June 2006 Archives

Nano and jasmine ricePasta was being cooked in Italy long before Marco Polo returned from his forays to the Orient. But how did rice make its way into the Italian kitchen? Perhaps we can thank Islam. According to the Oxford Food Companion, "Rice cooked in clarified butter is said to have been the favourite dish of the Prophet Muhammad." The Moors who worshipped him would have brought the grain with them through Sicily, Spain and North Africa.

Like so many delicious eats, risotto seems to have started out as a peasant food, a way to stretch the flavor of tasty ingredients with starch and stock. You wouldn't know it from the pricy truffle/saffron/porcini versions you find on many menus these days. That's why I love the simple elegance of this lemon risotto.

I started out with these two recipes: one from Epicurious and one from Jean-Georges Vongerichten. I used a basic vegetable stock made with leek tops, onion, carrots, garlic, bay leaf, thyme and parsley (a nod to the vegetarian guest). I couldn't find Meyer lemons; the dish was pretty stellar anyway. It's unfussy, rich and super creamy with a gorgeous brightness. I made the risotto, from mise en place to plating, in about 25 minutes, while my guests were finishing their cocktails and bruschetta. That sounds like a long time but it's really not, as long as your friends can entertain themselves.

Here's an interesting article which talks about the different kinds of rice you can try in risotto. I used Vialone Nano rice (pictured above), a very short, rotund grain rice which is great for creamy risottos.

Lemon Risotto

Serves 8 first-course servings

A huge pot of vegetable or chicken stock (10 cups)
Butter
Olive Oil
1 leek, minced white and lightest green parts
2 shallots, minced
2 cloves garlic, minced
Zest and juice of 2 lemons
1 3/4 cups of nano or carnaroli rice
1/2 cup vermouth or dry white wine
1/2 cup mascarpone cheese
1/2 cup grated parmigiano reggiano, plus more for the table
3 tbsp. minced chives

Simmer the stock on low on one of your back burners. Heat up your large saute pan. Add a hunk of butter and a few glugs of olive oil. When the butter has melted and the foam subsided, add your minced leek, shallots, and garlic. Sweat them for a few minutes until they're soft and translucent. Add your dry rice to the pan and saute the rice grains for two minutes until the edges of the grains go clear and the center glows bright white. Add the vermouth all at once and stir one minute til absorbed.

Add your hot stock 2 ladles at a time. Stir the risotto slowly with a wooden spatula, making sure to scrape the edges of the pan and folding the rice into the middle. As the liquid starts to ooze and get absorbed by the rice, add two more ladles of stock. Repeat for about 17 minutes, testing the rice grains regularly after 12 minutes. As soon as the center of the rice is barely cooked through and not raw in the center, add another ladle of stock if needed, give it a stir and turn the heat off. Your risotto should be creamy but a little soupy, the consistency of clam chowder. It will continue to cook as you prepare it for serving. Add 3 tbsp. of the lemon juice, 2 tbsp. lemon zest, the mascarpone and parm, salt and pepper to taste. Garnish with a bit more of the lemon zest and chives. Serve PRONTO, with extra parmigiano grated at the table.

***

Incidentally, do not try and use Pacific vegetable broth in a box for this dish. That shit is all kinds of nasty -- it tastes like watered down, rancid bloody mary mix, heavy on the celery seed. And it's reddish orange. Yuck.

The problem: With all the gorgeous local produce coming into the Greenmarket, all you want to do is have a dinner party. But with the heat and the humidity, the last thing you want to do is to subject your friends to the sauna-like conditions of your a/c-less kitchen. (Do you have a/c in your common areas? Then you don't feel my pain and you don't need my help, lucky bastard.)

The solution: You need foods you can cook ahead and serve at room temperature. Besides, at a dinner party, when you don't have an in-house cook (which is probably the case if A. you read my blog and B. you don't have a/c, pobresito), the goal is to get out of the kitchen and into the dining room with your guests. It's no fun to have to listen to the conversation while chained to the stove. Here's an elegant summer menu that's light, colorful, incredibly easy, impressive, and will get you out of the kitchen.

On the table: French breakfast radishes with fatty French butter and sea salt
First course: Bruschetta
Entree: Slow cooked salmon with blanched asparagus and lemon
Fresh strawberries with whipped cream

Slow cooked salmon

I got this recipe from the Chez Panisse Cafe cookbook. It's an incredibly easy, set it and forget it kind of recipe that tastes a lot fancier than it has any right to taste. It'd be great to bring to a party since it requires no reheating.

4-4.5 lb. salmon fillet (wild king salmon if you can afford it)
Olive oil
Salt and pepper
Handful of basil leaves
1 lemon
2 shallots

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees. Put a pan of water on the lowest rack of the oven to humidify it. Spread some olive oil on the bottom of a baking sheet. Place the fillet on the baking sheet. Rub it with olive oil, salt and pepper. Chop a handful of basil leaves, zest a lemon, and thinly slice 2 shallots; scatter over the fillet. Place in the oven and bake carelessly for 1 hour. Press the fillet with your finger -- it should be firm but still moist. Let cool to room temperature.

Serve with cold blanched, peeled asparagus (1 1/2 minutes in a sea of boiling salter water, then chucked into an ice bath), sea salt, and lemon wedges.

I served this at a dinner party chez nous last night. Our first course was bruschetta two ways using recipes from the Babbo cookbook (the chickpea and olive paste recipe can be found here; the other one, which was also shockingly good, was made with cubed roasted beets, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, basil leaves, chives, and parmigiano reggiano shavings). The second course, a rich lemon risotto, was delicious, but a mistake to try and make in our hot apartment. It was a bit of wishful thinking on my part. I'll post the recipe for you anyway, because La Doug said it was the star course of the evening.

For dessert, our strawberries came from the Yuno Farm stand in Friday's Union Square Greenmarket. I had originally planned to make a strawberry rhubarb cobbler, but these strawberries were so supremely sweet and perfect, it would have been blasphemous to fuck with them. All they needed was a quick rinse in the colander and a big bowl of chilled whipped cream.

To my friends whom I owe dinner (I'm looking at you Winnie and Chris), my dinner party season has just begun. You're invited over next, I swear.

Apologies to you recent commenters. I just figured out where the comments live on this thing and finally got them published. Switching from Typepad to Movable Type has been like moving to Japan. At first I was totally frustrated because I barely knew the words for bathroom and water. But over the last few weeks, I've gotten over the culture shock and I'm making real strides in my conversational skills. I even had a normal transaction at the ramen place yesterday. It's a fascinating and beautiful place. I can't yet discuss the nuances of Noh drama, but I'm on the right trajectory.

I guess I'll take this time to point out some NEW and IMPROVED features on eat drink one woman:

1. Updated About page! Because there's no such thing as Too Much Information.

2. New e-mail address -- send all correspondence to ganda {at} eatdrinkonewoman {dot} com. Isn't that so professional sounding?

3. Category drop down menu, Monthly archives drop down menu, and Restaurant reviews in (mostly) alpha order! (You have no idea how long that took this techtard to figure out.)

4. A search box! Dig, poke and prod away, my friends.

5. Google Ads -- okay, not that exciting for you, but at least they're relevant, unlike the Kanoodle porn ad strip. Every click helps.

Construction will continue at its slow but steady pace, and I'll post whenever I'm not turning Japanese. I'm open for business all this month. On June 30, expect the launch of eat drink one woman's EXTREME MAKEOVER, with a whole new look, a few special features that have been percolating, and a You Are What You Eat interview with a Very Special Surprise Guest. Stay tuned!

Name: Shii Ann Huang

Occupation: Real estate broker/ former (has-been) reality TV “star”

Borough: Brooklyn

Relationship status: Two weeks from being a Missus…

What did you eat today?

I was in Chinatown most of the day so all day long, I ate Chinese food. Early morning, I had half a red bean bun and some bottled iced jasmine tea. Around 11ish, I ate a sausage roll (one of those pigs in a blanket that consists of a hotdog-like sausage wrapped in soft white bread from Tai Pan Bakery). For lunch, I ate a $4 lunchbox consisting of white rice, black mushrooms and bamboo shoots, braised seaweed & eggs, and scallion chicken. Geesh! I ate a lot today and it’s only 4PM. For dinner, I’ll try to control myself…maybe I will eat a mango and some left over duck or kielbasa…

What do you never eat?

Hmmm…even though I consider myself an adventurous eater, I try never to eat sweetbreads, blood sausage or anything blood-based. Diseased goose liver? Give it a French name and I’m there! But blood and BRAINS!? Save it for the zombies…

Complete this sentence: In my refrigerator, you can always find:

Hot sauces (I have 8 different bottles in there right now), bottles of champagne (gifts from friends but I don’t drink champagne because it gives me a massive hangover), scallions and cilantro.

What is your favorite kitchen item?

My big butcher knife from Chinatown. I use it to prep almost everything.


Where do you eat out most frequently?

Now that I am in Brooklyn, I go to Al Di La and Sakura sushi on Fifth Ave. quite often. But if I am in the city, I have to go to Grand Sichuan because I am of Sichuanese decent and they make some authentic tasting spicy food. I highly recommend the Ma-Po Tofu but be ready for some, um, future pain…if you catch my drift…

World ends tomorrow. What would you like for your last meal?

Without a question, my mom’s homemade pork chops with steamed rice and garlicky “empty-heart” Chinese greens. She makes the best damned pork chop in the world!

Mazeltov on the coming wedding!

Yesterday, a friend of mine asked if I knew where he could get a coconut cake* for Saturday. I had a flashback of the birthday cakes I'd had as a kid. Until Costco came along with their shrink-wrapped sheet cakes, my friends and I were subjected to my Pau's cake choices. What I usually got was a faintly sweet mocha cake with sugary, translucent white macapuno (young coconut jam) filling and mocha buttercream, which probably came from a Filipino bakery called Betsy's (if I recall correctly) in L.A.

Betsy's was one of my Pau's regular joints. He would go there once every other week or so on his way home from work. If I was lucky, I'd stick my hand into one of the white paper sacks and the pan de sal—oblong, dense dinner rolls that are slightly sweet, yeasty, and incredible with a little butter—would still be warm. They were even better sliced into three flat ovals, toasted, and topped with scrambled eggs with fish sauce, tomato and garlic. No pan de sal I've had from anywhere else could compare to Betsy's. I wonder if they're still around.

But I was always disappointed to see that funky mocha cake. It made me feel like such a foreigner. Why couldn't I have a normal flavor? I wanted chocolate or white cake with the kind of bleached white frosting so thick with sugar granules you could feel the grit between your molars when you rubbed them together. Or maybe a yellow cake with strawberry filling and a simulated whipped cream icing. Or, better yet, the cake of my dreams -- a freezer-dwelling, rainbow shaped Baskin Robbins confection with mint chip ice cream and a toothsome, icy layer of chocolate cake.

Now, of course, I can't stop dreaming of the mocha macapuno cake. Anyone know of any good Filipino bakeries? I suppose there are some in Woodside. I can taste it, I can almost feel it in my mouth -- that mildly sweet, coffee tinted buttercream; the silky macapuno strings in clear, sweet jelly; the airy tan sponge cake. I'm looking forward to the moment when that cake and I meet again, and I can prove that kid in my memories wrong.

*In case you're wondering, I suggested Billy's Bakery, Sugar Sweet Sunshine, and Baked, where, unlike certain places we know, you don't have to place an order 8 weeks in advance and leave your first born child as an advance deposit to get a cake.