words: “Giant Dumplings—Korean Boiled Pork—Cold Noodles,” but as the name declares, the knife-cut noodles are the best.

On each table, you can find an urn of kimchi, from which you serve yourself throughout the meal. This kimchi has a strong, sharp flavor, but it's still a little raw with almost crunchy cabbage leaves, and therefore not that sour. You might think you only need to fill the little dish provided for this purpose, but my family ends up emptying almost the entire urn.

The noodle soup is also clean and simple. The broth has the clear, light flavor of anchovy-broth, with some body that likely comes from dashi. The noodles have that irregularity so dear to the hearts of all those who love homemade noodles. They have that important bite, not the Italian al dente standard, but an exemplary chewiness that is so prized by Koreans in a range of foods, there’s a word for it, 쫄깃, cholgeet. You say it twice, cholgeet-cholgeet, if it’s really deliciously chewy. Piled on top of the noodles are a good number of clams, a little gritty but who’s complaining at 5,000 won a bowl? And then there are strips of dried seaweed, carrot, and zucchini, which add a little flavor and a lot of color, which is an important principle in Korean cooking.

It’s not a zingy food. It’s not the kind of thing that will make fireworks go off in your brain, and I can imagine some non-Koreans might even think it a little bland. But that’s what the kimchi is for, and there are days when nothing is as satisfying as a restorative soup of handmade, knife-cut noodles. The answer for me is always the same, “Noodles forever!”

Who doesn't love something tasty wrapped in dough?

It gives me a warm feeling to think about how so many cultures love to eat foods wrapped in dough. Pierogies, dumplings, wontons, empanadas—the list goes on and on. In Korea, our national dough-wrapped food is 만두, or mandoo. The most traditional version involves a thick doughy skin, more like a pierogi than a wonton, with a filling of mainly crumbled tofu, lots of green onions, perhaps some bean sprouts and/or kimchi, and a bit of meat. We like to eat them bobbing in soup, sometimes with sliced ovals of 떡, dduk, or rice cake. They are as comforting as all foods that are doughy and warm.



One of my favorite places to eat mandoo in Seoul is called, simply enough, 만두집, Mandoo Jip, or Mandoo House, a tiny little hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Apkujongdong. Apkujongdong is probably Seoul’s most chichi neighborhood, full of cafes serving 10,000 won (over $10) coffees, bars serving even more expensive drinks, and hip restaurants for ladies who lunch. It’s wedged into a little shed-like building that is itself wedged into an alley right next to the new Uniqlo, which occupies the space where McDonald’s used to be, right across from the glossy Galleria Department Store. It would look like a little bewildered thing, surprised by what’s sprung up around it, except that it has spruced itself up a bit lately so that everything is shiny and new.

For 7,000 won, you get cabbage kimchi, a refreshingly spicy and slightly raw julienned radish, and a big steaming bowl of fat mandoo. It’s all very bare-bones—there’s nothing in the beef-broth soup than a sprinkling of Korean red pepper powder that gives it a heartening bite.



Such a fat little bundle that has been boiled in beef broth is likely to be scalding hot, and so you are supposed to take one mandoo out of the soup, place it in the little side dish provided for you, and cut it with your spoon into pieces, adding a bit of scallion-spiked soy sauce with each bite. The dough here achieves that perfect, difficult balance, thick but not starchy, satisfying rather than stupefying. The chopped green onions in the filling are not just a side note, they take up a lot of room, adding a clean, green sharpness to the crumbled tofu. The filling is seasoned so well, you only need a dab of soy sauce to make it complete.

This is the kind of Korean food I miss the most when I am in New York, a small restaurant making one thing so well, it becomes a minor masterpiece.

Koreans love pork

There are a few things from my past that I am deeply embarrassed about. One is that as a teenager, long, long ago, when I didn’t know much about anything, I was a big fan of New Kids on the Block. The other is that also when I was a teenager, long, long ago, when I didn’t know much about anything, I spent most of my time eating out at TGI Friday’s. At least with my bad taste in music, there wasn’t much lost other than my dignity. But with my bad taste in food, while growing up in Seoul, Korea, I lost a thousand and one opportunities to eat a meal as delicious as the one I had last night.

Last night, my cousin Young and I went to 사월에보리밥 , or Sawhuleh Boleebap, which translates into something like “Barley Rice in April.” The fact that it has a name that sounds sissy in English is a hiccup of cultural translation; it doesn’t say anything about the food, which is as simple and assertive as the best Korean food has to offer.

Koreans love pork. We love it so much some people have convinced themselves it prevents hypertension and eliminates toxins. It’s true that 보쌈, bossam, one of the best manifestations of Korean pork, has a surprisingly clean flavor. It’s simply boiled, sliced pork, with nothing on it or under it or in it, not even salt. I think it also tastes purer than it deserves to because of the way we eat it. Like many Asian cuisines, Korean food values a contrasting balance of flavors and textures. If you’re eating a tender hunk of pork with glistening lumps of fat, you’re not supposed to douse it in gravy and eat it with potatoes. You’re supposed to place it in a crisp piece of napa cabbage or spry shiso leaf or even just a very fresh piece of red-leaf lettuce with a good piece of spicy bossam kimchi. Some people might even add a small piece of hot green pepper or raw garlic, or raw oysters dressed in spicy sauce, or just a bit of soy sauce to add some acidic saltiness. In any case, the raw, bright, fresh flavors in your mouth make that fatty pork taste almost as virtuous as salad. And it may even make your skin glossy!



While we ate our pile of pork, we also cleansed our systems with bowls of barley rice, into which we mixed various sautéed vegetables and red pepper sauce, a variation on the bibimbap many Americans know. I loved the nutty flavor of the barley, especially combined with the slightly bitter greens, the bean sprouts, and the chewy root vegetables.



And since Koreans rarely eat rice without soup or stew, there was also a very good bowl of hot 된장찌개, daenjang jjigae, a stew made from Korean fermented soybeans, filled with potatoes, squash, and cubes of firm tofu. Daenjang is a good example of a Korean food with the fifth flavor of umami, beyond salty, sour, sweet, and bitter, the unmistakable sense that a food tastes full.



We washed it all down with a comically large jug of 동동주, dongdongju, a creamy, sweet liquor made out of rice. My cousin, like the good Korean she is, had most of it.

I have so much lost time to make up for! I gained 10 pounds in Spain. I may just have to gain another ten here.

Home, Seoul

I’m home. I'm lucky I have two places to call home: Brooklyn, New York, U.S.A., and Seoul, Korea. Brooklyn has its obvious charms, particularly the absolute joy of living alone without one’s parents, but as I get older, being at home with my parents in Seoul has its own incomparable sense of comfort and ease. There’s the twin bed I slept in from the age of 9 through high school graduation, the little yard I used to run around with our dog, and most of all, the ugly, ornate, wood table on which I ate so many of my meals growing up.

Before I left New York, my mom called to see what I wanted to eat for my first meal when I arrived home. I knew if I gave her even the slightest encouragement, there would be an almost-obscene amount of food waiting for me. So I said to her over and over, I really can’t eat that much just getting off the plane, just a bowl of my favorite Korean soup will do.

It’s hard for me to describe what 배추국, or baechuguk, tastes like. How would your average American describe the taste of mac and cheese, of meatloaf? (Meatloaf, incidentally, remains one of the most bewildering food items to me.) It’s a fermented soybean soup, made from daenjang, which is a more aggressive, Korean version of the Japanese miso, with a beef broth-base, in which sliced Napa cabbage is simmered until it’s tender and delicious. That’s really it. You can throw in some minced garlic and green onions to add a bit more bite, but you don’t need much else. With a bowl of rice and a few small plates of banchan, maybe some spicy, chewy anchovies or black beans cooked in soy sauce and sugar, it is the perfect meal for someone who has been traveling for almost 24 hours.



I didn’t take a picture because I was too busy basking in the warmth of my mother’s love. But here are some pictures of a spicy 나물, namul, of greens dressed with garlic and sesame seeds, with fresh homemade 김치, kimchi, in the background.



And then there is my sister’s favorite food of all time, Korean braised short ribs with chestnuts, or 갈비찜. I ate all this for lunch the next day. I am lucky that my mother is who she is, and that I am her daughter.

Oh, the French (in Spain)

Like many people, I can only keep one foreign language in my head at once. At one point in my life, I knew quite a bit of French. I never did speak it gracefully or even well, and I never really could hear it properly with all those mushy syllables, but I understood it well enough to pass out of Yale’s undergraduate foreign language requirement. Now it has been completely crowded out by Spanish. (Korean, thankfully, is in a separate part of my brain.) This became particularly apparent when the nice young French family next to me at Zurriola Marítimo noticed I was taking pictures of my food and started to talk to me, asking if I spoke French. Although it literally took me a whole minute to remember how to say “trés bon,” the “un peu” French I do have enabled me to understand the husband’s very French assessment of food in Spain: “La cuisine française est la meilleure de Europe!” (French cuisine is the best in Europe!) So modest of him not to proclaim, “de tout le monde,” n’est-ce pas?

I also did not love the food at Zurriola Marítimo, although it was much better than it should be, given its spectacular view of the surf at Playa de Zurriola. Most restaurants with astonishing views tend to have terrible food, and it’s a testament to San Sebastian’s gastronomic standards that the food was good and reasonably priced, if not great. But I doubt the French homme thought what I did while eating my roasted oxtails: “It would be so much better in a hot Korean soup!”



The first course I ordered, a vichysoisse of leeks with a poached egg and poached bacalao was tasty, if not quite hot enough. (Is it because I’m Korean that I want my soup to be piping hot?) The soup was very smooth and clean-tasting, despite its rich creaminess, and the salt cod was as soft as butter, almost melting in my mouth. They need to be a little careful with the sea salt on the poached egg, though; I almost choked on a small pile of salty granules.



The second course was not as good, though there was nothing really wrong with it. The oxtails had been browned until they glistened, almost caramelized, and the meat still fell easily from the bone. They sat on a surprisingly light bed of soft, long-cooked potatoes and carrots, perhaps celery as well, and there were interesting tasty blobs of orange sauce that I couldn’t identify. The fried strips of green pepper were wonderful, so much sweeter than any green pepper I’ve ever had in the U.S. So perhaps it was me, not the oxtails. I couldn’t help but yearn for oxtails just simmered straight in a very hot beef broth, perhaps a handful of glass noodles, scads of chopped scallions, and a big pinch of sea salt…Korean oxtail soup! I also sat there pitying cultures that didn’t enjoy spicy, picante food, thinking how just a little bit of a spicy condiment, like Korean red pepper paste, would have enlivened the stew. So who am I to think the French are snobby about food?

Especially since the family was very nice. The maman directed her little boy to give me a bisou, or a kiss on the cheek, before they left. Qué cariñoso!

Cook and Taste in Barcelona

I had been a little apprehensive about what the cooking class might be like at Cook and Taste in Barcelona. It was listed in my Lonely Planet, and a poster on Chowhound had recommended it, but I had been afraid that it was a school targeted to tourists wanting to swill sangria and that it would inevitably avoid “scary” ingredients. When I saw the menu, I wasn’t really reassured: tortilla espanola (the eponymous potato omelet), paella (the eponymous rice dish), sopa de tomates (suspiciously like the eponymous gazpacho), and crema catalana (suspiciously like flan). I wanted to learn how to make food that was essentially Spanish, but also to learn more about Spanish food than I could in New York.

But as I’ve learned so often on my travels, my pessimism was greatly misplaced. Bego, our teacher, was instantly likable, a somewhat serious woman with a quiet but sharp sense of humor. She had been an engineer for years and had started the cooking school as a major career change, but she kept her kitchen clean and her knives sharp like any professionally trained chef. And there was cuttlefish in the paella, bought fresh from La Boqueria that morning.

The class wasn’t big, three middle-aged women traveling through Italy and Spain together from Los Angeles, me and Anne, one young guy who was clearly a foodie from Australia, and then one motorcycle instructor from England, who it turned out never cooked but had been sent there as part of a tour package. We cooked through the recipes together, two volunteers at a time joining Bego, but all of us watching on, which was a nice change from the team-approach at other cooking schools I’ve been to.



What I loved best was definitely the sopa, the cold soup that she served in little glasses, with a pungent garnish of garlic aioli, hazelnuts, and a hard grated cheese. The tomatoes were almost raw, having only been blanched in boiling water to remove their skins, but sweet and red. It was as beautiful as it was good.



Tortilla espanola, I have never particularly cared for, since potatoes are not my favorite vegetable. Bego revealed that the question of whether onion should be added to the potatoes cooked in oil was a controversial question in Spain, one that could even divide families. When I asked Isaac, Mao-Mei’s husband about it, he said, “Huh, that’s funny. I never eat tortilla without onion,” proving her point. But this tortilla, so expertly flipped by Anne, did have a lovely golden crust, and although I still will order almost anything else at a tapas bar, I can see how it’s the kind of everyday food that I love, simple, cheap, filling, and tasty.



The other controversy in Spanish cooking is apparently whether lemon should be squeezed on paella or not. Bego warned us, if we’re invited to a Spanish home and served paella without lemon, not to ask for it. Anne and I had avoided paella up to that point, since it’s the kind of thing that tends to get advertised by garish backlit photographs at tourist restaurants, and we both loved what the lemon juice added to the prawns and the cuttlefish, the tomatoes, and almost al dente rice. I loved how the grains felt in my mouth, as if each grain had its own integrity.

Crema catalana, in the end, turned out to be a Catalan version of crème brulee, complete with blowtorching of the sugar on top. I liked it, as I like almost all custards, but I think you can imagine what it was like without much more description.

I had to admit, what was typical was still real and still good. I left New York to be humbled, to stop being so sure of what I like and what I don’t. It’s happening.

Bragging about my soup

One of the things I love most about my friend Mimi is that she does not believe in hiding one’s light under a bushel. Hanging around her, it has started to rub off on me, and I can say, without hesitation, that I made a fantastic black bean soup the other night, and that I also made tacos of chicken and Mexican greens in a tomatillo-serrano sauce were both complex and soothingly delicious.

Of course, I have to admit that neither was very hard to make. Both recipes came from Rick Bayless’s “Mexican Kitchen,” and involved little more than patience and a good blender, though the availability of authentic ingredients like avocado leaves and Oaxacan chorizo was no small matter.



The black bean soup involved so little work, it’s almost embarrassing. I put Mimi to work picking out the ugly beans, while I roughly chopped a small white onion and peeled the casing off of three fat, round links of Oaxacan chorizo. I also toasted 4 avocado leaves very briefly on the burner, watching with fascination as dark spots spread almost instantly and completely across the leaf. Everything got simmered together for about two hours, until the beans were tender, and then salted to taste. I blended the soup in batches, and we ate it garnished with fried tortilla strips and crumbled queso fresco. There was no stock! And yet so much flavor came from the chorizo, the beans, and the unique anise-like scent of the avocado leaves. It was slightly spicy, in a deep, dark way, and utterly warming.



The chicken in tomatillo sauce had a completely different flavor, all brightness and verve. I began by roasting tomatillos and 2 serrano chiles on a metal comal, directly on the stove, until they had big, dark, soft spots. In the meantime, I sautéed half a white chopped onion until deep golden, adding some chopped garlic to cook for a minute more, and then blended the onions and garlic with the roasted tomatillos and chiles. This puree got fried in oil for 10 minutes, getting darker and richer. When it was done cooking, I stirred in 3 tablespoons of chopped cilantro.



In the meantime, I was simmering three chicken legs in plain water. I had been nervous about buying unrefrigerated chicken in the markets, and had wandered around for 2 hours looking for a rotisserie chicken, but in the end, I felt so lucky I had had a chance to cook those marigold-yellow chickens in the market. I didn’t put in an onion or a carrot, peppercorns or thyme, too lazy to try to make a real broth, and I even pulled off the skin in a fit of fat-consciousness, but nothing I could do could make the chicken taste bad. To think I just boiled the darn things! And yet they were meaty with flavor. Now that I think about it, chicken in the U.S. so rarely tastes like meat, it just tastes like filler or a flavor vehicle. When I think of all those people who only eat chicken, and even then only white meat, I have to blame them for creating a market for flavorless gum.



While the chicken finished poaching, I added thin strips of amaranth leaves, or quintoniles, in the tomatillo-serrano sauce, until they were only slightly bitter. I almost felt like they took on a bright tartness of their own. When I added the cooked, shredded chicken, the richness of the meat rounded out the tartness of the greens and sauce. All it needed was a little crumbled queso fresco.



We also had a salad of jicama, mango, and avocado, with some red leaf lettuce to bulk it up. Mimi and I ate most of it, as Alex didn’t even notice we had a salad until he was full of soup and chicken. (Thanks to them both for the glamorous close-ups; I was too frazzled to take photos.)

The comforts of posole

Just when I thought my month of eye-opening, homemade Oaxacan food was over, Patty served posole for our Saturday comida. Her entire family had been up late celebrating her second oldest’s graduation. Unlike American teenagers, Valeria and her friends had big party at which her mother, father, little brother, aunt, uncle, and 84-year-old grandmother were all very welcome. Valeria, according to her own words, had several shots of whiskey mixed with soda, right in view of her parents, probably with her parents for all I know. Her grandmother got home around midnight because she was tired; her parents, Patty and Homero, came home at 4 in the morning. Valeria and most of her family were tired and “cruda” or hungover, and posole was the most restorative thing Patty could make. I love Mexican family values.

Posole is a soup made of chicken or pork broth and rehydrated dried corn kernels, bigger than any most Americans have ever seen, to which various kinds of meat can be added, depending on your regional definition of “posole.” Patty’s was chicken-intensive, to which you could add shredded cabbage and a fresh squeeze of lime. Some crunchy, fried tortillas crumbled into the broth made it even better. It’s my favorite kind of food, homey, warming, and very, very delicious.

I wasn’t hungover, since I’d spent much of the night watching the Simpsons in Spanish, but I think the posole did me a lot of good, too.

Spring is finally here

Spring chose a good time to come back to New York. After a week of unseasonably cold weather, Friday was sunny and Saturday, today, is downright hot. Everyone is radiant. Erin, my roommate from San Francisco, is in town, and we walked all the way to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden today to look at the cherry blossoms. Even though I have been on a spending freeze, and virtuously resisted the adorable little herbs at the farmers' market, I couldn't stop myself from buying a big potted dahlia.

Spring also means sorrel is back at the farmers' markets. The first time I tasted sorrel, at the Alemany market in San Francisco, I almost couldn't believe it. It seemed so unreal, this bright, green leaf that tastes so intensely lemony. I'm always looking for new ways to cook with it, to see what strange and delicious things it can do.



Deborah Madison's "The Savory Way" is definitely one of my best cookbook buys this year. I snatched it for $5 during the madhouse of the James Beard Foundation's biennial cookbook tag sale, which makes it even more precious. Whenever I use her recipes, I end up with food that is fresh, delicious, and healthy without being self-consciously so. For example, the tomato, fennel, potato with saffron stew calls for a big blob of garlic mayonnaise, and this lovely sorrel and lentil soup happily incorporates a tablespoon or more of heavy cream. And with every added ingredient, you can really taste the change, the added dimension. It's funny, the recipes feel only incidentally vegetarian--the word "vegetarian" is nowhere on the cover, and the first mention of it in the inside flap is to proclaim, "These brilliant recipes are not just for vegetarians." Heh, heh, apologetic vegetarianism is my kind of vegetarianism.

Deborah Madison is right to warn you that the soup isn't pretty, because it isn't. But she's also right in saying that it's absurdly simple, and the more I ate it, the more I loved it. It's almost miraculous how flavorful a handful of lentils and water can be, and the sorrel, as it turned olive green and murky, kept its sharp, citrus tone. I would probably reduce the amount of water to 1 quart next time, but that's the only modification I would make. The recipe is so easy that the summary that follows is from memory:

1/2 cup of lentils
1 small red onion, diced small
1 bay leaf
1/2 t. salt
1.5 quarts of water
3 handfuls of sorrel, shredded
1-2 T. of heavy cream

Combine lentils, onion, bay leaf, salt and water. Bring to a boil and simmer for about 30 minutes, until the lentils are completely soft. Puree half the lentils. Add the sorrel and cook for 10 more minutes. Stir in the cream, add salt to taste, and serve with freshly ground pepper.

That's it, a great Saturday spring lunch.

Tomato, fennel, and potato stew with saffron...and Taqueria Coatzingo

It's been a gluttonous weekend, but it's pretty much impossible for me not to devote Sunday night to cooking at this point. It seems like such a waste not to try something new, with all that lovely free time to chop and simmer. Tonight, well, I regret not inviting anyone to come eat with me, because truly, it was delicious, and I made successful mayonnaise for the first time to boot.

Deborah Madison calls this a "failed fisherman's soup," with all the elements of a bouillabaisse minus the fish. I had some frozen fluke I wanted to use, from my previous big fish, so I slipped in some pieces at the end, but I didn't bother making a fish stock and pretty much followed her recipe. What follows is a paraphrase:

1.5 lbs red or yellow-fleshed potatoes
2 fennel bulbs
1 pound ripe tomatoes, peeled and seeded, juice reserved or 2 cups whole canned tomatoes
salt
3-4 T. virgin olive oil
1 large leek, white part only, finely diced
1 large yellow onion, cut into wedges 1/2 in. thick
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
1 t. herbes de Provence
2-3 pinches of saffron threads
a large strip of orange zest, about 2 in. long
2 bay leaves
1 cup dry white wine
2 T. chopped parsley
12 Nicoise, Gaeta or oil-cured black olives, pitted

Peel the potatoes and slice them lengthwise into quarters or sixths. Trim the fennel and cut into wedges 1/2 in. thick. Cut the tomatoes into large, neat pieces.

Boil the potatoes for 5 minutes. Remove the potatoes but reserve the water.

Warm the olive oil in a wide pan and add the leek, onion, garlic, herbs, a little salt, saffron, orange zest and bay leaves. Cook slowly over medium heat until the onions soften, about 6 minutes. Add the wine and reduce by half. Add tomatoes, potatoes, fennel, half the parsley and olives. Pour in enough of the potato water to cover and bring to boil. Simmer covered for about 35 minutes, until vegetables are tender. Or preheat oven to 375, cover loosely, and bake for about 1 hour. Garnish with remaining parsley and garlic mayonnaise.

I've tried making mayonnaise before, and ended up with this harsh, viscous pudge. It was time to try again. This recipe is from Deborah Madison's "Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone." Whisk one egg yolk until it's thick, add one t. Dijon mustard, and 2-3 t. lemon juice or white wine vinegar. Add 3/4 c. peanut oil in drops at first, while whisking, and then in a steady stream after it's started to thicken. Then add salt and lemon juice to taste. I set my bowl on the counter with a towel coiled under it, and although I was too clumsy to really drip the oil drop by drop, it really worked. With some mashed up garlic, presto, it was garlic mayonnaise.

It's amazing, I love tomatoes and I know I love tomatoes, but it's still a shock to me every time I eat something rich with tomatoes how sweetly delicious they are. This very simple soup, which is essentially vegetables and herbs, had so much bright flavor, and it just went over the top with a dollop of garlic mayonnaise.

I wish I'd been hungrier so I could have eaten more, but I'd gone to Jackson Heights for lunch to have chilaquiles, enchiladas with mole poblano and more with some friends at Taqueria Coatzingo. Oh the woes of having only one stomach!

Dumpling sweatshop

The easiest way for one person to get a lot of dumplings made quickly is, of course, to have a party and have your guests make dumplings for you. It's amazing how quickly 300 dumplings can be made, even with amateur dumpling makers.



It's the Year of the Pig, which meant porky dumplings were even more appropriate than usual. One of the co-hosts is Chinese-American, but since I was in charge of the food, I hijacked the dumplings for the Korean New Year tradition of dumpling and rice cake soup. It's everyday food, the kind of thing my mom made for dinner when she was tired or busy, but it's so satisfying and obviously lucky, since Koreans eat it every year on New Year's without fail.

The broth was made by simmering a 3-lb. piece of brisket for about 2 hours, being sure to skim off the brown foam as it started to boil. Then seasoned with a little soy sauce (not too much, as it would turn it brown) and salt. I then let the brisket cool, shredded it, and mixed it with chopped garlic, scallions, a little soy sauce, and a little sesame seed oil. With little diamonds of pan-fried eggs and crumpled up seaweed, the beef was set aside to be added for last-minute garnish and flavor.

I prepped two kinds of dumpling filling: a vegetarian, tofu-and-kimchi filling, and a truly porky filling adulterated only by minced garlic, minced ginger, chopped scallions, soy sauce, and sesame seed oil. Koreans traditionally like to put strained, crumbled tofu in their meat dumplings, but I've decided that until I start making my own dumpling skins, the thick, doughy kind that I love the best, I'll go with the more Chinese, meaty style for store-bought wonton skins.

The rice cakes just came from the big Korean grocery store on 32nd Street--I've never known anyone who made her own--but they fascinated more than a few guests, including one who insisted on seeing the bag and noting where they were bought.

So the upshot: 4.5 lbs. of ground pork + 2 lbs. of firm tofu + 3 lbs. of brisket + 300 dumpling skins + 50 guests = mighty fine eating.



And for dessert, since it was the Year of the Red Pig, I made a red velvet pig-shaped cake!