Mouthing Off

If retweeting is re-posting a twitter feed, what's the word for re-blogging a Facebook status update? Retatting? This is a retat. Last night I got so excited I mentioned this on my Facebook page. A vegan friend is coming for Passover, and while concocting vegan main courses and a dessert is fairly brainless (see these excellent vegan main courses from F&W and desserts from Babycakes vegan bakery), I got kind of addled at the idea that anyone might feel left out during the requisite courses of gefilte fish and matzo ball soup. The soup was easy: I made my vegetable broth look like chicken stock by browning the onions in a little olive oil before simmering them in water. Then I added big florets of cauliflower, which look a lot like matzo balls, and simmered them until soft.

Vegan gefilte fish was the stumper. Gefilte fish, for me, is mostly just an excuse to clear my sinuses: The bland quenelles of whitefish taste best swirled in peppery beet horseradish. (They're also a fun way to paint your plate purple.) So what's bland, holds together in quenelle form without eggs, and goes well with a peppery beet-colored condiment? It only came to me at about 11 pm: chickpea cakes! My recipe: Sauté a finely minced quarter of a white onion (or 2 large shallots) in 2 tablespoons of olive oil with a pinch of dried thyme and a pinch of crushed red pepper flakes. Add the rinsed chickpeas from one 15-oz can, cover and simmer until just heated through. Remove the pan from the heat and let cool. Add 1/4 teaspoon freshly grated lemon zest and season with salt and pepper. Mash the heck out of the peas with a potato masher and form into 1/4-cup mini-footballs. Cover and refrigerate before serving. We'll see how they go over at this evening's seder. But three of them made for a lovely midnight snack last night.

Easter is this Sunday. This means that my mother has started baking her annual batch of pizza rustica using a recipe from her aunt, a stubborn woman who, because of a lamp, did not speak to her sister (my grandmother) for six years. Per this aunt's instructions, my mother will whisk six eggs and some flat-leaf parsley with half a pound each of fontina and Parmesan cheeses before adding six pounds of ricotta and half a pound each of cubed salami, soppressata, prosciutto and ham. This will make three to four double-crust pies. Clearly, we’re not light eaters.

Curious about its origins, I discovered that pizza rustica is an Easter staple in Naples. Nancy Harmon Jenkins, author of Cucina del Sole, has heard of it among the Pugliese and the Abruzzi and confirmed that it’s pretty widely eaten in the whole southern Italian boot. In my house we actually call it “pizza gain”, a phrase that’s an Italian-American corruption derived from pizza ripiena or piena, meaning “stuffed” or “full” in Italian. In short, piena, or chiena in certain dialects, became chien', then “gain” as it got passed down across generations (and an ocean). These pies, most made from some combination of cheese, meats and eggs in a sweet crust, are meant to break the Lenten fast by offering many of the rich treats given up as a sacrifice.

And break the fast it does. David Greco, who runs the Arthur Avenue Café and Mike’s Deli in the Bronx, makes a Neapolitan-style rustica based on his maternal grandmother’s recipe that’s very similar to my mother’s – and one that weighs in at a little over three pounds a pie. He’s been selling 200 a day for the past week. His secret is a touch of lemon zest in the crust. He also makes a Calabrian version from his father’s family with chunks of soppressata and thinly-sliced prosciutto baked into an eggy focaccia. Frank Generoso of the Royal Crown Pastry Shop in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn says the key to his rustica is using the best quality ricotta that’s firm but still creamy. A thick ricotta, he says, will hold up and not run all over the place.

My mother's is still the best, especially a couple of hours out of the oven. I should start fasting now to heighten the enjoyment of that first bite.

Until this week I had never had tuna noodle casserole. Much to my chagrin at the time, I did not grow up eating that kind of food. I begged my mom for Hamburger Helper and SpaghettiO's, but she was more into grilled chicken and steamed vegetables. (Turns out that was not such a bad thing.) When put to the task this week of creating a tuna noodle casserole recipe to put on our website, I had to do a little research. The common factors among all the recipes I saw were canned tuna, egg noodles and canned condensed soup. Canned condensed soup was out!

I wanted to make a thick, creamy sauce as my casserole base, but didn't want to make a béchamel sauce, which would require a few more steps. Instead of a béchamel or a can of cream of mushroom, I settled on a cream-cheese-based sauce. By melting cream cheese into warm milk, you end up with a thick, creamy sauce just perfect for the job of binding the noodles with the tuna and vegetables (in my case, mushrooms and peas). Still very much in the style of tuna noodle casserole, but elevated a step above the can.

Tuna Noodle Casserole with Cheddar-Panko Crumbs
6-8 servings

2 tablespoons unsalted butter
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 onion, cut into 1/4-inch dice
1 celery stalk, cut into 1/4-inch dice
1/2 pound white button mushrooms, thinly sliced
1 teaspoon coarsely chopped thyme
1 3/4 cups whole milk
1/2 pound cream cheese, cut into 1/2-inch dice
1/2 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper
Two 7.5 ounce cans tuna packed in olive oil, drained
1/2 cup frozen peas, thawed
1 pound wide egg noodles
4 ounces sharp cheddar cheese, coarsely grated (1 3/4 cups)
3/4 cup panko

1.    Preheat the oven to 375. In a large deep skillet, melt the butter in 2 tablespoons of the oil. Add the onion and celery and cook over moderate heat until tender, about 8 minutes. Add the mushrooms and cook until tender, about 5 minutes. Add the thyme and cook until fragrant, about 1 minute. Add the milk and cream cheese and cook over moderate heat until the cream cheese melts, creating a thick sauce, about 2 minutes. Remove from the heat, add the Worcestershire sauce and season with salt and pepper. Fold in the tuna and the peas.
2.    Meanwhile, in a large pot of boiling salted water cook the egg noodles until al dente. Drain and rinse under cool water. Add the noodles and 1 cup of the cheddar cheese to the sauce and gently toss until the noodles are well coated. Scrape into a 2 1/2 quart baking dish.
3.    In a small bowl, toss the panko with the remaining 1 tablespoon of olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Add the remaining 3/4 cup  of cheddar cheese and toss to combine. Sprinkle the panko topping over the casserole and bake for about 45 minutes, until the casserole is hot and the topping is golden. Serve.

Make ahead The unbaked assembled casserole can be refrigerated for up to 1 day. Bring to room temperature before baking.

What happens when you put six star chefs in the same kitchen? In the case of Seattle's Thierry Rautureau (Rover's), Maria Hines (Tilth), Joseba Jiménez de Jiménez (The Harvest Vine), Johnathan Sundstrom (Lark), Jason Wilson (Crush) and Holly Smith (Cafe Juanita), you get an ingenious musical-chairs-like dinner series called Seattle Chefs Table 2009. "The idea—six chefs and six courses at six restaurants—was born in the face of this horrible economy," says Rautureau, who hosted the first dinner a few weeks ago at Rover's, taking care of the hors d'oeuvres, while the other five chefs handled the remaining courses. This evening, the chefs are convening at Tilth, where the menu includes dishes like vanilla-scented lobster by Jiménez de Jiménez, handmade garganelli with uni by Sundstrom and almond financiers with Meyer lemon preserve by Hines. The dinner series ($90 per meal) have been such a hit that the chefs have just announced a second night of dinners. Here, the remaining dinners:

The Harvest Vine: April 13 (2701 E. Madison St.; 206-320-9771 or harvestvine.com)

Lark: May 19 (926 12th Ave.; 206-323-5275 or larkseattle.com)

Cafe Juanita: September 22 (9702 NE 120th Pl., Kirkland; 425-823-1505 or cafejuanita.com)

Crush: October 19 (2319 E Madison St.; 206-302-7874 or chefjasonwilson.com)

Undisclosed location: mid-November for a "Holiday Feast" celebrating six different holiday themes.

For those unable to make it to Seattle for one of the dinners, create your own with these superb recipes:

Hines's Salmon with Oyster Mushrooms and Peppers

Wilson's Herb-and-Spice Lamb Chops

Sundstrom's Herb-Grilled Chicken with Goat Cheese Ravioli

Sadly, F&W's Test Kitchen is temporarily relocating to another space while our offices undergo renovations. Unfortunately, that means packing and moving equipment, pantry items and all sorts of nonperishable necessities. What it also means is clearing out and cleaning out our fridges of all fresh ingredients. We filled our "give-away table" with cheese, eggs, broccoli, half-full jars (optimist that I am) of jam, mayo, mustard, pickles, chutney, hot sauce and various and sundry condiments for the staff to take home. Of course, I kept a few things for myself—a few slices of pancetta, some moldy pecorino  (which I cleaned up), a slightly wilted endive and a lemon, all of which went into my clearing-house salad. I cleaned out my fridge at home to complete the meal, and it was a huge success, not to mention a pleasant surprise.

4 servings

1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
4 slices pancetta
2 tablespoons pine nuts
1 pocketless pita
2 tablespoons lemon juice
2 tablespoons mayonnaise
1 garlic clove, minced
1 Romaine lettuce heart, coarsely shredded
1 red endive (traviso), sliced
1/2 can drained chickpeas
Salt and freshly ground pepper
4 ounces sliced young pecorino (Sardinian pecorino)
2 slices turkey breast, shredded
4 hard cooked eggs, quartered

1.    In a large skillet, heat 1 teaspoon of the oil. Add the pancetta and cook over moderate heat until crisp, about 6 minutes. Drain on paper towels. Add the pine nuts to the skillet and toast, stirring, until golden. Using a slotted spoon, transfer to a plate. Add the pita to the skillet and toast until golden, about 2 minutes, turning once or twice.  Cut into quarters.
2.    In a large bowl, whisk the lemon juice, mayonnaise and garlic with the remaining oil. Add the lettuce, endive and chickpeas, season with salt and pepper and toss. Arrange the pancetta, pine nuts, pecorino, turkey and eggs on top and serve with the pita.

--------------------------------

Last Friday, the seventh-floor conference room at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square could have been the Kodak theater at this Sunday's Oscars, for all the excitement generated by the 3rd Annual Simply Manischewitz Cook-Off. Six finalists chosen from nearly 2,000 entrants each had passionate partisans cheering them on as they competed for serious prizes: $25,000 in GE appliances—and Manischewitz products. Myra Smolev was cracking jokes as she assembled her delicious Sloppy Moses potato pancakes stuffed with ground beef and mushrooms; Deborah Leebove from Denver nearly lost it but managed a miraculous recovery when she realized her oven wasn't on to bake her superfluffy Mani Meatloaves. They each hoped to make the tastiest dish in under an hour using at least one Manischewitz product; I got to be a judge. I had no idea, but the New Jersey–based company, founded in 1888, today makes over 400 items, everything from matzo to kosher pasta sauces. Only about a dozen were used, particularly the borscht (which turned out to be great flavorer for Shana Schuman's Meaty Manischtroni), and the Tam Tam crackers (Leebove's meatloaf secret weapon). The winner used the falafel mix: Calm, collected Amy Siegel from Clifton, NJ, came through with her Marvelous Mediterranean Falafel Sliders—juicy mini burgers made with ground turkey and topped with caramelized onions that I'd readily make myself. Congratulations, Amy. But watch your back—I may have to enter next year.

With little notice, we are moving our Test Kitchen to temporary digs across town. Not only do we have to pack up equipment and tools, we have to empty our freezers—freezers that (in my case) have housed long-since-forgotten items, held on to for some future use. (I've had this fridge since 2002...) It's sort of liberating to get rid of things, but I must say, I'm very sad at tossing my two quarts of rendered duck fat. Yes, I could take it home to fry potatoes, but I'd like to someday meet my grandkids....
I did find several packages of frozen sweet cherries that I couldn't bear to toss (remember how thrifty/cheap I am). I didn't feel like baking them into a clafouti or pastry, so I threw them into a food processor with some honey and lemon juice and made a superfast sorbet. Since I can't eat it all in one sitting, it will have to go back into the freezer, but with a few more days until the move, I'm sure it won't get lost in there.

QUICK CHERRY SORBET
MAKES 4 CUPS

Two 10-ounce bags frozen sweet cherries
1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
1/4 cup honey or agave nectar

Put all the ingredients into a food processor and puree until smooth. Transfer to a shallow bowl and freeze until firm, about 1 hour. Scoop and serve!

I have a disproportionate amount of guy friends, which means I usually start getting distraught calls around this time of year (i.e., two days before Valentine’s Day) asking for gift suggestions. Case in point: Over the weekend, I asked my newlywed friend Adam what he was doing for his wife on Valentine’s Day. His response: “I didn't know you still have to do Valentine's Day after getting married!” For any other guys out there who may have forgotten, or waited until the last minute, here are a few ideas for the food-and-wine-loving woman that will fit every budget.

* The newly introduced Pulpe Vitaminée facial ($235) at the Caudalie wine spa in New York City’s Plaza Hotel is an hour and 20 minutes of pure bliss. The grapeseed-based vitamin-E serum used in the treatment is superhydrating and left my skin glowing. After the treatment you get to relax even more in the spa’s glamorous wine lounge, where a sommelier will serve you a complimentary glass of the house wine, Chateau Smith Haut Lafitte.

* Cult beauty brand Fresh recently launched a new collection, Citron de Vigne, inspired by Veuve Clicquot’s vintage La Grande Dame Champagne. The perfume is $75, but I also love the soap, which comes hand-wrapped in kimono-inspired paper and costs $14.

* I eat out for work all the time, so I’m always more impressed when a man offers to cook me dinner. It’s much more intimate and thoughtful (and usually less expensive!) For inspiration, check out Food & Wine's most sexy recipes and irresistible milk-chocolate desserts.

© Caudalie Spa
The wine lounge in Caudalie Spa at the Plaza Hotel

© Courtesy of Fresh
Fresh's new Champagne-inspired collecttion

I stopped in the other night at the Macao Trading Co., which occupies a desolate block of the Tribeca landscape (or at least it seems desolate at 11 PM when there's sleet blowing in your face). It's a neat trick, then, to walk in and abruptly find oneself transported back to some fanciful version of colonial days in Macao; Somerset Maugham may have spent more time at the long bar at Raffles in Singapore, but I still wouldn't have been surprised to find him lurking in a linen suit somewhere in a back booth.

The restaurant brings together the disparate talents of David Waltuck, Chanterelle's longtime chef-owner, and Dushan Zaric & Jason Kosmas of the West Village cocktailian watering hole Employees Only. Waltuck handles the food end, which splits somewhat oddly between Portuguese-influenced and Chinese-influenced dishes (a nod to Macao's colonial history, but—like that history—a somewhat conflicted relationship). For my part, the winning dishes were mostly on the Chinese side of the menu, like an appealingly earthy-briny bowl of Manila clams with black beans and chilies, and a whole sea bass with a ginger-scallion sauce that was fun to pick at and expertly cooked.

But the real reason to head here is the cocktails. In the interests of scientific inquiry, I felt it incumbent on me to try all nine or ten of the house cocktails. They were uniformly excellent both in concept and execution, the sort of cocktail experience that's becoming oddly easy to come across in NYC these days (think Clover Club, Tailor, Pegu Club, PDT, and six or seven other places) and that tends to make one think we're living in a kind of cocktail golden age—an excellent thing, since every other aspect of our age seems rapidly to be turning into some base metal, say lead, or brass.

Anyway, here are two of my faves, recipes courtesy of Mssrs Zaric & Kosmas:

Esmeralda
3 cubes of fresh honeydew melon
1 heaping demitasse spoon of cubed ginger
2 demitasse spoons of sugar
3/4 oz. fresh lime juice
1/4 oz. Luxardo Maraschino liqueur
1 1/4 oz. Esmeralda Cachaça
 
Directions: Muddle the melon, ginger and sugar in the bottom of the mixing glass. Add the rest of the ingredients and ice. Shake and pour unstrained back into a rocks glass. Garnish with a honeydew cut as a "sharks fin."
 
Kaffir Jimlet
3 oz. Kaffir leaf infused Plymouth gin
1 oz. fresh lime Juice
1/2 oz. agave nectar
Green Chartreuse
Kaffir leaf
 
Directions: Wash the inside of a cocktail glass with Green Chartreuse. Pour Gin, lime juice and agave nectar into a mixing glass. Add ice and shake vigorously for 7-8 seconds. Strain into the prepared cocktail glass. Garnish with a Kaffir leaf.

I'll add as a final note: go for the Esmeralda, if you can find it; it's a great aged cachaça, and has more depth than run-of-the-mill white cachaças (for more on artisan cachaças, see my F&W article here). And if you don't feel like infusing your own gin with kaffir leaves, Hangar One makes a kaffir-lime vodka that would probably work as a good substitute.

Our amazing editorial assistant Alessandra Bulow shares a few thoughts on fenugreek:

"When New York’s mayor Michael Bloomberg revealed yesterday that the aromatic herb fenugreek is the source of a mysterious maple syrup-like odor that has pervaded the city’s streets periodically since October 2005, I immediately asked “What’s that and can I put it on my French toast?”

Although commercially-processed fenugreek seeds yield a sweet extract that can be used to make artificial maple syrup, in a home kitchen, the hard golden seeds have a slightly spicy aroma and a bitter flavor and are often used in Indian-inflected recipes.

So while I won’t be sprinkling fenugreek over my brunch tomorrow afternoon (I’ll be having crisp Blueberry Corn Cakes with Maple Syrup), I'm feeling inspired to incorporate it in a hearty Sunday supper. Now my only remaining question is which recipe should I make: Beef Stew or Spicy Chicken Curry?"