On Arugula

I've been kicking around this post in my head for a month now, really trying to find the right voice to get across what is, for me, a pretty challenging subject.

In late summer of 2007, well before the Iowa Caucuses and the never-ending Democratic Presidential Primary and wholesale slaughter of the Republican Party in November, the New York Times Caucus blog casually reported on a relatively innocent comment about Obama in an attempt to poke a little fun at a line that fell flat:

One line that landed a little flat, though, was when Mr. Obama sympathetically noted that farmers have not seen an increase in prices for their crops, despite a rise in prices at the supermarket.

“Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula?” the senator said. “I mean, they’re charging a lot of money for this stuff.”

The state of Iowa, for all of its vast food production, does not have a Whole Foods, a leading natural and organic foods market. The closest? Omaha, Minneapolis or Kansas City.

 

ARUGULA!!!  ELITIST!!!  The Right-Wing Noise Machine went into hyperdrive.  A Google search for "Obama arugula" now returns an unimaginable 145,000 hits.  A Google search of prominent wingnut blog Redstate.com alone returns 86 hits.  The message was clear:  Real Americans don't eat arugula.

What??

Where did this come from?  Why is it that blue blooded Americans only eat tasteless, watered-down iceberg lettuce, but enjoying the bitter peppery flavor of arugula relegates you to an Ivory Tower?  And of course, it's not just arugula.  Real Americans drink beer (specifically Bud, Miller, or Coors.  Tasty microbrews are still elitist.  And don't get me started on anything Belgian.).  Effete liberals drink wine.  Thinking about some organic iceberg lettuce?  Not so fast.  A search of that earlier mentioned conservative site for "organic elitist" returns 26 hits.  In fact, any food or drink that has been prepared for the purpose of tasting exceptionally good...all of it.  It's elitist.  And bad.

This post isn't just for me to rant about the Republican Noise Machine.  I mean, it's that too.  But it's also about the sad state of affairs the sets entire genres of food (most importantly the organic variety) into a cultural gallows.  Ezra Klein stumbled across this very concept recently as he described a fundraiser held by Alice Waters:

And that's the other problem. Good food -- the sort Waters features at her restaurant -- is considered a luxury of the rich rather than a social justice issue. As Waters frequently argues, no one is worse served by our current food policy than a low-income family using food stamps to purchase rotted produce at the marked-up convenience store.

I get this just as much as anyone.  When I was working two jobs to get by just after college, I knew there would be about 4 or 5 days every month where I would survive solely off of french fries and $1 double cheeseburgers at McDonald's.  That money wouldn't have been particularly well spent on organic carrots from Whole Foods (about $3 on their own).  But my point is that it shouldn't...be this way.

It's hard to escape the morbid irony of the morbid obesity omnipresent in our nation's poorest neighborhoods.  The cheapest food available to us is loaded up with trans fats, sodium, saturated fats, perservatives, chemicals...The best, freshest, safest, most healthy foods are loaded up with markups for an organic label.  The rich get healthier, and the poor get fatter and sicker.  (Oh, and they often don't have health insurance, so...)  Hey Republicans out there, this is one of many reasons why voting with your pocketbook doesn't always work.  We are quite literally staring at a market failure that is screwing over poor Americans in place that hurts even worse than their pocketbooks:  their own bodies.

Klein also notes one of my fears about writing this blog as he finishes describing Waters' meal: 

However, it wasn't clear that [politicians] would be publicly promoting the "new American table" anytime soon. It was the sort of dinner that would work well in an attack ad. A politician who spent a lot of time extolling the virtues of such dining would be served up medium-effete in his next election.

Frankly, I'd be surprised if, when I run for office one, I'm not attacked for my "Horseradish Crusted Rack of Lamb with Cherry Gastrique" or the upcoming "Torched Escolar."  But I can only hope that the mainsteaming of fine cuisine via outlets like the Food Network and Top Chef (see?  Food Network does do SOMETHING right apart from Iron Chef!) will make such a focus on good, healthy food become less the aberration of a sushi-eating (by the way, what the HECK is wrong with sushi???) latte-sipping liberal and more the usual habits of families around the country.  To do that, the price of such good, healthy food simply MUST come down.  As Klein concludes:  

But Waters' vision is almost depressingly realistic. An America in which schoolchildren are assured fresh and nutritious meals and the government doesn't spend billions subsidizing high-fructose corn syrup would be cheaper to the taxpayer and healthier for the nation. What we'd spend purchasing fresh produce we'd almost certainly save in medical bills. Our current food policy makes us fatter, sicker, and poorer. And, as Waters reminds us, it tastes bad.

Family

There's really nothing like cooking for family.  Friends are great.  Dates are cool.  But then there's cooking for the people that knew you before the food.  WAY before the food.  The people that are proud of your culinary development, bewildered at how you went from your first job flipping burgers at Wendy's to being a chef wannabe, and most appreciate the food that you put on the table when all is said and done.  So the cooking I've done for the little brother, my parents, and my grandparents is by far the most rewarding that I can do.

Last night's guests weren't...TECHNICALLY...family.  But we've all got relationships with folks that are so deep and go back so far they might as well be.  So when my man David and his wife came over and joined Roommate Nirmal and Former Intern Monica for a Saturday evening dinner, I knew that only my best was to be on display.  The particular challenge?  David and his wife are vegetarians, and most of my best work involves meat of some sort.  Hm.

I decided I wanted to give a bit of Indian flavor to some classically non-Indian cuisine, so we started with a Spinach Souffle:  the time-honored bechamel sauce, spinach, eggs, cumin, garam masala, and turmeric.  I thought the dish could use both some acidic and some earthy tones, so I put together a wild mushroom vinaigrette....that really ended up more like a wild mushroom paste.  I sauteed oyster mushrooms in olive oil with a little bit of salt and pepper, pureed them with some balsamic vinegar, and pushed the whole thing through a chinois.  While the texture didn't end up as....saucy?...as I wanted it to be, the flavor was completely spot on:  an earthy punch and a little bit of acid that really enhanced the souffle.  I could have included a bit more garam masala, but overall this dish really worked.  It does seem the souffle didn't puff QUITE as much as I wanted (the picture is a bit misleading, as I only filled the ramekins about 2/3 of the way), so I've got to continue to work on getting enough air whipped into these before Restaurant Weekend in a couple of weeks.

Second course was a chile relleno.  I roasted some poblano peppers, peeled and seeded them, and stuffed them with rice, feta, cheddar, and gruyere cheeses.  The stuffing also got a seasoning of cumin and garam masala as well as turmeric.  After running them through a dredging station where they got a coat of corn meal, salt, pepper, and cayenne, I deep fried the chilis and served them on a plate with a simple chili oil (olive oil and thai bird chilis pureed and strained) and a delightfully pungent roasted garlic sauce (just white wine, salt, and roasted garlic).  Topped with a bit of fried oregano for garnish andddd boom goes the dynamite.  Spicy and rich, with a variety of flavor profiles, this one really came together.

We finished with some chai tea ice cream that I made a couple of weeks ago for Roommate Shala.  Recipe for that one was lifted directly from here.

Building Blocks (cont.)

Chicken stock is one thing. It only takes a little preparation, some attention in the way of skimming off the impurities for an hour or so, and a simple mirepoix. Two hours of time, max.

Veal stock is another. Completely. And totally. Another. So settle in for the story of a stock that takes 12 times as long as chicken stock. (For you 1st graders out there, that's 24 hours.)

I started with 16 pounds of veal bones from Eastern Market. It's the closest thing I can find in DC to this place back in home sweet home ATL. It's not quite the same, but it makes a good effort. I let a roasting pan get realllly nice and hot in a 450 degree oven until I tossed the first of the bones in and I got that satisfying sizzle that tells me they're going to be cooked from both sides. They roasted for 45 minutes before I took them out and tossed them into my ginormous stock pot. After covering in cold water, I verrrrry slowly brought them up to a simmer at about 190 degrees (aided by my sexy new IKEA meat thermometer. Yes I called a thermometer sexy, and yes I have problems. Hush.). The time was 10:30pm.

After about three hours of simmering and skimming, I strained the first liquid into a second stock pot, added more water to the bones, and brought back up to a simmer. This second soaking of the bones is called a remouillage and is designed to extract maximum flavor from the bones. During the initial soaking of the bones, the water and the bones reach an equilibrium in flavor. To get more flavor, you need to add new, unflavored water. The remouillage drains more flavor from the bones and then gets added back to the original liquid and reduced later.

So after adding cold water, I brought the stock back up to a simmer and then stuck it in a 190 degree oven overnight. The first liquid sat, reducing, on a burner on low overnight as well. At this point it was past 2am.

I woke up in the morning around 10am to an apartment filled with the most warm, intoxicating fragrance I can imagine. Well, except for cookies. Cookies smell better, but not by a whole lot. And brownies. Ok, excluding baked goods...this smelled better than most anything I can imagine.

Finally, I discarded the bones. At this point, the stocks were still too large to fit in one pot (or, to be honest, two...I had three burners going for most of the morning). I added two cans of tomato paste and let the stock continue to reduce. Reduce and skim. Skim and reduce. Hours and hours of it. At about 3pm I added a mirepoix, along with some fresh thyme, garlic, and bay leaf. I let these cook (while skimming) for about two hours before straining them out. It was 5:30 by the time I got the stock back up to a simmer, but hark! It finally all fit in a regular sized stockpot--not even just the humongo one I had been using earlier.


I left for a few hours, came back, and finally found it had the body that I wanted it to have. It was 10pm. I strained the final product through a double rinsed-cheesecloth and my chinois and only then did I really see the beautiful dark brown stock, free of impurities and bursting with this amazing strong and yet somehow neutral flavor.




All it needed was a sprinkling of salt before I stored and froze it.

Why go through all this? Veal stock is the foundation of the basic brown sauce, of which there are at least dozens of derivatives: espagnole (one of the mother sauces of classical french cuisine), bordelaise, demi-glace....you name it. If it's a brown sauce, it is (or should be) based on a veal stock.

And with two upcoming dinners of epic proportions, it definitely made sense to have some on hand. More on these later...

Building Blocks

When I first started writing this blog, I was really only interested in having some tasty meals now and again.  But somewhere along the way, that mild interest and talent turned into something to study--to understand from beginning to end.  A real thirst to read and learn everything I can get my hands on.

This thirst has taken me to all sorts of new cooking techniques, from cooking my steaks by basting them in smoking hot clarified butter to using a chinois to strain my soups and stocks to tying bouquet garnis and sachet d'epices.  At times I have become obsessed with classic sauces, and I've even had a bit of success;  I'm pretty proud of my ability to make a good gastrique or a flavorful coulis.  But my success with sauces is limited by my success with an even more basic building block of fine cuisine.

Making your own stocks allows you to avoid spending $4 on these guys' oversalted version (510 mg/serving!!!) in addition to controlling the flavor profiles.  And having plenty of chicken stock on hand gives you an ingredient essential to make a consommé, a velouté, or any one of a number of other white sauce derivatives.  Beef or veal stock lets you make brown sauces like the classic demi-glace or espagnole (a sauce that apparently dates back to the 19th century).

But for this winter weekend I was simply content to let my chicken stock be the base for a rich, earthy parsnip and celery root soup.  I blame my obsession with creating the perfect parsnip soup on the exceptional soup sometimes offered by my oft-mentioned favorite restaurant Corduroy, and I was determined to do all the right things with this latest attempt.  And boy did it pay off.

Not only was I incredibly careful to let neither the stock nor the eventual soup boil, but I actually did my due diligence and skimmed away the impurities that rise to the top during the simmering process.  Usually this step falls victim to lazy ambivalence, but fellow Emory Grad Lauren had strep throat and she deserved the best, darnit.  So there was the skimming, the use of a bouquet garni to have full control over how long my spices infused into the soup, and finally another basic building block of classical french cooking:  a roux.

A roux is simply three parts flour to two parts fat, cooked over medium heat until it combines.  Lighter roux (white or blond) have mild flavors but do well to thicken sauces or soups.  Darker roux (brown or dark brown) have strong toasted or nutty flavors (dark roux is an essential ingredient in good gumbo) but don't have as much thickening power as the lighter roux.

I chose to cook my roux until it was brown, sacrificing a bit of the thickening power for the flavor.  It did every bit the job it was supposed to:  thickened my soup without a need for heavy cream.  Score.

I finished the soup with just a sprinkling of cayenne, paprika, and thyme.  In the future, I'd prefer a full sprig of fresh thyme, but I had to use the rubbed thyme I had on hand.  I've also got to find a way to cut the richness of this soup.  It's good...very good...but has so much intense earth flavor that a bit of acid (maybe some lemon oil?) or sweetness from a butternut squash coulis (successful in the past) could provide a little break.

Mythical

I don't know what it is about hot chocolate, but it's always seemed like one of those things you just don't make from scratch.

It almost has a mythical nature--this perfect drink I would enjoy as a kid on those brisk Atlanta mornings during our three week long winters.  But you never actually saw someone make hot chocolate.  It would come out of a paper packet, like so much oatmeal or cream of wheat, to be mixed with water or milk.  Sometimes, if you were lucky, it came in a nice canister (but make sure to avoid this stuff!).  You could get it at IHOP or Ruby Tuesday's, but you never got refills.  There was something special about hot chocolate.

And so I've deep fried turkeys, made cheesecakes and mousses, put cranberries in a risotto, and made ice cream from scratch.  But I've never thought to make hot chocolate from scratch.  Until today.

Outside:

Inside:

It's actually much easier than I thought.  Just some unsweetened cocoa powder, sugar, salt, water, milk, and vanilla extract.  I finished it with a little vanilla cream and mmmmmm, no longer mythical.

I'm on my second cup right now and I can see why they don't serve multiple cups of this to little kids.  I feel like one of the balls in this commericial.