Grill, schmill. Give me a good hot pan.

A good hot pan nicely chars bistro-style steaks and creates those delicious “browned bits” to be deglazed from the pan. Recipe below.

It’s summertime. That time when everyone cooks every possible meal on the grill. Well, almost everyone. Me, not so much. We have an old Weber kettle that sees action maybe three or four times a season [although so far this year, I’ve used it—oh, let me think now—zero times].

I could chalk up my lack of enthusiasm for grilling to the pain-in-the-ass factor: Starting the coals, cleaning the grill before and/or after, the fact that we live on the second floor and it lives down in the yard… but that would be less than honest. I readily do plenty of things that rank high in the pain-in-the-ass department.

For me, it’s more a control issue. Mainly my apparent lack thereof. Sometimes, food grills beautifully, and it is indeed sublime. Other times, it overcooks, undercooks or just plain underdelivers on wonderfulness. Admittedly, even then, the smoke does its magic flavorwise [and that’s why I stick with charcoal on the rare occasions when I do grill]. But the frustrating thing is that, while the results vary wildly, my cooking methods don’t, at least as far as I can tell.

So give me a good pan and a gas flame every time. I become one with pan and stove. Which brings me to the topic of cookware. As with most cooks, our collection of pots and pans has grown organically over the years. Among the cast of characters are always a couple of non-stick skillets which we tend to view as semi-disposable—however gently you handle them and whatever the warranty promises, sooner or later, they lose their non-stickiness. So we buy decent heavy ones, but don’t go overboard. And we don’t become too attached to them—when they stop working, we replace them.

At the other end of the spectrum are some very beautiful, very heavy French copper pots and pans that Marion heroically lugged back from Paris over a few visits—because of these, our total foodie friend Dan says we are the only people he knows whose cookware he covets. In between is a varied collection that includes everything from a copper pot Marion’s mother found at a yard sale for a quarter to a sturdy, utilitarian aluminum saucepan recently bought for cheap at a Chinese restaurant supply store and a gorgeous Staub La Cocotte roasting pan, also French, picked up at the National Restaurant Association’s trade show here in Chicago.

And then there is this pan. Is it possible to love a pan too much? I don’t think so, not if it’s a Calphalon One Infused Anodized Fry Pan. It sears meat beautifully and provides those delicious “browned bits” you’re supposed to scrape up when you deglaze the pan, much like the vaunted All-Clad stainless pans. It also releases food easily when it’s properly caramelized and, unlike what I’ve heard of the All-Clad, it cleans up easily, pretty much like non-stick pans do. And they don’t just let you use metal utensils with this baby—they recommend it. The better to scrape up those browned bits.

I had read about the wonders of these pans and was totally ready to try one, but the $135 price tag for the 12″ fry pan for something that might or might not be all it claimed seemed a bit steep. Well, sometimes he who hesitates is saved. I found it for 40 bucks at a Chef’s Outlet store in Michigan City, Indiana. Yes, it was a factory second, but all that had kept it from being a factory first at Bloomingdale’s Home Store was some minor scuffing along the pan’s rim. And if you’ve got food out where those little scuffs are, you’re not cooking—you’re spilling.

So I tried one, digging through the dozen or so in the store to find the factory second least deserving that label. Then I took it home and cooked with it. It. Was. Amazing. I think I cooked chicken breasts the first time. After they’d been in the hot pan for maybe four minutes, I started to slide the metal spatula under one of the breasts. Nothing doing. It was stuck. So I waited another minute, as the instructions said, and tried again. Bingo. One by one, the chicken breasts released effortlessly and, when I flipped them, revealed a beautifully caramelized browned side. I was in love. And when I achieved a perfect char on what I like to call my bistro steaks, I knew that love was here to stay. Continue reading “Grill, schmill. Give me a good hot pan.” →

Spanish sausage and well-traveled legumes

Paprika-rich Spanish chorizo teams up with globe-trotting beans in this Warm Butter Bean Salad with Chorizo and Tomatoes. Recipe below.

Anything that prompts me to call my Aunt Veta down in southern Mississippi is a good thing. She is my favorite and most colorful of all my aunts—and I have been blessed in that department. She and my Uncle James raised a family and then proceeded to raise two grandkids until Uncle James passed away several years ago. Then Aunt Veta finished the job on her own. She is stubbornly positive and optimistic, even when the going gets rough—and if she can’t find something good to say about you, you are a sorry individual indeed.

What prompted my call the other day was this dish. Specifically, the butter bean part of it. Based on a dish served as a starter at London Moorish/Spanish restaurant Moro [covered in the May issue of Food & Wine], it also features Spanish chorizo—but more about that later.

Butter beans? Lima beans? The one thing everyone agrees on concerning these beans is that they originated in South America. Explorers and slavers of the early 1500’s carried them to the farthest parts of the earth—Europe, Africa, the East Indies, India, the Philippines. Depending on who’s telling the story, they’ve been cultivated since either 4,000 B.C. or 6,000 B.C. There are two distinct varieties: The baby lima—an actual variety, not just a lima bean harvested early—and the larger, plumper Fordhook. According to most sources, the names lima and butter are interchangeable, with butter beans simply being the popular name for them in the southern United States. But other sources say that southerners insist that the lima bean and the butter bean are two different beans altogether.

It was time to call Aunt Veta. “They’re as different as black-eyed peas and English peas,” she proclaimed. “James and me, we never much cared for lima beans. So James would always plant speckled butter beans.” [When mottled with purple they’re called calico or speckled butter beans—great, more names.] But Uncle James would harvest the beans early, when the pods were light green, so the beans would be white. Still, when Aunt Veta cooked them, they would turn the cooking liquid to what she called a “blue liquor.”

Whatever the name/size/color, these full-flavored, slightly kidney-shaped beans contain high quality protein, phosphorus, potassium and iron. They’re also rich in the best sort of fiber, soluble fiber, which helps to eliminate cholesterol from the body.

Spanish Chorizo. Last week I wrote about Spain’s love of all things pork and mentioned this dense, paprika-powered sausage. Chorizo is made from coarsely chopped fatty pork and seasoned with mild Spanish paprika, salt and garlic. That’s pretty much it. Spicier versions will also include small dried hot chiles. In Portugal, they make a similar sausage called chouriço. Both are completely different from the ground pork Mexican chorizo.

As an indication of how much paprika is used in making chorizo, when you sauté the fully cooked sausage, the rendered fat is deep red-orange and will color anything else you cook with it. I like cooking up some chorizo and maybe an onion and some red bell pepper, then scrambling some eggs with it—they take on a nice, orangish tinge. They are also quite delicious.

So is this dish. I adapted the recipe to use as a side instead of a starter. Either way you use it, it’s as impressive as it is easy to make. Continue reading “Spanish sausage and well-traveled legumes” →

Iberia meets Italia—for dinner

Pork Chops with Paprika and Fennel Seeds combine favorite flavors of Spain and Italy. Recipe below.

My friend Stan went to Spain last year. After he got back, the first thing I asked him about was the food, of course. He said that most restaurants offered pork, pork and more pork. Stan is Jewish, so he would notice this sort of thing.

To be fair, he did find other things to eat in Spain [and as he admitted to me later, did finally succumb to the delights of pig meat in his travels]. But Spanish cuisine does embrace meat in general and pork in particular, in all its forms, both fresh and cured. The small, dense Spanish chorizo sausages, a completely different, um, animal from the Mexican variety, are wonderfully intense. I know I’ll feature them in at least one upcoming post.

And to flavor all this meaty goodness? Paprika, of course. Paprika [or pimentón, as it’s known in Spain] is one of the essential ingredients of Spanish cuisine. It is made from ground aromatic sweet red peppers and ranges in flavor from mild to hot and in color from bright orange-red to blood red. Originally from the Americas, most commercial paprika now comes from Spain, South America, California and Hungary.

The Italians are no slouches in the consumption of pork either. And for them, one spice of choice for combining with it is fennel seeds. If you doubt this for a moment, just wait ’til the fennel seeds hit the hot skillet—you will smell the essence of Italian pork sausage. Fennel seeds have been compared to anise, but while they do have a big flavor, it’s not as pronounced in its licorice flavor as anise.

In this recipe, paprika and fennel come together to deliver a nice, subtle complexity in a quick, easy-to-make main course. Continue reading “Iberia meets Italia—for dinner” →

Black-eyed peas and big-flavored steaks

Black-eyed Pea Salsa with chili powder teams up beautifully with Curried Steaks. Recipe below.

A couple of quick notes. First, for those of you who don’t eat red meat, this black-eyed pea salsa also livens up grilled fish or chicken breasts. Also, I’m doing two posts today, so be sure to scroll down for the second one.

The other day I realized that, as much as I love red meat, you wouldn’t know it to look at this blog. In fact, in the seven months Blue Kitchen has been open, I’ve talked about it exactly once, unless you count the two chili recipes that use ground beef. That is just plain wrong.

Growing up, ground was about the only kind of beef I knew, aside from the occasional stringy pot roast—burgers, meatloaf, spaghetti sauce, more meatloaf… I wasn’t introduced to the wonders of steak until I was in college, and then it was at one of those cafeteria-style joints called BEST STEAK HOUSE [or something equally overpromising] where you watch hairy-armed men tossing steaks on permanently charred grills with flames shooting up all around as the fat sizzled off. A steak dinner with baked potato and iceberg lettuce salad set you back maybe four or five bucks, and it was love at first gristly bite.

I have since graduated to better cuts of meat—and from medium-well to medium to medium-rare to rare. But the pure primal satisfaction that is steak remains undeniable.

Although one of my favorite ways to prepare steak is what I call my French bistro steak, seared in butter and the pan deglazed with red wine, I’m starting with this recipe because when I came across it in my files recently, I immediately wanted the black-eyed pea salsa.

Black-eyed peas are another food item very popular in the south [like last week’s okra]. Even though this salsa is named for them, there are lots of flavors at play here. When you first start cooking the green pepper and chili powder, the aroma will be less than encouraging. Don’t worry, though—when the other ingredients are added, it all comes together fabulously. And when it gets together with the steaks with their peppery curry marinade, the results are amazing. Continue reading “Black-eyed peas and big-flavored steaks” →

Small kitchens, big solutions

Chicken and Rice in a Pot, a quick one-pot dish adapted from the Itty Bitty Kitchen Handbook. Recipe below.

Update: See Other Notes below for a timely food blog find.

In at least one previous post, I’ve mentioned New Yorkers’ collective penchant for ordering delivery instead of cooking, and my Brooklyn buddy Ronnie has backed me up on this. One huge reason is the tiny kitchens in most New York apartments. Real estate is expensive in New York. Really expensive. And usually, kitchen space is the first thing sacrificed on the altar of square footage.

For New Yorkers determined to cook at home—or for space-challenged cooks anywhere—there are solutions. Smaller sized appliances, for instance, that pack all the features of their bigger brethren, just in a smaller footprint. Forget hot plates and dorm fridges—these are high-end appliances made by the likes of Jenn-Air and Viking. It’s possible to drop a grand or two [or more] on an undercounter fridge, as an example. But for creative cooks, solutions to small kitchens come in all sizes, shapes and price ranges.

Which brings me to Apartment Therapy: The Kitchen’s Smallest Coolest Kitchen Contest. Last year, parent site Apartment Therapy held its first annual Smallest Coolest Apartment contest and showcased some wonderful apartments whose residents packed maximum living and versatility into minimal square footage. This year, they’ve rolled it out across all their sites: The Apartment, The Kitchen, Home Tech [home office or audio visual] and The Nursery. Site co-founder Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan and his wife Sara Kate live with their baby, born in November 2006, in a 265-square foot apartment in Manhattan’s West Village, so they know whereof they speak.

When you live in an apartment, smart use of space is an ongoing challenge, no matter how big or small your place is. So checking out last year’s entries and their solutions that ranged from brilliant to creative to sometimes a little bizarre became a daily obsession. Besides, let’s be honest—seeing other people’s apartments is just plain voyeuristic fun. Now that there’s a kitchen-focused category, I may need a 12-step program once it’s over.

There’s still time to enter, by the way. The deadline is April 16. So if you’ve got a small kitchen, apartment, nursery or home office you’d like to show off, go to the site for details.

If anyone is qualified to give advice on organizing and working in a small kitchen, it’s Justin Spring. For more than a dozen years now, he has cooked in a kitchen that is just 45 square feet. And he grew up cooking weekends, vacations and summers on the 36-foot family sailboat, where the kitchen consisted of a camp stove, ice chest and bucket. Spring has written an appropriately diminutive book on small kitchens with a ridiculously oversized title: The Itty Bitty Kitchen Handbook: Everything You Need to Know About Setting Up and Cooking in the Most Ridiculously Small Kitchen in the World—Your Own.

Unlike most kitchen books whose ideas are guaranteed to make your wallet bleed, Itty Bitty is refreshingly all about editing and purging, making pots and utensils do double duty and making space work efficiently. Besides lots of solid advice on equipping, organizing, cleaning, cooking in and entertaining from a small kitchen, you’ll find plenty of encouragement and inspiration, all in a friendly, fun, quick read.

You’ll also find recipes. A hundred of them, to be exact, all of which can be accomplished with no more than two burners and a toaster oven, if necessary. And while you won’t find haute cuisine, you’ll find some decent, doable eats. The recipes all feature what Spring calls “the combined imperatives of (1) being breathtakingly simple and (2) being interesting enough to merit the trouble of cooking.” The quick one-pot dish above is my adaptation of one from Spring’s teeny kitchen. The recipe follows. Continue reading “Small kitchens, big solutions” →

Instinct and Improvisation

Roasted pears and onions pair nicely with pork tenderloin. Recipe below.

Okay, this is the second week in a row I’m talking about pork. For those of you who don’t eat it for religious, cultural or dietary reasons, please bear with me. I promise next week’s post will be 100% pig-free. For those of you who don’t eat pork because “I just don’t like it” [picture someone delivering this line with a pinched face and a whiny voice], what’s not to like about a one stop source for chops, ribs, roasts, a dazzling international array of sausages, hams and bacon, for crying out loud?

This is also the second week in a row I’m using fruit in a savory dish, this time pears. As far as I’m concerned, another reason to like pork is how nicely it plays with fruits and fruit juices.

As a quick aside, Mimi of French Kitchen in America just featured pears in a savory treatment, sort of, at her blog. A delicious sounding Pear-Ginger Crisp with Salted Almond Topping. I’ve had a link to Mimi’s blog in my Food Stuff section for some time now, but I’ve been remiss in not flat out telling people to visit it. You’ll find lots of great food and great writing there, including wonderful memories of her French grandmother. Mimi is a generous, charming hostess. Go there.

Another quick aside. See Other Notes at the end of the recipe for a tip about another great food blog.

Okay, back to the kitchen. Mimi recently did a post on chef James Haller’s instinctive approach to cooking. The more I cook, the more I understand instinct. More often than not, as I look at recipes these days [in cookbooks, online, in magazines], I find a technique or an intriguing pairing of ingredients that will have me improvising a completely different dish in my head. That’s one of the things that keeps cooking exciting for me.

It’s also how this recipe came about. Normally, I’m a stovetop kind of guy. Searing, sautéing, braising, stewing—anything you can do in a good, heavy pan over a gas flame—I’m all over it. But we had a couple of pork tenderloins that weren’t getting any younger, and Marion wasn’t finding time to do anything with them. And yeah, I could have sliced them into medallions and sautéed away, but I thought I should work on some roasting skills. Besides, it’s as cold as a witch’s, er, bazoom in Chicago right now. Firing up the oven to a toasty 400ºF for a while sounded like a good idea. Continue reading “Instinct and Improvisation” →

Rebranding the Prune: Dried Plums

Dried plums [or prunes, if you must] offer a sweet touch to savory chops. Recipe below.

Prunes have gotten a bad rap. The name alone conjures up visions of old codgers with their waistbands hiked up under their armpits ordering prune danishes from waitresses who call everyone Darlin’ or Hon.

Now that we’ve all figured out that fiber is good and that these babies are loaded with it [not to mention potassium—ounce for ounce, about twice the amount found in bananas], you’d think they would be flying off the shelves at the supermarket. But they’re not because they’re, well, prunes.

The industry is now trying to do something about that. Has been for a few years, in fact. From Sun-Maid to Trader Joe’s, somewhere near the word Prunes on the package, you’ll also find Dried Plums. That’s what they are, after all. And yes, I know that raisins are really dried grapes, but raisins have never suffered from an image problem like prunes. I doubt dried plums will ever completely replace prunes on the label, but I suspect it will continue to become more prominent over time.

This all reminds me of a successful rebranding by a Japanese automaker. Nissan used to sell its cars in North America, Europe, Africa, Australia and New Zealand under the name Datsun. Datsun had been the company’s name originally, even in Japan, but they had switched over to Nissan for the domestic market.

At some point, they decided Nissan should be the name in all markets. To me, it sounded like a difficult task. And a reckless one—they risked pissing away the equity built in the Datsun brand in a lot of markets. They handled it just right, though. First, there was the necessary if somewhat awkward phase of tagging both their product and their advertising with both names: Datsun/Nissan.

But the final move to the name Nissan was brilliant. A simple, assumptive statement delivered in a “we have arrived” kind of voiceover as the Nissan logo appeared sans Datsun at the end of each commercial: “The name is Nissan.” Beautifully done.

So what does this have to do with prunes, er, dried plums? Get over the name—call them dried plums, if that helps. Buy them. Eat them. They’re healthy, quick snacks—five is a single serving, and you don’t have to peel or slice them—and they’re sweet and pretty satisfying between meals. They also add a nice, fruity complexity to this wintry meal. Continue reading “Rebranding the Prune: Dried Plums” →

Blue Kitchen: The mysterious… Pot Roast?

Indian biryani curry paste gives an exotic twist to classic American pot roast. Recipe below.

It’s funny the things that stick in your brain. I routinely forget to pick up the dry cleaning or that we’re out of cottage cheese or that I was supposed to get the oil changed. But I still remember the day we talked about food in my grade school French class with Mademoiselle [okay, I forget her name too—something French, since she really was from France].

She, being from France and probably wondering exactly how she’d ended up teaching a bunch of squirmy American eleven-year-olds in St. Louis, Missouri, began to wax nostalgic about French food. We, being squirmy American eleven-year-olds from St. Louis, Missouri, were horrified. Sauces were involved. Shallots. Innards. Finally, one of the girls in the class cracked, saying something insightful, like, “Ewwwww.”

Mlle. [Je-ne-sais-quoi] rolled her eyes and said, “Ah, yes. For Americans, everything must taste like fried chicken.”

Despite the fact that, unlike all my other teachers, she was actually young and pretty and spoke with that wonderful accent, I was offended. What the hell was wrong with fried chicken? Being eleven, hell had entered my vocabulary, albeit under my breath unless I was around trusted fellow hell sayers like Carl Halford and Mike Prokopf.

Besides, didn’t we Americans have pizza? Okay, I had never tried it, but my brother Mike had eaten it at Little Charlie’s house and pronounced it good. And didn’t we have chop suey? This ersatz Chinese delicacy hadn’t yet been widely outed as an American invention, so it counted. Okay, I hadn’t personally tried that either—Mike and I always ordered hamburgers when our parents forced us to go to some sketchy Chinese dive downtown.

But that was then, this is now. Continue reading “Blue Kitchen: The mysterious… Pot Roast?” →