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Posts Tagged ‘Alice Waters’

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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An onion sandwich?

One night many years ago I found myself in the center of the rink in Rockefeller Center. No ice:  it was a hot summer night. Uncomfortable. Humid. Crowded. I looked around, blinking, trying to make sense of the crowd moving me around like a rip tide at the beach. Through circumstances lost to the mists of time, I had found myself at “Taste of the Nation,” the annual event that benefits Share Our Strength, an amazing organization that has been working to eradicate childhood hunger for over 25 years.

I don’t remember the year, but it was definitely BFN (Before Food Network). In the swirl of people, the center of the vortex was Paul Prudhomme, the ample king (in pre-Emeril days) of New Orleans food. He brought blackened food to the fore, a modest idea that unfortunately became a vogue as outsized as Prudhomme himself. The whole thing got a bit out of hand: if it swam or walked, chefs everywhere were suffocating it in too much spice and burning it in a cast iron skillet. 

Can you tell that I never connected to blackened food? I always felt like I was fighting hard to like it —and losing. That’s just my humble opinion, and is certainly not a slam against Prudhomme. He’s forgotten more about food than I will ever know, and he is certainly about more than just blackened redfish.

But on that humid night, in the middle of an ice-less skating rink, Paul Prudhomme may as well have been Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. People just had to be near him, touch him, and eat his purposely-burnt food. 

I am not built for summer. I am bald, pale, and chilly Eastern Europe lurks vaguely in my background. When the mercury goes over 55 degrees I start to sweat. So that night one of my main missions was to find enough water to drink to replace the water that was rapidly sweating out of me and onto my clothes. (Bald, pale, and sweaty: Attractive, no?)

It was in my quest for yet another bottle of water that I found, tucked away in a corner and under the stairs, a kindly-looking, tidy little woman, making tidy little sandwiches with the crusts cut off. She was not attracting a crowd. The only way to explain how bad the location was that she’d been given is to say that if the event had been inside on a cold night, people would have tried to check their coats with her.

My heart went out to this poor ignored woman, so I approached her and asked what she was serving. 

“These are onion sandwiches. Have one!”

Oh, this poor misguided woman. Everyone around her was cooking up a storm, and here she was making these quaint little sandwiches that looked like something Norma Shearer would eat in an old MGM movie. Is that all she knew how to do? Mostly out of pity, I took one and ate it.

How do you best describe in words those moments in life when your perceptions of the world have been changed in a flash? If I were filming the moment, there would be a choir singing “AHHHH” on the soundtrack, and the camera would circle around me while streaks of sunlight would break though misty clouds and hit me like pin spots.

The sandwich was as sweet as sugar. The “onion-ness” we all expect from an onion was only an accent to the sweetness—more like the reassuring presence of a parent at a child’s recital. Understand that this was a sandwich about the size of two fingers, a slice of onion on buttered hearty farmhouse white bread, and as I said, no crusts.

I simply had never eaten anything like it, and quickly asked if I could have another. 

I am blushing as I admit that my next question was, “Is there sugar on the onion?” 

(Picture it: a bald, pale, sweaty, man asking if this woman had sprinkled the onions with sugar. And quite a picture it is, yes?)

The kindly-looking, tidy woman tilted her head to one side, a gesture not unlike a teacher addressing a first grade student, and explained patiently, “No. That’s the onion.”

“But it’s so sweet!”

With almost heartbreaking empathy she replied, “Yes, well, they’re Sweet Onions.” Clearly the kindly-looking, tidy woman was on an educational mission.

I’m sure I ate a lot of food that night, but I only remember the onion sandwich. At the time I had no idea that the kindly-looking, tidy woman–Alice Waters–is considered the pioneering mother of cooking that uses only fresh, local, seasonal ingredients. The influence she has had on American chefs is profound to say the least.

Such a simple philosophy. So easily demonstrated by an onion sandwich. 

I have never tried to recreate this simple, beautiful sandwich. Why? Alice Waters didn’t, after all, invent the onion sandwich. (I think hers was actually modeled after James Beard’s, and I doubt that he invented it either.)

Am I intimidated by being able to find the perfect onion? I am. I think the onion sandwich demonstrates that shopping with an open mind for just the right ingredients is just as important as refined cooking technique–perhaps more so. And to me, that’s a bit daunting.

It is likely that when she woke up that morning, Alice Waters had no idea what she was going to cook that night. She probably decided after she had poked around a greenmarket and found the wonderful Sweet Onions she used in the sandwiches.

My shopping is so passive. I go to the supermarket. I buy whatever is there. I don’t ask questions like, “Is this in season locally?” or “Where did this come from?” I experience frequent disappointment with apples and tomatoes.

I have the exercise backwards! I shop with a recipe in mind, instead of seeing what potential ingredients are at their peak, and then figuring out what to do with them.

I should know better. When I was a kid we lived a short foliage-viewing drive from an apple farm, wonderfully named Honey Pot Hill Orchards, a place where the smell of apples was intoxicating.

My favorites were the small, crunchy, sweet Macouns. I have, at times, tried buying Macouns at various supermarkets here in New York. My ritual is always the same: as the apple approaches my mouth, a rush of memories floods my consciousness. Then the first mealy, dull, bite jolts me back to the present, not unlike being jostled awake because of a mildly disturbing dream.

My parents would never have gone to the orchard at any other time of year. Everyone knows that fall is apple season. I need to apply this same logic to the other things I eat.

Is it time for me to recreate that onion sandwich? The answer would be found at the market.

The bread and butter part is easy. But for the Sweet Onion, as an experiment I decided to try four sources: my neighborhood market, a fancy gourmet market, Whole Foods, and the greenmarket in Union Square. No agenda here: I really like all four markets for different reasons.

I have learned that there are onions, and then there are Sweet Onions: higher sugar and water content, lower sulfur content. Sulfur is what makes your eyes water when you slice onions.

My neighborhood market had navel orange-size faux Vidalias labeled as being from the “Western United States.” But slicing this onion made my eyes water: not a promising sign. Indeed, the onion was very harsh raw; overpowering in a sandwich, but delicious cooked.

The fancy gourmet market had smaller Sweet Onions from Peru whose thin skins held out great promise. These made a decent sandwich, but one not nearly as sweet as Alice’s. And it violates the fresh, local rules: I had at the very least hoped to stick with an onion from the USA.

Whole Foods and the greenmarket were not selling any Sweet Onions the day I went foraging.  Lesson learned. Sweet Onions are advertised as being available all year round. But the prime season is late spring through mid-summer, so I’ll wait to make the sandwiches then.

For now I’ll stick to apples, which are also advertised as being available year round, but are truly coming into their season now. It is still a bit early, but I found some outstanding, crisp, sweet, Courtland apples from Massachusetts, and some better than OK Macintosh apples from Upstate New York.

So now that I have the apples I have to figure out what to do with them.

An apple sandwich? Oh! Even better: Pie, anyone?