Are quesadillas pass?? They seemed really trendy for a while. Remember Beijing duck with fruit salsa or pear and brie with chutney? Then they started to seem, well, just regular. Nothing exciting. After all, they’re just about the same as a grilled cheese sandwich, right? That’s just the thing. They’re so easy, quick and versatile and melted cheese is always good. They are also the perfect thing for using up leftovers, which is why I’m writing about them for the third rendition of Leftover Tuesdays being hosted by Megan at What’s Cooking?

When I started looking into recipes, I realized that I don’t make quesadillas, which are filled corn or flour tortillas folded in half and browned in a skillet. I make sincronizadas. This is when you take one tortilla, layer on your filling and then put another tortilla on top. When the bottom one is browned, you flip it over. I find that the cheese is melted more easily this way and the tortillas get browned more evenly.

You can fold one tortilla in half and call it little cheesy thing, which is how you translate the word quesadilla from Spanish, or layer two of them and call it sincronizada, meaning synchronized. I like this idea, you sandwich everything together and synchronize the browning, melting and keeping it all together. Either way, these are good when filled with a variety of things, especially leftovers. I mostly make them with just cheese and leftover vegetables, unless I have leftover chicken, pork or beef to put into them. In the last two weeks, I’ve made sincronizadas twice. We made them first with some leftover sirloin steak and some Monterey jack cheese. We topped them with scallions and on the side we had some arugula with lime juice and some leftover Mexican rice from a restaurant outing. This week, we had sincronizadas with leftover chicken and caramelized onions and red peppers with garlic and a sprinkle of cilantro. These could have been boring, but I served them both times with a crema with chipotles and lime juice to spice it up.

Sincronizadas for two people

• 4 flour tortillas
• 1 cup mild shredded cheese (queso fresco, Monterey jack, etc.)
• 1 cup chopped roasted or saut?ed vegetables (peppers, onions, garlic, spinach, mushrooms, tomatoes, etc.)
• 1/4 -1/2 cup cooked protein, chopped (shrimp, chicken, steak, pork, beans, tofu, etc.)
• Vegetable oil or cooking spray

Suggested sides

• Guacamole
• Diced tomato
• Sliced scallions
• Chopped cilantro
• Shredded iceberg lettuce
• Lime wedges
• Chipotle crema (mix 1/2 cup sour cream with 1 seeded chopped chipotle and juice of 1/2 lime)

Heat skillet over high heat with 1 teaspoon vegetable oil or a pshht of cooking spray. Put in one tortilla and spread on cheese and then filling in even layers. Turn heat to medium. Add a second tortilla to the top and press it down on top of everything. When bottom tortilla is brown, flip it over and brown the other side. Remove to a cutting board, let sit for a minute and then cut into wedges. Repeat with second set of tortillas. Serve with any or all of the suggested sides.

I had a magical birthday dinner on Friday. If you know me or have been reading this blog, you know that I’m a serious food geek and I love to cook and read about food. I’ve been following recent developments in the food world on paper, but I’ve not been to a recent of high quality in several years. I think the last time I was at a really well known restaurant, it was in Paris in 2001 at the Pr? Catalan, well before their 3 star anointment by the Michelin guide. Family friends took us there and it was good, but not mind-blowing and I didn’t really like the stuffy traditional decorating.

I’ve been reading about Blue Hill, the restaurant in Manhattan, and Blue Hill at Stone Barns for quite some time. The idea of offering a menu with as many things as possible produced on site or locally intrigued me more than anything else and for some reason I was expecting more hearty, less refined food. I also went online and was convinced that we would take the cheapest option of $64 for a three course meal. When we got there however and had a look at the menu, we saw a Farmer’s Feast for $110 with wine pairings for an additional $65, that wasn’t on the on-line version of the menu.

Once we had decided on the much more elaborate menu, I was faced with the food blogger’s dilemma. Do I spend my time here writing down every last detail so that I can give my readers a run down of absolutely everything that touches my lips, or do I enjoy myself and the experience? I decided not to write everything down, but took pictures to jog my memory. Unfortunately, it was already dark out by the time we started eating, so the light wasn’t very good for picture taking. I was impressed with the setting, the space and the very well thought out details of the d?cor. I liked the color scheme, the feeling of loftiness from the vaulted ceiling and the upscale rustic touches like wide planked floors. Erik and I both loved the very soft slate colored upholstery on the banquette where we were seated.

Our amuse bouche included a series of tiny bites including a parsnip soup shooter with a tiny cranberry marshmallow floating in the top, which gave it a slight tanginess, but wasn’t too sweet. I’d say this tangy sweet flavor combination permeated a lot of the food that followed, the soup was a good foreshadow of what was to come. We also had one slice each of dark red venison sausage, lollipops of pork crusted with sesame seed, tiny beet burgers that were a touch too sweet and baby carrots with the tops still attached. The carrots had been dipped in a salty lemon water and placed in a wooden holder that had pins sticking out of it to hold the dainty vegetables. As we were examining the block of wood, the waiter offered to let me have it, but I didn’t dare accept it, I think he was joking. With the amuse bouch we drank a Prosecco that was light and not heavily flavored and went very well with the wide variety of flavors.

When we had finished our Prosecco and little bites, the sommelier presented us with a 1994 German Riesling and the server cleared the empty dishes and replaced them with two smallish slices of a buttered toasted grain bread on a tray presented with two kinds of salt: carrot and cilantro. These were dried and powdered carrot and cilantro mixed with very finely ground salt. The cilantro one was good, the carrot one was divine. Can someone get me a dehydrator? I’m going to have to try making something like this at home (I’m thinking of replicating the carrot, but also trying tomato and something citrus).

After the toasted bread, they gave us each a large plate that had a small well in the middle. The well was filled with a panna cotta of beet, actually a sort of beet pudding with a creamy layer of panna cotta over it. This was topped with jewels of marinated white anchovy, candied pistachio and little herbs and a few droplets of what looked the oil that in which the fish had marinated. It was unctuous and offered a pleasing variety of textures. I could have eaten more of it. Even Erik, who doesn’t really like beets, ate every bite. When we had drained our Riesling, we were given a little more of it. The wine was the most perfect pairing of the evening. It brought out the flavor of the anchovy and muted the sweetness of the beet. When we told the sommelier how much we had liked the pairing, he admitted that this wine was his current crush.

While we were eating the panna cotta, a waitress brought out a long rectangular wooden tray with 7 different kinds of microgreens on it to show us what had been gathered from the greenhouse that day for a green salad. This is the part where I wished I had a pen and paper to copy down all of the names. I was especially happy to see the tiniest m?che I’ve ever seen in my life. I must say that this member of the staff as well as everyone else that evening seemed genuinely excited about their work, enthusiastic about food and absolutely not at all snobby. Unfortunately, the very plain green salad course that we had next had a mustard in the vinaigrette that did not go well with the greens. I am a mustard fanatic, though, and maybe I had just expected something different.

For the next course, we were served a Meursault, a white Burgundy made almost entirely of chardonnay grapes, though I thought that I detected some Savagnin in the mix, it had that almost sherry-like quality that you get sometimes with these wines. I tried to talk to the sommelier about it, but he didn’t know the exact grape blend, though I was flattered when he asked me if I was in “the business.” No, sir, I’m just a food and drink obsessed French professor. With this wine, we were treated to a luscious lobster course. It was simply prepared with a small amount of a creamy saffron tinged sauce topped with perfectly arranged pieces of tail and claw meat. Lobster is one of my favorite things on earth and I was quite happy.

The next wine was another Burgundy, this time red. A 2001 Hautes C?tes de Nuit, if memory serves me right, but I may be wrong, I was getting a little tipsy by this point. With this, we were served a dish of poached egg and wilted greens surrounded by a ring of lentils from Le Puy, otherwise known as du Puy lentils. These are the small French lentils that hold up better in cooking than their greener, bigger cousins. They were prepared in a thick sauce with an echo of that sweet tartness that I mentioned earlier. In the sauce, I think there was a veal demiglac? or other gelatinous meaty broth used to cook them and then a finish of a sweet vinegar, probably a balsamic, but I’m not sure, it could have been a pomegranate molasses or something of that nature. The egg was luscious and so obviously fresh with a very clear white and a bright yellow center.

The next dish to arrive was a plate of sliced veal tenderloin on a bed of baby carrots topped with greens. It was served with a Bordeaux from 2000, a very good year, but I’m not sure where it was from. At this point I was really enjoying the food and not taking my blogging duties quite as seriously. I must say that Erik and I recently enjoyed a 2000 Bordeaux from our own cellar that was under $10 when we bought it but tasted better than the one we were served. Erik is now talking about buying cases and cases of wines to store away for future consumption. I may have unleashed a monster, or a fairy godfather, time will tell.

At this point, our very efficient, polite and silly smiled waitress asked us if everything had been to our liking. Without hesitation I said that we were quite happy but sorry that we hadn’t been given a course with their famed Berkshire pork. She replied that she was sorry too, because it’s so great. “Hang on a minute,” she said and disappeared. When she came back she asked if we were willing to sip some more Bordeaux and wait a few minutes. The carafe of Bordeaux was already on our table. We agreed to wait. Within 10 minutes, she reappeared with two large glass plates, made of a pyrex looking material with high sides
and placed them before us. A second meat course! Four small slices of pork tenderloin on a bed of saut?ed red cabbage - again tangy and sweet, maybe lemon and honey this time? To the side was a small slice of pork belly, salty and smoky and fatty-licious. It was perched on top of a smear of parsnip pur?e. I am so happy that my mother taught me to pipe up and ask for what I wanted in restaurants, her advice and her example have always served me exceedingly well. Wow. I was so happy I wanted to do a little dance, but so full I couldn’t quite finish this course.

A flight of desserts then zipped by. We had a Tokai from Hungary, a sweet dessert wine with citrus and floral notes that went well with all of the desserts, especially since there was nothing with very much chocolate. We first had a citrus salad; a small chopped salad with a citrus gel?e and a creamy topping sporting a crunchy dehydrated slice of mandarine orange. We then had a chocolate drink with tapioca pearls. I love tapioca, but I think that the chocolate flavor was too mild. The main dessert was a passion fruit souffl? with a side of passion fruit ice cream. The latter was served in a tiny cast iron frying pan, which gave it a slightly metallic flavor in my opinion, but Erik didn’t notice it and called me The Princess and the Pea (a name he often slings at me). On my plate with the passion fruit combination was also a tiny madeleine-like muffin with a candle in it for my birthday. The waitress must have been listening closely, because we hadn’t make a big deal about this being a birthday outing. And I’m so happy that we were in an elegant enough place that nobody sang to me. I hate the singing.

The mignardises that followed were tiny macarons ? la bergamote and two other kinds of little cookies: one of them like a baby baba without the rum and the other a rice crispy kind of confection, but made with upscale cereal and white chocolate. I liked the macarons the best and I thought they were a good closure to the meal, bringing back the refrain of tart and sweet, and they went perfectly with the Tokai, making it feel more silky in the mouth and giving it a more caramel flavor than it had had with the passion fruit.

I had read on-line that the wait staff was pushy and snobby and that’s not the experience we had at all. The service was crisp and friendly, the water filled when appropriate. We chose the wine pairing and found that the sommelier was knowledgeable and careful and quite generous with the bottles. The only thing we found to be less than ideal were the bread and butter that were served with the meal. It was a strangely shaped parker house roll, in a floppy leafy flower cylindrical sort of form (I’m sorry I didn’t get a picture, it’s hard to describe) and salty room temperature butter, even though it was served in a little butter chiller with a tiny stainless steel dome. This wasn’t a really big problem, we had so much food, we didn’t really want bread and butter, but I might have been unhappy if we had ordered the smaller menu. On the other hand, some people might love this bread, as did the guy seated next to us who was gulping it down and talking about how great it was to his girlfriend, so I might be wrong. Or he might have been hungry. This type of roll is certainly very American, which I’m thinking is the idea. They might want to find a better recipe, though.

I’ve got a long list of places all over the world where I’d love to eat. I’m sure that some of them would be more innovative or more extreme. Here, close to home, I found exactly what I was looking for. A singular, memorable experience of delicious, largely local food prepared and served in a careful manner. I’m glad we put ourselves in the chef’s hands.

Today is my birthday. I’m forty years old. So there’s this idea that I’m supposed to be reflecting on my life so far and on getting older and close to death and all that rubbish and I just don’t get it. I don’t feel much like I’m a different person than I was at 14. I certainly don’t feel like life is over or anything. I don’t feel like Keith Griffith, though I do like his poem, “Turning Forty.” I’m thinking this one is more like it. Or maybe denial isn’t just a river in Africa after all.

At the last decade milestone, when I turned thirty, I baked myself a white cake with raspberry filling and lemon buttercream frosting and I threw myself a party. He gave me rollerblades. I hadn’t asked for them. That was the last year with that guy. Erik and I usually have our birthday dinners at home, sometimes a big party, sometimes a smaller one. Erik says to me every year, “You weren’t so old when I married you.” When it came time to start planning this year, what is supposed to be a big one, we decided to go out. I’ve had a few restaurants on my list and I decided that Blue Hill at Stone Barns was the place for this day. I’ll give you an update on our dinner within a couple of days.

Are you wondering about the photo? That’s my birthday present. I am pleased.

For the second installment of our celebration of the year of the pig, we looked in our freezer and found a huge pork roast. Not a fancy schmancy heritage roast, but a good quality grocery store center cut pork loin with a decent bit of fat left on the top. The package claimed that the contents were hormone and additive free. I bought it because it was a decent price, the meat was a pretty dark pink rather than ghostly pale and because it had a thin, even layer of fat on top. I’ll cut the fat off my piece as I eat it, but I want it there to protect the meat as I cook it.

People talk a lot about how good pork used to be because it used to have fat. When I hear those grumblings, my head swings around, “wah?” What I remember from pork chops when I was a kid are somehow always the dry, thin, hockey pucks bathed in gravy from a can that my father’s mother made. They did have a band of fat on them, but it tasted like rubber from having been boiled in the gravy. No wonder one of my father’s favorite foods has always been bread with gravy poured on top. That was the best part. The chop was something that you just had to somehow choke down to fill your belly. I know my mother made something similar that wasn’t quite so bad, but somehow when I think back, it’s always to grandma’s version, the worst version possible of that recipe. She also made pork roast that was equally dry and overcooked. Except there was no gravy.

Most people are aware by now that the fat has been bred out of the major brands of pork to compete with the leanness of chicken. The study on pork nutrient data has been out for almost a year. The effort to produce leaner pork has been so successful, trimmed roasted pork tenderloin loin now measures slightly lower in fat than skinless chicken breast. The USDA has posted the results of the study on pork here, but they don’t do an actual comparison with chicken. There is a good comparison summary here.

Discussion of environmental impact aside, the problem is not health; it’s taste. Cooking a roast from such lean meat can lead to dried out chewy leather instead of the succulent, juicy pork of our dreams. Whenever I’m in France, I beg my friends to let me make a pork roast for dinner because the flavor is so much more piggy than pork here and there’s somehow more caramelization even though I don’t brown it first. This is not easy to swing, though, because French people are notorious for not letting people into their kitchens. Kitchens in France have doors on them and those doors are usually closed to guests. If you rent an apartment with an open floor plan, they say it has a “cuisine am?ricaine,” an American kitchen. The last time I was able to convince a French woman to let me cook a pork roast in her house, it was when we were in Banyuls-sur-mer three years ago visiting my friend Mercedes’ sister, Marie. Marie is not your typical Frenchwoman. She’s a doctor, she tells dirty jokes and she doesn’t cook. So she let me make a pork roast in her beautiful kitchen. The only problem was that the only sharp instrument in the house was a scalpel blade (without the handle). I stuck the blade into the end of a carrot and made do.

You can make a terrific pork roast using good quality grocery store variety pork. Of course, if you can lay your hands on some heritage pork, you’ll get something even better. If you can’t find any good quality pork near you and you’re willing to order meat over the internet, try Niman Ranch. The important thing is to follow one unusual step. I’ve seen it done in Cook’s Illustrated from 1995 and in a recipe from Chez Panisse. The trick is to start your roast at a high temperature, cook it for a certain period of time and then take it out, give it a rest on the counter and finally put it back in the oven with much lower heat until it has reached the desired temperature. The rest after a short period of high heat causes the meat to cook through induction very slowly and more of the moisture is retained. This makes the most flavorful, tender pork roast I’ve had this side of the Atlantic. One year for my birthday, Erik invited over tons of friends and bought the largest pork roast I’ve ever seen (at Costco, where else?). It had to go into our oven diagonally on a size huge baking sheet bought just for the occasion, it doesn’t even fit in the dishwasher. He followed this recipe with no problems. I only helped a little with the tying, which is an easily acquired skill that I wouldn’t recommend trying to learn just before having a big dinner party for your wife’s birthday. I’m not a big fan of making slits in my meat and stuffing garlic slivers and/or other herbs in the holes. I always feel that the garlic just sort of steams in there and doesn’t get cooked enough, so I usually make a paste to rub the pork with a day ahead of time. If you like the garlic this way, feel free to make those slits and shove ‘em full of the spice and garlic rub or just with slivers of garlic or whatever. You can also use all sorts of spice and herb combinations, the essential thing here is the roasting method. Even when brought to a final temperature of 160 degrees, the pork should still be a little pink. Even the USDA says this is safe.

Pork roast

• 2 T fresh rosemary, finely chopped
• 4 cloves of garlic, peeled, smashed and finely chopped
• 2 t good quality salt (kosher or fleur de sel)
• 1 t freshly ground black pepper
• 1 center-cut pork roast, 3-6 pounds
• 2 T olive oil
• Butchers twine
• Aluminum foil
• Meat thermometer

Mound first four ingredients together in the middle of a cutting board. Use the back of the blade of a large knife to make a paste. Add a little olive oil if the garlic isn’t wet enough. Place the pork roast in the middle of a piece of aluminum foil large enough to completely wrap the roast. Rub the paste all over the roast. Tie the roast with butcher’s twine (use the instructions here, don’t let it scare you, it’s easier than learning how to tie your shoes). Pour olive oil over the roast and rub it in to the paste, reapplying any paste mix that has fallen off during tying. Wrap the roast tightly with the aluminum foil and refrigerate for at least two hours or overnight.

Preheat oven to 475 degrees. Place roast in a pan on a rack (if you lack the proper equipment, just put it on a baking sheet, if will be fine). Place roast in oven and cook for 30 minutes. Remove roast from oven. Let roast rest for 30 minutes. Reduce heat to 325 degrees. If you’re going to cook some potatoes or vegetables in the oven to serve with the roast, now would be the time to put them in. After the 30 minute rest, insert the meat thermometer and put the roast back in the oven (if you don’t have a fancy digital meat thermometer, you can take it’s temperature from time to time with the simple instant read kind or just take a chance). Once the roast comes up to 145-150 degrees, you can take it out of the oven and let it sit for about 20 minutes before slicing (the juices won’t run out so much that way). The final temperature will be somewhere around 160, which is what the USDA recommends. We like it best at around 155, but you can take your own chances. This can take anywhere from 30-60 minutes, depending on the size of your roast, I estimate it’s about 10 minutes per pound. After the 20 minute rest, slice the roast and serve. You can put the roasting pan or baking sheet on the stove top, deglaze the pan a little with water and pour these juices along with any on the cutting board over the top of the roast, or if there’s a lot of juice, serve it on the side in a gravy boat. Leftovers make great sandwiches.

I am a girl who loves a great deal. One year when I was in college, my mom told me that their budget for us for Christmas was $200 dollars each (my parents have always been too generous). My sister-in-law asked for a coat. I still remember it. It was a beautiful 3/4 length gray wool coat. I asked for a trip to TJ Maxx. I got 3 sweaters, two skirts, two shirts, some pants, a belt, 5 pairs of tights and some underwear. I don’t think my sister-in-law was very happy on Christmas morning after opening her one box and watching me open a dozen of them. I still have two of the sweaters and that was 20 years ago. My walnut Danish modern dining room set with two leaves and six chairs only cost me $300; a great graduate school find at the Kiwanis sale in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Three years ago, Erik and I bought a car on e-bay. That’s right. A car. From e-bay. My mother is a great bargainer and I learned from her example. When I go with Erik to garage sales, he gives me all the cash and makes me talk to the people. I, of course, put my cash in different increments in different places, so that if I want to pay $10 dollars, I reach into my left pocket, pull out a neatly folded Hamilton and say, “Will you take ten bucks? That’s all I’ve got.” You get the picture.

Normally, I limit my use of vanilla beans to recipes that really beg for the visual specks that come from using them, or recipes that only use vanilla as a flavoring, like for vanilla ice cream. When I do use vanilla beans, I always save the pods after having scraped them clean. I even fish them out of the custard or pudding, rinse them off, dry them and save them. For what? For vanilla sugar. What they call in French sucre vanill?. In France you can buy pre-made vanilla sugar in little paper packets or little bottles. I’ve sometimes seen it in the U.S., but it’s not cheap here. So I put my used up, cast off vanilla bean pods in a jar filled with sugar and use it to give a boost to recipes that call for both sugar and vanilla extract. I’ll also use it when making hot chocolate or when serving a fancy tea.

About 5 months ago, I read about a great source for cheap vanilla beans at one of my favorite food blogs. You can buy vanilla beans for 1 euro a piece, that’s about $1.30 in American dollars, from a website run out of Mayotte, an overseas territory of France. Vanilla is a major agricultural product of this island, part of the Comoro archipelago off the southeastern African coast near Madagascar. I got so excited about the deal on vanilla that I ordered some right away and soon I was the proud owner of 2 packages of vanilla beans with 10 beans in each package. An embarrassment of riches for a person like me, because like I said, I love a bargain. I also love to cook with the finest quality ingredients and these two pursuits don’t always go together.

I’m sure you’re asking yourself, o.k., where’s the catch? Because if I’m writing about this, there must be a catch, right? Well I’m not sure, but I recently read a post from another favorite food blogger about unfair labor practices from some of these cheap vanilla sources. On this blog is a link to the site of Patricia Rain, the woman they call the Vanilla Queen. At www.vanilla.com, the beans are twice as much money, but are touted as “pure, natural, environmentally safe and cruelty-free!” Is this a dilemma? Am I supposed to worry about where my vanilla comes from? Where does the vanilla come from in the expensive little brown bottles of vanilla extract at the grocery store? Is there such a thing as cruelty to vanilla beans? Erik suggested to me that I’m having this reaction because of my culturally Catholic upbringing. The Catholic Guilt issue is there, he’s right. But this is something else. Global warming, the promotion of democracy and paying attention to food sources are all starting to feel like intricate pieces in the puzzle of post-modern American life that are increasingly difficult to navigate (nice mixed metaphor, eh? Let’s sail across the puzzle of life together my friend). I’m left with bourgeois angst over how to spend my blameworthy blood stained American greenbacks. And I eat meat. At least my car gets almost 50 miles to the gallon (such a good deal). But Volkswagens sold in the U.S. are assembled using cheap labor in Mexico. As you can see, I’m driving myself crazy. I can imagine my sociology colleague’s repartee, “Yes, but you have the leisure to be going insane, while those people harvesting vanilla on the other hand…”

While I’ve been anxiety ridden over the vanilla question, others have been blithely blogging about their vanilla successes and gushing vanilla love. Deb at Smitten Kitchen did an entry on vanilla with a recipe for vanilla bean pound cake with gorgeous photos. It seems that like me she’s afflicted with what my mother always called the champagne taste with a beer pocket book syndrome. Matt over at MattBites uses vanilla in a savory treatment, with vanilla brined pork chops (sorry he doesn’t have permalinks, you’ll have to go to his site and search for the recipe, but poking around there will be worth your while, I assure you). Sara Moulton did a whole show on vanilla with several great looking recipes I’m going to try soon. She even mentioned Patricia Rain.

Finally, at one of my favorite new blogs, cookthink, I found what might be a solution to my conundrum. It appears that at Hartley’s Herbs you can buy a bottle with some vanilla beans in it. You open the bottle, take out the beans, slice them lengthwise, put them back in the bottle and fill it with alcohol (rum, whiskey, cognac, vodka, etc.), let it steep for a couple of months and you have Perpetual Vanilla Extract. Every time you use some, you top off the bottle. The claim is that you can keep your bottle of vanilla going forever this way, just add more alcohol as you go along and occasionally throw in some new vanilla beans.

You can order your Perpetual Vanilla from Hartley’s or just do like I’ve done. Slice vanilla beans lengthwise, put them in a bottle, fill the bottle with alcohol, cork it and let it sit until the contents turns into vanilla extract. I slit the beans without cutting through the tips so that they would hold their shape and I used rum. You don’t need a recipe for this, right? Now I’ll have vanilla extract whenever I want it at a bargain price. With the money I’ve saved, I can buy politically correct vanilla beans. Or shoes. I made three bottles, so I can give two of them away to friends. I may be cheap, but I’m not stingy.

For Saint Patrick’s Day Green or Irish

My husband teases me about being a Mick. He tells people that’s why I like potatoes so much. And whiskey (with an ‘e’ thank you very much). He also says that’s why I sometimes stretch the truth a little bit, which is absolutely not true. Not like some people in my family. I’m really only part Irish (I’ll leave it to you to guess which part), but my family always celebrates St. Patrick’s Day in a big way.

When I was growing up, my mom would dress me in green for St. Patrick’s Day. I’d also wear a white and green pin with a four leaf clover on it that said “Kiss me I’m Irish.” Was I really such a big dork? On March 17th, my mother would usually make corned beef and cabbage for dinner. She’d make a cake with green frosting until I got old enough to make cake. Then I’d make a cake with green frosting. It was the same as our regular cake recipe, but with green dye added to the butter cream. I found out recently that when my mother was growing up, the oldest daughter living at home with her family had to make two sheet cakes every day for their dinner. One yellow cake with vanilla butter cream frosting and one chocolate cake with a coconut brown sugar topping. My mom said she was happy when she got to be the oldest girl at home, because making cake was more fun than the other jobs like peeling 10 lbs of potatoes. My grandparents had 13 children (that lived!), there were also two cousins and some other random people so there were always about 20 people at their house for dinner, so they needed two big cakes and a whole sack of potatoes. You see how Irish I am? Luckily, my parents were not so prolific; there are only four of us. So, on Saint Patrick’s Day, our mother even dyed our milk green, no joke. One time she even dyed the mashed potatoes green, but that only happened once, we must not have taken too well to green mashed potatoes.

I thought about making corned beef from scratch this year, but then I would have had to invite people over to eat it with us. Everyone we know is just too busy right now for that. Besides, we have this running joke about giving up buying meat for lent. We started it right after Mardi Gras when we realized how many things we had in our freezer. We’ve already gone through a pork roast, 2 pork tenderloins, some chicken breast, a sirloin steak, a meatloaf, some meatballs, a package of calamari, 8 sweet Italian sausages. We’ve still got a whole chicken, 2 more pork tenderloins, enough boeuf bourguignon for 4 people, and at least 12 individually packaged servings of leftovers from various meals, those are for our lunches during the week. There are also frozen raspberries, strawberries and blueberries, some green beans, peas and chopped onion, a couple of quarts of fish stock, chicken stock and some soups of various colors. Oh, and we have our house for sale and all that stuff needs to get eaten because we’re not going to move it. And it’s about to be spring and we won’t want to roast a chicken or eat boeuf bourgignon once it gets warm outside. We also just had the mother of all snowstorms, so there’s no way we’re going to the grocery store. Out of all the possibilities, I settled on lamb shanks. Not Irish enough for you? I’ve added some Guinness to up the Irish quotient. And we’re having it with mashed potatoes. I’ll just sprinkle them with parsley for the green bit and leave the dye for the frosting on the cake.

Lamb shanks with Guinness

• 4 lamb shanks, about 2-2 1/2 lbs. total
• 2 T olive oil
• 1 can Guinness draught beer
• 4 carrots
• 1 large onion chopped, or 1 cup pearl onions, peeled
• 4 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped
• 3 T flour
• 1 cup beef broth, chicken broth or water, warmed
• 24-26 oz. stewed tomatoes (make sure that the only ingredient listed on the can or box is tomatoes, we like Pom?)
• 1 bouquet garni - 3 stems parsley, several stems fresh thyme, 1 bay leaf, tied with string
• Salt and pepper to taste
• 3 T chopped parsley

Sprinkle lamb shanks with salt and pepper. Place oil in Dutch oven over high heat. Add lamb shanks. Let them get brown and unstuck from the pan before turning to brown them on another side. When they are brown all over, remove them to a bowl. Turn heat down to medium and add onions. Cook onions stirring frequently for about 4-6 minutes. If using pearl onions, let them get some brown spots in a couple of places. Add garlic and carrots and cook for another couple of minutes. Lower heat to medium low. Add flour and stir to coat everything. Cook for about 4 minutes until flour has turned slightly golden in color. Slowly add broth or water, stirring with a whisk to make sure no lumps form, warming the broth or water beforehand will also help with this. Add reserved lamb shanks and any juices that are in the bowl along with Guinness, tomatoes and bouquet garni. Add about 1 teaspoon salt and more pepper. Turn heat to high and bring liquid just to a boil. Turn heat to a very low simmer, place the lid on the pot and cook for about 3 hours, stirring occasionally, until lamb shanks are tender. If the liquid isn’t thick enough at this point, you can fish out the lamb shanks and boil it down a little and then add the lamb back to the pot to reheat a bit. You can serve this with mashed potatoes, polenta, pasta, rice or just with some good bread. Garnish individual servings with chopped parsley. I always try to make this a day ahead of time because it really is better the next day, and I can also remove any fat from the top of the sauce before reheating it.

Serves 4.

Some people believe that King James I, or possibly Henry VIII or even Charles II, depending on who is telling the story, was so taken with a loin of beef that he knighted it and the sirloin was born. This is just one more instance of folk etymology. The story probably comes from the fact that these kings were mocked for selling titles to their friends. It even shows up in Bugs Bunny more than once. The sirloin actually gets its name from an older French term, sur loynge, meaning above the loin, which is where the sirloin comes from, though this cut of beef in French is now called the aloyau.

Tonight we needed to get dinner on the table fast. And it had to be steak.

Sirloin steak on arugula with balsamic vinaigrette

Takes approximately 10 minutes start to finish

• 1 package baby arugula
• 2 T olive oil
• 2 garlic cloves, smashed and chopped
• 1 lb sirloin (1 inch thick)
• 2 T good quality balsamic vinegar (the syrupy very dark kind)
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
• 1 plum tomato, seeded and diced

Place arugula on a large platter. Heat olive oil over high heat. Sprinkle steak with salt and pepper. Add meat to skillet and cook about 3 minutes on each side (you want this medium rare). Remove steak from skillet and allow to rest. Lower the heat to medium, add garlic and cook until fragrant, about one minute. Add balsamic vinegar to skillet and bring to a boil. Pour liquid over steak and garnish with chopped tomato. Add more salt and pepper if desired.

I am answering a call to arms. My virtual friend, Mimi, suffered a put down from a food snob and has asked that we show our solidarity by cooking something with Bisquick. I’ve got nothing against Bisquick. I remember my mother using Bisquick for biscuits, and pancakes and strawberry shortcake, for sure. She may have used it in other things. I went to my friend Heather’s house not too long ago and she was worried that her Bisquick dumplings weren’t elegant enough food for us. Pshaw. Heather is an awesome cook. She made us something that was a nostalgia food for her: a stew made with browned hamburger, a can of vegetable soup and some sour cream, topped with Bisquick biscuit dumplings. She called it hamburger stroganoff. Erik made some jokes about the name, something about stroke, but we both agreed the stew was great. And we ate seconds. Erik probably had thirds. It didn’t hurt that she used high quality beef and I think the soup was organic, but it was the dumplings that made it such a success. I hope she makes it for us again.

Remember in the 80s, when real men didn’t eat quiche? I’m glad that my father didn’t have issues with his masculinity, because I’ve always really liked it. My mother had this recipe for a no crust quiche that we ate fairly often. You just zip all of the ingredients together in a blender and pour the liquid over your filling. As you’ll see below, the directions are three sentences long. That’s it. Easier than pie. I don’t know if my mother likes this recipe more for how easy it is or for how clever it is. In any case, our mothers should not be derided for their use of easy recipes and semi-homemade food, I don’t care how much you want to diss Sandra Lee. Our mothers were working goddammit.

The quiche I’ve made has spinach and caramelized onions and garlic and I didn’t have any meat or fish to add in, so I skipped that part of the recipe. And I reduced the amount of butter (sorry mother, I couldn’t do 6 tablespoons). And I couldn’t find Bisquick at the little store we go to on the way home from work tonight, so I called Heather. She still had some of her off brand of Bisquick, “Morning Gold Baking Mix All Purpose,” which sounds a little like engrish to me. She bought it at Aldi — we go there too, for the coffee especially. This stuff is even less snobby than Bisquick. We were going to eat it with a piss-elegant “simple green salad” but the lettuce was bad and I had already made the vinaigrette, so we chopped up a variety of vegetables instead, shallots, radishes, carrots, tomatoes, scallions, red pepper, most everything we had in the crisper bin of the refrigerator. There are endless possible variations for quiche. Now that I have revived the recipe, I’m going to clean some things out the rest of my fridge and cupboards to get ready for spring and put them into this quiche. I’m thinking roasted red pepper and goat cheese, ham and asparagus and saut?ed shallots and mushrooms. Maybe some leeks in there somewhere, unless you all think that’s too snooty.

All in one quiche

• 1/2 cup half and half
• 3 T butter, room temperature
• 3 eggs
• 1/2 cup Bisquick mix
• Pinch of salt
• 1 cup diced meat or fish
• 1 cup vegetables, chopped
• 1 cup grated cheese

Combine first five ingredients into blender. Put remaining ingredients in buttered pie plate and pour liquid over all. Bake 45 minutes at 350 or until golden brown.

I don’t know how to tell you about this recipe because it’s so astonishing. Sort of like free money, high-temperature superconductors or perpetual motion, fat free potato chips sound like some sort of scam or pie in the sky. I tried the fat free variety of chips made with olestra that were so popular when they were first introduced. Maybe you did, too. I don’t know how you feel about them, but they didn’t really agree with me. At least I didn’t overdo it like this guy. I hope you didn’t either.

I’m not a potato chip addict, even though I love potatoes. You would never find me creating a whole blog about chips, which I wouldn’t do anyway because someone already has one; it’s called the chippie. I must be spending too much time reading other people’s food blogs, because I keep finding all sorts of posts that make me run to the kitchen and try new recipes. I was fearing that I’d be like Jennifer the Domestic Goddess or Mimi of French Kitchen in America and you’d soon be reading about my new diet. Those fears have been squelched though now that I found a recipe for fat free potato chips made in the microwave.

You know that I love you, dear mother, because as soon as we finished eating the first batch, I called you first to tell you about them. I don’t think you believed me, though, because you obviously haven’t made them yet. If you had, you would have called me back to rave about them. I also called my best friend, my sister, my younger brother and told everyone at work who wanted to listen. This is easy, it works and you have crispy chips with no fat in about 10 minutes.

I want to make sure I give proper attribution, so I’ll tell you that I first read about this recipe at Slashfood. As far as I know, the original is Uncle Bill’s Microwave Potato Chips. If you want to make these yourself, you could run out right now and buy a
micro chip maker at the As Seen on TV store or get one on-line. The Japanese version comes with a mini slicer, but I can’t seem to find a place to buy one on-line. Or you can just do like I do, and use parchment paper. The only thing is, this leads to flat chips, and more than any other kind of chip, I love the ones that are folded. I’m going to work on it, maybe by folding some of my potato slices in half? In any case, I can’t keep this one to myself any longer, so I’ll fiddle with the recipe and you can, too.

Fat free microwave potato chips

• 2 potatoes (Russet or Yukon gold), scrubbed and dried but not peeled
• Salt to taste
• Parchment paper
• Optional flavorings: paprika, Cajun spices, garlic powder, black pepper, use your imagination

Cut the potatoes into slices about 1/16 of an inch thick using a mandoline, a food processor or a sharp knife. Line a microwave oven with parchment paper and place potato slices evenly over the paper. Top the slices with another layer of parchment paper. Microwave on high for about 6 minutes. Check on them after about 5 minutes. If they aren’t done, keep on cooking them and check on them at 30 second intervals. Be very careful, because they can burn very quickly and stink up your house, don’t ask me how I know this.

Repeat with remaining potato slices using the same pieces of parchment paper. I’m sure you could also rig up something so that you could stack them several layers high and cook the chips all at one time, but like I said, I’ve not worked out the details yet. These were so startlingly good, I had to get the recipe posted right away.

Erik gobbled these up, but said he missed the fat. If you miss the taste of the fat like he did, you can spray them with a little cooking spray and not add many calories. I did try this, and they were great, but I think I’ll keep on cooking them without the fat.

As we unwrap the layers, first the aluminum foil, then the banana leaf, a rich, savory scent fills the air. I’ve been working all afternoon with my friend, Luz, preparing tamales as they are made in Guatemala, where she is from. We have had a great afternoon cooking, talking, sipping wine as we slice, dice, mix, stir, taste and assemble everything before friends and family sit down together to eat a luscious meal. All afternoon, I am struck over and over by the smells. First the corn dough that we stir and stir for forty five minutes, until the wooden spoon sticks straight up out of the pot. Then the sauce, made with tomatoes, onions, garlic, peppers and pumpkin and sesame seeds; the steam fills the air with a spicy, nutty perfume as we pur?e it in batches in the blender. For me, the banana leaves are the biggest surprise. I hadn’t thought they would have a smell, but they have a pungent, grassy bouquet that intensifies as the tamales steam in the big pot on the stovetop. It is obvious when they are done, because the banana leaf smell mellows and the corn, tomato and peppers make themselves more noticeable.

A couple of weeks ago, I showed my blog to Luz after a discussion about food. When I used to talk about food with people, I used to just say that I like to spend time in the kitchen. But it’s kind of like telling somebody something in another language, they usually just stare. If you’re like me, you know that stare, that moment when you realize that other people don’t understand, that you are speaking a different language, foodeese. Now when I tell people about my food obsession, I have something to point to, the blog. So, I was in her office and I just pulled it up and told her to check it out, as a sort of proof of my alien status. The next day, she came into my office and asked if I wanted to learn how to make tamales. I sat up like a dog and begged. She hadn’t realized that I had been wanting to do this, seriously, for about 15 years. I’ve read about them, copied recipes, bought books, thought about it, talked about it, tasted them, blah, blah, blah, words, words, words… (I see you don’t really speak foodeese, do you). So, we made plans and I went to her house and I learned a new trick.

Most people think of tamales as a particularly Mexican dish. They originate in the pre-Columbian era (before Columbus) probably in what is now Mexico between 5000 and 7000 years ago. But tamales are made all over Central America in a variety of ways and sometimes are known by different names. Part of their spread happened before colonial times, and part of it happened because of colonial occupation. In Chile, Ecuador and some parts of Bolivia, they know them as humitas, in Venezuela they are called hallacas. In Per? and other parts of Bolivia they are pasteles de choclo, though in some parts of Bolivia and in Chile the pastel de choclo is a corn and meat casserole. In Argentina, Belize, Colombia, Guatemala, Mexico and the United States, they are usually called tamales. In some parts of these countries, these words are used to describe two different ways of preparing them. I’m sure that if you’ve spent extensive amounts of time in one of these places, you’d know the finer points of vocabulary, ingredients and method from that area. If you’re from one of these places, you are probably convinced that there is only one, true version, probably your grandmother’s. Ultimately, we’re talking about a corn husk, banana leaf or some other large leaf that is used to enclose a corn meal dough that may or may not have things mixed into it or placed inside of it before it is bound up and steamed, boiled, baked or grilled to form a complete meal. The word tamal (the singular of tamales) is of nahuatl origin and means wrapped. Now who in their right mind would say that Spanish is easier to learn than French? That’s one stereotype that should be put to rest.

The most important thing about tamales in general is the main ingredient: maize, also known as corn. This cereal originated in Mesoamerica and spread throughout the American continents and was quickly brought to the rest of the world after European contact in the late fifteenth and earlier sixteenth centuries. In Europe today, corn is thought of as a food for animals and poor people. This is because when Europeans brought corn back with them, they overlooked the processing that corn was put through in the Americas that made it more nutritious. This process is called nixtamalization and involves cooking the corn with an alkaline substance, usually lime, or lye or sodium carbonate from ashes. This process makes the maize more nutritious, allowing up to 750% more absorption of the available calcium, for instance, as well as providing smaller amounts of other important minerals and vitamins such as iron, copper, zinc, niacin. It also reduces the amounts of some carcinogens present in the corn. The process of soaking helps remove the pericarp, the hard part of the corn kernel, after which the resulting product is dried and ground. In the southern United States, this is known as hominy or grits. Other than removing the pericarp and making the maize more nutritious, nixtamalization improves flavor and makes it easier to digest. The first instances of nixtamalization have found to have occurred in Guatemala around -1200 to -1500 BCE. This process was commonly practiced by the ancient Mayans and Aztecs, but apparently not by the Aztecs, but they used a wider variety of crops and their cuisine did not rely so heavily on corn.

As Luz cooked, I helped her and took lots of notes. The recipe below is her version of tamales. Where she is from, they use a mix of masa and rice flour. She also uses chicken breast or boneless chicken thigh, though it is customary to use chicken (or pork or beef) cooked on the bone that is cooled and shredded before being put in the tamales. Luz doesn’t like to use lard, so she uses vegetable oil and that’s easier to find in the U.S. and healthier anyway, so I’m sure no one will complain about that deviation. The other ingredients she used for the filling: red sauce, olives, capers and red pepper are traditional, but there are many options. I’m sure that if you learned how to make them somewhere else, you have another way of making them. Here is a video of some Guatemalan women and a young girl making them to help you see the assembly process. Luz uses a banana leaf to wrap her tamales, and then adds a sheet of aluminum foil to protect them from the water, but as you can see in the video, you can wrap them in two banana leaves and tie them with string if you have a steamer. Here’s a picture of cooked, unwrapped Guatemalan tamales; as you can see, the one in the lower left looks like ours. If you’d like to branch out and make other kinds of tamales, the best books on the subject are Alice Guadalupe Tapp’s Tamales 101 and Mexico One Plate at a Time by Rick Bayless. There’s also the tamale trail, a website with great recipes, oral history and other information documenting the tamale tradition of the Missipi Delta region of the United States.

As I finish my second tamal and drain my glass of wine, I see why this is food made during the holidays in Central and South America. Two women spend the day cooking a feast. It’s time consuming, but it’s not really work. We talk, giggle, share stories and learn from each other. As we sit down to eat with people who are important to us, we share our day’s work and our laughter. After the meal, we are all sleepy and content.

Tamales Colorados Guatemaltecos

Guatemala-Style Red Tamales

For sauce

• 1/2 cup pumpkin seeds
• 1/2 cup sesame seeds
• 4 ancho chiles
• 4 guajillo chiles
• 1 lb. tomatoes
• 1 onion
• 2 cloves garlic
• 2 cups chicken broth or water
• salt to taste

Remove stems and seeds from chiles and place seeds and chiles in a dry skillet over medium low heat and toast, stirring occasionally, until fragrant and lightly browned, about 10 minutes. Meanwhile, place tomatoes, onion, garlic on a pot with broth or water over high heat until it comes to a boil. Turn down heat and simmer until tomatoes are completely soft and beginning to break down. Turn off the heat and put the seeds and chiles into the pot. Let mixture cool slightly and then pur?e in batches in a blender, or use an immersion blender, until sauce is completely smooth. Add salt to taste. This step can be done one or two days ahead.

For dough

• 4 cups Instant Corn Masa Mix
• 2 cups Goya brand rice flour
• 6-8 cups water
• 1-2 cups corn oil
• salt to taste

Put the corn flour and the rice flour into a large pot. Slowly add in the water and then the oil, stirring vigorously with a wooden spoon to avoid forming lumps. The mixture should be quite liquid, like a loose pancake batter. Put the pot on the stove over medium low heat and cook stirring nearly constantly until the wooden spoon can stand upright on its own in the dough. Add salt to taste. Turn off heat and let dough cool to room temperature. This step can be done one day ahead.

For filling

• 1 lb. boneless chicken (breast or thigh meat), cut into pieces
• 1 red pepper, seed and sliced
• 1/2 cup capers
• 24 large green Spanish olives (not stuffed), sliced in half

For assembly and cooking

1 package Goya brand banana leaves, defrosted, cut into 14″ x 12″ pieces,
24 pieces aluminum foil, approximately 14″ x 16″

Place one banana leaf on top of one piece of aluminum foil.

Place 1/2 cup dough in the middle of the banana leaf.

Place 1/4 cup sauce on top of the dough using a teaspoon and mix the sauce a little into the dough.

Place one piece of chicken in the middle of the sauce.

Place two olive halves on top of the sauce

Sprinkle on a few capers.

Top with a piece of red pepper and douse with another spoonful of sauce.

Gather together the top and bottom of the banana leaf, roll them together, pull in the left and right ends and flip the whole thing over to form a closed package.

Repeat these steps with the aluminum foil (but don’t flip it over).

Repeat until you have 24 packages. Place a large pot on the stove and add one inch of hot water. Place all of the tamal packages into the water standing upright. Cover with any leftover banana leaves and put on the lid. Turn heat to high until the water comes to a boil. Turn down and simmer until tamales are ready, about one hour. Add water if necessary to make sure they don’t burn the bottom of your pot. Use your nose to know when they are done.

When they are done, remove tamales from the pot. Unwrap and discard the aluminum foil and serve each tamal on a plate on its opened banana leaf. The tamales can be frozen and reheated either by steaming or in the microwave. Any ingredients leftover from assembly (dough, fillings, meat, sauce) can be stirred together, simmered for about a half hour and served over rice.