Please don't laugh...

But vowels seem to be difficult for my Israeli. And I'm pretty sure that he is not being crass when he ends our nightly phone call with "Good night, Boobie."

Pizza Party Part II

We had a lot more pizza eaters than bakers for PPPII. Cherry came at the appointed 10AM hour and we whipped up three batches of dough (18 pizzas). The kitchen wasn't pretty:

But the little dough balls were:

Our three batches were: 00 pizza flour imported from Italy, a mix of AP flour and farro flour, and whole wheat mixed with bread flour. We discovered that the 00 flour (what is used for pizza and pasta in Italy) really DID make a difference all the way from making the kneading of the wet dough easier to rolling out easier, to tasting better once it was cooked.

We left our dough to rise and set off to the farmers market. Our biggest score was delicious and cheap tomatoes. FINALLY, tomatoes that actually smell like the ones on the vine in the garden when you are a kid. And it made a huge difference in the sauce...the most delicious I've had in a long long time. At the market we also found early apricots and white peaches for a tart. After that we headed off to Sorrento's. It is an Italian market straight out of the 50's, meatball sandwiches, prepared salads and all. We got prosciutto and brasaola and buffalo mozzerella and ricotta and Parmegiano...and they advertised "sweet European Butter" but were all out when we asked. We sat down for a quick nibble on a ricotta cheese canolo before heading home.

Just plugra, but still beautiful. Use about this much for a large galette.


We mixed the apricots and peaches together and let them sit in a bowl with sugar, lemon verbena and mint. We took the herbs out before we baked the tart, but they made a delicious syrup which I later burned. (Pizza cooks at 550, not tarts).



For appetizers we had brasaola with wild arugula and mustard greens dressed with lemon juice and olive oil.

Though we made artichoke and goat cheese pizza, prosciuto and arugula pizza, egg and anciove pizza, potato and rosemary pizza, and ricotta and spinach pizza, the margherita was the best. As always:


See, I really did burn it. Once it was off the burnt pan and covered in lots of cream, it was actually fairly tasty.

Luckly Oleg turned the camera around at some point. As our resident photographer no one might ever know he was here. Or that he had a pizza named after him (prosciutto, spinach, bechemel, and potatoes) aka the tv dinner pizza.

Wok, bread, and cherry tarts

I've missed posting a few things, so I'll have to catch you up. Last week, I assisted a cooking class for a teacher at the New School of Cooking who I've never worked with before. It turned out to be great. He was teaching a class on how to use a wok. I've never really cooked with a wok before and I learned a lot.

First, everything should be cut to a similar size so it cooks in a similar amount of time. This even includes not chopping the garlic up into microscopic peices (cus they'll burn).

Second, there is a specific order in which you add ingredients.

Fat (high burning...like peanut oil or lard)
Aromatics (garlic, onions, lemongrass, etc)
Protein (meat, fish, or tofu)
Vegetables
flavorings (soy sauce, fish sauce, sesame oil...)

The teacher also happens to belong to the family that owns the Bangkok Market, so part of the class was that everyone got to take home a wok. He had one left over for me. I didn't have any Asian ingredients at home (must fix this seeing as I live in Korea town) so I decided to try the method with my own ingredients.

I couldn't decide if pancetta was a "fat" or the "protein" or the "flavoring." I finally put it in as fat.

You should heat the wok until it is smoking, but only white smoke. As Jet said, "Black smoke means start over."



Next I added some aromatics (leeks), and then my vegatable (since my protein and fat were one in the same). These are sugar snap peas cut diagonally as we learned in the class.

Last, I put in my flavoring...uh, salt and pepper.

I ate this mixture on top of a bowl of farro. It was delicious. But you really can't go wrong with pancetta.


Later in the week, I had some left over pizza dough that needed either to be frozen or cooked. Since I was too lazy to wrap the little balls for the freezer, I combined them all into one and made focaccia. It really was amazing. The outside was super crusty, the inside super chewy.

And check out those air bubbles!

Last night I decided my cherries were getting a bit sad for eating fresh and I baked them in tarts. I was imagining a corn-meal sort of crust so I added some semolina to my flour when I made the crust. I don't recommend it. I think for the grany cornmeal crust you need more of a short-bread style crust, which you need a mold for. I had to add too much water to hold the dough together, so it came out a bit cracker-like. However, make these with my recipe from a few weeks back (blackberry pie) and they would be heavenly. The cherries were really sweet and tasty with just a little sugar mixed in.

I've been too afflicted with love-sickness to do much cooking lately. BUT, tonight I went out with Cherry to a bunch of John Cohen films on American folk music. I can't even begin to describe the strange time and culture and language warp I saw. One of the films was shot in the Appellations in the 1970's but it might as well have been the early 1800's. People still using a hand plows, missing a lot of teeth, heads like those rotten apple-dolls. And I could have used subtitles to help me out with the accents. But it gave me a bit of appreciation for growing up singing all the time. And for having gone to church and learned songs that lots of other people knew. I even knew some of the rsongs like, "keep on the sunny side" and had a hard time not singing along.

It also brought up a couple of questions about my childhood. For example: how did we come to own an auto-harp? And, do I remember correctly that Grandpa George played a gut-bucket and also had an electric bass in his house?

New Identity

It's not every day that I get mistaken for Cinderella. But, truth be sworn, as I was walking toward my apartment manager Irene and her granddaughter Emma, Emma said something in Spanish to her grandma. "She wants to know if you're Cinderella" Irene relayed. Apparently, she thought I had walked out of the new apartment building at the end of our street, that does, indeed, look like a castle.

Ah, the world through the eyes of a little girl. :)

Here is the P. Charming you've all been hearing about...
(still can't figure out how to rotate pictures).

From The Man Who Ate Everything

"God tells us in the Book of Genesis, right after Noah's flood, to eat everything under the sun. Those who ignore his instructions are no better than godless heathens."


Amen, brother.

Surprise!

I don't always plan my meals perfectly (gasp!) Often, I miscalculate and end up with odds and ends that all need to be used up instead of something to put in one cohesive dish. Alas, I ended up with a bag of brown mushrooms that were starting to dry out and NOTHING to put them in! No pasta, no cream, no cheese, no bread....so, I sweated part of the gigantic sweet maui onions I have, threw in the mushrooms, and then sprinkled cilantro and lime juice in. I can't tell you how unexcited about eating this I was. But it was delicious! Mostly due to the lime juice...really good on cooked mushrooms. Who knew?




This Greek salad, however, I was very excited about. I had some good tomatoes, and some dill, so I bought a cucumber at the market and then made a special trip to the Greek grocery store to buy really good feta and oil-cured olives. But by the day that I made my salad, the tomatoes had begun to get the slightest big mushy. It COMPLETELY ruined the entire salad. Totally inedible. And they didn't even look that bad! So, it turns out that the best recipe for Greek Salad is the same as the best recipe for any salad: only ingredients in tip top shape are allowed. Ingredients not in tip top shape must be cooked. Hmph. And I waisted so many olives!

Pizza Party

Maureen and Erin came over for the Pizza Party Part I (Part II to follow on the 25th). We started out with watermelon, mint, and feta appetizers:

Then moved on to pan-roasted garbanzo beans. Cherry and I were sympathizing with each other because we both bought gargantuan bundles of fresh garbanzo beans which are fun for the first few hours of shucking, but not so fun after that. Luckily Cherry found they could be pan-roasted and served like edamame. Leave two cups garbanzo beans in their pods. Rinse, and shake off excess water. Put in a hot pan with a tablespoon of olive oil. Cover. Roast for 5-8 minutes, shaking pan occasionally. Put them in a bowl and toss with lots of salt. Mmmm.
One of our pizza toppings was bechamel, ricotta, and spinach. I just wanted to remind you what good spinach looks like:
First out of the oven was our margherita pizza. The crust was the most perfect I've had it from a home oven. I tried a new recipe from the bread bakers apprentice that calls for far less yeast and a much longer proofing time than anything I've tried before.

Mix 4 1/2 Cups AP flour with 1 teaspoon yeast and 1 teaspoon salt. Add 2 cups of water. Using your hand like a dough hook (or an actual dough hook) knead the dough for 8 minutes. It is really sticky, but that's okay. Shape it into six balls.Roll the balls in oil and put them on a half sheet pan covered with parchment paper. Put the whole thing in a plastic back (i used a garbage bag) and refrigerate overnight or up to 4 days. You can also freeze the balls at this point. I put my oven at 550 and let my pizza stone preheat for two hours. I did not put it directly on the bottom of the oven, as most books suggest, because I've had bad results doing that in this oven (though it worked fine in my last oven) so I put it on a rack on the lowest setting and it worked perfectly.

Maureen and Erin tried their hand at it:


Erin spent a good portion of dinner climbing up and down this chair to man the fire alarm. Who puts a smoke detector right above the oven????
My favorite topping was tomato sauce, fresh mozzerella, jambon serrano, arugula dressed in olive oil and lemon, and Parmesan cheese.

But they were all good.

My neighborhood today...

is full of kids passing by decked out. Boys are wearing slacks and button down shirts, girls, their frilly dresses. This is pretty much every Sunday, but especially for the holiday. I looked out my window to see what the frequent screams were coming from the street. A full on Soccer game is going on with goals set up in the street. The men are playing in their undershirts. They have their dress shoes and slacks on, and their button downs are draped over cars parked on the side of the road. I can hear the faint screeching of the chickens that live in the apartment above mine. Why exactly these things make me feel so happy, I cannot quite say.

Chicken Tacos for Me and Mom

Like mother, like daughter, so they say. Mom called me up tonight to tell me about the delicious chicken tacos she had just eaten for dinner, WHILE I was making chicken tacos for dinner. Not only that, but we were both having mango/cilantro salsa on them. She did a variation on the usual salsa (see earlier entry) and added cucumber. Since I just happened to have a cucumber, I decided to try it. Delicious. Nice and crunchy. I also added onion (which I usually find overpowering), but those gargantuan spring Maui onions (last sunday's entry) are so sweet you can bite into them like an apple.

A few weeks ago, when I was sitting in Orin's apartment with nothing to do (waiting for my door to be removed so I could get into my own house) I picked up a Cook's Illustrated he had lying around and read all about pulled pork. They discovered that by using a Mexican method of first braising and then frying pork in previously cut off and rendered pork fat, they got the perfect shred and flavor. Well, I think I accidentally discovered this once a long time ago while reheating chicken for tacos. The chicken was dry and sticking to the pan, so I added oil, and it came out a little crispy. SO, tonight I decided to try frying up my already cooked chicken (I pulled it off a roasted bird I hadn't finished) in....you guessed it...duck fat! DELICIOUS! It came out still moist but with a crusty outside, so crusty that it almost appeared to have a batter on it. Great in the the tacos.



I've been discussing having a pizza-making party with the Children's Book World gang for some time and decided to read up on pizza dough. I got so inspired reading about the most authentic way to make pizza as it has been made in Naples forever, that I went to the Italian grocery store and drove all the way to the Santa Monica farmer's market to go shopping. I haven't bought such great food in a long time. A giant jar of really good anchovies, fresh ricotta, mozzerella, pecorino, Parmesan, farro flower, jambon serrano, olives, a very good loaf of bread. I was in heaven. I'll be showing off more of the ingredients after our pizza party tomorrow, but here is a little preview. A sandwich on a crusty loaf (but not so crusty that you pull your teeth out trying to take a bite) with a generous amount of olive oil drizzles on the bread, fresh ricotta cheese, a slice of jambon serrano, and wild arugula. Below, my very favorite style of olives, Cerignola.

For Chris: Varaitions on a fava bean theme

The salad I invented while emailing you sounded so good that I decided to make it. This is slices of pink grapefruit with sliced fennel on top, fava beans, and basil. I doused it with a dressing of shallots, lemon juice, olive oil, salt and pepper. Would have been good with mint or tarragon too.



This pasta looks a little dull, but it was anything but...I sauteed green garlic and a hot pepper in olive oil and butter, then added fresh garbanzo and fava beans, salt, added the pasta and put in some cold butter (to make up for the Parmesan I didn't have.) Really quite tasty.

At the Library...

I like to think of myself as an atypical librarian. But yesterday, after waking up late and throwing on the first thing in my closet, I found myself at work with a black shirt and black cardigan that has a hook and eye at the top. The combination did a good impression of a sweater-set. On the bottom half, I had on straight-leg khaki pants and black and white two-tone (rounded wing tips) shoes. My hair, quickly pulled back and secured with a pencil, resembled, yes, a bun. Now, I'll admit there are days when I wear a pencil skirt and heals and play up the librarian thing a bit, but it is rather disconcerting to subconsciously dress, not like the sexy young librarian featured in so many films, but as the baggy eyed, slightly butch librarian that is more often found behind the desk.

As if , in such attire, I wasn't already feeling insecure, a first grader named Nova (who was helping me make duck finger puppets) asked me if I had any kids of my own.

"Nope." I said.

"I know why you wanted to be a librarian! So you could be with kids." Nova exclaimed.

I didn't know weather to be impressed that a first grader had such insight into the adult female psyche, awed by how instinctual reproducing is to us that even in first grade we are aware of it as a "deepest desire," or insulted that I looked so old to her that she automatically assumed I would never have any kids if I did not have them already. I was, though, flattered that she saw me as human. Most of the kids think I live in the library.

"Yep," I said. "That's exactly right."

So, in addition to the sweater set, the kahki pants, the butch shoes and the, uh, bun, I was also old.

Today I wore white pants, tennis shoes, and a hot pink hoodie and felt much younger. Until around 4:00 when our volunteer reader (Chris, 45) asked, "How old are you? 35?"

Sunday...

is market day as you all know. My friend, neighbor, and former co-worker Luke came along this week. Thanks to his manliness, I got a bundle of fresh garbanzo beans which then had to be hauled around the crowded market. In fact, we could hardly walk down the street so many people stopped to ask what they were. No need for a dog or a baby, just carry around garbanzo beans and you'll be dating in a jiffy. They were well worth Luke's muscle-work. So sweet, I've been picking them off and eating them raw. Though, I do intend to make something out of them at some point.


The onions were on steroids.
Luke and I decided to make pea soup. With fresh peas. Luckily, Luke did most of the shelling while I dealt with my laundry. I like having a prep chef around.


Later, I made the soup with leeks, tarragon, vegetable stock, and peas. Luke and his beautiful girlfriend Sarah came over to share.



Not too shabby with grilled cheese on the side.

Ode to Duck Fat

This is potatoes, an onion, salt, and duck fat cooked in the oven at 400 for about 40 minutes. Mmmm.

No, Gypsy, haven't read that book...but I will now.