Coppa!

Coppa is one of those restaurants that I kept meaning to get to. Chef/Owner Ken Oringer is legendary on the Boston food scene, with restaurants as diverse and well-loved as Clio, La Verdad, Toro, and KO Prime to his name. The other Chef/Owner, Jaime Bissonette, has not only worked with Oringer at several of those restaurants, but he’s the sort of young, funky, tattooed chef who gets profiled all over the place. All signs pointed to Coppa being a great dining experience. So what took me so long to get there?

I’ll admit it, location was a huge factor. Coppa is tucked away on a little side street in the South End that just isn’t that convenient to my nightlife. I’m in the neighborhood once a week during the school year to volunteer, but the middle of a work day isn’t the best time to visit a restaurant that calls itself an enoteca – while it’s not literally a wine shop, there is a very serious Italian wine list. I was also concerned that this would be a splurge meal – something I have no trouble doing, but I needed an excuse for said splurge.

One finally came in the form of my third marathon, which I ran with two friends with similar attitudes toward good food and drink. We would celebrate our accomplishment with wine and meat!

Because that’s Coppa’s specialty – a marvelous selection of Italian salumi, cheeses, and meaty delights. This is not a restaurant that vegetarians would enjoy. Thankfully, I am no vegetarian. So, did it live up to my great expectations?

DID IT EVER.

We started with pretty much our only vegetable dish of the evening, little crostini topped with sunchokes and marscarpone cheese.

(apologies for the blurry picture – it was quite dark in the restaurant. Eventually I caved and used my flash.) This little bar snack is seriously fantastic. If you’ve never had a sunchoke, imagine a cross between a chestnut and a mushroom – nutty but earthy at the same time.

Our other non-meat dish was the burrata, which is type of insanely buttery mozzarella cheese made right in Somerville, MA.

If it had been acceptable to lick the plate, we would have.

Similarly warm feelings were had about these:

These are pig’s tails, roasted in a wood-oven and glazed with mostarda. They are tiny nuggets of pure joy. If I could eat them every day, I would be extremely happy for the rest of my incredibly shortened life span.

Naturally, we couldn’t visit Coppa without getting a salume plate. Regrettably, I forgot the name of nearly everything on this platter the minute she put it down, but I DO know there’s some lardo on that piggy, because we asked for it, and it was amazing. Also, how adorable is that tray?

This was an entree special of an extremely decadent rib. Though just one, the meat was plentiful.

Finally, we did try one of the wood-fired pizzas – bone marrow with beef heart pastrami and horseradish. If, like myself and the ladies I was dining with, the combination  of beef heart and bone marrow on your pizza tantalizes, GET THIS. It is outstanding, meaty and silky and cheesy and wonderful.

If, on the other hand, like the young couple on a date next to us you are in fact a pair of very confused vegetarians, DO NOT EVEN ASK what is on this pizza. You will be sorry you did.

The atmosphere in Coppa is jovial and close – the space is teeny tiny. Everyone seems friendly and the wait staff is lovely, but if you’re in Boston and want to go, I’d get (I did in fact get) reservations, because there’s really not the space to wait. Since they call themselves an enoteca, a note on the wine: I thought it was fabulous. I also really love Italian reds, so this seems like a no-brainer, but I felt like Coppa carries interesting grapes for a reasonable by the glass price. They don’t have a full liquor license, so the cocktails are all cordial-based (Boston has some weird liquor laws). That’s not really my scene so I didn’t try them – but if you have I’d like to hear about it!

Cocktails and Science

In previous posts I’ve outlined my love of food science, and of Harold McGee particularly. And of course, my affection for cocktails is well–documented. So it will come as no surprise to hear that when I had the opportunity to hear the man himself talk about the science of cocktails, I was all over it.

I gave the heads up to my friend Jess, another avid cocktail fan, and we set out to get schooled. Joining Mr.McGee was Dave Arnold, the Director of Culinary Technology at The French Culinary Institute. Basically, the way the lecture worked was that Dave would do something crazy onstage, usually involving fire, then hand out the resultant samples while Harold would talk about the science of taste and the physical properties of alcohol. In other words, it was awesome.

This was bourbon mixed with the very essence of banana – banana juice, if you will. It was uncanny.

Scotch with all of its impurities removed (but not its flavor). It was weird – the skeleton of Scotch.

The best part of the night came when Dave made his recipe for Red Hot Ale, a drink that dates back to Colonial times. First, he demonstrated the method with a hot poker – the drink was traditionally made by sticking irons from the hearth into a mug.

Clearly, that’s no longer a practical option, so Dave invented his own hot poker. Alas, it’s not really ready for the average bar just yet.

So then he showed us his stove-top method, which was…dramatic.

That’s Harold and a lab assistant, singeing off their eyebrows.

This was easily the most delicious drink of the night, despite (because of?) the fireworks. Here’s a recipe if you’re interested – I’ll admit I have a slight fear of burning alcohol. Maybe one day I’ll get brave enough, though, because the caramelized beer and cognac is truly remarkable.

They also played around with making stable oil emulsions with pumpkin seed oil, making for a thick, fatty drink that won’t separate:

A combo of gum arabic and xanthan gum achieves this magic. I wasn’t incredibly into this particular drink, but the idea of making truly stable emulsions is intriguing – perhaps a different oil would have been more enjoyable.

My favorite actual science moment of the night came when Harold explained why adding water to spirits like whiskey enhances its flavor – something that has always fascinated me. Essentially, it all comes down to the fact that ethanol, the alcohol we drink, attracts aroma molecules. Aroma molecules (remember, most of taste is really smell) hang out little molecular cages on the ethanol because they’re similar in structure to it.This stops them from reaching your nose. On the other hand, they HATE water. When you add water to a drink you drop the concentration of the alcohol and these aroma compounds, break free from their cages for us to enjoy. Here’s a more coherent explanation from Harold himself.

Speaking of which, this post took me so darn long to get out that I’m leaving it mostly pictures. Here’s a better recap of the actual science at the lecture by Frederick Yarm, who is a far more dedicated cocktail blogger than I am. (If you are at all interested in mixology, and especially if you live in Boston, you should be reading his blog.)

Harvard does a whole series of these lectures using McGee’s On Food and Cooking as the text, and the guest lectures, all by amazing chefs and food scientists, are open to the public. If you’re local to Cambridge check them out!

Sake For Beginners

I have made it a rule, in the past 5 or so years of my life, never to say no to interesting opportunities if I can at all help it. Thus, thanks to Mr. Menace, I was recently fortunate enough to attend a very special seminar on sake. Not only was it conducted by John Gaunter, one of the foremost non-Japanese experts on sake, it was held here:

That’s the home of the Boston Consul-General of Japan, Takeshi Hikihara!
The purpose of the seminar was to learn more about and taste a variety of high-end sake – to show that even with all of the recent tragedies Japan has gone through, they are still creating fantastic, safe, high-quality products. In addition to the immediate problems caused by the earthquake and subsequent tsunami, Japan is forced to struggle with consumers who may be fearful that their exports have been exposed to harmful radiation from the affected nuclear reactors. This was a chance to show that this is not only not true, but that the sake creators are still making superior beverages. Meanwhile, Haruo Matsuzaki, chief of the sake export group who were involved in putting this event together, asked us to remember the passion of the sake-makers for their product.

Going into the seminar I knew very little about sake – I’ve had it once or twice in Japanese restaurants, but not in any structured or meaningful way. By the end of the brief talk I’d learned quite a bit, though Mr. Gaunter made quite clear that it was merely the tip of the sake iceberg. A few highlights:

1. Sake is brewed, a bit like beer, rather than fermented like wine is. Sake is made from rice, and rice is pure starch. Fermentation requires sugar to work, so some of that starch must be broken down.

2. However, unlike beer, where the starch is broken down into sugar, and then, in a whole different step, fermented, sake has this break down and fermentation happening at the same time. This is accomplished by infecting some of the rice with a special kind of mold, called koji. Because both of these things happen simultaneously, sake’s alcohol content is naturally higher than that of beer and wine, usually around 16%.

3. Most sake is not aged. About 90% is meant to be consumed a few months after brewing. There are a few notable exceptions, however. That said, even these are not cellared as long as certain wines or spirits.

4. To a degree, sake quality correlates with sake price. This is because the three tricks to better sake are better rice, rice that is highly polished (meaning you are losing quite a bit of the grain) and is more time-consuming to make. All of these factors lead to more expensive sake.

5. The catch-all phrase for the top four grades of sake is “ginjo.” While only 7% of sake available fits into this category, this is the premium grade product. It further breaks down into six different styles that are primarily differentiated by how much the rice is polished, whether amendments such as additional water or alcohol are allowed, and how it is brewed, but the term “ginjo” will at least get you to the quality sake.

Gaunter’s main point was that to enjoy sake, one doesn’t need to know everything about sake and its rich history – one must simply drink it and enjoy it. He also pointed out that it went well with food of all kinds, and the Consulate did not disappoint in this regard.

This was the “light buffet” prepared for our tasting pleasure.

As you can see, it involved dishes of both Asian and Western pedigree.

Truly, it was the most complicated “light buffet” I’ve ever seen. Usually those words describe some salad and over-rare roast beef.

My sake-tasting partner and I elected to eat lunch before embarking on the rest of our sake journey, since we had up to 20 to get through, and, as mentioned, the alcohol content of sake is quite high. We also vowed to do a considerable amount of tasting and spitting, a practice that is just good sense if you want to maintain your dignity in the Japanese Consul-General’s home.

My lunch:

Everything was outstanding. A gentleman from Harvard’s Japanese Studies department informed me that the house chef made his own pickles, which were delightful, and the spring rolls were a revelation. Armed with this base I commenced to tasting.

To a palate informed by beer, wine, and cocktails, sake is a nearly alien beverage experience. The flavor is light and very floral, yet hot from the high alcohol content.

The few aged sakes were more complex, almost heavier and maltier in their flavors. This was the Kirin Daiginjo Hizoushu, stored at low temperatures for five years:

The bulk of the others had peach, melon, and lychee notes to me. One of my favorites was the Akita Seishu Company’s Dewatsuru “Sakura Emaki” – a sake made with ko-dai-mai rice. The rice is red, and the sake produced from it is a lovely pale pink:

This had a slight sweet fruitiness, but not in an overwhelming or cloying way:

Packaging and naming seemed very important. Most of the bottles were gorgeous, with elaborate names like “Heaven’s Door” and “Bride of the Fox.” This manufacturer, Takasago, has a claim to fame in it’s “ice dome” – an igloo-style structure in which it brews its sake:

I finished my day with a small spot of dessert and a new appreciation for sake:

It was a fantastic day, and a wonderful opportunity to learn more about a spirit I hadn’t really understood. I learned a lot, had amazing food, and all in a gorgeous setting. Here’s to saying yes!

Turning Over a New Leaf

Way, way back in 2006, I read an article in the New York Times about pie crust. The perfect pie crust, to be more precise. Long time readers of this blog know that I have a vested interest in this topic – I am determined to master that simple yet surprisingly difficult pastry. If I’m being completely honest with myself, I want people to notice my pie crusts, to be struck by their perfect balance of tenderness and flakiness. This is not a humble goal, I realize, but hey, the goal’s not for ME to be perfect – just the crust.

So anyway, back in ’06, there was an article on making the perfect pie crust, and while I read it, intrigued, I didn’t actually do anything with that article, or achieve that crust, until half a decade later. Why is that, you may be wondering? What stopped this lady, who seems to balk at no challenge, no matter how ridiculously complex or silly, from making her dream crust? I’ll tell you in two words.

Pig. Fat.

Specifically, leaf lard. Y’see, pig fat comes in three grades. The lowest grade is caul fat, which is far too soft for pastry baking. It’s found around the digestive organs of the pig and is typically used for sausage casings and for adding much-needed fat to lean cuts of meat. Next up is fatback, the fat to which we’re most accustomed. It’s found between the skin and the muscle, and it’s the fat of your slab bacon and chicharrón fame. Fat back is actually plenty hard, and renders out well. The problem become obvious though, if you’ve ever eaten bacon, or chicharróns, or lardons. Fatback tastes like meat. It makes an awesome fat if you want to make some french fries (though suet, which is beef fat, was traditional before vegetable oil became the norm) but in a dessert it’s somewhat disconcerting.

So, leaf lard! Like caul fat, it’s a visceral fat, meaning it’s found around organs, in this case the kidneys and the loin. Unlike caul fat, it’s hard, has a fairly high smoke point, and unlike fatback, it has very little porky taste. In short, it’s a dream fat for baking. While I typically use an all-butter crust, for the flavor, (because I think shortening is kind of nasty) there are problems with butter as your primary fat – largely, that it is not just fat. It’s milk solids – that’s the deliciousness – but there’s also water in there. If you’ve read the post linked above, you know that means gluten, and too much gluten is the enemy of tenderness. A half-butter, half-pure fat crust is the way to go, but again, shortening is yucky. However, we can hearken back to the days of our ancestors with some leaf lard – good old fashioned animal fat!

But the article, by Melissa Clark, made using the lard seem a bit arduous. I didn’t want my house to smell like a pig, nor did I want to pay $20-$30 for pre-rendered fat. And so, I put it out of my mind for a time, and settled for a less-than-perfect (but still pretty delicious) all-butter crust.

So what changed, you might wonder? Well, for one thing, this blog. Rendering my own pig fat and baking a pie with it seemed like an appropriate task for these pages. Then too, since 2006 we’ve gotten more Farmer’s Markets and organic meat possibilities in the area – I have more access to weird offal these days.

And so, on a recent trip to the brand-new Somerville Winter Farmer’s Market, I decided to ask the fine ladies of Stillman’s at the Turkey Farm if they had any leaf lard. They did, pretty much just enough for my purposes. I purchased it and began my adventure!

Here’s the lard before anything is done to it:

It can’t be used like this, it needs to be rendered. Remdering makes the lard stable and removes all of the extra, non-fat bits that we don’t need in our pie. I followed the instructions on Chichi Wang’s awesome Serious Eats column, The Nasty Bits. (Seriously, if you need recipes for weird spare parts of animals, she’s got it.) It seemed easy enough!

Cut the fat into bits:

At this point there was definitely a slight “barnyard” odor to the fat. I feared that the entire household would annoyed with me, but it was far too cold to open a window.

Add some water and start cooking at a low temperature!

Seriously, you just really have to leave it alone and stir on occasion. The water keeps the fat from burning and also improves the end product.

Surprisingly, the cooking fat odor didn’t really extend beyond the pot it was in. I just let it do its thing, stirring it every ten minutes or so, until the cracklings (think pork rinds, though these were tiny) started to fizz in the pot:

Eventually, these release most of their fat and sink to the bottom of the pot:

These get strained out of the fat. You can basically eat them as a little, very decadent snack later!

Or not, if that wigs you out.

Here was my prize, about 2 cups of liquid gold:

I just cooled this and stuck it in the freezer in preparation for my next pie:

Pretty easy, and not nearly as smelly or painful as Ms. Clark led me to believe! There is something very satisfying about a project like this, using up the bits of an animal that might otherwise go to waste.

In my next post, I’ll show you the resulting pie! There will also be a poll about our next food adventure, so watch out for that.

Orange Line Adventures, Part II!

As promised, the continued saga of our trip to JP and the Scottish delights we encountered there!

After thoroughly enjoying all of the appetizers, it was time to dig into our entrees. For the most part we tried for “traditional” fare, though we made an exception for duck. It is imperative, if you’re dining with me, that you always make exceptions for the duck.

For my own part, however, I went with the sassitch and mash.

The sassitch refers to a lovely house-made sausage, in this case pork combined with apples and sage (you can see a bit of apple poking out in the photo!), always a fantastic group of flavors. Mash can mean any of a number of mashed vegetables, often turnip or potato, but in this case roasted sweet potato, to play nicely with the fall flavors of the sausage. Finally the kale on the side added a bit of much-needed bitterness to balance all of the sweetness, and the cider-jus, with bacon and duck stock, was to die for. The leftovers made a killer hash the next day, too!

Others at the table
The beef and ale pie! The ale really brings out all of the flavor of the beef, and the caraway crust was perfectly flaky.

Hard to see, alas (it was VERY dark!) but this is the fish supper – beer-battered haddock, thick chips, and mushy peas. Fish and chips, but very, very good ones, some of the most tender fish I’ve had outside of home in my life, and the batter was thick and delicious. I’d never had mushy peas before – essentially mashed fresh peas with mint. Very green-tasting, and I liked them, but they were served cold and I think I prefer my veggies of this type hot, as a general rule. Others at the table had no such qualms, however, and they did not go to waste!

Our duck exception, and it was exceptional! The duck was perfection, crispy outside, still rosy inside, and served with mustard greens, red curry, and some kaffir lime yogurt that makes me want to go back and ask for the recipe.

Now I know that at this point you might be thinking, “BUT WHAT ABOUT THE HAGGIS?” Fear not, my lovelies, for it was ordered and it was eaten. I didn’t get it as my personal entree because two other folks at the table were getting it and I wanted to make sure we had our culinary bases covered (though I needn’t have worried, two other folks ordered the sassitch!).
Here she is:

A few words about the Haven’s haggis, before I give my thoughts. First, rather than a sheep’s stomach, they use a beef sausage casing. Secondly, they forgo the pesky, only-recently-legal lungs in the filling,though the heart and kidneys are still present. Finally, they serve it with a Drambuie butter, which maybe the tastiest damned thing that’s happened to butter in many a year. I think I may need to make some of my own to keep around the house and spread on everything.

And so, my thoughts – fantastic. The filling ends up being soft and rich, with the strong flavor of the heart coming through. Served on a bed of mashed sweet potatoes and rutabaga, this was a perfect winter food.

All of this was washed down with a Kelpie Seaweed Ale, a Scottish chocolate ale brewed with bladderwrack seaweed. Think chocolate with a bit of brininess. Tasty, and low-alcohol enough to go well with dinner – plus I really loved the label!

The great thing about dinner with 9 people is that you almost always have room for dessert, because you’re sharing nearly everything and eating tiny, tapas-like amounts of it all. Even better, if you’re lucky, with 9 people it is totally reasonable to order EVERY DESSERT ON THE MENU and eat the round-robin style. If you have never had such an experience I highly recommend grabbing 8 other people and finding a spot that carries 4-5 dessert options. You will not regret this.
We ate:

A deep-fried Mars Bar! Way better than any of us had expected it to be, mostly because it was lightly sprinkled with sea salt, which the ladies at the table figured would make nearly any dessert appealing to us, but also because it was all melty and warm inside, and the coating was crisper and tastier than I, for one, was expecting.

A tart of lemon curd, scented with rosemary smoke. This was the most flamboyant dish, coming as it did with elements that were on fire. You can pretty much always impress with open flame tableside. The taste was also fantastic, however, like a lemon square that had upgraded from the church bake sale and learned to be fancy.

This is cranachan, a traditional Scottish dessert similar to a parfait – layers of fruit, whipped cream, and whiskey are topped with toasted oatmeal. The fruit in ours was, as is seasonally appropriate, cranberries. Valerie, upon enjoying her first spoonful of cranchan, exclaimed “I want to write poetry to this!”

However, the cranachan was soon upstaged by our last dessert, another traditional beauty. Alas, due to the dark, my photo hardly does her justice:

That is sticky toffee pudding, and that is pure joy on a plate. Imagine a rich, moist sponge cake enrobed in the thickest, darkest toffee sauce possible. The taste is burnt sugar molasses goodness. If you put sea salt on top of it might possibly die right at the table. Upon biting into this, Valerie was moved to say, “If I wanted to write poetry to that, this I want to eat in the back seat of my car!” Her sister, Elise, then summed it up thus: “[Cranachan] is who you take on a nice date, to dinner. Sticky toffee pudding is who you call up after when you didn’t get any.”

Here at Adventures in Food we like to keep it classy.

The waitress, who really was an absolute delight, did us one last favor and took a picture of the whole group:

It is painfully obvious who did and did not skip the hat portion of our day, but we love you guys anyway!

A big thank you to the delightful staff of The Haven, who put up with a rotating number of people, our ridiculously early selves, and a very large party with grace and charm. I can’t wait to go back and try their brunch!

Fruit Queen

How often do you get try new fruit?

Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of fruits out there that I haven’t tried. The fabled durian and I are yet to have an encounter, and there’s always the ackee or breadfruit or a black sapote. Yet the very reason that I haven’t tried them is the one that makes new fruit exciting – they’re very hard to come by. Many fruits stop ripening once they’re plucked, and rot soon after they’re ripe, making them hard to transport over long distances. Throw in the danger of bringing exotic diseases and pests into the country, and it becomes difficult to get your hand on fruit that can’t be grown in your (relatively) immediate vicinity. (This is also why the fruits we do manage to haul over long distances – citrus, for example – are not nearly as good when you buy them where they don’t grow.) So, while I do believe in reducing your carbon footprint and eating locally where possible, I have to admit, I get pretty excited at the opportunity to experience new fruits. Enter Kam Man Food!

Directly after the Filipino food adventure in Quincy, my band of intrepid friends and I headed over to this impressive Korean grocery store and market. Both Elise and Valerie have shared some adventures in the home goods department – check them out. True to the spirit of this blog, however, my heart belonged to the grocery store, and in particular, to the large bag of hard purple fruit that we found there. Mangosteens!

Mangosteens come from Southeast Asia and require ultra-tropical conditions in which to grow. This makes them a lousy crop for most of the United States. Throw in concerns around the Asian fruit fly and let’s just say that they’re not the easiest fruit to come by in these parts. I’ve had them freeze-dried from Trader Joe’s and enjoyed them, but here was my chance to try the real thing! So I bought them for a pretty penny and brought them home.

The dark purple outer skin isn’t edible – like the pomegranate, the edible part of the mangosteen is an aril – a fleshy coating to the seeds inside the fruit. Unlike a pomegranate the mangosteen arils are quite large and less numerous – they actually correspond to the petals on the little flower shape on the bottom of the fruit! There are always 4-8 of them.

Should you ever have one of these in your possession, I’ll let you know they aren’t the easiest fruit I’ve ever tried to open up. That outer skin can be up to an inch thick and is rather tough, but I got through eventually and managed not to slice right through my prize! The fruit inside is white and soft, and looks like a bit like a goth orange.

I plucked the segments out with a fork and dug in. The texture was very soft and pulpy, but not unpleasantly so. And the taste!

A mangosteen tastes like a peach and a banana had a baby, with a faint hint of citrus acidity on the finish. The fruit doesn’t have much of a fragrance, so the amount of flavor is a wonderful surprise. I found myself wishing they were much bigger! It’s said that the mangosteen is the Queen of Fruits, and it’s easy to see why. This treat is a bit too expensive to be enjoyed regularly (and sadly, all of the nutrition is in the inedible exocarp – some companies grind it into the juice to create an antioxidant-rich drink) but it was a wonderful coda to my Quincy adventure. Next up, for better or worse, I hope to experience the fruit king!

Hear Ye, Hear Ye!

Today I have a few exciting announcements! They’re largely applicable to those of you who live in the Boston area, but even if you’re not local it’s all worth knowing.

Let’s start with the one that’s actually happening today – the long-awaited opening of The Boston Shaker’s standalone store in Davis Square! You may remember from my bar tools post that the Boston Shaker is my go-to spot for the latest and greatest in bar tools, books, and bitters. Until today, I had to schlep out to Union Square on my bike or the bus – but no longer! Adam’s beautiful shop is within walking distance of my house, and right on my commute home. If you are not so blessed, visit the online shop at thebostonshaker.com. You’ll be glad that you did!

Next up, even though it is not Sunday Run Day, I have a marathon announcement – the next big fundraiser! This is a joint effort between those teammates who work in the Boston Partners in Education office (of whom I am one, which you should be aware of if you read this blog ever.) We are hosting a trivia night at the Crossroads Pub in the Back Bay on February 19th, at 6 pm. Tickets are $10 each, but if you put together a team of 4-6 and pre-pay, you’ll get $5 off! We’re going to have some fantastic prizes, so come out, have some fun, and support us at the same time. Contact me to pre-buy tickets or for more information. Space is limited to 100 people, so don’t delay!

Finally, I would like to announce to all of the amateur cooks out there that the Boston Lamb Takedown is coming up on February 28th! The Takedowns, the brainchild of Matt Timms, are basically big ol’ cook-offs – but a bit hipper than your average Pillsbury Bake-Off. I’d really love to enter, as I’ve got some interesting ideas (they involve dried fruit, ala Katniss’ favorite meal in The Hunger Games) but I think it’s a little too much to put on my proverbial plate at this point in my training. Next time, Mr. Timms, NEXT TIME! If you all have time, you should show off your skills. In any event, tickets to simply eat the fantastic creations are only $15, so even if you’re not confident in your lamb-cooking prowess you can still join in the fun! It’s at the Middle East Club in Cambridge, and you’ll be able to purchase your tickets through them. Oh, and if you DO enter, let me know!

I hope to see you at any and all of these exciting events – it’s going to be an amazing February, and how often do you get to say that?

Taking Stock

Few things bother me more than throwing out food.  What could be more wasteful than letting perfectly good nutrition rot in the refrigerator when people are starving?  Then there’s the money you spent on the food in the first place, gone without benefit.  So we try to be really good about eating up our leftovers.  We even bought a food-saver with last year’s Christmas money, to better extend the freezer life of our excess.  In order to make leftovers more exciting I try to rework them, making hashes and salads instead of simply reheating last night’s dinner.  All of these tricks are pretty good, and while we still have to throw out the occasional moldy tomato, we waste very little.

One of our biggest victories in the war against waste, however, is stock-making.  Stock is a great recycler for a number of reasons.  First, in making the stock you’re able to use bits and pieces of whatever kind it is that you wouldn’t eat under normal circumstances.  For example, if you’re making veggie stock, in addition to the fresh vegetables that form your base you can dump in trimmings from previous meals.  In making chicken stock this week, I threw in some of those trimmings, along with several carcasses and necks that I’d saved in the freezer.  While you still need some fresh meat and vegetables (bones and trimmings alone will taste just like you’d imagine) this is an awesome way to get more mileage from your chicken dinner.  The bones add a bit of collagen that makes your stock nice and thick, and the trimmings add flavor and color – onion skins are key to a beautiful rich yellow stock.  Like so:

I like to use thighs for my fresh meat, because they’re cheap and more flavorful, since they’re dark meat. Throw them in the pot with a bay leaf, carrots, onions, and celery, cover the whole mess with water, and you’re good to go.

After the stock is done, it continues to help you recycle! The most obvious use for stock is soup, which in our house is the favored way of dispatching with vegetables that are still good but on the verge. It’s much easier to eat carrots, green beans, corn, onions, peas, and broccoli all in one meal when it’s in the soup pot. In our last creation we even tossed in a little left-over pancetta, which added a pleasant saltiness to the finished soup.

Stock is also the key ingredient in risotto, another canvas for “whatever we’ve got left in the fridge.” Even if I’m not in the mood for the full risotto treatment, throwing stock instead of water into the rice cooker adds a bit of depth to our meal.

Making stock at home is a bit time-consuming, but well worth the minimal effort. We’ve never wasted a drop!

Local, Seasonal, Vegetarian

There’s a great farmer’s market in Dewey Square on Tuesdays and Thursdays all summer and throughout the fall.  Since Dewey Square is right outside the South Station T stop where I pick up the subway, this makes it supremely easy and convenient to quickly grab some fresh and local produce on the way home, and unless I have somewhere to be after work, I usually try to take advantage.
While this is always fantastic, today I really struck gold:

These lovelies are maitake mushrooms, also known as hen of the woods. While they’re popular in Japan for their medicinal properties, these fungi are also really, really delicious. The name hen of the woods is apt because the mushroom has this wonderful meaty flavor and chew. Finding them was super exciting because they’re one of my favorite mushrooms and I don’t see them around that often. They’re rather expensive, but I find a little goes a long way with mushrooms, so I bought enough for a solitary dinner since the man was working late and hurried home with my prize.

I’d already been thinking about making barley tonight, as a change from rice…but what else to serve with the barley and mushrooms? I didn’t want to make a risotto – I wanted the mushrooms to shine on their own. And then I remembered that we had some beets in the fridge! Barley, beets, and maitake – the perfect fall meal!

Cooking the barley was easy enough – into the rice cooker it went, with 2 cups of water. For the beets, I decided to slightly modify the Beet Crisps recipe in How to Cook Everything Vegetarian and slice them a bit thicker – they were not so much crisps as individually roasted beet slices. Into a 400 degree oven they went, coated oil and, once they were flipped, dusted with salt, pepper, and curry powder.

Finally, it was time to cook the mushrooms. I decided on simply sauteing them following the general outline of a recipe found online. My big change here, besides quantity (the mushrooms weren’t $29 a pound, but they weren’t so far off that I was going to buy that much of them!) was that I lacked the fresh herbs. I didn’t plant thyme in the garden this year, and my rosemary is somewhat…lacking. So I winged it with dried and hoped Marco would forgive me.

Maitake smells absolutely outstanding when sauteed. Don’t start dinner when you’re too hungry or you’ll be sorry.

When the mushrooms were drained of their excess oil, I put it all together on the plate. The beets saved the meal from being too drab.

The earthiness of the mushrooms played nicely with the sweetness of the beets and their slight curry mustiness. The barley came out beautifully – fully cooked and tender but still chewy. A lovely fall meal – local, seasonal, and totally meat-free!

Fair Food!

This weekend I went to Eastern States Exposition, better known as The Big E. Like The World’s Fairs of the 19th century, The Big E is designed to showcase the agriculture and products of the New England States.  Those products include food.  Lots and lots of food.

For starters, there’s all of the typical food that you can eat at any county or state fair. Like fried dough:

Wings:

Or GIANT CORN DOGS:

These are the greasy delights that we all enjoy before promptly becoming sick on the Ferris Wheel, and I’ve been known to enjoy them myself.   But the Big E has so much more to offer, and that’s what I’d like to focus on in this post.

For example, one of the things that makes this fair unique is that it’s an exposition not just for a county, not just for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, but for all six New England states!  Each state has a house that acts as an embassy (you are legally in that state while in its building) and showcase of its culinary glories.  You can also usually buy scented candles and other such nonsense, but we all know where my priorities are.

We stopped into the Massachusetts building and started the day with some macaroni and cellar-aged cheese local to the nearby town of Granville.  The cheese was pleasantly sharp and there were just hints of tomato in the mix – this was a far cry from boxed mac ‘n cheese.  I’d have liked to purchase some cheese but didn’t think it would survive being dragged around the fair all day.  No one likes weepy cheese.

Next we went to my favorite building:

This is the Rhode Island building. While I am Massachusetts born and bred, the RI building offers a treat that we cannot compete with:

That, my friends, is a hot bag of clam fritters.  Also known as clam cakes, these little gems are worth the trip in and of themselves.  Conversation actually heard as we stood eating these outside the Rhode Island building:

Little Girl: But mom, why do you want more fritters?

Mom: Well, Isabelle, because that’s why we come here.

Clearly Mom is raising her children right.  Anonymous mother, I salute you!

Lest you think that these are just little balls of corn dough, let me assure you that there are indeed chunks of clam embedded in them:

While I did not indulge in it, Rhode Island is also home to coffee milk, which I believe has it all over chocolate or strawberry.  I believe I am in the minority in this opinion outside of Rhode Island, however.  Three cheers for that tiny state to the south with all of the bizarre regional cuisine!

That was the extent of our state building tour this year.  Two of my fair companions did eventually return to the Maine building for the baked potato, but as I am personally unexcited by that treat I didn’t bother to document it.  Forgive me, Maine.

Instead we headed over to the 4H buildings to look at the adorable and slightly pungent animals.  Check out my Flickr if you enjoy pictures of cows and sheep!  Since I’m focused on the foodstuffs, here, I’d like to draw your attention to the joys of the dairy bar:

This gentleman is a first-time patron of the Dairy Bar, a magical place where you can get a proper New England milkshake made with fresh milk. He’s enjoying the vanilla variety. For those uninterested in clicking my links, the difference between milkshakes in New England and the rest of the world is that here they do not include ice cream. That particular confection is called a frappe. Learn the distinction to avoid disappointment at your local soda parlor or ice cream establishment.

Also next to the Dairy Bar is a work of food art:

The artistry of this piece is jaw-dropping – look at those little cows! Quite a bit of butter goes into this ephemeral masterwork:

After enjoying the agricultural delights of the 4H barn we headed to the midway to play some games.  While my companions excel at games like shooting out the star, skeeball, and plate breaking, my only talent is darts.  I can pop balloons with a dart like nobody’s business.  Sadly this talent doesn’t transfer to the plate breaking  – I can very accurately hit a plate with a baseball, but not with enough force to shatter it.  Perhaps I will train for next year.

In any case, all of that throwing worked up an appetite, so we headed to lunch.  I decided to try a couple of fair treats that I’d never had before.  The first was the fried pickles:

These were great – hot and salty, with a light, crisp breading. The frying seems to draw out some of the vinegar sting from the pickle. Though not, apparently, from the pickle eaters:

Oh, and they were prepared for me by the fine young men of Dr. Vegetable:

The Vegetable Therapist approves!

The rest of my lunch was a food I’ve eaten before, but not at the Big E – pierogies. Western MA has a big Polish population, so I’m not sure if these are a common fair food or specific to the region. I do know that the Bolton fair has spectacular galumpkis. (as a half-Pole it’s my duty to know these things.)

The Big E’s pierogies were tasty but a bit greasy. The aforementioned field expedition to the Main Building brought them to me – an assortment of potato, kielbasa, cheese, and cabbage filled.

I was partial to the cabbage, which had a nice sour flavor to complement the bland dough casing. The kielbasa were pleasantly salty – really just flecks of sausage embedded into potato. Certain table companions were too put off by the grease to truly enjoy them, but I believe that’s the hallmark of good fair food.

We finished off the day with a few more games and the always amazing Circus Museum. Check out the Flickr for lots of pictures of incredibly detailed circus miniatures.

My last food item for the day was a sarsaparilla float. This was some of the best soda I’ve ever had – just enough of that root flavor to be a nice complement for the ice cream – sweet but a little spicy.

All in all it was a grand day at the fair! Good fun, good people, and of course, good food!