Butter. Flour. Eggs.

Archive for the ‘Healthy Foods’ Category

Of course the lyric of the Cole Porter song quoted here was all about discerning true love from mere passing fancy. (For the uninitiated, Cole Porter wrote many hit songs along with film and Broadway scores. Unfortunately he passed on before getting the opportunity to write for Beyoncé.)

However, I, true to form and blog content, am writing about food, in this case, frozen confections. Last week I wrote about desserts made with fresh cherries, and mentioned in passing what a shame it was that I didn’t have an ice cream freezer handy. Happily that has now been remedied and I am ready to freeze all manner of dairy products.

This isn’t my first time at the freezer, folks. I go back to the days of bagged ice, rock salt, and hand cranks. Let me tell you: hand cranked ice cream is manual labor, a clever trade off where you burn calories and then eat them back while hopefully avoiding the dreaded “ice cream headache.” Happily I have joined the twenty-first century: my Kitchen Aid now does all the work.

I should back up here for a moment and explain that I was all ready to write about something completely different this week. But the combination of fresh cherries waiting in my refrigerator, a rueful note from a friend about a late-nineties Cherry Garcia addiction, and the stinky-hot weather got me in the mood for making ice cream. Yet, something nagged at me, and I believe it was called vanity. I was afraid that with an ice cream freezer in hand I would shortly become a candidate for “The Biggest Loser.”

Thus my new mission: lowering the guilt quotient of frozen desserts (you can tell I mean business here because I used “thus” to start this sentence.) Clearly I have my work cut out for me; Ben, Jerry, and many others have been working on this mission for a very long time.

The science of ice cream is not a straightforward one. Indeed, Penn State has a world renowned course dedicated to ice cream science, nicknamed “Cow to Cone”; this is no mere “gut” course (although if you stop by Penn State’s Berkey Creamery enough you’ll have one. (A gut, I mean. Pardon the pun.))

Big companies have long been studying ways to compensate for the thin flavor and underwhelming mouth feel of low fat ice cream. What makes me think I could do any better? I don’t. I’m not out to remake the world of ice cream, I’m just looking to have something cool and delicious waiting in the freezer after a hot, stinky day. If I can manage to keep it healthy too then I’ll consider it icing on the cake (again, you’ll please pardon the pun.)

So, with lowered expectations well in hand I got work. I happen to be a big fan of Greek Yogurt. Even the low fat versions tend to be thick, creamy, and very satisfying. What if I combined the cherries and chocolate from last week’s blog with Greek Yogurt and took them for a spin in my new ice cream freezer? Sounds promising.

I combined a 37.5 ounce container of plain 2% Fage Greek Yogurt with two teaspoons of vanilla and five packets of Stevia-based sweetener, a supposedly healthy, herb-based non-sugar sweetener. I’m not big on artificial sweeteners, but I thought this would be a good occasion to take this one for a test drive.

Following the Kitchen Aid’s directions, I let that mixture spin around in the freezer for fifteen minutes before adding a cup and a half of sliced, pitted cherries, and a half cup of milk chocolate that I had cut into chocolate chip-sized chunks. (Slicing and pitting the cherries was the most labor intense part of the project, but even that was easier than cranking an ice-locked freezer. I pitted and sliced the cherries while sitting and watching TV. No biggie.)

The result just out of the ice cream freezer was still very soft, but very tangy, and with a pronounced cherry flavor – no doubt the sliced cherries gave up some of their juice as they were knocked around by the ice cream freezer’s dasher. Pinkberry came to mind, but better due the chewy cherries and chocolate that popped up with each bite.

After finishing the frozen yogurt with an extended stay in the freezer I dug in with crazed anticipation. Or I should say I tried to dig in: the frozen yogurt was frozen solid, and required well over a half hour before being ready to scoop and serve. Once scoop-able I thought it tasted even better, the intense cold muting some of the overly bright notes of the yogurt, the stevia, and the cherries.

But it was the texture that was a bit of a letdown, too icy in spots, and too “melty” in other spots, with no compromise in sight. Clearly science caught up with me and won. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the stuff was still delicious, cool, refreshing, and all about the fresh cherries. So, yes, it is definitely the mock turtle soup, but still yummy. (I’m not publishing a formal recipe. For now let’s consider this a work in progress.)

My next attempt will find me substituting a bit of honey for the stevia. The natural glycerin in the honey may help the freezing qualities of the yogurt. We’ll see. I’ll happily trade a few carbs for a better consistency. I’ll report the results to you in this venue, but for now I’ll get to work on that second batch.

No, don’t worry about me. It’s okay: I’ll make the sacrifice.

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Read about my talented friend Fabiana Lee and her hand-crafted empanadas in The New York Times.

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Write to me at the email address below with any questions or thoughts you may have. Thanks!

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Blackberry Tart - deconstructed

A trainer at my gym related an experience he had a few nights ago. Just to set the scene, this guy is in tip-top condition; not an ounce of body fat. A seemingly virtuous paragon of discipline and self control.

Until the cookies called his name.

He reported that he woke up in the middle of the night and could not get back to sleep because a package of chocolate cookies was calling his name. He ate the entire package before returning to sleep.

Some of you reading this may think, “Well, if he has such discipline, one slip like that isn’t going to kill him.”

My reaction veers more toward relief: Relief that my struggle with will power is not as abnormal as I think. Relief that even those among us who seem to be paragons of self-control have their own “moments.”

And, relief that I am not the only one on a first name basis with his cookies.

Of course, it is my own darn fault. Nobody puts a gun to my head and orders me to bake cookies.

With that swirling in my mind, a friend called and invited me to a barbecue this weekend. Would I mind bringing dessert? (Is the Pope…?)

Fasten your seatbelts and get ready for the usual onslaught of news stories about how this is the “unofficial first weekend of summer.” For some folks this may mean that it is time to head over to Kmart for a new inflatable pool, but for me it means (and yes, I can tell you’re way ahead of me here) the official first weekend of summer eating.

Everyone loves the warm weather (except for pale, sweaty me.) But, I think there’s an unacknowledged caveat here: in the warm weather we have less material with which we can camouflage our various bodily flaws. So yes, everyone loves the summer, but everyone is self-conscious about this bump or that bulge (or both, in my case.)

Under the circumstances, I feel guilty foisting my usual parade of sweets upon a sun-baked, half naked, will power-compromised audience.  I sympathize: if I eat enough of my own desserts, it’ll be hard to distinguish me from the pool float, so light and easy does it.

A trip to the market answered all doubts about my ability to provide something summery, sweet, and light (ish), but still hit the proverbial “dessert spot.” (I can’t stand getting home from a party and feeling like I need to root through my fridge for a little something, so I want to make sure the other barbecuees will be equally sweet tooth sated. I take the request, “Will you bring dessert?” as a job description, not a social nicety.)

This week, California blackberries and strawberries are in abundance and cheap at the market. There’s the backbone of my Memorial Day dessert right there, yes, but the question remains: what to do with them?

The berries are very sweet and juicy, so it would be a shame to bake them into a pie or crisp. Nevertheless, dumping them in a bowl, even with whipped cream seems anticlimactic. What if I made a pie – deconstructed? Perhaps I’ve been watching too much of the last half hour of “Iron Chef” (the only part of the show I like; that’s when they eat) but here’s an example of what I mean: You and I both know what an Ice Cream Sandwich is, right? But as seen through the lens of a pastry chef, an Ice Cream Sandwich is really just ice cream and cookies. You could serve them in any order and still call it an ice cream sandwich, granted, at times what a pastry chef serves may be stretching the name of the item to the limit.

(Some years back we had a happy family meal with our 90-plus year old aunt at one of “superstar” chef Bradley Ogden’s restaurants. Auntie reveled in the whole thing, giggling like a schoolgirl as the waiter described the ranch from which her Veal Chop was sourced. Dessert time rolled around and the chef presented us with an extra dessert, Fresh Citrus Agar. As we dug in, we all had the same reaction: “Oh! Lemon Jello!” Yes, we are a sophisticated bunch.)

But I digress from my digression. The point is that I can do whatever I darn well please with my berries and crust, and still call it a pie or tart.

I checked my freezer and found some Pâte Sucré waiting for an assignment. (Doesn’t everyone?)

(Pâte Sucré is the slightly sweeter version of pie crust.)

When I was a waiter, I used to see the old cliché berry tarts all the time: fluted crust, frangipane filling, and berries glazed to within an inch of their lives. Delicious, yes. Berries in their natural state? No. For Memorial Day I’m stripping away some of the varnish.

I started by rolling the thawed Pâte Sucré to ¼” thick, and cutting 3” diameter round disks. Before baking I washed them with egg and sanded them with granulated sugar. As they baked briefly in the hot oven, they puffed slightly. The result is like a dryer version of puff pastry, the dryness being desirable because I’m not a fan of puff pastry, which always seems tasteless and greasy to me.

I dabbed a bit of Crème Fraiche on the cooled rounds, and plopped a few chilled blackberries on top. Other rounds got Chambord-spiked whipped cream and sliced strawberries, the latter being too plump whole to fit on the pastry. An ample sprinkling of Demerara sugar added sweetness, a bit of amber twinkle, and a soft crackle in the mouth. Three or four of these little pastries on a plate swiped with very, very soft chocolate ganache should keep everyone happy.

Now the important question: do I really have to wait an hour after eating before jumping into the inflatable pool?

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Write to me at the email address below with any questions or thoughts you may have. Thanks!

Let me email you when the blog has been updated! Opt in by clicking the biscotti at right or by sending your email address to michael@butterfloureggs.com

Ramp Goat Cheese Crostini

When I was a kid my Dad frequently travelled to New York City on business. It was not unusual to see him climb down the stairs from the Eastern Air Shuttle lugging all manner of things that he either couldn’t find in Massachusetts, or thought he could get at a better price in New York. Occasionally my Mom or I will still invoke his promise, “I’ll get it in New York.”

(Yes, he flew the Eastern Air Shuttle, and yes, he climbed down the stairs. I have vague memories of propellers. The whole scene is very “Mad Men.”)

(A shoe textile engineer, it was also not unknown for my Dad to climb down the shuttle stairs lugging a shoe that had been sawed in half lengthwise. Ah, glamorous New York.)

I’ve made New York my home for many years, but I wonder if my Dad’s idea of New York as a great source for any and all things may have become musty with time. Or is it that the rest of the world has caught up?

I should perhaps cut New York a break here as I have been searching for something that is generally considered hard to find under any circumstances: squash blossoms. (C’mon, sooner or later you knew I would bring the conversation back to food.) The problem is that squash blossoms are as rare in New York as garden space. Squash blossoms are exactly what they sound like: the flower that grows on top of the growing squash. Considered a delicacy, they are slightly sweet and “squashy”, and they have a very brief shelf life. You literally need to eat them the day they are picked or “pffft” they’re gone.

Squash blossoms are usually stuffed with cheese and fried, although recently on TV I spied Frontera Grill Chef Rick Bayless chopping them (from his own garden) and mixing them with Queso Blanco, then using the mixture as a loose quesadilla filling. Later, as summer settles in I’ll have to try haunting the local greenmarkets in search of my elusive prize.

This past weekend I found myself in rapt conversation with the mother of a friend of mine. The subject? Gardening, something that to this urban dweller seemed as distant and far away as mining for rocks on the moon. I’m the first to admit that I don’t know if I have the right stuff to be a gardener. I hate bugs flying around my head (cows handle this better me: they swat them with their tail.) I prefer air conditioning (mine has three settings: “cold”, “colder”, and “meat locker.”)

The flip side to this spoiled city boy rant is that folks with gardens eat enviably well, my definition of eating well, in this case confined to flavor. Everyone and their mother know that veggies fresh from the garden taste better. Tomatoes are the prime example of this. I am very happy when friends with gardens shove paper bags full of tomatoes fresh off their vine into my hands. I’ve never found anything comparable at the supermarket, although every now and then the Greenmarket delivers the goods. But how many tomato “frogs” must be kissed before one finds the Prince?

Amongst her other bounty, my friend’s Mom also grows her own Watermelon. Imagine that drippy, chilly seed spitting fest on a hot July Sunday afternoon. If that doesn’t cool you down you’re beyond saving.

She informed me that they are just now coming into lettuce season. Speaking of seasonal items, I gently prodded her about those squash blossoms, my ulterior motive droolingly obvious. (No luck.) Taking a different tack, I asked her if she also grows Ramps.

Ramps are this year’s arugula. That’s not my quote. You can read it in Time Magazine. While it seems that I’m edging into true “foodie” territory here, my interest in Ramps is more due to their seasonality – my inner Alice Waters at work. Ramps are also known as Wild Leeks and have as short a season as squash blossoms – albeit with a longer shelf life. Calling them Wild Leeks is perhaps a bit misleading as their raw flavor favors their close cousin garlic in pungency. Their perfume straddles the fence between onion and garlic.

I’m not a huge raw garlic fan, but sauté it with a light touch so that its sugar caramelizes and its spiky “pepperiness” mellows out and I’m in love. Ditto Ramps. The good news is that due to Ramps’ new found fashion they are easier to find. I happily scored some over the weekend at Whole Foods.

Ramps

I wanted to do something quick and simple with the Ramps so that I could eat them in the aforementioned mellow state, but not drift too far from their natural state. This is just like when you find really good berries: you don’t want to bake them into a pie. A quick, cool rinse and a dab of loosely whipped cream is all you need.

So I sliced the Ramps into rings, and sautéed them very briefly in good Extra Virgin Olive Oil. They have a lot of natural sugar, so the intense heat of the pan gave the smaller pieces a sweet crunch. Store-bought Crostini served as a stage for the sweet, mellow rings, and I used a drip or two of goat cheese thinned with Greek yogurt to glue the Ramps to the Crostini. The goat cheese / yogurt mixture was totally unnecessary, although it added a creamy counterpoint to the sautéed Ramps. A quarter pound of the pricey Ramps (mine were $9.99 per pound) will make enough of these little forshpeisen to keep four cocktail revelers happy.

Anyone got Squash Blossoms?

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Write to me at the email address below with any questions or thoughts you may have. Thanks!

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Miso hungry

Wow. That was fast. January – the “Monday Morning of the year” – ends this weekend. Can it be just a few short weeks ago that I was gorging myself on holiday cookies? Eating chocolate like a condemned man? Seems like a distant memory. Ah well, that’s okay because you may recall that I designated January as my month of virtuous eating. The idea was to deblobify while not letting myself feel as though I was on a diet.

This week I had planned to make a cleansing, healthy, but substantial soup. The type of thing that makes you feel like you’re treating your body like the temple that it is, while also feeling like you’re indulging in one of life’s great pleasures – which to me is what cooking well and eating well is all about.

Then I caught a doozy of a winter cold, and that changed the dynamic. Out went my plans for a carefully tended, delicate but hearty chicken soup. “La grippe” rendered me too lazy to chop the onions, carrots, celery, and garlic that serve as the aromatic base for really good chicken soup. No, all I wanted to do was sit on my big fat…uh…sofa.

So I changed tactics a bit. I suppose I could have opened a can of soup. I have no objections to that. But what kind of a blog would that make? “Dear Readers: Tonight I opened a can of soup. The End.” I think I can be a little more creative than that, even with a stuffy nose.

Here’s how this came to be: I may have mentioned in the past that I am a bit of a lightweight when it comes to alcoholic beverages. You can add Ny-Quill to that list: one dose and the room starts to spin. The other night as I was holding on to the bed to make sure I didn’t fall out, I thought of Shirataki noodles.

Non-sequitur? Yes indeed, and don’t you envy my ability to get completely ripped from one tiny dose of Ny-Quill? I have no idea why I thought of Shirataki noodles, but once the thought came to mind there it stayed until I drifted off.

Japanese Shirataki noodles are kind of amazing – in theory. They are not made of flour; instead they are made of powdered Konnyaku root (a yam), with certain brands throwing in some tofu for good measure. More important: they are gluten free, and extremely low in carbs, and calories.

Here’s the problem: I tried them a year or two ago and hated them. The easiest to find Shirataki noodles come packed in a bag of water and have a somewhat gelatinous texture. In other words, they have the mouth feel of overcooked noodles. That’s a major flaw for me; I’ve been known to fatally undercook pasta. I’m talking al Dente with a capital D. (Or should that be a capital A?) As I was riding the Ny-Quill roller coaster I decided that I should give Shirataki noodles another chance, but this time I’d make sure to keep them within a milieu where they can feel at home: miso soup.

Miso soup is a staple of Japanese cuisine, so much so that many Japanese even drink it for breakfast. Miso is a paste made of fermented soy and usually another grain like rice or barley. The paste is simply mixed with water or broth to make soup. Easy and fast, right? The best part is that anything else in the soup is your choice.

Cut to the next day, and me, stone cold sober, trawling the aisles at Whole Foods. In my shopping cart: miso paste, and Shirataki noodles. As I walked up and down the aisles I kept an eye out for things that would complement the mild saltiness of the soup while adding color (miso soup tends to be a bit muddy), and add a bit of texture. I also hoped for something vaguely medicinal to attack my cold. Garlic was a given. Supposedly it has antiseptic properties that would wash away my cold.

I thought scallions might be a nice addition too; they were usually floating in the bowls of miso soup I have been served in restaurants. But that day Whole Foods was pushing big fat Vidalia Salad Onions which looked like scallions that had gorged themselves at an all you can eat buffet. They looked too good to pass up. A few shiitake mushrooms found their way into the basket – one of the familiar faces I thought would keep the Shirataki noodles company.

Finally, I realized that I craved a bit of protein and bought a palmful of 41-50 shrimp from the fish counter.

Back home in my kitchen, making the soup was literally as easy as boiling water. I cut the garlic into not-too-thin slices. I figured I could steep its medicinal qualities into the soup by not chopping it too finely. I sliced the mushrooms, and added the Shirataki noodles early so they’d have enough time to heat up with the soup.

(Shirataki noodles usually need to be boiled very briefly before using, because straight from the package they may have a bit of a funky smell. I did as directed, but I probably could have skipped this step: mine didn’t smell bad coming out of the package.)

I added the shrimp last and let them cook in the soup. This takes a whopping two to three minutes. After pouring the soup into the bowl, I added thin rings of the Vidalia Salad Onion as a garnish. Their spiky / sweet crunch would be a nice counterpoint to all the other mellow ingredients.

My instinct about the Shirataki noodles was right on target. In a soup I didn’t find their softness objectionable; here they fit in beautifully and added a bit of guilt-free chew. The soup itself was light and refreshing with a reassuring sting of garlic that I chose to assume were its medicinal qualities announcing their report for duty.

No, the soup didn’t rid me of my cold. But it did get me back on the sofa quickly, well nourished, and with happily amused taste buds. What’s the old saw about colds? Three days coming, three days here, and three days going. If that schedule holds, my cold should exit with the month of January.

And will January leave me deblobified? I’m down ten pounds. Not bad, eh?

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The kind folks at Saveur Magazine found my August 31^st, 2009 posting about Ines Rosales Sweet Olive Oil Tortas and asked me to distill it for inclusion in their readers’ 2010 Top 100 list. You’ll find it in the Jan / Feb 2010 issue of the magazine, now on newsstands everywhere. Take a look and let me know what you think!

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Write to me at the email address below with any thoughts you may have. Thanks!

Let me email you when the blog has been updated! Opt in by clicking the biscotti at right or by sending your email address to michael@butterfloureggs.com

Are you looking at me?

In a previous century I worked as a waiter for one of New York’s well known chefs. I will not mention any names here – not because I have any juicy gossip on the guy – but because the anonymity will give me freedom from the fear that if any of this ever got back to him his reaction would be, “Michael who??”

To say that I never bonded with the guy would be a tremendous understatement, although I think it is a safe assumption that chefs, as a rule, don’t bond with the wait staff. More accurate would be to say that in the better establishments they view the wait staff as the only socially accepted conduit to get the food to the table. A necessary evil. I’m not evil, I’m just clumsy.

Unconfirmed legend around the restaurant had it that Chef enjoyed Cuban cigars – strictly illegal mind you – so he only smoked them in the privacy of his office. One day when I had been asked to deliver a phone message to Chef in his office, I opened the door and was greeted by a fog of cigar smoke. I thought, “I will not cough, I will not cough, I will not cough…” and stumbled my way through the windpipe-constricting mist to where he was sitting. Delivering the folded paper containing the message, I politely queried, “Is someone burning old tires?”

Understand: I had, indeed still have, no idea where that came from, except of course that his Coroña Grande did indeed smell like burning tires.

He glowered at me, but in his eyes I recognized one resolute thought: “I will not laugh, I will not laugh, I will not laugh…”

And that, ladies and gentlemen, was the extent of our bonding.

You’ll be relieved to know that in the intervening years I have sharpened my self-censoring skills. To his credit, I think Chef appreciated the fact that I trusted him enough to make an attempt at joking banter, lame as it was.

When I think back on my career as a waiter I think of two things: sore feet, and tableside service. I have no idea how many hundreds of Caesar salads I made tableside, but here’s where I have poor Martha Stewart beat. Some years ago on her show I watched her teach an actress how to make a Caesar salad – incorrectly. Drove me nuts.

For a waiter the fun thing about tableside service is that you and the folks at the table have a few minutes to bond. If you are able to bring a little obvious skill to the task – a bit of show biz – it is an opportunity to earn a little respect as more than just an order-taking drone. There’s also the remaining fork-full or two of salad that somehow didn’t make it onto the plate.

Whole Dover sole, filleted tableside, was a staple item on Chef’s menu. Filleting, or “de-boning” as some folks called it, was one task I actually enjoyed. It looked like it required a bit of skill, but the truth is that a chimp could do it with two sticks. The only snag was when large groups ordered the sole. On those occasions the business of the restaurant would pause as most of the staff stood quietly de-boning the fish.

I love to follow fashions in food the way some follow hemlines in the rag trade. Last year Short Ribs were everywhere. Every time I turned on the TV some chef was extolling their virtues and how tender and meaty they are when cooked “just so.” But I knew they were really thinking, “Short Ribs are dirt cheap and I can still charge $18.95.”

Lately it seems as though these chefs’ attentions have migrated to roasting whole Branzino. Branzino are delicate little Sea Bass that are rapidly becoming every menu’s “must have” item. While not as friendly to the chefs’ bottom line as other fish, they have a European cachet. They abound in the Mediterranean, and have been on the menu over there for years. I would guess that individual whole fish require less Sous Chef attention too.

I realized that nature was offering some help to me for January, my month of virtuous eating. Small whole fish are perfect portions; just enough, very healthy, and a good dose of protein. While I have filleted hundreds of Dover soles, I have never roasted a whole fish at home. My month of virtue seemed like the perfect time to try.

I ran to my fish market and, voila: no Branzino! My choice that day was Porgy, but Porgies have a mouth that appears permanently fixed in a frown. There’s something about my potential dinner frowning at me that I found unsettling. I’d be frowning too if I were on his plate.

I could preach to you now about not being squeamish about food that looks back at you. Most of the folks who ordered Whole Dover Sole asked me to remove the head. Yet, I’m just as guilty as the next guy; this is something I wrestle with constantly. A few years ago I roasted a chicken. Delicious. That night as my head hit the pillow a thought flashed in my mind: “There’s a dead bird in my refrigerator.” (I still slept just fine.) Some months later I had no problem plopping a live lobster into a steaming pot. No thoughts haunted me that night. I think this is a symptom of being a bit disconnected from the true source of my food. We all try to operate under the illusion that our food was born wrapped in plastic.

Anyway, I was about to leave the fish counter empty handed when I spied some happy little Sardines sitting in the chopped ice. I remembered Chef serving fresh Sardines as an appetizer. Up ‘till then I thought Sardines were something you got from a can, but he served them delicately roasted, and topped with something I couldn’t entirely remember –I just remember it was unobtrusive and tomato.

While I was convinced that I could come close to replicating my Sardine memory, I also wanted to experiment a bit. So I filleted one of the Sardines before cooking, and the other two I roasted whole with just a few sprigs of dill in the cavity where the fish had been “cleaned.”

I filled the bottom of my roasting pan with a layer of salt. Salt allows a gentler, more even heating of the fish. I placed the fish on the salt and roasted them at 350˚F for twelve minutes. Larger fish require closer to twenty minutes.

If I hadn’t filleted one of the fish, dinner would have been ready in less than twenty minutes. Rachael Ray would be proud.

The result was simple, clean, and so totally unlike the denizens of the tin cans that you may think they are different animals. I enjoyed the one I filleted before cooking the best, but the preference was one of convenience. I was starving and could eat it sooner.

On top of the fish I tried two simple toppings. The first was a simple Tomato Oil I made by lightly sautéing a couple of chopped cloves of garlic in some olive oil then adding diced tomato and warming just until the tomato was warmed through and the oil was stained by the tomato.

The other was a Mango, Jicama, and Pineapple salad that I bought at the market. Which one did I enjoy more? The answer, admittedly a dodge, was that I enjoyed most whichever was in my mouth at the time.

While roasting whole fish is an appealing addition to my month of virtuous eating, the process of shopping for the fish and preparing them is so much fun, and the final result so gratifying, that they have officially been added to my year ‘round repertoire.

Except Porgy. I can’t deal with that frown.

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The kind folks at Saveur Magazine found my August 31^st, 2009 posting about Ines Rosales Sweet Olive Oil Tortas and asked me to distill it for inclusion in their readers’ 2010 Top 100 list. You’ll find it in the Jan / Feb 2010 issue of the magazine, now on newsstands everywhere. Take a look and let me know what you think!

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Write to me at the email address below with any thoughts you may have. Thanks!

Let me email you when the blog has been updated! Opt in by clicking the biscotti at right or by sending your email address to michael@butterfloureggs.com

Virtuous

When I was a kid, we always joked that you could tell the best Chinese restaurant in town by how many of “us” ate there.

Indeed, there were nights at Dave Wong’s China Sails that there were enough of “us” munching on Moo Goo Gai Pan to exceed the number needed for a temple quorum ten times over.

Am I teetering on the brink of the politically incorrect?

Yes, “we” love our own food too – although for the most part we save it for special occasions like Jewish holidays.  But truth be told, much of it originated as peasant food, was usually made with fairly unhealthy ingredients, and lacked…shall we say, complexity of flavors. I think that is why “we” became such rabid fans of other folks’ food.

This discussion will likely bring some stern words of disagreement my way, but to paraphrase an old borscht-belt joke, look around: Do you see one Jewish restaurant?

Yes, there are millions of delis, but nowadays those are only nominally Jewish, and as much as I love Hot Pastrami you’ll have a hard time convincing me of its merits as healthy food.

My Grandmother had a very old, very grand looking brass samovar which used to fascinate me because it was engraved with Russian words and images of the Czar. She never served anything from the samovar, but she did show me how they used to keep the borscht hot by loading a tube inside with hot coals. In her house the samovar was the only thing – besides her – that came from the “old country.” She didn’t speak with an accent, but the samovar did.

Like most immigrants of her era, she embraced all things American – she and my grandfather even spent their honeymoon in Washington, D.C.

As time brings “us” further and further away from our Eastern European roots, the definition of Jewish food becomes more watered-down than my Grandmother’s chicken soup. Pure Jewish food, when you can find it, doesn’t resemble the stuff served to me as a kid. I can’t remember the last time I had a Knish of the type they used to serve when I was a kid: tiny, crusty, and filled with mystery. (Unfortunately the mystery was about the filling, as in, “What the heck is this stuff?” That didn’t stop me from inhaling them.)

I’ve had a few requests for a Noodle Pudding recipe, but I have found that cooking Noodle Pudding (a/k/a Kugel) generally entails choices that are no more troublesome than asking, “Raisins? No raisins? Raisins in half the pan?”

Again, not very complex, and probably shouldn’t be. It is home cooking – comfort food – and needs to hew closely to an ideal well formed in peoples’ minds. When Passover rolls around I’ll probably fiddle around with Noodle Kugel, but if I stray too far afield from people’s expectations I’ll have to name it something else. Our assimilated tastes cause us to change these recipes to fit our surroundings, not unlike the way a little girl born in a rural Russian village was changed and became my city-dwelling-American-as-apple-pie Grandmother.

It’s January. It’s cold. As I wrote recently, this is my time of year to detox and deblobify. I am determined to do this as painlessly as possible, and that’s why healthy food, well cooked, is essential. I have been snooping around for healthy things to eat that will give me the fuel to stay warm during this cold winter. Hopefully it will also take my mind off the cookies and the bars of chocolate that are screaming for me to rescue them from the evil clutches of the grocery store.

So it was that I cracked open a box of kasha – cracked buckwheat– that has been sitting on my shelf so long that I forgot how it got there. This is what made me think about my Grandmother and Jewish food in general, but it was actually my Mom who used to serve Kasha Varnishkes, or cracked buckwheat mixed with bow tie noodles. The Kasha Varnishkes of my youth was that magically delicious blend of salty and greasy, hallmarks of really good soul food.

But the basic ingredient, buckwheat, is so healthy that I figured it was worth a try to see if I could recreate the flavor I remember while keeping it on my list of virtuous foods for my January cleanse. Happily, kasha is relatively obscure, so I am free to do whatever I want to it without going against anyone’s preconceived notions.

I used the Kasha Pilaf recipe on the box and added a dose of sautéed garlic then merely substituted olive oil for butter and low sodium chicken stock for water. Making Kasha Varnishkes was as simple as throwing cooked bow ties into the kasha. Because I am trying to be “good” just a few bowties were all I needed.

But what struck me was the texture and flavor of the kasha itself. Due to the mix of the kasha’s toasty graininess and my use of chicken stock, it had a gratifyingly meaty flavor. I immediately imagined it mixed with a liberal quantity of lightly toasted pine nuts and a sprinkling of currants as a really delicious filling for Stuffed Peppers. How about a cold salad of farro and kasha? I may even try to make those little Knishes of my youth with a kasha stuffing. Too bad I’ll have to save the knishes for later in the year when I’m not being as virtuous.

The bonus is that buckwheat is being touted in nutrition circles for bringing more than just a pretty face to the party. It is high in protein and fiber, it is gluten-free, and there are theories out there that it may even lower cholesterol and reinforce capillary walls.

Now I really feel virtuous!

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Click here for the recipe for Kasha.

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The kind folks at Saveur Magazine found my August 31^st, 2009 posting about Ines Rosales Sweet Olive Oil Tortas and asked me to distill it for inclusion in their readers’ 2010 Top 100 list. You’ll find it in the Jan / Feb 2010 issue of the magazine, now on newsstands everywhere. Take a look and let me know what you think!

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