chez pim

The slow and difficult bread soup: IMBB25

Really. I kid you not. This is a slow and difficult bread soup recipe.

If you are one of those people who are averse to doing anything slowly -and in the most difficult way possible- you might as well stop now. I am warning you.

You are still with me? Good! You're not still hoping I'm kidding you, are you? Because, let me say it again, I am not. The idea is hardly original, there is even a book on the subject. But then again, originality is just so…overrated. Heh.

This idea itself came to me in the most roundabout way possible. It began with my friend Derrick of Obsession with Food, who is hosting the current edition of Is My Blog Burning. Stale bread is the theme.

I've said here before that Pa amb Tomàquet might just be the best thing to do with stale bread, but this being May and not August so it's early yet for superlative tomatoes required for that Catalan bread dish.

My mind moved on to another good use of stale bread: bread soup. David reminded me of a French bread preparation called Panade, so I went digging in our cookbook library to find a classic recipe. Escoffier –strangely enough- didn't have a recipe for Panade at all. It may have been too provincial for him. Wait a minute, provincial, eh? Now that was a clue from on high. Who else to consult then but the king of the French provincial cuisine himself: Paul Bocuse?

There it was, in Paul Bocuse's Paul Bocuse's French Cooking, not so much a recipe, but a description.

A Panade is made with coarsely diced bread, sometimes fried in butter, and cooked in milk, which maybe diluted with water.
…
This soup has the consistency of a cream soup or velouté.
Generally hard bread or stale bread is used.

That was enough.

Noodle with green garlic, shitake, and crab meat

So much green garlic at the farmers market yesterday in Santa Cruz, everyone was tripping over them. I couldn't help but buy some. I also bought some fat Shitake mushrooms and plump local Dungeness crab meat.

Those, and some dried Chinese egg noodle in the cupboard, made a lovely simple dinner last night. So simple it would be a crime to write a recipe.

In a hot wok goes a little oil and then some green garlic cut up on the bias. When the garlic is nice and fragrant, throw in thinly sliced Shitake. Take the Shitake on a spin round the wok until it wilts a bit and gives up some moisture. Then the crab meat. Add a splash or two of good soy sauce. Then in goes the noodle that's been cooked up on the side. A few quick stir. A bit of pepper if you'd like, black, white, whatever, we're equal-opportunity around here. Another splash or two of soy sauce just to make me happy.

Four ingredients. Fifteen minutes to cook. Not a frozen pea in sight. Take that Rachael Ray.

tag(s):food |noodle |green garlic |shitake |crab

The ugliest photo of food ever

Well, ok, perhaps it's not the ugliest. But it's getting right up there. It's a photo of tuna tartare from Gotham Bar and Grill found in the NY Times food section today. To begin with, the presentation on that dish looked to be a rather pathetic attempt at tall food: at the base a cylindrical pile of tartare, barely holding its shape and bulking under the weight of two long slices of crouton stuck on top, with some inconsequential and rather hairy-looking little greens caught in between them. And around it all, a so very perfectly symmetrical circle of overlapping cucumber slices, with a worrying little red dot piped ever so precisely at the center of each one.

And let me get this right, the folks at the Times called up the people at Gotham and asked for a shot of food and that's what they came up with? Worse yet, perhaps that's how the tartare look at the restaurant!?

The photo accompanies a funny piece by Alex Witchel about singing for one's supper. You got to go there to check it out.

Eat as local as we can!

I'm sure you've heard me mentioning the May Eat Local Challenge a few times before. My friend Jen at Life begins at 30 joins up with Locavore to organize this challenge. I am going to take her up on it. And I hope you will too.

You don't really need me to tell you why we should eat more locally grown food, do you? You know it's a good idea to reduce our dependant on oil: all those gas-guzzling trucks and planes shipping food from who-knows-where to where-you-are can't be good for the environment. You even like the idea of supporting local farmers and local artisans. Diversity makes for a nice environment to live in, no? If the entire San Francisco Bay Area looks like the Financial District, where are you going to hike on Sundays?

Are those your arms thrown up in the air? Is that a shrug I see? You're giving up before you even got started? Eating Local is easy for me to say, that's what you think, yes? I live in bountiful California. I have access to farmers markets and all kinds of amazing local produce that you would never see at your farmers market -if you even have one, that is. How are you going to do it?

Are you ready to eat local?

The farmers market in downtown Santa Cruz today was a study in color: bright orange beets, green asparagus, colorful flowers, and purple everything. There was purple everywhere: purple carrots, purple kohlrabi, purple cauliflowers, and even purple 'red' cabbage. I felt a strange urge to put on something purple too.

The season is a little odd because of the incessant rain in the last couple of months. The cold, wet weather is keeping some winter vegetables around long after they should have been gone, and holding up the spring produce and fruits that should have been around by now.

This is going to be a difficult season and a difficult year for our local farmers, which is all the more reason to support them, as my friend Jen put it quite eloquently on Bay Area Bites.

I'm taking a cue from Jen and join her on the Eat Local campaign next month. Won't you join us too?

(More farmers market photos on my Flickr)

tag(s):food |Santa Cruz |Farmers Market |Eat Local |Locavores

You are paying me to do this, seriously??

The current issue of Food and Wine magazine features 'The Go List' with a list of 365 hottest restaurants around the world, seven of which are contributed by yours truly.

You might remember that it has been a year since I quit my geeky day job, ostensibly to turn my love of food into something resembling a profession. After so many months of trying my best at being as useless as humanly possible all in the name of a good rest, I finally got my merde together to do something about my dream. And here is a fruit of that labor.

Just between you and me, I get a little giddy seeing my name up there on the list of the plugged-in correspondents -even though they dropped a couple letters off my last name. (I really can do with less anyhow, ha!) I guess I am having a hard time believing that I actually got paid to do something I love this much. Frankly, they really could have just asked nicely...

Besides this piece, there was also a radio piece I did for Living on Earth on NPR (Podcast here), a few more pieces of writing to appear soon in a variety of venues, and a couple more really fun projects brewing -which, of course, I can't tell you about just yet. ;-) Soon, I hope. Very soon.

Ingredient: Kapi, Thai shrimp paste

You must be wondering what in the world has possessed me to put a photo of this ugly looking thing on my blog. (And, no, it's not what you think!) Well, you see, I've tried to dress it up. Don't you notice it's in a perfectly formed quenelle, and on my favorite Bernardaud Sardine plate besides? Didn't help much though, did it? Oh well, no matter how I dress it up, it's just ugly old Kapi, or Thai shrimp paste.

And you know what? It is ugly, and it tastes even worse. Well, when eaten out of hand, that is. Yet it is an integral ingredient in so many Thai dishes. It gives a depth of flavor in curry pastes, and plays a starring role in a lot of Namprik relishes. One of my favorite Thai dishes featuring Kapi is Khao Kluk Kapi. The recipe for this is at the end of the post.

I'm not sure if I should tell you how it's made. Perhaps it is, as with sausages, better to just enjoy the result? But then again, this series is about ingredients, so I guess I would have to tell all. Shrimp paste is made from a type of tiny black-eyed shrimps called Keuy. The Keuy shrimps are macerated with a huge amount of salt overnight, then let dry in the sun. The process is repeated for many days until the shrimps disintegrate and dry out completely. The resulting dark paste is the Kapi shrimp paste. It can be kept practically forever.

Different brands of Thai shrimp paste vary in color from light to dark brown, often with a slight purple hue. The consistency is usually firm (see the quenelle above). It has a very pungent smell that might need a little getting used to.

Wine Blogging Wednesday#20: Aligoté and Saumur

I really like the theme of this Wine Blogging Wednesday, which is for us to blog about white wines that are not from the Big Three varietals, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, or Riesling. Actually, aside from Rieslings, I really don't drink much of Chardonnay or Sauvignon Blanc. I drink plenty of Bourgogne Blanc and Sancerre, you see, but not a lot of Chardonnay or Sauvignon Blanc. ;-)

All joking aside, I really do like a lot of white wines from somewhat unusual grapes. In fact, I like so many of them that I have such a hard time picking what to write about. I've settled on two of them, one is a Bourgogne Blanc made entirely from a lesser known grape called Aligoté, and the other is my favorite wine from the Saumur appellation, made from the Chenin Blanc grape.

The first wine I'm writing about is a Bourgogne Aligoté from a young domaine named after the current wine maker Bruno Clavelier. Domaine Bruno Clavelier is my favorite find from my trip a few months ago to Burgundy. On that trip, I visited many well known winemakers and tasted wines in many an illustrious cave, but it was this young domaine that was the coup de coeur of the trip.

Ingredient: Green Garlic

This Spring has sprung us quite a bit of rain -alright, quite a bit more than a bit, in fact. The sky has been leaking almost daily for weeks on end. It's perfect soup weather, yes, but I haven't been eating much soup. I steadfastly refuse to surrender to this horrible weather, and I've been doing a lot of sprightly stir-fry in defiance.

One of the ingredients I have been using a lot is green garlic. Have you seen it? It looks like an over-grown scallion, or perhaps a meager leek. It is a fresh shoot of a young garlic plant, before it develops the bulbs that we are familiar with in older garlic. Young garlic has a taste that is unmistakably garlic-ky, but in a milder and gentler way. It turns quite sweet and delicious when cooked, and retains the flavor of garlic without being overpowering.

I adore green garlic. In fact, the very first recipe I posted on Chez Pim -way back before it became a food blog- actually had green garlic as an ingredient. I have been using it a lot in stir fries, and for dinner yesterday I did a variation of the first recipe I posted on this blog, but this time with shrimp, a much more available and easier to deal with than crabs.

Ingredient: Cara Cara orange

Do you know what this is? It's my favorite orange at the moment, the Cara Cara orange. From the pinkish tone of the flesh and the bright orange skin, it looks like a cross between regular orange and blood orange. It's actually a type of Navel orange that originated at the Hacienda de Cara Cara in Valencia, Venezuela, hence the name.

The orange is very sweet, flavorful, and low in acidity. It's one of those rare things that is as pretty as it is delicious. The only problem with them is the season is so very short. I've been getting mine from Hamada farm at the Ferry Plaza farmers market. You probably should give them a try before they are gone.

I love the pretty pink flesh of the Cara Cara in a salad with shaved fennel and arugula. I first had this salad at a small restaurant in Turin, and it was love at first bite. It was so simple, just a handful of arugula leafs, a few very thin slices of fragrant fennel, and some orange sections thrown in. The pinkish red sections of the Cara Cara add a little more fun to the salad in place of the ordinary orange orange. The dressing is just a basic dressing, a little mustard, a little vinegar and olive oil, oh yes salt and pepper of course. Give it a try, I think you will love it as much as I do.