Photos

Categories

• About
• Travelogue
• Dining
• Books
• Wine & Spirits
• Freakish Ramblings
• Tools
• Recipes
• Des Autres Bon Mots

Monthly Archives

• August 2010
• June 2010
• February 2010
• January 2010
• December 2009
• November 2009
• October 2009
• September 2009
• June 2009
• May 2009
• March 2009
• February 2009
• December 2008
• October 2008
• September 2008
• August 2008
• July 2008
• June 2008
• May 2008
• April 2008
• March 2008
• February 2008
• January 2008
• December 2007
• November 2007
• October 2007
• September 2007
• August 2007
• July 2007
• June 2007
• May 2007
• April 2007
• March 2007
• February 2007
• January 2007
• Complete Archives
• Category Archives

Most recent entries

• Suddenly, we’re in Paris.
• The Baltic Cruise 2010: Friday and Saturday, St. Petersburg
• The Baltic Cruise 2010: Thursday, Tallinn
• The Baltic Cruise 2010: Wednesday, Stockholm
• The Baltic Cruise 2010: Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday at Sea
• Minor Calamities
• The Summer of Us
• Valentine’s Day
• If You’re Ever in Cedar Rapids, Iowa …
• The Cowboy Star Restaurant and Butcher Shop
• Beginning the New Year With a New Kitchen
• Favorites from 2009
• On My Not Getting Lucky Last Night
• And I’ve Decided That Close Enough, Is Enough
• A Little Closer

Syndicate

• Atom
• RSS 2.0

Sunday, January 03, 2010

Beginning the New Year With a New Kitchen

“The larder is looking a little bare,” commented Honey P. “No, my darling,” I retorted, “what you see is clean and well-lighted place.”
You wouldn’t know it from a cursory glance--a lot looks the same--but I’m beginning the year with a new kitchen.

When we moved into our townhome roughly six years, I spent a good deal of time thinking through how I wanted to configure the space. The kitchen was--and continues to be--the room in the house that most belongs to me. And I think I did a pretty good job back then, but things change. My style of cooking evolved, and with it, my tools and the ways in which I used them. Also over time, I allowed what was originally a very organized space to accommodate the sprawl of foodstuffs, toys, and other miscellany. In a room almost twice the size of my last kitchen, I was starting to run out of both space and order. I was determined to meet the new year with a re-calibrated kitchen.

I began by opening all of the cabinets and drawers in the room to take stock of what was in the them, all the while asking myself three simple questions:

1. What do I use most?
2. What do I find most frustrating?
3. What would Michael and Molly do? (A few years back, Michael arranged for Molly Stevens to teach a class on braising in his kitchen. During her tutorial, she asked Michael where he kept a certain utensil--he told her, and she smiled and said something along the lines of “that’s where I’d keep it, too. This is definitely a cook’s kitchen.” I want to go to that place.)

The first to get emptied out, two cabinets devoted to bags (mostly brown paper bags from Whole Foods and the really nice shopping bags I’d gotten from little boutique stores over the years and thought were too nice to get rid of) and wicker baskets and trays from catered events years back that I’d also felt the need to save.

Then, the appliances. Taking into account the relative weight of each machine (the juicer’s pretty crazy-heavy) and the frequency with which I used each piece, I moved them all into the now-empty cabinet and arranged them in rows to allow quick reminders of their existence and easy reach, should the need occur.

I cleaned out the junk drawers by grouping all of the user manuals and restaurant menus together respectively, and stacking all of the recipe clippings I’d grabbed over the years into a gigantic pile that I relocated to my desk. (I later went through the pile, and pulled the electronic version of each recipe--most of them were online--into Evernote for the future.)

Next, the kitchen island, with its massive drawers crammed with all manner of gadgetry. I regrouped utensils by type or purpose (clips with clips, muddler with mallet, chinois with colander) and moved the items I used most so they’d be only an arm’s length away from the sink and the island, where I do most of my prep work.

Three piles began to form in the adjacent dining room: things I thought that friends and family could use, things to be donated to The Brown Elephant, and things to recycle or discard.

Storage items: Tupperware, Gladware, mason jars, and the like. This was mostly a matter of matching and stacking the containers and lids together--so easy, and it brought me such a sense of peace.

Pots, what to do with all of the pots and pans? I took the opportunity to burnish all of the All-Clad back to brilliant bright with the help of some Bar Keeper’s Friend before I redistributed the pieces into drawers closest to the ovens and cooktop. Note, Bar Keeper’s Friend is absolutely fantastic for removing stains and blemishes from stainless steel!

Next, the foodstuffs. Quickly discarded, anything past its freshness date, which reduced the pantry by a third. Then, I changed the shelve configuration around so I could reach items without the use of a stepladder.

And finally, the counters. I hear stories about counter wars: debates over what stays out and what gets tucked away can often be contentious. Thankfully, Honey P. lets me decide solely, and I decided that less is more. I kept only the food processor and Kitchenaid mixer by the sink. And on the island, a cookbook in its stand (for now, it’s Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc at Home), my OXO kitchen scale, and an instant read thermometer. The book is currently open to Thomas’ recipe for a New England clam bake, which I intend to make as soon as I can get my hands on a 20-quart stockpot. Seven hours and eight bags of donations later, I can honestly say I’ll have room to store that pot, once I find it. Sante.

Thursday, December 31, 2009

Favorites from 2009

Most everyone I know is eager to wrap this year up. Out with the bad, in with hopes for the new, better, best yet, best ever! Amen to that. To close the year out, I’d like to share my favorite discoveries from the last 12 months, in no particular order:

LoseIt! This free and handy little iPhone app helped me to lost 35 pounds in the last year by letting me track what I was eating each meal, each day. New items not already in the database are easy to enter into the program, and the last version (still free) has a web interface, as well as the ability to track/encourage friends who are also using LoseIt! to, well, lose it.

Ad Hoc at Home. I’ve been cooking out of Alice Waters’ Art of Simple Food for awhile now, and one of the many things about that book I appreciate is that fact that she makes good food so accessible--every recipe I’ve made works out wonderfully, and I feel like she communicates in everything she writes that “I can.” Thomas Keller’s book says to me “I could.” A home cook can definitely execute his recipes with great success, but there’s something aspirational about the way the book is written and illustrated. I read through it and think to myself, with a little more attention to detail, a little more planning, I could make this dish extraordinary. And Thomas tells you how, and that’s cool.

Subaru Forester XT. I test-drove the previous version of this car roughly four years back and was disappointed by the stiff, underpowered, distinctly boring experience it offered. The newest evolution, with turbo, is altogether a different beast. The car’s got more room, significant punch, an updated sense of style, and a bunch of new features incorporated in elegant, understated fashion. I love driving this thing so much, I’ve started to pass up frequent flier miles in favor of solitary road trips--just me, my Subaru, my iPod, and my triple shot short Americano.

Evernote. My own electronic shoebox, accessible via a browser, desktop application, and iPhone app. Evernote collects text, electronic files, audio recordings, pictures--any little snippet I don’t want to lose track of--and allows me to sort and tag this information easily and sensibly. And it synchronizes all of this stuff in real time, so however I pull up my information, I’m up-to-date. I keep my project notes, recipes, ideas for blog posts, and important PDFs in Evernote for easy, instant access. Ooh, and I can share notebooks with others as well. Nice.

Dumb Little Man. I love their intro text: each week we provide a handful of tips that will save you money, increase your productivity, or simply keep you sane. Thank you, I’ll take more of each, please.

Managing Thought. My life coach recommended this book to me, and it’s transformed the way that I work and live. Check it out.

Glee. What a great show. I could watch them sing “Don’t Stop Believing” or “Bust a Move” again and again. Oh, wait, I have. Thank you, Hulu!

Kindle 2.0. I somewhat covet Honey P.’s Kindle DX, with its oversized screen, but I’m plenty pleased with my own Kindle--a gift from Buck and Jeff for my 40th, and an upgrade from the original Kindle I bought when it first came out. The changes in form and function in the newest edition are worth the new investment, and I continue to love the “read a sample” function that allows me to check out a book without committing to it. Best yet, I can shop, sample, and purchase books from the comfort of my living room.

Lululemon Athletica. Yes, yes, it’s pricey, but it’s wonderfully well made, feels good to wear, and makes me want to be a stronger, leaner person than I already am. A dear friend once said that spandex is a privilege, not a right--if you’ve earned it, you deserve a little Lulu.

Burt’s Bees Hand Salve. All of the time I spend in the kitchen takes a toll on my hands. This stuff has been fantastic in healing cracks and cuts. And it’s under $10.

So that’s my list! May 2009 leave gracefully, and may 2010 bring more healthy, wealthy, wise, and happy than any of us know what to do with. Sante.

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

On My Not Getting Lucky Last Night

I finished reading through Madeleine Kamman’s “The New Making of a Cook: The Art, Techniques, And Science Of Good Cooking” yesterday, all 1,155 pages of it. And I’m a better cook for it.
Michael had given me this book as a gift almost 10 years ago. When I first received the book, I flipped through it, immediately found some recipes to try, and then put it on the shelf for safe keeping. I simply wasn’t ready yet for all of the background of food chemistry and explanation of technique that Madeleine provided. Until now ...

I didn’t consciously decide to read the whole thing--at least, not this time. I’d made that resolution earlier this year, and the book sat on the coffee table, ignored, for several months until I gave up on the idea. Then, one day roughly two weeks ago, I pulled the book off the shelf again to read up on bread. I wandered back to the introduction and found myself 100 pages in by the end of the night. I was hooked.

One realizes the full value of this work, I think, by progressing through it in the most linear way--page by page from the dedication and table of contents to its glossary. Each chapter provides a wealth of scientific and historical information on its topic, notes on technique, warnings about what not to do, tips on repairing what may go awry, and then specific recipes that become the proving ground for mastering the approach just explained. All, with an understated, decidedly French, wit, and the occasional, inconsequential typo. The result: understanding not only the what and how, but also the underlying why behind what one should do.

Last night, I made chicken provencal with 40 cloves of garlic, one of the recipes shared to illustrate the French approach to semi-moist cooking. Imagine a whole chicken, first browned and then pot-roasted in a cup of olive oil, some fresh herbs, and a wealth of garlic. It didn’t come out perfectly by any means--I made a number of adjustments on the fly and produced what Honey P. pronounced to be a very good meal. Being able to do that made me feel more confident of my general skills in the kitchen. More importantly, however, I realized what I needed to do differently, in the future, to properly and confidently prepare a pot roast the French way.

Thomas Keller says in the introduction of “Ad Hoc at Home” that, if a recipe comes out perfectly the first time you make it, you’ve probably just gotten lucky. No luck last night, but a whole lot of learning going on.

Tuesday, December 29, 2009

And I’ve Decided That Close Enough, Is Enough

Bread. The staff of life. The time and experience that goes in to baking great, great bread, significant. And the places where one can get great, great bread--few and far between.

But by no means non-existent. So forgive me, if this seems to be my taking the path of least resistance, but Zingerman’s does it better than I ever will, and that’s a blessed relief:

http://www.zingermans.com/Category.aspx?Category=bread

One big order each month saves me from the vagaries of babysitting my starter, and all the notes I get from Toni at Z’s telling me how much she misses me ... no fear, Toni, I’ve come home. And while you’re at it, I’ll take one of the Georgia Reuben sandwich kits for two, worth every penny.

A Little Closer

Third time’s the charm. Ish.

I’d written last week about my attempts to make sourdough bread using red cabbage starter. Tried to make a second batch of starter, no dice--maybe because the inner leaves of the cabbage don’t have enough wild yeast on them? Possibly. I went to Madeleine Kamman’s book The Making of a Cook (subject of another blog post) instead and made a starter using yeast and cumin. After four days, I had a happy, healthy levain for my dough.

I followed her instructions precisely and after the first rising was thrilled to see how well the dough was behaving. It rose beautifully, doubling in bulk in a little less than two hours. The hang-up, olive oil. Specifically, her recipe calls for two tablespoons of it to coat the bowl and the dough itself to prevent dehydration. It’s one tablespoon too much--as I punched the dough down and kneaded it again for the second and third risings, I found it developing pockets and folds where the extra oil made the dough’s surface too slick to to be reincorporated into the larger mass. The result, sourdough baguettes that look, in places, like layered pastry. The taste was pretty good (the cumin comes through faintly), so I know I’m on the right track. My starter will be ready for use again by Friday morning--keep your fingers crossed, I’d love to serve some homemade bread with the lunchtime chowder. Sante.