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?” →