Pink of Perfection

I wish you could have seen me the day I made this tart. I felt like I was auditioning for a Martha Stewart Living picnic feature, but with glaring (and decidedly un-Martha) Sarah-isms: my tupperware was leaking, the napkins didn’t match, and I forgot the salad dressing. While Martha may have you feeling inadequate if you don’t print out templates to label everyone’s mason jar lemonade glass, with me as your guide, you will feel like the Queen of Togetherness if you just remember the cutlery. Perhaps it is only my way of justifying my own inadequacies, but I find the thrown-together, fly-by-night approach less precious and infinitely more charming.

Salad dressing and damp mismatched napkins aside, you can’t take away the raw materials I had to my advantage for this evening picnic: a community garden lush with hosta, roses, and vegetables, a small wooden gazebo to sit under, and at dusk, the brightest lightning bugs I’ve ever seen. Wedges of this rich tart still warm from the oven and Lillet spritzers weren’t too shabby either. And for dessert, Lisa brought a pint of blueberries and the lightest macaroons I’ve ever tasted (like Samoas for grown-ups, I said). Tuesday nights really don’t get much better.

I’ve been wanting to make pissaladière, a Provencal onion tart, for awhile, but it wasn’t until my Grand Diplôme Book 8 lesson on savory tarts popped up that I knew the hour was nigh. Even the anchovy-phobic might be able to appreciate the counterpart the little fishes play to the sweet pile of thyme-scented caramelized onions underneath them. Later on in the summer, I think this would make a great picnic on a very hot day with hard-boiled eggs and a sliced tomato salad.

Here’s hoping you all have a blissful, relaxing weekend perhaps including your inaugural glass of rosé for the season (I think I just might!).

Continue reading “French Friday: Pissaladière” »

All the seasons have their signifiers — the arrival of tomatoes in August, the emergence of pumpkins in the fall — but none seem quite so ecstatic as the harbingers of spring. We get pumped for the arrival of spinach, strawberries, asparagus, and artichokes, and this year, for the first time, I got to know another spring debutante: rhubarb.

Here’s the story: I’ve been eyeing my Grand Diplôme books on the book shelf, knowing its high time for a lesson. But when I pulled out week 7 (oh boy, is it going to take a lifetime to get through all 72 books), the lessons seemed woefully out of season. Who wants to make crème caramel or Bavarian cream in late April, I thought?

But the particularly gorgeous and inspiring May issue of Martha Stewart put everything right again. There were not one but two recipes for custards, which looked perfect and sounded delicious. And that’s when it hit me. The lessons in the Grand Diplôme lessons rarely seem appealing or seasonal, but I think it’s a matter of bad packaging and poor lighting (the photography, as previously established, is vile and a true testament to its age). In other words, from now on, as soon as a lesson rubs me the wrong way or seems stodgy or just plain blah, I’m turning elsewhere for a little inspiration.

And then I’ll turn back to the el grosso ’70s pictures for “the lesson.”

Have you ever had raw rhubarb? I snagged a piece as I was chopping up the stalks and found myself floored at its complex flavors. It’s tart with a citrusy zing that reminded me of lemongrass, which got me thinking about all the wonderful ways in which rhubarb could be used in savory dishes. But as for the recipe at hand, this is perfect spring comfort food. The custard is rich, but each bite is punctuated with the bright pink tartness of rhubarb. The milky caramel wards off the chill in the air and the rhubarb braces you for warmer days ahead.

Continue reading “Grand Diplôme Book 7: Rhubarb Custards” »

As soon as I saw the page titled “How to Fry” in my Grand Diplôme books, I knew this lesson would really just be an excuse to make beignets. Ever since I sat in the French Quarter late one Friday night in March, my black dress dusted with tell-tale powdered sugar, I’ve collected recipes for these airy pillows of dough. But frying isn’t a cooking technique that gets much play in my repertoire. And so the recipes sat in my delicious account gathering internet dust. That is, they languished there until Super Bowl Sunday, when suddenly I had the gumption and urge to make these. My bravery fueled by coffee, I put on my apron and dug in the cabinets for the splatter guard.

This recipe makes a lot of beignets. As in, you will certainly be tired of flipping dough balls in oil before the dough is all gone. But you should soldier on, cause who wants to waste 7 cups of bread flour? These would be great to make at a brunch party where you could hand off the frying job. What I learned about frying is that it takes no real skill. It’s just a matter of keeping a close eye out for a deepening golden color, and then flipping.

Because I’m not a regular fryer, I didn’t have a thermometer to hang on the side of the pan. This proved to be no big deal and please don’t let it stop you from trying these. I remembered the advice of a Southern friend and kept the gas at medium or medium-low. I decided the oil was hot enough to start frying when a flick of flour sizzled when it hit the surface. I didn’t crowd the pan, and if things seemed like they were getting too intensely sizzly, I dropped the heat a touch more.

All I have to say is, thank heavens for book club. If I hadn’t been able to send six women home with a grease-stained paper lunch sacks filled with these powdered sugar stomach bombs, I don’t know what might have happened. Frankly, I might not be here today.

Continue reading “How To Fry: French Quarter-Style Beignets” »

Alright, now we’re cooking with gas. For the first time since my lesson on cutting up a chicken, my Grand Diplôme program has served up something of use: how to make a white sauce. This may be what stands between me and never having to make a casserole with cream of mushroom soup again (not that there’s anything wrong with that). With my yellow apron hanging officially from my neck, stirring at the stove yesterday, I felt for the first time in a long time that I was actually learning something new in the kitchen. I’ve tried to wing a roux before, but following instructions for this sauce made something thrilling happen with the most basic kitchen ingredients and in a matter of moments. It was almost as transfixing as those grade school rockets made from vinegar and baking soda.

I grew up in a house without sauces (unless chile con queso and ranch dressing count). In fact, I don’t think it was until I worked at a restaurant that I really began to understand all a sauce can do. As my course book says, “An inventive sauce can transform a simple dish into something superlative.” (I wish I knew more short-cuts like this in life — how, for instance, to take a simple outfit to something superlative. Know what I mean?) But really, when it comes to sauces, it seems that the sauce need not even really be “inventive”: plain pasta can be transformed into mac and cheese with a mornay or cheese sauce. Instant supper update.

Continue reading “How to Cook: White Sauces” »

Sometimes the mythology of a thing is more prevalent than the actual experience of it. Take, for example, running a marathon: hard, really hard. You and I both know that. In fact, even if we can’t run more than a few miles, we are convinced of its difficulty to the point of impossibility and have a feeling it’s not in the cards for us.

On one hand, this is great: word gets around in our gossipy little world with its love of quickly boxing and defining experience, and we are able to make shorthand decisions about what’s worth our time without even having tried something ourselves. We give a quick no thanks to War and Peace (too long), childbirth (too laborious), Antarctica (too cold, too desolate).

This is where I stood with puff pastry. If Mark Bittman said it wasn’t worth making from scratch, then Pepperidge Farm it would be. Enter book 5 of my Grand Diplôme program, and there it was in black and white: puff pastry. My heart sank. My contrarian side rose up. I resisted for weeks, ignoring the lesson. “Why not skip it?” a friend suggested. Tempting, but what kind of student would I be if I just skipped the lessons that seemed too hard?

And then last night, as I had courage enough and time, I went to the grocery store for butter. Then my phone rang, and it was my mom. “You’re making puff pastry? Oh, I’ve heard that’s really hard.” It is a credit to her mothering, I suppose, that I did not respond, “I know. You’re right,” shelve the butter and head back home for some pasta. I soldiered on, like, well, a marathon runner.

When I stopped long enough to look at the actual recipe I was deeply encouraged by this:

Rough puff pastry originated in farmhouse kitchens where lard from home-butchered pigs and homemade butter were readily available.

Haute cuisine makes me shake in my clogs a bit, but farmhouse cooking? Farmhouse cooking is in my bones. And can you feel what’s coming next?

I could hardly believe how simple puff pastry was. I didn’t struggle with the dough, I didn’t wipe away tears from a flour-streaked face. I pulled out the food processor, measured a little of this and that, rolled and turned and rolled and turned and rolled and turned the dough, and then thought, is that it? It was. Feeling a little too pleased with myself, that doubting voice of mythology was heard saying, “yeah, but just wait to see how it comes out once it’s cooked.” The happy reply was flaky and buttery and as puffed up as I was.

This triumph is exactly why I set out to cook from these booklets. So often we take on expert account what is and is not worth trying for ourselves. But if we have the time and the inclination and the will, we may find that our own opinions differ from those heavyweights of the cooking world. This amateur, for one, thinks puff pastry is more than worth the effort to make at home, if only for the wild sense of triumph from accomplishing what others deem too troublesome.

Continue reading “Homemade Puff Pastry & My First Chicken Pot Pie” »

Once, a very long time ago, I desperately wanted a job at Vogue as an assistant to their food editor. I went to the library and there, spread out on the floor, read just about every food column ever written in the magazine. The one that has really stayed with me all these years later, was the writer’s attempts to make the perfect omelet, and the omelet quest seemed more like a hero quest. It was all such a test of fortitude, so maddeningly just out of reach, as if the writer were flying on the back of Falcor trying to get to gain access to Fantasia. I didn’t have enough cooking experience at the time to know better, and didn’t have enough real world experience to not buy the whole thing hook, line, and sinker. Omelets are the province of the truly skilled! Once you can make an omelet you’ve really made it!

There is a lot to be said for knowing the rules before you break them (pretty much the reason I’m doing this Grand Diplôme thing to begin with), and Escoffier would probably slap me if he could hear me say this, but I don’t think cooking is codified. One of the many reasons why Ratatouille is such a delightful movie is because it’s so empowering; just as Auguste Gusteau encouragingly proclaims, anyone can cook. And even the most classically trained chefs can go about the same dish differently.

Continue reading “The Great Omelet Hero Quest” »

Put on a stripey top and an apron. Grab a whole chicken. Wielding a boning knife and kitchen shears — or, if you are a girl with a less fully equipped kitchen, a sharp knife and a lot of determination — cut chicken into pieces, fearlessly, and with the cold detachment of a surgeon. For dinner, sauté the chicken parts with shallots and fresh tomatoes; serve with a chilled Macon Chardonnay. Toss the leftover neck and back into a stockpot with whatever bits you have rolling around in the fridge: celery, carrots, an onion, some sprigs of parsley and thyme. Cover with water and let simmer for a few hours to make stock while twist in the living room to Francoise Hardy.  When tired, recline on the couch with Cheri, and later, when complimented on your cooking prowess, shrug your shoulders as if it’s nothing. Buf.

Even if you skip the French shenanigans, I would highly recommend attempting to cut up your own chicken. I was scared, I’ll admit, and had successfully avoided the task since I first learned to cook chicken. But then there it was in Week 3 of my Grand Diplôme program, and I couldn’t hide anymore. I channeled my imaginary boyfriend, Jacques Pepin, and his relaxed efficiency as well as his no-waste policy, and here’s the thing: there was immense satisfaction in buying the least processed poultry available in the highest quality available and doing the heavy lifting myself. Some people may squirm at the up-close-and-personalness of this process, but I saw it this way: if I choose to eat animal products, the least I can do is learn how to handle it with skill myself and not to waste a bit of it.

Continue reading “How to Cut Up a Chicken and Feel Totally French” »

It seems to me that the Grand Diplôme program has about 47 lessons in pastry which, in my book, may just be 45 too many. But at the very least, I’ll be learning the difference among them, which is probably a basic culinary knowledge requirement.

We begin, class, with Pâte Sucrée, a rich, slighty sweet pastry made with flour, butter, eggs, and sugar. This is the backbone for sweet tarts and pies (though people also make pies, of course, with pâte brisée, a pastry dough made without sugar and sometimes without egg). It’s nice to have options.

I made this tart to bring to a barbecue on Saturday night. This means I spent hours on a rainy Saturday afternoon, listening to Lauryn Hill, showing off my mad rapping skillz, slicing strawberries, rolling out dough, and admiring the silver shine of a tart pan. My meditation practice, sadly, has never really made the jump from “sporadic thing I do” to “part of my daily routine” but weekend baking is a great stand-in. In the relaxed assemblage of a baked good, it seems we have no choice but to be in the moment and enjoy the crack of thunder and hiss of rain on the black pavement.

Continue reading “Pâte Sucrée: Strawberry Tart with Buttermilk Vanilla Pastry Cream” »