Warm Salad Nights

Up until my experimentations with pork tenderloin, I hadn't marinated anything since college when the farthest I went was to soak some boneless, skinless chicken breasts in off-brand Italian dressing--it needed the help. Now it's a whole new world of wine and vinegar with whole garlic cloves and rosemary with added honey to make a warm salad dressing. I made the whole tenderloin for myself in my quiet kitchen on a Wednesday evening last week. The days are longer making dinner come a little later. I used up the last of some autumnal butternut squash for the salad. Things will soon be fresh peas and salad greens.

On this last winter meal, I marinated that pork overnight. The red wine dyed the flesh dark purple, permeating deep into the meat. I love this trick of using the marinade or the leftover bits of meat stuck to the bottom of the pan (called sucs, if you want to know) to make a savory sauce. There's so much bang, and it's certain to pair well with the rest of the meal. It's so nice to have this: a quiet space to have dinner in the middle of another busy quarter of life.

Warm Tenderloin Salad with Squash: serves 2 from Epicurious
1 pork tenderloin
1 cup red wine
1 teaspoon rosemary
1 garlic clove, smashed
1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes
1/4 cup red-wine vinegar
1 tablespoon honey
1/2 butternut squash, cubed
1/2 onion, julienned
salad greens

Pour the wine, garlic clove and rosemary into a bag with the tenderloin. Seal and let rest for an hour or overnight. Heat a saute pan on medium with a tablespoon or so of canola oil. Reserve the marinating liquid. Season the tenderloin with salt and pepper and add it to the pan. Sear the outside of the meat and then turn the heat down to medium-low and cover. Cook until the tenderloin reaches an internal temperature of 155 degrees or is just faintly pink on the inside. Remove from heat and let rest covered with tin foil for 10 minutes before slicing. Then add the squash and onions to the saute pan and cook until softened.

In another saute pan, bring the red-wine marinade to a boil with the vinegar, honey and red pepper flakes. Reduce in volume by half. Blend with a bit of olive oil and reserve as a warm dressing.

Serve the sliced tenderloin and warm vegetables over a bed of arugula and topped with the warm dressing.

Pain Rustique

I've been struggling for a couple weeks now with bread class. Crafting the perfect or even acceptable bread is such a subtle art. A few minutes can make the difference between just right and under-proofed, which means the innards of the bread are exploding from a few cracks in the crust (this has been my problem). And the process involves a lot of waiting. We're talking hours, even days. For the pain rustique, I made the pre-ferment, a mixture of flour and yeast and water that adds a lot of flavor and some shelf life, the night before using it, and with the sourdough loaf, I began the sourdough starter two weeks before ever getting to use it. That means I babied some fungus and bacteria for 14 entire days before I popped it in the oven.

Patience is not strength of mine. I'm still weighing whether the payoff was worth it. Don't get me wrong, that sourdough bread is pretty good, and after four days and no preservatives, it's just about as good as is was on day one. Homemade bread making is such an antiquated thing these days. No one really values it. People want their bread soft, sweet and of the Wonder variety. It's consistent, pleasing and costs $2 or less and a short trip to the grocery. Gone are the days of fresh rolls with every meal, and I'll be honest and say I'm mourning that yet. I think about the slice of sourdough I ate toasted this morning. It had something, a very very slight sour (I wish it had more), and crunchy crust and a sweet, wholey center that melted butter tucked into so very nicely. Sprinkled with a little sugar, it was a pleasant morning start. As of week three in artisan breads class, I'm not sure about trading bread from the grocer that isn't bad but isn't super for a two-week process, but maybe my skill is still holding me back. I think that's a real possibility.

Pain Rustique: from Bread: A Baker's Book of Techniques and Recipes
Poolish:
1 pound bread flour
16 fluid ounces water
1/8 teaspoon yeast

Dough:
1 pound bread flour
6.1 fluid ounces water
2 pounds poolish (all of the above recipe)
1 tablespoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons yeast

Make the poolish the night before by mixing and letting it sit out to ferment for 12 to 16 hours.

Mix all the ingredients, starting with the water and poolish to loosen the pre-ferment, then adding the flour and yeast and finally the salt. Let sit (autolyze) for 15 minutes and then complete the kneading process. Knead until the dough has a smooth texture when stretched. Let ferment for 70 minutes. Stretch the dough by the corners and roll over to form a ball twice during the fermentation process. Divide the dough into three equal pieces. Form into a round loaf by folding the corners in and pressing out the air. Proof for 30 minutes. Score the bread and then bake for 35 minutes or until golden brown at about 450 degrees.

Meat and Potatoes

I've never cooked a pork tenderloin before. I don't even know that I've eaten one before. I don't think my mom ever made it when I was growing up, and it's not the sort of thing I would select off a menu. "Oooh, grilled pork tenderloin with mashed potatoes." It doesn't really get me going. I guess it sounds rather boring, just plain meat and potatoes.

I'm in the process of discovering all that is great about pork. (We already know my fondness for bacon.) But there's something about pork that lends itself to pairing with sweet things, like apples or honey. It's a sultry flavor that isn't quite savory or salty, like a steak or hamburger, but is just loaded with this great fat that lends itself so well to being smoked or cured or ground up into sausage. Except the tenderloin. It's a piece of meat that has no fat in it. There's fat all around it, of course, and some residual flecks make it onto a fabricated piece, but it's just this great soft piece of muscle.

I practiced removing the silverskin on this tenderloin from Wohlner's and didn't mangle the meat as much as I had the first time, though it's by no means an A effort. I followed Ina Garten's instructions for a marinade and then made an integral sauce at the end of the cooking. My sauce class turned out to be fairly handy in the end as I now know some really fancy tricks. Not bad at all for a first effort if I do say so. The green beans and fingerling potatoes are another easy trick I learned from Culinary Foundations. I partially cooked the beans and the potatoes in boiling water and then blanched them with really cold water to halt the cooking process. Then I sliced the potatoes and lightly salted them and sauteed them right before service to get a golden-brown sear on them and to get them all good and hot right before dinner. So simple, but that's what makes it so good.

Herb-marinated Pork Tenderloin: from Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics
3 pork tenderloins
1/4 cup lemon juice (about 4 lemons)
1/2 cup olive oil
6 cloves garlic, minced
1 1/2 tablespoons fresh rosemary
1 tablespoon fresh thyme
2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
salt and pepper

For sauce:
1/4 cup apple-cider vinegar
2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
1/2 cup chicken stock
2 tablespoons brown sugar
4 tablespoons cold butter

Place all the ingredients in an oven bag or large ziplock and let rest for three hours or overnight. Season the tenderloins with salt and pepper and cook in a very large saute pan with the lid on until the outside is seared and the inside is just cooked and reaches about 140 degrees. Remove the tenderloins and let rest for 10 minutes cover by aluminum foil.

Leaving the good bits of marinade and pork in the pan, deglaze the sucs with the vinegar. Add the mustard, stock and sugar and bring to a boil. Reduce in volume until the sauce is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon. Mount with pieces of the cold butter and season with salt and pepper.

The Starter

My new set of classes, protein fabrication and artisan breads, have me completely re-energized. The sun came out again, the smell of the earth is seeping up through my open windows and I get to start over just like everything else. Artisan bread is such an interesting course. There's so much I've learned in just one session (and a lot of reading), like how yeast was only just discovered as an organism that can be harvested and sold in the late 1800s by Louis Pasteur. Before that, folks just added water to flour, let it ferment, kept feeding it and using it and feeding and using the exact same starter sometimes for generations. Families would pass the bread starter on as a wedding gift. There's a sourdough starter in San Francisco that is more than 100 years old. This is exactly the sort of thing that completely enthralls me but is also the sort of thing I will absolutely fail at. I am going to kill it at one point or another. I've already had one close call.

One of our assignments for the artisan bread class is to make and maintain a sourdough starter for the entire quarter. We're supposed to show up the day of the final with our starter to make a loaf of sourdough bread. If the starter is dead, so are we. The starter is sitting out on my counter on day seven of the fermentation process. It's starting to get a little bit stinky with a faintly sour aroma. This starter is a tad bit high maintainence. Starting on day three it has to be fed twice everyday, like a pet. In the morning before work, I scrape about one-tenth of the goop into a clean glass bowl, stir in half a cup of water and then two-thirds of a cup of flour. Then I cover it and let the bacteria feast on the fresh flour. When I get home at 5 p.m., I repeat just dumping the leftover starter into the trash. Yesterday, I missed a feeding. I forgot to set my alarm for work. Fortunately, I woke up only 10 minutes late, but I ran out of the house before tending to my fermentation project. I thought for sure that would be the death of the starter, but it was still bubbling when I got home that night, which is probably only going to encourage more neglegent behavior on my part.

The starter won't be ready for the oven for another couple days, although I probably won't be ready to make the bread for another couple of weeks into the class. Apparently patience is key when it comes to delicious bread ... this should be interesting.

Let's Fabricate!

Spring classes started for me this morning with Protein Fabrication, which is (in laymen's terms) butchering meat. It's a bit of a suprise that I signed up to learn about breaking down meat seeing as five to seven years ago I did not eat red meat. It wasn't for ethical or health-related reasons; it just kind of grossed me out in its raw form. So slimy and rubbery. Plus my mom had a tendency to overcook. But these days, things are different. I don't eat much meat truly. I try to always have bacon on hand, but other than that, I only buy meat or poultry when I have something specific I want to make in mind. I've moved far away from being jittery with grease or skin, and I suspect this class will only move me even further.

We started out with pork. Simple stuff really. Although I now have a greater appreciation for the word "butcher" because I butchered my tenderloin, trying to remove the tough, inedible silverskin from it. It was a bit of a juicy mess. Removing the back fat from my pork chops did not go smoothly, but it was only day one, and I have never spent this much time with a piece of raw meat before.

We were assigned to do some readings, look up information on pork and to watch some videos posted on Chef Garvey's Web site. The series of videos on pork follows the piglet from pretty much whole hog (minus the innards) to portion-size cuts. Not going to lie, it was a little shocking at first. There was Drew, the class teacher's aid, with the pig pointing out the kill point in its throat and then, yes, sawing the head off. It ended somewhat dramatically with him snapping its neck. I'm not sure I'm up to that. I'm not even sure I'm up to jabbing a live lobster between the eyes to snuff out its life, but if I'm eating it, shouldn't I be able to kill it? Sebastian and Wilbur deserve a little more respect than what I give them, I think. Trussing a pork tenderloin ... that I can do. I'm already working out a plan involving a dry rub. Now all I need is a guinea pig or two--and not to cook although I have eaten guinea pig (tender dark meat, very tasty).

Amaretto Biscotti

I had three days off in a row last week. Three. It was nice. I slept, kind of a lot actually. I didn't even cook anything on my days off until Sunday evening when I was home alone. I almost drove to Noodles and Company but committed to making two of my favorites, my old standbys. One is a Giada de Laurentiis pasta recipe combining Italian sausage, artichokes, roasted tomatoes and parmesan cheese (so all things delicious). The other is the amaretto biscotti I found in a Gourmet magazine issue several years ago.
 
Biscotti are like cookies for adults, to be dunked in coffee instead of milk. This version of biscotti isn't too hard at all, not that I mind much the crunch. Dunking still leaves little remnants in the cup, saved for the last slurp. I use amaretto liqueur instead of kirsch because it's cheaper, also it reminds me of my early days of drinking. At 21, amaretto sours were just about all my friends and I could handle. That and midori sour. Those were our "adult" drinks after the too-early days of drinking Smirnof Ice, yikes. Now amaretto's only use in my house is in baked goods. Maybe once I'm in my 30s I'll start using kirsch brandy and drinking whiskey with ice (that seems a long way off).
 
The recipe is easy with almost no cleanup. And these beauts are addicting.
 
Amaretto Biscotti: makes 18
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup butter, melted
3 tablespoons amaretto liqueur
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 teaspoons almond extract
3 eggs
1 cup almonds, toasted and chopped
2 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
 
Preheat oven to 350. In a bowl, stir together sugar, butter, liqueur and extracts. Add the eggs and stir to combine. Add the almonds. Stir in the remaining dry ingredients until everything just comes together. Turn out on a baking sheet and mold into two logs that are eight to ten inches long, three inches wide and one or so inches thick. Bake for 30 minutes. Remove and let cool a bit. Slice into one-inch thick pieces and bake again for 20 to 25 minutes.

Here's To Breaking Things

The winter quarter ended along with, you know, everything else. The only things left standing are my ability to throw together a kicking meal (albeit on a more restricted budget in the future) and my voice, which does nothing but complain.

I have a tendency for the dramatic (if you haven’t noticed). Every once in a while, the bike I’m riding breaks down (in this case literally; I broke the wheel of my bike) and I just throw it away and start again on a brand new bike and on a brand new trail. I went on a diet five years ago when I was about 20 to 30 pounds heavier (it’s hard to tell because I didn’t weigh myself much). Diets aren’t successful for most people, but for someone with my personality type (ENFJ, if you must know), they are fantastic. It’s invigorating to throw out old habits and start all over again. Of course, I gave it up after a couple months, but that was enough to change my life. New Year’s resolutions are great for me. I’m simultaneously self-analytical (to a fault) and persistent, which means I'm constantly trying to better myself in a one-step process. So when things started to sort of unceremoniously unravel in the past couple weeks, I was ready with a plan. Or perhaps the plan was ready for me.

I got fired. Well, I should (less dramatically) say that the steady contributing editor position I held at a newsweekly was given to somebody else (in the sales department, I might add), but they still want me to write for them. I found out and was a little crushed. I loved parts of that job. A lot. I drove 12 hours round-trip in winter weather for a story about George Paul’s artisanal vinegar, I get to hear about people’s lives and passions told through their food, and it sort of feels like that was shat on. But in the same vein, I understand why, and a week or so away from the let down, I’m a little relieved to go home from eight (or so) hours at work or school and not have to churn out a story or interview someone. But it feels devastating in a way because writing is what I love, it’s what I do, it’s what I want to do, and a door closed feels a little like all doors closed.

My bike broke, I bent a wheel on my car running over a pothole, I let go of a friendship and nearly lost another. Writing about the loss of friends at the end of statement like that makes it seem like no big deal, like they’re as easy to fix as a bent tire rim. I wish it were. With letting go, I hope that means I can come back. I do, I really do. Many times, I want to call or email and say that I take it all back and that I can get through on a bent wheel until the entire thing just breaks or maybe the road we’re on is already bumpy and a friendship with a bunch of dents in it doesn’t matter because it wasn’t going to be a smooth ride anyway. I need more time, time to fix my wheel. And then there’s the other friendship, the one nearly lost, which in the end exposed me to be a complete crazy person. I’m not the only one who acts completely irrational in this world. In fact, I would defend my actions (most of them) and am grateful that my friend was willing to hash everything out.

Then there’s dating. I am complete and total failure at dating. No one aces it, I know. And if you do, keep it to yourself thank you. My mom said it is supposed to be fun (is it?). For me, dating has never been fun. It occurred to me, well it occurred to my mom and sister who then told me, that I’m trying too hard and I should just give it up for a while. So I did. I am doing the cliché thing that everyone says they do right before they meet somone (gag me please all you people with your rose-colored hind-sight): I am giving up dating for something like a Lenten period. Forty days of not worrying about meeting a guy here or flirting with someone there or not making a fool of myself in this or that situation. The first thing I did was to give up Facebook. I have spent an entire week away from Facebook with barely a temptation to return.

On my first day off after the quarter ended, I fixed my car and set to work on fixing myself. Self-help, as far as I can tell—and I am no expert—involves quite a bit of journaling, venting to all your friends and doing the things that you love. One of the things I love is, as you may guess, cooking.

I finally learned something useful from my soup and sauce cookery class, and that is integral sauce made from pan sucs. For this sauce, I seared the outside of a whole chicken (divided into legs, thighs and breasts) to crisp up the skin and baked it at 350 degrees for a little less than an hour, leaving all those beautiful juices in the bottom of the pan. I removed the chicken once cooked and set to work on the sauce by deglazing the pan with a bit of dry white wine. I poured in some hot chicken stock and added beurre manie, which is equal parts flour and butter kneaded to a smooth consistency (about one-fourth a cup will do for one chicken). I brought the sauce to a boil to cook out the flour flavor and then served it sprinkled with fresh tarragon and alongside new potatoes and green beans. Ice cream for dessert and Nebraska Brewing Co. beer. It was a good meal in my almost excellent life.

They'll Probably Serve This in Heaven

Eclairs don't travel well as you can see, but it doesn't really matter does it. They taste the same whether smashed or not. These were a product of my baking basics class--perhaps, no undoubtedly my favorite skill to have learned. It's actually a combination of skills. Three elements go into this pastry: pate a choux, pastry cream and ganache. None are hard, but they all require this knowing familiarity. The pate a choux has to be this certain consistency in order to puff up just so in a hot oven. The pastry cream should be thick, but you have to take caution not to burn it. And the ganache is just a simple blend of melted chocolate with heavy cream finished with butter for a shine but it should be poured (or dipped in this case) at just the right temperature or it will melt off (I've done it) or it won't pour.

Familiar knowing. I think "to know" is better said in French or Spanish, languages that have two words for "to know." Connaitre (or conocer) means to know a person and to me evokes this feeling of having met someone, talked to them, been in their presence. Whereas savoir or saber is to know about something, to have a well of information. Perhaps I'm being cavalier with my translations, but when I think if savoir, I think of reading. And when I think of connaitre, I think of doing. I would like to connaitre pastry cream. I'd like to connaitre it so well that I can transform it into other things. Something with a different flavor perhaps. Strawberry, saffron, lavender. I'm not there yet with chocolate eclairs. These are just plain ol' pate a choux with vanilla pastry cream and straight-up chocolate ganache.

Pate a Choux: yields 12

4 ounces butter

8 fluid ounces water

5 ounces flour

3 to 5 eggs

Preheat the oven to 400. In a small sauce pan, bring the butter and water to a boil. Stir in the flour with a whisk, let the mixture get pretty dry with the excess water evaporating out. Transfer the mixture to the bowl of a standing mixer. Let it cool down a bit, until the bowl is just warm to the touch. Add the eggs one at a time being sure they fully incorporate each time, until the consistency is pasty and not too runny. You'll be pipping it out, so it has to hold its shape. Using a pastry bag, pipe into logs or rounds (those can be cream puffs) and bake at 400 for 15 minutes and then reduce heat to 350 and bake until they're dried out and nice and brown.

Pastry Cream:

12 fluid ounces milk

4 fluid ounces cream

3 3/4 ounce sugar

5 egg yolks

1 ounce cornstarch

In a heavy saucepan, bring the milk and cream up to a boil being careful not to scorch it. Meanwhile, in a separate bowl, whisk together eggs, sugar and cornstarch. Once the milk boils, carefully and slowly pour one-third of it into the eggs mixture to temper it while whisking. Once the eggs have warmed slightly, pour it all into the saucepan with the milk and return to heat. Bring to a light boil and continue whisking (do not stop whisking) until the mixture thickens up quite a bit. Remove from heat and refrigerate.

Chocolate Ganache:

1 part chocolate

1 part whipping cream

a couple tablespoons butter

Melt the chocolate in a double boiler. Add the cream slowly until you reach a desired consistency, which should take no more than the same amount of chocolate you used. Finish by melting in some butter. Pour over cakes or pastries once it has cooled to 90 to 100 degrees, which is barely lukewarm.

At Last

These scones signify a couple things for me. First off, a free weekend. Saturday I had nothing planned whatsoever, which meant I slept in, had time for French-press coffee and journaling, and made scones. Second, these are my new go-to scones. I shouldn't say new because I've never settled on a scone recipe. I've tried all sorts of scone recipes from Molly Wizenberg to Martha Stewart to Better Homes and Gardens. They've been too soft, too hard, too sweet, not sweet enough, and never ever flaky enough. But here it is, from the Tartine Bakery cookbook I just bought, my scone recipe.

With two sticks plus a tablespoon of butter blended (by hand--and this may be the key), I just knew I could get the flakiness I wanted. The outer edges of the currant scones caramelized to a crusty golden brown while the inside is soft like a buttermilk biscuit. Biting into them after 35 minutes in the oven at 400 wasn't the hallelujah moment I expected to have once I accomplished what feels like the goal of this blog. I tore off a piece, popped it into my mouth, and thought, "Yeah, this is it. I think this is the one." Like the rocky turning of winter to spring, or the slow realization of sweet, simple love: Yes, this is right. Yesterday was the pits, but today I can make scones and spring will come.

My sister and I were sitting at the bar of Senor Matias earlier this week, before the weather changed from 4 degrees to 54. We were both sipping on margaritas counting our woos on both hands, both of us down in the dumps. I kept saying, between bouts of lying my head on the bar, "It's going to get better once it's spring. The sun is going to come out and the snow will melt and it will be better." All said more as a reassurance to us both than in a real sense of hope. I swear that everyone I know is just aching for the long days of summer. I can think of so many people emerging slowly and limping from the great cloud that is winter in a temperate climate zone. It's so funny to talk of the weather, but do you realize what an impact the environment has on people? Of course we all talk about it. I'll celebrate 54 degrees on a Saturday in Feburary with scones, perhaps I'll commemorate 68 degrees coming up this Thursday (!) with a cake.

Buttermilk Scones: from Tartine Bakery yields 12
3/4 cup zante currants
4 3/4 cups flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 cup sugar
1 1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup and 1 tablespoon cold butter
1 1/2 cups buttermilk
1 teaspoon lemon zest

top with melted butter and large-grain sugar crystals

Preheat oven to 400. Soak the currants in hot water for 10 minutes to plump up. Sift flour, baking powder and baking soda into a large mixing bowl. Add the sugar and salt and stir to combine. Cut the cold butter into cubes. Cut butter into the flour with your hands. Before my baking basics class, I used a pastry blender, but my teacher says she likes to get in and touch everything she bakes. I love the philosophy. Get to know it by feeling it, sort of thing. It works well in this case. Blend the butter into the flour until the mixtures forms pea-size crumbs. Pour in the buttermilk, lemon zest and currants. Stir with a wooden spoon to blend. Add more buttermilk if the mixture is too dry, which mine was but that's probably because it's winter and there's no moisture in the air. Once the dough has come together, turn out on a heavily floured work surface. Form into a log that is 18-inches by five- and is two inches thick. Cut out scones with a chef's knife. Arrange on baking sheet. Brush scones with melted butter and sprinkle with sugar. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes. I actually ended up needing to bake it for 35 minutes. But bake until the top is nice and golden brown.

Drunken and Sunken

My world right now is sludgy and slick. Stepping outdoors requires a certain application of layers and once outside, walking down my outdoor steps is treacherous work (I fell two weeks ago and still have a bruise). But Tuesday I was gifted with a snow day. I woke up to check the school Web site and then slid back under the sheets, barely crawling out sometime around 10 to do some work. By noon I was ready to experiment in the kitchen. As you can see from the above photo, that experimentation did not go well the first round.

My sister gave me a cookbook from the Humingbird Bakery in London, which interestingly enough sells American baked goods specifically cupcakes. I forget about all the great sweets Americans bring to the global table: brownies, cookies, pies, a sweet and moist cake and cupcakes. My problem is that I often come to things like brownies, cookies and cakes and think they're too boring or too sweet, which they often are, so I want to mess with them. So I do things like replace the milk with whiskey, which frankly should be a lifelong rule of thumb, and add instant coffee. Using my now somewhat scientific knowledge of the baking process, I figured the moisture with the milk and with the whisky would equal out, what doesn't even out is the fat content--there being none in whiskey. So batch one of the drunken mocha cupcakes was a flop, literally.

I think the friends I rounded up to watch movies on the snow day would have been happy with the drunken-sunken cupcakes, but pulling what little bit of a perfectionist I have lying around deep down inside, I made another batch, which didn't turn out perfect (the recipe was listed in weight and I lost my scale, so measuring was a touch inaccurate) but it was acceptable. Someday I'll find a good American chocolate cupcake recipe, and when I do, I'll share it with you.