We began our Thanksgiving feast with the Traditional Tracing and Coloring of Hand Turkeys. We were thankful for the bounty of colors that even a small box of crayons offers.
Our first course was a communal tasting of the Jones' Soda Regional Holiday Pack. First we tasted the Smoked Salmon Pate, an activity which Tejal undertook with admirable stoicism:
I, however, was more demonstrative in my distaste at the combination of artificial sweetener, smokiness and fish:
Nearing the end of November, I was becoming more and more uncomfortable with the warm and sunny days of Half Moon Bay. It's practically December! And being used to the dark and appropriately miserable Novembers of Boston and London I was in need of some grey clouds, hard rain, and snow--to be remedied with braises, roasts, and soups. So imagine the thrill I felt when yesterday, as I stepped outside at about 6 o clock, I felt a chill in the air and saw heavy rain on our stairs. I shuddered, then rejoiced: finally, a wintry night and a wintry meal to take me through it: Shabu shabu.
The word, apart from being fun to say over and over, is the name of a Japanese hot pot meal which is healthy, delicious, cheap, and simple. Apparently the words come from the motion of swishing your pieces of thinly sliced beef and vegetables in the pot. Unlike sukiyaki, which is a similar meal of cooking at a table side hot pot, food is swished about in boiling water rather than simmering stock, then seasoned in various dipping sauces.
From what I've read, it appears that Ghengis Khan's soldiers ate similar meals on the go to maximize on nutrition and create a sense of camraderie--they gathered around communal pots dipping what edible things they could find in boiling water and seasoning with pickles that they carried with them. At Shabuway on 3rd street, where they serve nothing else, you are presented with a choice that Ghengis Khan's soldiers probably were not: large or regular and chicken, vegetarian, shrimp or beef.
Coming in from the rain, we were seated in the tiny room and huddled at the communal bar with all the other lucky people who'd chosen this place as refuge tonight. The windows inside were steaming from all the personal hot pots boiling away, and every time the door swung open, the steam from our row of pots smacked my nose with a little warmth.
I ordered the regular beef shabu shabu and got a vegetable plate of cabbage, carrot, mushrooms, udon, and tofu, as well as a plate of thinly sliced beef with the most beautiful, white swirls of fatty marbling I'd ever seen. They use chuck, from the shoulder, slice it frozen at the bar, directly onto the plate, which is on a set of scales. It took me a while to arrange all my bowls and plates efficiently and tidily: sesame sauce, ponzu sauce, rice bowl, veggie plate, and beef plate, and then a little more time to season my sauces with sliced green onion, pickles, and chilli oil. But then, the feast of dipping and swishing and scooping began, and went on well into the evening.
The ingredients are really quality, and for a meal like this, it's the only important thing, as the cooking is done by you! It's up to you how far you want to cook your meat and vegetables--I like the beef still pink, before all the fat melts away, although the odd slice I left in too long was still tender.
Glyn had to order another side plate of beef and vegetables after he finished, which surprised me as I was so full after my order I could do nothing but sigh and sigh and feel warm and happy. He decided to go with the large next time, but I'd still stick with the regular which is a very generous portion at eleven dollars.
The service is really wonderful and attentive for the fast food atmosphere: they check first that it's O.K with you to seat a single person before you and your boyfriend (as there's only one seat open), walk around with squeezy bottles of sauce to make sure your sauces are always full, even skim the coagulated proteins from your hot pot if you forget to do it! But you shouldn't, because there's a fine mesh skimmer sitting in water just for that. Each server then shouts a genuine thank you as you bundle up and head back into the cold rain, your belly likely warm and full, and your mind on winter foods to come...
Shabuway
145 E. Third Ave
San Mateo, CA 94401
closed every monday starting next week until they finish opening their sister restaurant
www.shabuway.com for great shabu shabu sound effects!
I don't know where to start with our Thanksgiving merriment, so I'll begin with the box of Jones calorie free Thanksgiving soda. It was certainly not the highlight--Martha's gorgeous bird, Whitney's secrey family noodles, drawing turkey hands. Those were the highlights. But the sodas were a five course meal, Willy Wonka style, served in twisty top soda bottles. I'm not that into soda, but I am into really cool designs and their soda bottles always have completely irrelevant images with a pretty sexy font. Who could resist?
1. smoked salmon pate
2. sweet corn
3. broccoli casserole
4. turkey and gravy
5. pecan pie
Yes, they are gross. Mostly, they just taste like artificial sweetener, but the smoked salmon had a clear fishy, smoky flavour, and the turkey a bouillon cube quality. I think if they used real sugar, and maybe upped the fizz factor, I might actually enjoy the sweet corn soda. Pictures to follow...
And then, what did I see? Turkey backs! Already chopped into chunks and ready for stock for about $1.00 a pound! Yay!
I don't remember doing it, but apparently, some time ago, I must have e-mailed el Bulli for a reservation. I think it was after reading Louisa'a blog. I thought it wouldn't amount to anything and forgot about it completely...until today. Did it come back to me in a dream? Did I remember in the shower with a gasp? Oh no. No. A Senor Luis Garcia informed me in an e-mail this morning that I have a reservation next August at 9pm.
They need only a confirmation with a direct phone number and a list of any allergies or problems. Allergies? Problems? Honestly, if Ferran Adria vacuum packs a leather boot and slow cooks it for me, I'll try it. There will be no nose wrinkling from me.
So regardless of where I may be next year--as the summer comes to an end I will take one person with me to Roses on the Costa Brava, and one person only..but who?
I have decided to draw names at random from a hat, or put hopefuls up to a humiliating Summer Challenge 2006 involving a three legged race, stepping through tires and balancing eggs on spoons. But more likely, it'll be Glyn.
What started as a dash to Cunha's on main street for a baguette and some chicken, turned into the last artichoke extravaganza of the year. A box--a huge, heavy box of fifty odd baby artichokes--for ten dollars. Glyn knew already what they would become--he had a terrine in mind.
According to my new book Charcuterie, the Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing, pates and terrines are essentially big sausages cooked in some sort of mould, in dough, or in skin. At first I thought that a bit crude, but I suppose that's actually a perfect description, simplifying maybe, but allowing room for the endless possibilities of a terrine.
Terrines can be chunky or smooth, vegetarian or meaty, elegant or rustic, covered in jelly, vegetables, skin--anything. A slice of meaty terrine, rillette or pate is often not unlike cat food in its fat and meat emulsion appearance...but can be much more when filled with nuts, vegetables, and other interesting garnishes. The meat that makes up the terrine itself can be seasoned aggressively as the terrine will be served cold, and then the whole thing tastes of Christmas.
At least a rustic meaty pate always reminds me of holidays in our town in France, when our neighbours brought over homemade pate de campagne and we ate them with bread, cornichons, and champagne before the big meal of Christmas or New Year's Eve.
But this was to be a vegetarian terrine. And so we returned home with the giant box of artichokes.
That same evening Greg and Leilani came over for a dinner of beet and cucumber raita, jeera chicken and Eaton mess before going to see HP 4. Glyn was busy plucking the pale thorned leaves from the little artichokes and turning each one. Greg helped, and they finished the job with blackened fingertips.
He then boiled the quarters in a blanc and set them the next morning in mini terrine moulds with a delicious aspic, that tasted of the red peppers and fennel that gave up their sweetness for the reduced vegetable stock, and goat cheese. This is a very simple and tasty vegetable terrine, good with a leafy salad--and I think it's the first of many to come this season.
This is Green Apple Books on Clement and 6th where Martha and I went for the afternoon. It's full of wonderful used and new books and with an unusually large cook book section. The shelves are beautifully crammed and close together--reminds me of the little bookstores in Harvard where the books are piled up to the ceiling and there are stools all over the place to reach that crumbling copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking. It made me happy just walking around.
As luck would have it, almost every book I picked up was not in fact used, but new, and therefore the same price it would be anywhere else. Though I did find a copy of Jim Harrison's The Raw and the Cooked--which is as the title suggests a bit raw and raunchy (for food writing) and very funny--for only five dollars. He says things like, Cosmic Gin Trance instead of drunken stupor, and I like him.
We then picked up some great Chinese candies and went to plan our Thanksgiving meal at, of all places to plan a turkey dinner, a shady heavy metal bar, over a couple of beers. And I'm excited about many things:
1. Beer, maybe I like it
2. Teaching Glyn to draw a turkey by tracing his hand on paper and drawing a beak on the thumb
3. Making terrines from my new Charcuterie book
4. Having Thanksgiving dinner with Martha, Stephen and Whitney
Yay, I can't wait till Sunday!
Green Apple Books
506 Clement Street
San Francisco, CA 94118
I don't like people ordering my food for me--I never have. As a child it was most important that I choose my own meal from the menu. Now it's the same. I think it's only a nightmare date that tells the server "the lady will have..."
And so why did I feel so comfortable letting Gary snatch my menu away from me and declare that he was ordering my meal for me? At least I think that was his name.
My uncle, the pilot, was on a layover so invited us to meet him for dinner. Years ago, he stopped in San Francisco a couple of times a week, and still knows his way around better that I do. He wanted to go back to House of Nanking, where he hadn't been in ages. I'd heard a lot of conflicting reviews about the place--how the food was the best Chinese food in the city, how the food was crap American-Chinese food made for non-Chinese eaters, and how the place had been successful for fifteen years--and I was curious.
Nanking was completely full at about 7:30 on Thursday, but we got a table right away. "That's Gary" my uncle said, of the animated man walking around and chatting up each table, taking orders, picking things up that fell on the floor, "it's his restaurant and he's always here." At this moment, the lights went off one by one, even in the kitchen. Gary was standing by the switches smiling. And then, the entire restaurant began to sing Happy Birthday to a table near ours--it didn't have the nauseating affect it does at say, TGI Fridays.
Our menus, one page front and back in a slip of plastic, were surprisingly short for a Chinese menu. Appetisers, Fish, Pork, Beef, Soups, Vegetables, Noodles and Rice. But I'd hardly read it over when, like I said, Gary came over and took them away.
"I send things for you--vegetable, chicken, seafood." And walked off. Five minutes later, sipping my anise and flower tasting tea, the food began to arrive in enormous white platters. Salty mushrooms with basil and onions, Fried fish in lemon and killer chilli oil, pea shoots with garlic and shrimp, sesame chicken with thinly sliced sweet potato and cucumber, and a bowl of steamed rice.
What had Gary told the kitchen? It's table seven's first time boys, sprinkle a little crack on their pea shoots, I want them coming back. Because the food was good, each dish completely different and tasty. The only thing expected and obvious was the sesame chicken, with that sweet sticky sauce so common in American Chinese restaurants--still, it was tasty regardless of how authentic. The seafood was fresh tasting, and unusually seasoned and flavoured. The food was generous, delicious, and cheap and the tea was free! As for authenticity--everyone's always on about authenticity when it comes to Chinese restaurants, and honestly, I have no idea. When I went to China, I ate all sorts of nonsense. Some of it tasted really good, so did my lemony chilli fish.
When Gary came to check that we liked it, we told him it was great. "Of course it's great!" he said harshly, "I choose it for you."
House of Nanking
919 Kearny St
San Francisco, CA 94133-5106
(415) 421-1429
Quince feels like an old Parisian living room, filled with people deep in conversations and bottles of wine, comfortable tables and chairs, big windows that look onto the residential streets--so that as you scan the little sheet of paper on which all the evening's menu choices are printed, a gentleman bends over just outside to scoop his Labrador's poop and a couple kisses under the dark trees of Octavia street.
Right away with the candles twinkling and Cesaria Evora singing her kind of blues, I felt at home. Our server was confident and comfortable translating the Italian heavy menu, describing the various pasta shapes and cooking techniques but not at all pretentious or condescending. And while the front of house team was smooth and efficient, they still managed to feel warm and caring.
The table was set with knobbly grissini and four small rolls with a sweet and spicy topping--cumin and chilli. To start, Glyn had the Nantucket Bay scallops with celeriac puree and prosecco butter sauce. They were steamed, still raw in the center. I had a frisee salad with fuyu persimmons, pears, and duck liver mousse spread on pieces of toast. The liver was strong and smooth, and went well with the sweet, tender persimmons.
There's nothing worse than tasting someone else's dish and realising it's better than yours as so happened with Glyn's pici with SB Farms goose. The pici was slightly chewy, soft spaghetti, with a ragu of braised goose meat and a few slices of smoked cured goose. I had the beet chitarra with Jerusalem artichoke and bagna cauda, which was good, but after tasting the pici, I wished I'd ordered that instead.
He then had the roast skate with Jerusalem artichoke puree and Chanterelles. I had the Paine Farm squab with butternut squash and farro, which came medium rare as asked, with a crisp skin--everything swimming in a delicious meaty jus.
For dessert, I had the poached Anjou pear tarlet with cinnamon ice cream and port reduction. Not so much a tarlet as a half pear on top of a disk of nutty, crumbly, crust--a few pine nuts sprinkled on the plate. A triangular gingerbread biscuit and chewy almond cookie came as petits fours with our espresso. Both very simple, and well done.
I'd certainly go back, as the cooking and service are quality but the prices are a little steep for the simple presentations and small portions--we ate four courses for 180 without wine.
Quince
1701 Octavia
San Francisco, CA 94109
415 775 8500
Closed on Mondays, dinner only Tuesday through Sunday (lucky bastards in the kitchen)
What's needy, moody, unreliable, tells me lies and ruins my dinner? It's the oven in my little kitchen, seeking attention. And so, after a delicious afternoon of semi-successful madeleine baking and cursing my oven, I decided to make something that required no attention. And if ever there was an offering to appease the restless gods of the oven (and my own pangs of homesickness), it's my mum's mac and c.
It used to be the way she sneaked vegetables I didn't like onto my plate. After all, any vegetable cooked for long enough with onions, bacon, and herbs then smothered with cheesy sauce and pasta, begins to taste sweet and delicious...But even as adults my brother and I requested it when we came home, and we got it exactly the same way, but with a glass of wine and fancier cheese. Nishant, here's the recipe, close, but no courgette.
1 finely sliced yellow onion
1 sliced green chilli, or a tsp of smoked chilli powder
5 slices of good bacon, chopped
2 cups sliced button mushrooms
1/2 cup sweet sherry
1 tomato, sliced thinly
2 tablespoons flour
2 cups whole milk
2 cups grated aged cheddar or mixture of other sharp cheese
1/2 box of pasta, penne or macaroni
For a one dish meal, one uses quite a few pots and pans, but all the cooking and preparing is very simple. First, fry onions and chilli in olive oil on a medium heat till they start to colour.
While they're cooking, chop up the bacon and fry in another pan on medium till cooked. Turn the heat high and add the sliced mushrooms and parsley (you may need to add some olive oil to the mushrooms depending on how fatty the bacon is). Once they're cooked, add the sherry and scrape the bottom of the pan. When all the alcohol has evaporated put the mixture in another bowl with the lightly browned onions and keep aside.
Boil the macaroni till almost cooked and drain, toss with a bit of olive oil and keep aside.
Drain the tasty fat from the vegetable mixture and use that and a tiny blob of butter to make a light brown roux. Add cold whole milk to it and bring to a boil while stirring. Take off the heat and while still hot (but not bubbling) add most of the grated cheese (saving some for sprinkling on top later) and whisk till smooth. Season after adding the cheese.
Now, coat the pasta in the sauce and mix in the caramelised onions, bacon and mushrooms. Cover the top with thinly sliced tomatoes and grated cheese. Bake covered with aluminium foil at 350 for about fifteen minutes then uncover and broil till the cheese gets brown and crisp. And as my mum would, serve it with a salad and a glass of wine that'll stand up to the cheese.
No matter how crap your oven, it will have no choice but to spit out something delicious that fills your tummy and reminds you of my mum. If, er, that's what you had in mind.
Unless you're fabulously wealthy, and have never had to make do with the crappy electric ovens in the apartments you rent, you know how heartbreaking baking can be. There are hot spots, cold spots, and inaccurate dials. My chef would say, don't blame the oven Tejal, so I'm not. But I do want golden madeleines, and to stop them from browning on one side and staying so pale on the other I have a five step plan:
1. don't watch emotional episodes of Six Feet Under while they're in the oven
2. place them on the higher rack for the first 4 minutes as the heat comes from the bottom broiler
3. place them on the lower rack for the last 4 minutes and change the setting so the heat comes from the top broiler
4. turn the tray every couple of minutes
5. make an offering to the gods of the oven (mac and cheese?)
I kept all the extra batter in a piping bag in the fridge, so even if it means eating several batches of warm madeleines this afternoon, I'm going to be brave and keep trying...
You think you know yourself. You think that at 22, working your first real job, living on your own at a distance from all things familiar, in the beginnings of a promising relationship, that you're starting to self-actualise. Your tastes are developing, and you're confident about them.
And then, one rainy afternoon, feeling lonely, you walk into the bookstore on main street, stroll about and feel drawn towards a magazine. You pick it up, ogle, and flip through frantically. How will you keep this pleasure hidden from your boyfriend? But seduced by the photos you decide to buy anyway, your face flushing as the middle-aged lady at the counter tells you that, she too, digs this month's issue of...Martha Stewart's Holiday Cookies.
Oh the shame.
In my defense: And there are some really cool cookies in there--stained glass windows made of jolly ranchers, twisty chocolate pretzels, pressed waffles, tiny sandwiched meringues--and some savoury flavours like pepper, thyme and rosemary speckled throughout. Best of all they're categorised like a nerdy insect encyclopedia--each one photographed and labelled in the index--in families of soft and chewy, crisp and crunchy, light and delicate, cakey and tender, rich and dense, chunky and nutty.
There are completely American recipes that I am at once attracted to and repelled by: whoopie pies, snickerdoodles, cheesecake bars and thumbprints. Although I didn't grow up with them, these funny named cookies have found themselves at home during Thanksgiving with my family in America, which is very food centric. Breakfast goes on for hours, then lunch, tea time, pre-dinner snacks, dinner, and afters. I'll miss my mum, cousins, and aunts especially this year, sitting around the table opening various tins of cookies, chatting in our pyjamas as Astrud Gilberto sings and the snow falls in Chicago.
So after a few nights of flipping through the pages, dog earing and dreaming about sending my family boxes of yummy things to eat at the holidays when I'm not around, I bought a madeleine mould. Nothing to do with the magazine really (although there is a recipe for them in there), but I suppose reading all about beautiful cookies and missing my family makes me want to bake something comforting for tea.
Madeleines are so simple. And unlike most cookies and cakes, they are best eaten right away, still warm from the oven. Clasically, they're made plain with lemon, but people like making funkier madeleines--I had savoury olive ones at Manresa as bouche, then chocolate ones as petit four. Cocoa can be added, lavender flowers, flavoured oils, spices, anything really.
Here's the recipe I'm following. It's classic, asking to play, from Glyn's recipes collected while at L'Orrery. This makes enough for at least four or five small sized madeleine moulds.
3 eggs
150 g sugar
zest of 1 orange and lemon
1/2 teaspoon of vanilla extract
100 g soft flour/cake flour
50 g almond flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 pinch salt
150 g cool melted butter
Take the eggs, sugar, zest and vanilla to ribbon stage. Sift together the dry ingredients and alternate folding them with the melted butter into the egg mixture until smooth. Let the batter rest for a couple of hours (so it doesn't get too big of a nipple in the centre when it bakes). Pipe it into madeleine moulds that have been brushed with melted butter and flour. Bake at 350 degrees for about 7 minutes, just until golden. Once they've cooled a bit, turn over and spank the madeleine mould; they should tumble out and be eaten right away with tea or coffee.
See, now I knew it was possible to write about having madeleines and tea without even mentioning Proust. Er, that doesn't count. Does it? Crap.
On the fifth of November, bonfire night, my family traditionally went to my brother's school to celebrate. There, all the boys and their families ate baked potatoes, toffee made with treacle, and sticky ginger puddings as a straw effigy of Guy Fawkes burned away on the bonfire.
He was one of the many Catholic conspirators attempting to murder King James I, his family, and the Protestant aristocracy by blowing up the House of Parliament in 1605--not the mastermind, but the one with explosive expertise placed in charge. Anyway he was found out. Taken to the Tower of London where he resisted torture on the rack at first, but then signed a confession with a shaky hand, revealing the names of all who worked with him.
We learned a poem at school that sums it all up:
Remember, remember the fifth of November,
Gunpowder, treason and plot,
I see no reason why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.
But it was forgot as the bonfire went on and the parents mingled with teachers, we went wild with fireworks and sweets, whose names have been muddled for me: fizzy loops, rockets, sparklers, double chinese snaps, meltaways, fountains, comets, jelly babies, curly wurlies, double deckers, dib dabs, roman candles, cakes, crackles, and silver rain.
Some of these English candies are here at Cameron's on highway one, a kitchy "English" pub complete with a smoking red double-decker bus, that I pass every day on the way to work. I went in just once and saw, behind the bar, a roomful of Sherbert Fountains and Aeros. The Sherbert Fountain is a humble sweet: a licorice twig wrapped up in a cylinder of sour sherbert for dipping and licking. What better way to remember a national villain?
People have trouble pronouncing my name the first time round. At work, it's etched onto a little badge that I wear above my pocket filled with pens, sharpies, tasting spoon, and notebook--still customers and at first my co-workers, needed help:
It's kinda like Bagel, I've said.
Or, it rhymes with Dradle.
Or as it so happens today, as in kneidle, as in chicken soup with.
See, my tooth is still hurting and I couldn't eat anything all day but wobbly jelly trimmings from my own cutting board. So tonight it's chicken soup for dinner with the stock that simmered overnight. Chicken soup and kneidles.
I watched the little dumplings swell and bob happily to the top of the boiling water and thought about how many times I've heard Glyn rhapsodise beautiful, firm, bullet hard, chewy kneidles, and complain about the soft squishy ones most people adore. But there they were, floating about in the chicken broth and ready to give in easily to my sore tooth: soft, fluffy matzoh balls. As in kneidles.
Today is Diwali. Or was it yesterday? I'm so disconnected from my family here in San Francisco, I'm not even sure. From what I remember of the comic strips I read as a child, today (or yesterday) marks the day Ram and Sita returned to their home city after a fourteen year exile. There's a whole series of comics depicting the Mahabarata, and another series devoted entirely to a single conversation between two men on the battlefield before the great war. My parents knew how to sneak a little Hindu mythology into my summer reading...I can still see the cartoon square of the streets lit with brown butter lamps--lights to welcome them home as they rode down the street atop a painted elephant. And flowers everywhere.
My mum tells me we've always celebrated this holiday at our house by eating fish, dahl and rice. Of this, sadly, I have no recollection whatsoever. Although I do remember dancing once, and candles and random friends and relatives filling the house with perfume and laughing. In honour of this forgotten tradition, I've made masoor dahl (or green lentils) slow cooked in red wine. Not very Indian, so I threw in some chili powder and garam masala. Much better.
For afters, there's the layers and layers of dried mango that my parents brought when they came to visit. It is a confectionery truly worthy of the name millefeuille--I know this because as a kid I took great pleasure in the separating of each layer, and to my family's annoyance, insisted on eating each one separately. They're dried on the streets in sheets, and so there's the occasional grain of sand in the sweet, chewy, still slightly moist candy--but one mouthful and you forgive it this.
It's strange, the half hearted desire to celebrate a holiday that isn't even a particularly special one in my parents' house. I suppose it's because I worry, in just a few years, that so much will be lost through distance, memory, and laziness--and it scares me. And then again, something will be gained through learning about Glyn's history. And surely there will be something new, something just my own. No? I don't really know how it works. But right now, I'll light candles, take comfort in it. And wait.
I heard a story in my kitchen yesterday about a cook who burned his hand so badly that he had to switch his knife over to his left hand--turned out he was left handed all along and didn't know it.
Thing is, I already know I'm left handed. But I hold my knives in my right hand. This makes no sense at all, but it's true. And as I'm learning since I've torn a bit of muscle in my right shoulder, or something, and it hurts when I move it, I'm not so good at chopping with my left hand.
I've been pretty useless at work: it hurts when I reach into the deck oven, scoop ice-cream or lift sheet pans; it hurts when I reach something from the top shelf of the freezer, and it hurts when I do the dishes--yes, yes, how convenient for me, you say. Also, my wisdom tooth is pushing through, I'm in need of a haircut, I have to go to the DMV this morning, and the last mosquito in San Francisco is hiding out in my apartment.
I was planning on distracting myself from all aches or responsibilities with cooking, baking actually, but a phone call from my brother complicated things further: to aid with the anti-inflammatories I'm taking I am supposed to avoid gluten, things in the night shade family like tomatoes and aubergine, coffee, dairy, and wine. That leaves...umm, quinoa? No, I'm afraid I'm just not up to the challenge this morning.
So when Leilani called and suggested we meet for dim sum at 11, I thought, maybe I'll go to the DMV first and get it over with, then treat myself to good company, dim sum and tea. Unfortunately, although there will be sweet beany goodness and good for what ails me seafood things, I will most likely still consume an excess of gluten. On the other hand, I thought, no pun intended, it's a beautiful morning for a drive over the hills, the queue at the DMV may be short this early, and I hold my chopsticks with my good, working, left hand.
Joy Luck Place in San Mateo was pretty good--we walked through the rose garden and Japanese garden of Central Park and sat in the big sunny space with a pot of Jasmine tea. The servers were very friendly and came over with carts full of steaming baskets and loosely covered noodles and vegetable dishes. The steamed pork buns and sweet bread pork buns were delicious, as were the tender spare ribs and hot, crispy sesame balls. Then we walked about in the Japanese dollar store where I bought cute cartoon animal clips to seal bags of food and had coffee in the street.
Driving home, the clouds got dark and spilled over the hills and I followed the blue lights home. Actually, I feel a bit better.
Joy Luck Place
(650) 343-6988
88 E 4th Ave
San Mateo, CA
As if there weren't enough reasons to make chicken stock, here's one more. It helps one avoid going to the grocery store for a little longer. Good chicken stock is the basis of good, simple soups that require few ingredients (basically the stuff languishing in your sorely ignored ice box) yet pack wallops of flavor. For example, Broccoli and Dry Jack Cheese Soup, constructed entirely from the odds and ends found in my produce drawer and cupboard. The recipe (more or less):
2 stalks broccoli, florets finely chopped and stems peeled and chopped
1 small onion, diced
2-3 cloves of garlic, minced
2 1/2 cups chicken stock (oh so preferably homemade)
1 cup whole milk
3 tbl butter
3 tbl flour
approx 3/4 cup finely shredded dry jack cheese (I used Vella dry jack from the Cowgirl Creamery)
1/2 tsp mustard powder
1 pinch cayenne
1/4 tsp dried thyme
1 bay leaf
Juice from half a lemon
Saute the onion and garlic in the butter until soft and translucent. Add the flour, mustard powder, cayenne and thyme, whisking constantly. Cook over medium-low heat for a minute or two, to remove the raw taste from the flour, but do not let the roux brown.
Meanwhile, bring the chicken stock to a boil. Add the bay leaf and the broccoli stems, cover and simmer for 4-5 minutes. Then add the broccoli florets and simmer until tender. It's worth noting that since the soup will be pureed, the broccoli needs to be pretty soft, not mushy, but a little softer than most of us typically eat broccoli by itself.
When the broccoli is finished, pour the chicken stock through a strainer and into the onions and roux, whisking until combined. Follow the stock with the milk. Whisking often, bring to a gentle boil over medium heat and cook for 3-4 minutes. Whisk in the cheese and add the broccoli.
Puree the soup with an immersion blender or in a standard blender. Season with salt, pepper, and lemon juice.
Ta-da. Dinner. No shopping required. I bet asparagus would also be good, if that's what you had around. All thanks to our good friend, chicken stock.