Osso Buco Semplice

This is a nice dish, and not hard to prepare --- but you have to leave time, about 2.5 hours start-to-finish. I cooked it out of Hazan several times, but not often since the Osso Buco veal cut is pricey when it's even available. It's been mostly for special occasions. But today we went to the grocery, Whole Foods, and they had Osso Buco for $13/pound. Not bad. Still pricey, not as pricey as usual. And I thought, when am I going to make this anyway if not now? So I bought it. I thought I'd freeze it and use it one day for a special dinner...

When we got back I looked through Hazan and I thought, ah, well it's a little involved. Then I looked at Elizabeth David, and I thought, as usual, ah, the essential recipe. Elizabeth David understood that having the essence of the recipe meant you could then be creative with it. So I suppose Hazan's recipe might taste better, more complex, than David's, but it also doesn't show you the core of the recipe. Once you know the core, you can do what you like with it. The core of Osso Buco is an excellent dish, a marvel of simplicity actually. And Hazan isn't hard either, once you see what you're doing.

After reading David's recipe through carefully (as I do now and didn't do as a beginner,) I knew I could cook it tonight, even though it was getting late. Which would mean I didn't have to freeze and then thaw the osso buco, which makes it better. Freezing and thawing meat well makes a big difference, I'm beginning to think, in your final dishes. For example, we eat Korean bar-be-cue, and we buy American Kobe beef and freeze it. It's always been a problem thawing that, since if you don't thaw it well then the thin slices don't come apart nicely. So I started putting it down from the freezer into the fridge the night before, and now it's perfectly thawed, and I'm sure it tastes better than when I used to have to quick-thaw it in a Ziploc in warm water --- if nothing else it's more reliably thawed all the way through.

But when you have a nice piece of meat, then it's best not to freeze it at all. So here's what I cooked, based on David's recipe:

Osso Buco

2 ossi buchi cuts, good amount of butter, 2 peeled tomatoes, 1/2 cup wine. Use a pan that will fit the ossi buchi without crowding. Brown the ossi buchi on all sides in the butter. Toss in the wine, let it bubble for 10 minutes. Meanwhile chop the tomatoes. After 10 minutes, toss them in along with 1/4 cup of water. Cover. Simmer for 2 hours.

Great dishes don't get simpler than that. Osso buco is always served with risotto Milanese (do the Italians know how to live?) and gremolata. I didn't have a lemon to grate the peel of, and I didn't have Italian parsley, so I made up Jackson-o-lata, which was pretty good. I took 6 basil leaves from my plant (in the photo!), tore them, mixed them with some lime juice and a chopped clove of garlic. That goes on top of the ossi buchi and gives them a little extra flair.

Lamb - Italian Stew and Spicy Indian Cubes

I never liked lamb. It was one of the first dishes I tried when I started out learning to cook --- in fact, out of Hazan. Surprising, now that I think about it, that it failed --- I think it's the only dish out of Hazan that didn't work for me. It was her lamb stew. I had to go to the kitchen to look up the recipe again, since her book is in the kitchen since I use it regularly. But I haven't looked at this recipe since 2002 or so. So now I see that the reason I chose it was because it had so few ingredients:

Lamb Stew with Vinegar and Green Beans

1 pound fresh green beans, 1/4C olio, 3 pounds (!) lamb shoulder with bone cut into 2" cubes, 1/2C chopped onion, salt, pepper, 1/2C red wine vinegar.

Cut the ends of the beans, heat the oil, brown the lamb, take it out, cook the onion 'til it's golden, put back the lamb, add the salt, pepper and vinegar, boil vinegar for 30 sec while stirring. Add the beans, cover, and simmer for 1.5 hours (!). Add water if necessary.

I might try it again, I remember working on it as when I was a Ph.D. student, I was excited, I decided to learn to cook and decided on learning out of Hazan's Essentials of Classical Italian Cooking and Pepin's Techniques. But I remember that I didn't read the recipe through, I didn't know it would take 2 hours, I'd never prepared green beans. I was working with 3 pounds of smelly lamb! And after all that, when I tasted this lamb stew, it was too gamy. So I avoided cooking lamb since then, though I probably ate it occasionally in North Indian restaurants.

The only time I enjoyed lamb was when this chef visited a friend of ours and made lamb-burgers with mint. They were excellent.

But then I came across Jaffrey's excellent Indian lamb cubes.

Spicy Indian Lamb Cubes

3 tablespoon oil, 1.5" ginger, 4cl fine chopped garlic, 15 curry leaves if you can find them, 1# lamb 1" cubes, 2 teaspoon garam masala, 1 teaspoon ground cumin, .25 teaspoon turmeric, .25 teaspoon pepper, 1 gr chopped chili, .5 teaspoon salt, black pepper, 1.5-2 teaspoon lemon juice

Heat oil in a pan at medium-high. Add ginger, garlic, curry, and stir. Add lamb, cut the heat to medium low. Add the garam masala, ground cumin, turmeric, pepper, chili, salt. Add .75C water, cover the pan, and simmer gently 50min. Then add black pepper, lemon juice and serve it forth.

And they are spicy, not gamy, and delicious.

Pasta alla Mafia

As I said in my last post, I've been cooking from Anna Del Conte's Portrait of Pasta, a nice book. I borrowed it years ago from the library, made the Horace pasta and another one, both were excellent, then returned the book and didn't make the Horace pasta for a while. I didn't know I copied the recipe into a file on my computer. So recently I checked and found the file. I like chickpeas, and leeks are nice because they keep for a while in the fridge. Then just a few days ago I saw a copy online for $1.25 shipped so I bought it.

The recipe I made last night is in del Conte's ``modern'' recipes section. She calls it Pasta alla Mafia because of its Sicilian origin but doesn't explain the title beyond that. I've always had a fascination with the Mafia, with all gangsters. Three of my favorite movies are John Woo's ``A Better Tomorrow'' trilogy.



(3:03 is a classic shot. But looks like you can watch the whole thing on Youtube now. Which I might do. A Better Tomorrow has scenes in Hong Kong restaurants, it makes me want to make Chinese food again. But I'm prevented. Maybe I should go through that list of recipes that don't use many Chinese ingredients from Dunlop a little more tonight.)

So back to Pasta alla Mafia. I visited Sicily once, I kept thinking whether to go to Corleone or not, in the end we didn't. Not that anyone would mistake us for Mafiosi. But many parts of Sicily were beautiful. I remember walking around in Palermo behind our hotel, which near the Quattro Canti, trying to reach the harbor to get on a hydrofoil to some island, the buildings were old, run-down, but full of character. A little like Napoli --- the pizza in Napoli was monumental.

For this Sicilian recipe you need anchovies. Anchovies have been defamed in the United States. This is probably due to incompetence. Anchovies are probably awful if you don't know what to do with them; I know what to do with them, and because I learned from Hazan, I've never tasted a bad dish with anchovies in it --- in fact I've tasted few bad dishes at all. But I remember when I was a kid and would've parroted the idea that anchovies are awful to anyone who asked me. Only the UK eats worse than us here in the US --- the Italians and French know what to do with anchovies. But ignorance is hard to overcome. If you don't want to use anchovies in this recipe, leave them out. Put in canned tuna instead if that makes you feel better. If you want to learn to use this fine ingredient, then my advice is to get a glass jar of imported Italian anchovy fillets in olive oil. I keep mine in the fridge but I doubt it's necessary.

Pasta alla Mafia

You need anchovies, pitted olives, chilies, citrus rind/zest, spaghetti, garlic, olio. You take the citrus rind and zest and put them in a saucepan with the olio and let it mingle. Bring the pasta water to a boil. Chop the chilies, garlic and olives. Add the chilies and garlic to the oil. Throw the pasta into the water, take out the citrus rind and heat the pan. When the oil is hot, add the anchovies, and mash them up with a wooden spoon until they're just a paste. Add the olives. When the pasta done, toss everything together.

Mangiare.

Indian Chappali Kebabs

I grew up on my Mom's Indian vegetarian food. Indian food is not the easiest to get off the ground, because most dishes require a mixture of spices from tray of about 8 spices: turmeric/haldi, coriander/dhania, cumin/jeera, pepper/mirch, garam masala, poppy seeds, mustard seeds/rai, cardamom/elaichi. (Recipedelights has a nice translation of more ingredients than I have heard of.)

But once you have these spices, then you can make Indian food. The easiest starch that goes with Indian is basmati rice, but I've been trying to use up my Jasmine rice and that's good also.

I don't make Indian food much --- though I grew up on it, because my Mom lives nearby so whenever I want something I phone her --- and because once I learned a little bit about how to make it, I settled for making passable dishes without much work. But the thing is, I've never learned the art of flavoring Indian food by fine tuning each spice to each dish, nor have I learned any non-beginner dishes.

I tried learning some South Indian food but I didn't progress. I never got good and fast at dosas... which is one of my favorite foods. I need to get back on that. Lately I've been working on Madhur Jaffrey's book, and it has some meat recipes.



Since growing up I've been corrupted into eating meat, and so I tried some of these recipes. I've modified her Chappali Kebab a little, because I don't eat 1.5 pounds of ground beef in a sitting, only a half pound between me and my wife. But rather than reducing everything by 2/3, which would then call for 1/6 of an egg, (which I may try at some point,) I instead boosted the amount of chickpea flour. It's not bad, but I think that much chickpea actually changes the taste, and not all for the better. The bitterness of raw chickpea makes an appearance. But they're not bad, and they're fun to make. I think in India these are made with ground lamb or goat, since I never heard of Indians eating beef. But this is what I do:

Indian Chappali Kebabs

Get the rice going (I use a rice cooker.) Thaw .5 pound of beef (I put it in a mylar sandwich bag in warm water.) Brown about 4 tablespoons of chickpea flour (besan) in your iron pan on medium, stir from time to time. Brown a little more than 1 teaspoon each of whole coriander and cumin along with the chickpea flour. Chop a small hot green pepper, put in the mixing bowl (or use powdered red chili,) and break the egg in. Leave the pan off the heat once the chickpea flour is browned. Wait until the rice is done and the beef is thawed. When that's done, then dump the beef into the mixing bowl, and then add the chickpea flour and spices (you don't want to add warm chickpea flour to the egg without the cool beef or it might cook the egg!) Heat a few tablespoons of olive oil in the iron pan, form 4 balls from the beef, flatten them into disks, and put them in the iron pan. Flip every 20 seconds, until they're done, about 2-3 minutes.

To get Jaffrey's original, which she claims to have reverse-engineered from a Manhattan take-out, use 1.5 pounds of beef, only 2 tablespoons of chickpea flour, only half an egg, and a little more coriander and cumin.

Horace's Chickpeas, Leeks and Pasta Soup

So tonight I'm setting up a beautiful chickpea and leek pasta soup based on a recipe I found in Anna Del Conte's excellent book Portrait of pasta. This is a great cookbook because it has a section of historical recipes and they've all been great, and it's fun to read about dishes that some historical figures might've eaten.

So the chickpea and leek pasta comes from Horace's Book I, Satire VI, Non Quia, Maecenas. It's a charming poem, Horace's Satires are available for free download from Project Gutenberg, which is one of the best sites on the Internet. So in this Satire, Horace is talking to the rich Maecenas, whoever that was, and says that although Maecenas is rich, he is content with his life. Horace talks about his father:

If I have lived unstained and unreproved
(Forgive self-praise), if loving and beloved,
I owe it to my father, who, though poor,
Passed by the village school at his own door,
The school where great tall urchins in a row,
Sons of great tall centurions, used to go,
With slate and satchel on their backs, to pay
Their monthly quota punctual to the day,
And took his boy to Rome, to learn the arts
Which knight or senator to HIS imparts.
Whoe'er had seen me, neat and more than neat,
With slaves behind me, in the crowded street,
Had surely thought a fortune fair and large,
Two generations old, sustained the charge.
Himself the true tried guardian of his son,
Whene'er I went to class, he still made one.
Why lengthen out the tale? he kept me chaste,
Which is the crown of virtue, undisgraced
In deed and name: he feared not lest one day
The world should talk of money thrown away

and then goes on to talk about how he whiles his days away in the Forum and the Circus, and sometimes winds down back at his house to a dish of chickpeas (vetch,) leeks and pasta. (Though I don't get how if his father was poor, he could afford to have sent him with a group of slaves behind him. But anyway.)

The leek and chickpea is what I will have tomorrow. It's a tasty dish. Here's an adaptation of Del Conte's .. adaptation of Horace? I use a slow cooker for all my beans --- I can't have beans without the slow cooker now

Horace Chickpea and Leek Pasta

You will need 1/2 box or more pasta, 1-2 leeks, 2-3 tomatoes, 6 ounces chickpeas, 1-2 bay leaves, parsley, salt, pepper, and 1 stick of celery. Soak chickpeas overnight, change the water once, drain and rinse (I do this in my slow cooker bowl.) Cut the white part of the leek into small rings. Add the leek, tomatoes, chopped celery, bay leaf, salt, and lots of ground pepper to the soaked chickpeas. Cover, boil, lower and simmer --- I slow cook on low all day, Del Conte says simmer 3 hours. Do not uncover.

When the chickpeas are tender and you're ready to eat, boil the pasta, drain, and fry it in olive oil. Add the fried pasta and oil to the soup and cook until the pasta is tender. Add the chopped parsley and serve with grated parmegiano on the side.

Sichuanese Dishes without Chinese Ingredients

I've been a fan of Fuschia Dunlop's since I met a couple who lived for a year or so in China. We went over their house and they made a Sichuanese hotpot for us (I think they used Dunlop p347 as a guide, but since they lived there I suppose they might've been doing their own thing,) in a beautifully crafted Chinese copper brazier. The meal was remarkable (this couple also made Ethiopian food for us, and homemade Gouda cheese... both of these were also exquisite.)



Anyway so during the Sichuanese hotpot evening, I asked the wife which Chinese cookbook she recommended, and she recommended Fuschia Dunlop, so I bought it. And I was converted to Sichuanese food, or maybe just Dunlop's food.

Many things aren't exactly fast or easy in Dunlop, but some things are. But I worked on Dunlop and I gained some skills in Chinese food. And one thing is that Chinese food is the most fun food to make of any cuisine, in my opinion.

Now I started learning to cook when I was finishing my Ph.D. at UCLA.. Actually perhaps I had tried a few dishes before that, out of the Moosewood cookbook, which I haven't used for years, if you know what I mean.... So when I decided I wanted to stop eating out all the time and start cooking, I wanted to learn from some time-tested books. And so I bought 2 books, one was Jacques Pepin's Complete Techniques, and the other was Marcella Hazan's The Essentials of Classic Italian Cuisine

(I'd been to Italy a number of times and remain a devotee of the country, the cuisine, the people, the architecture, the art, the history, the churches, the ruins, the gelato, the culture, the lifestyle.) Pepin was good, I used him to buy a few tools in the beginning (see my 1st post), and to learn a few basic things.

Marcella Hazan taught me to cook.

Since then I've collected a lot of cookbooks, read what's good and what's bad in cookbooks. Dunlop is a good cookbook, one of the best. Sichuanese cooking isn't hard, but you do need one skill that I didn't have as a beginner --- reading the entire recipe, preparing all the steps in advance, and being ready. You need this skill particularly when you're cooking Sichuanese, because once you're done with the prep, and your stove is on, and the oil is starting to smoke in your wok, everything happens very, very, very quickly. And that's what's fun about it.

So I made a bunch of dishes. Here's a simple, fast easy one, which isn't from Dunlop but was taught to me by the husband from the couple mentioned above.

Chinese Fried Rice

Prepare 1C rice. (I make Thai jasmine rice when I cook Chinese, it's what I find at my Chinese grocery so I suppose it's what they eat there.)

Meanwhile, chop 2 green onions, 1/2" ginger, and 2 cloves garlic. Beat 2 eggs with some salt. Now heat your wok with some peanut oil, superhot, just until it starts smoking. (If you don't have a wok, use a large pan that as much of rice can fit in as possible.) Throw the eggs in, they will fry and cook very quickly, slide them out. Heat some more oil, add ginger, then the rice. Mix and coat the rice with the oil, then cut in the egg, then toss in the green onions, and salt.

Anyway, now, my wife has barred me from making Chinese food because of the melamine thing. Now it's understandable --- but Chinese food is so much fun to make. So I'm going to go through the recipes in Dunlop and list which ones can be made with non-Chinese ingredients. Here's my list so far.

No Chinese Ingredients

• Sea Flavor Noodles p93
  
• Spicy Cold Noodles with Chicken Slivers p96
  
• Mr. Lai's Sticky Rice Balls with Sesame Stuffing p97
• ZHONG dumplings! p102 (these are a culinary masterpiece)
  
• "long" wonton dumplings p104
  
• steamed pork and pumpkin dumplings
  
• steamed pork and cabbage dumplings
  

Yacai Only (Yacai is a Chinese ingredient, but it's only 1)

• Dan Dan Noodles p88,
  
• Mr. Xie Beef Dan Dan Noodles p89,
  
• Yibin Kindling Noodles p91,
  
• Spicy Noodles with Soft Tofu p92
  
• Leaf-wrapped Sticky Rice Dumplings

(I changed Dunlop's titles from using the word glutinous to using the word sticky. The etymology of the word glutinous is that it comes from the word gluten which is related to the word glue. Hence glutinous rice can be thought of as related to gluey rice --- but that's problematic for a different reason, so I went with sticky rice, which is another common translation. But sticky has a different etymology --- people used sticks to 'stick' things to other things...)

The Siren Song of Ova

Eggs are one of the best items to have if you like fast, cheap cooking, and want excellent food. Eggs are the simplest excellent dish. You can make eggs just as well as some fancy Lyonnais chef can, here's the recipe:

Heat your iron pan. Put in 1-2 tablespoons of butter. Crack 2-3 eggs in a small bowl and mix, but not thoroughly. Wait until the butter just smokes and then dump the eggs in. It will sizzle, the clear albumen will turn white. Shake the pan back and forth over the heat as the eggs cook, this gives the eggs a little bit of fluff. Then slide out your omelette onto a plate, salt and pepper. Done. You could pay $300 for the same omelette.

There's all kinds of yakking in cookbooks about the perfect omelette and whatnot. There's nothing to it. The perfection of the omelette is that it's simple. Anyone can do it, easily. That's the perfection. It's not that someone who went to Le Cordon Bleu and then staged with some supercool celebrity chef like Susur Lee can make it any better. It's already perfect.

You crack the eggs into a small bowl, mix them up, dump them into the just smoking butter, shake the pan as it cooks. That's all.

There's also boiling the eggs. Put the eggs into room temperature water in a pot. Turn on the heat. Wait for it to boil. Keep the boiling very gentle, so the eggs don't break. Wait about 10 minutes (you'll have to do this by trial-and-error to find what consistency you like.) Dump out the water and fill the pot with cold water. Take out the eggs after a minute or so and peel the eggshells and the skin. Eat with salt and pepper. Perfection.

One silly thing I remember about boiled eggs --- I once went to Turkey for sightseeing. I wanted to see the remains of the Eastern Roman Empire --- being a classical history buff. So we were in Istanbul and we were served breakfast every morning at the small hotel we stayed at. And every morning it was hard to peel the skin off the eggs. We marveled that the Turks didn't know that you should chill the eggs right after boiling them to make it easier to take the skin off. The older lady who prepared the breakfast didn't speak English, and we didn't raise the point with anyone. So then we came back and we met a lady who raised chickens, and also my cello teacher raised chickens, and they'd give us their fresh eggs from time to time. When we boiled them and chilled them, the skins were hard to peel.... Turns out that the freshest, best, eggs, are hard to peel even if you chill them right after boiling. And so the Turkish breakfast lady wasn't the ignoramus, we were.

But anyway what's the siren song about? Eggs are attractive, a perfect dish, so simple, so easy, so fast, so flawless.... But there is a flaw! Eggs are pure protein, and they don't reach their highest until they are paired with a starch! How many times there were eggs in the fridge, and butter, and perfection awaited, but no, there was no bread! (Rubbing some garlic on toasted, sliced, French or Italian bread that has been drizzled in olive oil is the way to go. Bruschetta.) So now I keep potatoes on hand, but potatoes take a while to cook. And so the siren song of the eggs, ever beckoning, luring, leering.