Ingredients:

Use roughly equal amounts by bulk of the following ingredients. The idea is to create a colorful, artful arrangement of ingredients with no single dominant flavor; a tantalizing mix of flavors in every mouthful.

Red Onion
Cabbage
Carrots
Broccoli
Red Leaf Lettuce
Pecorino Romano

Preparation:
Dice the red onion 1/4″ wide and as thin as possible. Chop cabbage into 1/8″ strips as long as can be made with the leaves. Grate the carrots into strips 1-2″ long. Chop the red leaf lettuce into 2″ squares. Shave the broccoli flower and stalk. Finely grate the Pecorino Romano.

Instructions:
Toss all ingredients in a large bowl until they are completely heterogeneous. Keep in a hard plastic container until it is to be consumed. This mix can easily last a work week if carefully refrigerated and not exposed to dressing until served.

Dressing:
1 TBSP balsamic vinegar
1/4 C olive oil
Pinch of sea salt

by

Masala:
Whole cloves
Pepper corns
Fresh ginger crushed
Cinnamon sticks
“A lot, lot, lots of these.” Boil in just enough water to cover the ingredients.

Tea:
Lightly smoke in a hot pan darjeeling or assam tea leaves. Then steep in water.
Combine tea and masala. Add fresh ground cardamom, stir and let sit five minutes.
Discard solids. Add milk and sugar.

My ears pricked when I heard Srikanta refuse a particular pizza topping because it wasn’t ayervedic. He explained he had been living with his dad the last year and his dad strictly adhered to ayurvedic food paring rules in his cooking. I asked if he knew how to make chai. Srikanta started reeling off instructions. As soon as he said, “Lightly smoke the tea leaves … ” I said, “Wait a minute. I am going to run out to my car, get a pad of paper, come back and take this down. Do you mind?”

by

2 TBSP brown sugar
2 tsp salt
1 tsp garlic paste
2 tsp molasses
8 tsp honey mustard
1 C olive oil
4 TBSP balsamic vinegar
2 TBSP wine vinegar
½C water

My interest in vinaigrette was aroused by Bradley Lechman-Su’s mixture of 1 TBSP balsamic vinegar and ¼C olive oil that he prescribes for his chop salad. Such a mixture is rather Zen in its wholesome simplicity and I think it performs well supporting rather than upstaging fine quality salad ingredients. I decided I needed something with more pizzazz for work-a-day salads. I made a mustard variation that I loved and then – can you believe it — I couldn’t reproduce it. I played with variations for months. I came close to what I had, but I wasn’t satisfied. I asked Horatio and Jessie Diamond to taste my latest generation and each of them recommended a touch of wine vinegar. I added that and – wow! It was finished.

I always use real brown sugar rather than the stuff with molasses added back into it. They have iodized sea salt now. The brand of garlic paste makes a big difference. Fresh crushed fresh rose clove garlic would be optimal. My favorite preserved stuff is Gourmet Garden and second favorite is Christopher Ranch. I am still working on a jar of black strap molasses I bought years ago from a co-op. Good luck finding its equal. I only use Beaver Foods honey mustard. There is a huge difference between brands of honey mustard. Beaver Foods brand is the hottest I have sampled. If you care about your heart, you will use only virgin cold pressed olive oil. If you you care about the flavor of the oil, you could make a life time study of oils from Italy alone. I have to admit I have never bucked up the money to use high quality balsamic vinegar. I have never seen anything other than generic wine vinegar offered in the stores where I shop. You could spend another lifetime researching different balsamic vinegars. If you care about the Earth, please stop using bottled water. If you don’t like the way your tap water tastes, try a filter. How about one of those low tech sand filters? If that doesn’t work, you could treat it with bleach. The taste of bleach should dissipate if you let it sit overnight in an open container.

by

Jessie is such a good cook and skilled at so many dishes (Her turkey gumbo is my perennial favorite.), it is something of a slight to attribute to her such a simple preparation. But I can’t help asking her to make the bread this way every time we have dinner together. Each time, I am amazed all over again how good the bread tastes under her personal care. I think this illustrates the fact that food need not be complicated in order to be exquisite.

1 Baguette
1/2 C Butter
2 Cloves Garlic

One must start with good quality, fresh bread. If you care enough to seek out a loaf so fresh that the crust is crispy and the inside is moist, then we are talking the same language. Le Panier used to make a miche that will remain my favorite even though the company and its products passed out of existence years ago. Grand Central’s Como comes the closest to that heavenly mixture of fluffy, spongy, chewy body with substantial weight that remains the gold standard in my mind’s eye. Their Rustic Baguette and Ciabatta are also nice. Marsee’s Ciabatta and Pugliese are my next most favorite, but these loaves are a little dryer and flatter.

Jessie slices the bread at a severe diagonal to its length. This will render ovals with acutely angled crust edges, 2cm thick. This maximizes the surface area upon which you are to spread the butter.

Fresh garlic is preferable to cured garlic for this preparation because it contains more fluid and will therefore release the most flavor over a short cooking time. My favorite is the rose garlic grown and sold uncured by Morning Star Farm. (Hey, what can I say, it’s my brother’s organic vegetable farm.)

Jessie peels and then minces the garlic as fine as is possible with a sharp knife. When I help her out, she always sends me back to dice the garlic a little finer.

I try to stick with organic butter because animal fats are the main vectors by which we consume toxins. I prefer to use salted butter rather than unsalted. Unfortunately, I have found no butter in America that is as tasteful as standard faire in France. Butter here doesn’t have much more character than cooking oil! Do not keep butter in the refrigerator. It is untenable to work with refrigerated butter. Butter will not begin to spoil for weeks at room temperature and when it does spoil, it just starts smelling and tasting more like cheese. I keep a half-cup cube on the counter at a time and never have a problem consuming it free of spoilage.

Jessie whips the minced garlic into the butter with a fork and then spreads a generous amount on each slice of bread. You want enough butter on the bread to prevent it from drying out on the grill. I notice that the butter knife tends to ride on the grains of garlic in the butter, thereby creating a layer of butter that is at least as thick as the largest grains of garlic. You want at least this much butter on the bread. You need not worry about spreading on too much butter, the excess will simply drip off the bread and burn on the grill.

I keep a gas grill out back and throw water-soaked vine maple rounds on the burner for smoke. I start up the grill and leave it on high for some minutes in order to get the wood smoking before I lay in the bread. Then I turn down the heat to somewhere between medium to medium-low and place the bread on the grate opposite the ignited burner. This way I get a smoky oven effect. I find that indirect flame is a lot more forgiving than direct flame. I can walk away from the bread and not worry about it scorching or drying out too much.

If you have the flame adjusted correctly, it should take 15-20 minutes to toast the bread. You should pull it from the flame when it just begins to brown around the edges. If you get everything right, the bread should be slightly crunchy on the outside and still moist on the inside; dripping with butter, fragrant with garlic.

Dig in while it is hot!

by

Paul’s Buttermilk Dressing
Are you tired of trying to find a salad dressing in the store that doesn’t contain artificial flavors or MSG? Try my alternative. It is nothing but the basics, yet it tastes so bright and lively:
1C mayonnaise
1C buttermilk
2 TBSP Dijon mustard
2 TBSP crushed garlic
2 TBSP horseradish
3 tsp ground pepper
1 tsp vinegar
1/2 tsp salt

Now, be careful picking out the ingredients too! It is a stretch to find mayonnaise that doesn’t have a long list of unintelligible ingredients. Forget Nalley’s. Try looking at the off brands. I find (for instance) that Fred Meyer brand mayonnaise is nothing more than the basic ingredients. For that matter, this is the perfect application for homemade mayonnaise (which tends to come out a little runny compared to store bought): whip up 2 eggs yolks, 1.5C oil (safflower, soy or olive), 2 TBSP vinegar, salt and mustard to taste, in a food processor. I eschew all but fresh crushed garlic, but crushed from the jar is better than cloves-gone-rubbery . Just don’t use the chopped garlic! I am convinced they make that stuff with reject or unripe cloves. There is no horseradish like Beaverton Foods Brand for strength and flavor. Normally I would rail about the prevalence of coarse ground pepper on the market (which in most applications yields about half the flavor and thereby encourages one to consume twice as much), but in this instance it works just as well as fine ground if the dressing sits in the refrigerator for any length of time.

by