First Baguette

Okay. Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day. The book. First attempt. Here's the before, and here's the after. Result (because I'm picky) could have been lighter, filled with more air pockets. BUT was a perfectly crusty, almost crackly outside with a moist, dense crumb inside. 5 minutes, well, YES. Very much looking forward to more practice.

Summer Seasonals Cuisine

Summer seasonal kitchens. The air is alternately cool and humidly warm from day to day, and the fresh produce at markets in Wisconsin does not tumble vivid and juicy from the aprons of Mother Earth. It rather springs forth, vital and bold, earthy and refreshing from beds of soil carefully nurtured by hard-worked hands and fingers.

The cook desiring to transform these seeming peasant vegetables - chard, radish, spinach, young savory herbs, pole beans - into healthful dishes pleasing to the eye and satisfying to a palate biased toward more gourmet fare, need look little further than the elementals of classic French and Italian cooking.

Simple is good, less *is* more, and as any artist will confide: doing less, elegantly, challenges the artist to reduce multiplex choices into single strokes of concentrated expression.

Moreover, today's cook has less time to prepare! And so this evening, we come to the table to eat:

Chard sauteed in olive oil and garlic, generously seasoned with pepper and tossed with sel gros for texture.
Nestled in the bed of chard is a poached fillet of cod, meaty flakes with their own juices and buttery texture, topped with diced roma tomato concasse and drizzled with extra virgin olive oil and champagne vinegar.
Garnished again with more sel gros and shavings of parmesan cheese.

The Italian influence and summer season call for a wine that is as simple and delicious as the meal itself. One of my personal favorites, introduced to me by an Italian businessman in America who longed for a flavor of home:

Canei, a soft, lightly effervescent white wine that is most often used as an aperitif. However, Canei is so eminently drinkable, it rarely lasts long and keeps getting pour after pour during mealtime.

Thank to the recipes contained in Sundays at Moosewood for the Ziti with Chard recipe on page 367, and Jacques Pepin's Chez Jacques cookbook for poached cod with capers and brown butter. Both contained preparation elements that blended in an extraordinarily satisfying manner.

Sommer Party Pictures

http://picasaweb.google.com/finn.bill

Love to see other pictures from friends at the party!

Sommer Turned 5

Bobo Travels to the O.C.

I'm traveling on business, doing business theatre, video and presentation media in Orange County, California. The O.C., as it's called in popular parlance. Locals say there's more to it than what you see in the popular television show.

I knew I would be lonely, so I asked my daughter to give me a friend to keep me company. She planted Bobo the monkey in my suitcase. Bobo likes hugs, she said.

Well, Bobo and I are having fun so far. As you can see.

Bobo likes the sheets at the hotel. So do I.

Bobo enjoys the view of the ocean while I'm working.

Bobo makes a good traveling partner. Wait a minute, who took this picture?

Dinner for 5

Champagne
Baguette slices with Meyer Lemon infused olive dipping oil

Clams Casino
White Sancerre

Chive blended chevre capped with sundried tomato rosemary and fresh garlic

Ratatouille

Grilled yellowfin tuna and sauce vierge

You'll Never Know Good Food....

Julia Child said: "You'll never know good food unless you taste all food." Or something to that effect.

Which is a polite way of saying eat what you make in the kitchen, no matter how it turns out. And in certain cases, you might be pleasantly surprised.

I recently made Thanksgiving dinner for six. It turned out very well. The menu was as follows:

Roast Turkey
Cornbread, sausage and mission fig stuffing
Fresh cranberry sauce with red grapes
Sweet and Golden Yukon mashed potato blend
Brussels sprouts roasted with pancetta ham, garlic and reggiano parmigiano
Rice pudding with rum raisin mascarpone cheese

My mother-in-law brought orange jello salad, under protest. I asked for it as an homage to my Polish Catholic childhood. In it, no holiday meal was complete without several types of jello salad; to wit: lime jello with shredded carrots floating like mosquitos in amber, or orange jello with canned mandarin orange slices and marshmallow bits.

There were other jell-o salads from my tender years, but I can't remember specific types, only a lightly chilled cinematic pastiche of whipped pastel colors, flung with gelatinous chunks of brilliant, jewel-tone greens, reds, yellows and oranges. Purple and blue were nowhere to be found.

You know, I pore laboriously over Charlie Trotter's cookbooks. Vow to slavishly cook my way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Mentally envision, the way athletes do before competition, the successful execution of a recipe in my kitchen.

However, the menu and recipes for this Thanksgiving, belong to a second-tier celebrity chef hired to write a menu for InStyle magazine. He was possessed of a face friendly to a camera, and seemed to enjoy, in his still-photo representation, cooking dishes in a large loft kitchen with the meticulous abandon brought on only by a full selection of carefully product-positioned designer cookware he did not select or pay for himself.

I give thanks for his menu, but mostly for my mother-in-law's orange fluff. Without the orange fluff, it would have been just a decent meal.

Guess What? You Can Do That Here.

The biggest lesson I learned was that, as Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz realized, "everything I ever wanted was always right here, in my own backyard". Except not.

In my 20/20, I realized that my favorite times during this vacation in France were the times spent with the Bolger/LaPlants at the Fayot Farm. The meals typically began preparation a 3-4 hours in advance of dinner time.

Preparations involved noon-time trips to local market days, quick jaunts to the Super U, wandering through the farm's apple-walnut-quince orchard, wondering how the hell anyone ever wrung the neck of a turtledove and served it for dinner (about 5 were in residence, bred specifically for the purpose of imminent death by home-cooked meal), scaring the sheep, feeding vegetable scraps to goats, chickens and a turkey, choosing cheese and drinking wine.

Best food discovery: Merguez sausage (at home, the rude equivalent is mildly spicy fresh Hungarian sausage). Delightful grilled, on a baguette with only its own moderate oils as a sauce, salted frites and crisply chilled Stella Artois.

Best invention: ripe market tomatoes, cored and stuffed with a blend of merguez sausage, cornichon, onion, some whole grain flour or cornmeal. Roast at moderately high temperature for about 30-40 minutes. Topped with parmesan, romano, or other dry shredded cheese.

Best failed attempt: an almost steak-like cut of meat, placed on top of a bed of salt, thinly sliced garlic layered lightly on top, roasted at high heat for 18 minutes. Would have been perfect, but I left it in the oven for 30 minutes. I blame the wine.

Best meal: 2 fresh sea bass buried and crusted in a bed of coarse sea salt, roasted whole for about 40 minutes. Gut cavities had been cleaned, and were stuffed with fresh rosemary branches. When done, we cracked the salt crust and carefully removed the fish to a serving platter, skin still intact.

The skin peeled effortlessly away, as did most of the bones. The flesh was delicate yet substantial, and sublimely infused with a misty rosemary and sea salt flavor.

We had some other things for dinner too, but I can't remember what they were - the sea bass eclipsed everything. Some white wine, I think.

Upon return to the US, I reflected that all I had to do was get fresh, seasonal ingredients and prepare them in ways that highlighted their natural goodness. That seems to be the essence of good French cooking.

So I went to the local West Allis farmer's market. Indeed, the produce in most instances was excellent! And for two weekends now, I've returned to that happy place of cooking recalled on the farm in France. It seems after all, that the secret was really the blend of all that mattered. The shopping, the chopping, the wine consumption, the family, disjointed conversations in between disciplining children, selected naughty humor when the children weren't watching -- taking the time to do it properly, even if it was really all just one big experiment.

Unfortunately, I'll probably revert to coffee in a paper cup and take-away food in plastic containers eaten over paperwork soon enough.

We struggle on, in hope.