Feeding Frenzy

Emmer ("Farro") Polenta

noreply@blogger.com (Daniel C. McGlothlen) — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 03:59:00 +0000

A couple weeks ago we got in some organic emmer (the Italians call it “Farro”) and spelt products from Lentz Farms in Eastern Washington. We got whole emmer and spelt berries and rolled emmer and spelt. We also got a nice cracked emmer cereal that I immediately knew I wanted to play with. I was also on orders from the boss to start creating recipes using Castelmagno (a fairly rare cheese from the north of Italy).

What I did was to make polenta with the emmer cereal and it turned out beautifully.

First, I made a porcini mushroom broth (yes, we carry dried porcini at PFI). I made it simply by simmering the porcini with garlic, chopped onion and salt to make a dark, coffee-colored broth. You could add typical stock vegetables to this – and you could roast those vegetables first. I didn’t and was happy with the results for my use, but roasting the vegetables first (until they’re dark).

Once I had my broth, I slowly cooked the cereal with it (3 cups of broth to each cup of cereal) until the mixture was quite thick, even stiff. At that point I grated some of the Castelmagno (about 2 ounces of the grated cheese for each cup of cereal) into the cooked cereal and stirred it well. I also added a few dried oregano leaves to the mixture. At this point you would salt and (white) pepper the “polenta” to taste.

You could, at this point, just serve it hot as a side dish for ragouts or meats. Or you could move onto the next step in our game. The choice is yours.

The next step:

Spread the mixture into a sort of cake about 3/4” thick onto a plate or cookie sheet and cover with plastic wrap. Cool in the refrigerator until cold.

When the mixture is cold, remove it from the refrigerator and cut it into squares or diamonds or whatever shapes make you happy. It’s easiest if the shapes fit comfortably on your food-turner (spatula). Chill the shapes again briefly.

Remove them once again from the refrigerator and brush them with a good, grassy extra virgin olive oil. Grill them over a quick hot fire, until nicely marked and heated through. About 4 minutes per side should do the trick. We like to grill over rosemary wood (it’s plentiful in our yard).

You may serve these hot as side dishes or you may let them cool (on a rack and not in the refrigerator or you’ll lose your nice crispy bits) and use them as bases for canapé-style appetizers. Again, the choice is yours.

Black Chick Peas

noreply@blogger.com (Daniel C. McGlothlen) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 12:35:00 +0000

One of the benefits of working at Big John’s PFI is the opportunity to play with ingredients in the name of product-based recipe development for our website. It’s particularly fun when the ingredients are novel in some way. Just such an opportunity presented itself recently in the form of the Black Kabuli chick peas from Timeless Natural Foods. Black chick peas.

These guys are pretty much what you look for in chick peas (garbanzo beans) – nutty and buttery. They’re a little richer than regular chick peas and a little chewier. Delicious. They’re not black all the way through, but have black skins and dark tan flesh inside.

The first thing I thought of when I saw them in the store was hummous. I mean, come on. Of course I thought of hummous. The recipe that follows is different in a few ways from a normal hummous recipe. Aside from the fact that the chick peas are black, I also added lemon zest and Aleppo pepper (my current spice obsession) to the mix. You could, of course, use regular chick peas.

Black Chick Pea Hummous

14 ounce package of Black Kabuli Chick Peas, from Timeless Natural Foods
1/2 to 1 ounce of raw, peeled garlic
1 tablespoon fresh lemon zest
2 – 3 teaspoons salt (to taste)
1 tablespoon Aleppo pepper
3/4 cup Moomtaz Koura Extra Virgin Olive Oil (you could use any olive oil but this is the one rocking my world at the moment – a Lebanese oil that’s as buttery as the Lebanese usually are but just a little peppery in the finish)
juice of two lemons, freshly squeezed
1 cup tahina

Wash and pick through the chick peas thoroughly. Place them in a pan with at least 5 cups of water. Bring to a boil and then lower the flame. Simmer for at least 2 hours. I found that three and a half hours was about right for hummous. There is no need to soak beans. Certainly don’t do it here.

Drain the chick peas, reserving about a cup of the bean liquor (the water the beans were cooked in – just in case). Cool completely – in the refrigerator to speed things up, if you like.

In the bowl of a food processor, using the metal blade, pulse the chick peas, the garlic, the lemon zest, the salt and the Aleppo pepper until they resemble the texture of coarse corn meal. With the food processor running, add the olive oil and the lemon juice. Then, with the food processor still running, add the tahina. At this point, if the hummous is too thick, you may add, tablespoon at a time, the bean liquor until the hummous achieves the desired consistency.

Serve at room temperature, garnished with olive oil and sliced cucumber, with warm pita bread, feta cheese and olives.

The yield is approximately 5 cups, depending upon how much liquid you add. I usually like my hummous chucky, but I made this one smoother (but thicker) figuring that the more of the dark skin was dispersed through the mixture, the better the color. I was right.

So the next thing I tried with the black chick peas was a Mezze chick pea salad I quite like. This worked beautifully. The color was gorgeous and the chewiness of the beans gave it a nice mouth-feel.

This isn’t so much a recipe as a guide. The dressing is absolutely a “to taste” sort of thing. I like citrus, so I have a heavier hand with the lemon.

Black Chick Pea “Mezze Salad”

This is the base of the salad

1 14 ounce Timeless Natural Food Black Kabuli TM Chick Peas
2 1/2 cups medium bulgar wheat
Lemon Juice
Extra virgin olive oil
Garlic, peeled and minced very fine
lemon zest
Salt
Pepper
1 cup well-chopped fresh mint leaves

Rinse and pick through the chick peas. Combine the chick peas in a pan large enough to hold them with 4 ½ cups of water. Bring to a boil and then reduce the heat and simmer the beans for about 2 hours, or until tender, but not yet soft. Drain and cool in the refrigerator.

In a large bowl, combine the bulgar wheat with 4 - 5 cups (depending upon how chewy you want it) of salty hot water. Set aside. The bulgar will absorb all the liquid in a fairly short time and it won’t get at all pasty. Perfect for salad.

Once the bulgar has absorbed all the water, add the chick peas to the bowl.
Make a dressing with lemon juice, a good, buttery olive oil (I used Koura again), minced garlic to taste, lemon zest, salt & pepper to taste. The proportions I use for the dressing is about 1:1 juice/oil, but your tastes may very. If you want less oil but don’t want a more intense lemon flavor you could add a little water to the dressing.

Add the dressing to the salad. It’s okay if this makes the ingredients pretty wet. The bulgar will absorb any excess and will only be improved in this way. Adjust seasonings again. Add the mint leaves now.

Additions:
This is where the fun starts. You can add pretty much anything to this salad and it will just make it better. I added pitted calamata olives, sliced cucumber, diced sweet red pepper, chopped scallions and sliced yellow crookneck squash to my salad and it was lovely. Heres a list of suggested additions:

• Pitted olives
• Cucumber
• Peppers (sweet or hot, pickled or roasted)
• Yellow crookneck or zucchini squash
• Scallions
• Fresh figs
• Dried cranberries
• Crumbled Feta Cheese
• Fresh peas
• Pine nuts or almonds
• Persimmons
• Roughly cut spinach
• Pickled shallots
• Capers
• Cherry tomatoes
• Shaved Kefalotyri cheese
• Grilled beets
• Grilled fennel
• Flat-leaf parsley
• Fresh oregano or basil leaves
• Dill weed

Don’t let that be a limiting list. Use your imagination here. It would be hard to fail this salad.

Cheese Crunchies

noreply@blogger.com (Daniel C. McGlothlen) — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 14:30:00 +0000

When we were kids, my best friend Bob Meyer and I created a snack by frying Rice Chex with our parents’ best cheddar. We called the snack “Cheese Crunchies”. Bob’s mom said we couldn’t make it at their house anymore. The smell drove her crazy and it made horrible mess out of her sauté pan. Also, she was probably annoyed that we used so much of her good cheddar. My parents were pretty used to me making messes in the kitchen by this time so we made it at my house after that.

I still love crunchy cheesy things and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone. Both of these recipes came from Feeding Frenzy.

The first one, Cheddar Straws, is a variation of a snack I first had in Davenport, Iowa. My ex-wife’s grandmother Kate used to make these things. This isn’t her recipe. It’s an adaptation of an adaptation of one I found in the back of a Gourmet magazine in the 80s.

Kate never used a food processor. I never watched her make these, but she’d have cut the butter and cheese into the flour with a pair of knives – or perhaps a pastry blender.

Feeding Frenzy customers often said, as they stuffed these into their mouths by the handful, that they were like the best Cheez-its ever. I’m pretty sure that this was intended to be a compliment.

These things are a lot of work. They’re worth the effort.

Cheddar Straws

2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 pound of the best, sharpest cheddar cheese you can find, grated
4 ounces unsalted butter, cut in 1/4" pieces cubes, COLD
dash chipotle powder or piccante Spanish paprika
5 tablespoons ice water

In a food processor, process the first 5 ingredients together with the metal blade until the mixture has the consistency of bread crumbs.

With the food processor running, add the ice water and process just until it forms a dough that holds together. Add more water only if necessary. In fact, if you don’t need to add the full 5 tablespoons of water to get the dough to hold together, don’t.

Turn dough out onto a board. Working quickly, tear off a chunk of dough about the size of your fist. Flatten it and set it between two good-sized sheets of wax paper. Through the wax paper, roll the dough out fairly thin – as thin as you can without the dough tearing or becoming translucent. Leave the rolled-out dough in the wax paper. Repeat the process until you’ve done this with all the dough.

When you’re done with the rolling-out, wrap the dough (wax paper and all) in plastic cling wrap and refrigerate it overnight, if possible – but at least for 2 hours.

After the dough has thoroughly chilled and rested, get it out of the refrigerator and remove the cling film.

Again, you have to work quickly here. Set one piece of rolled-out dough on a cutting board, remove the top sheet of wax paper and using a pizza cutter or a pastry cutter (or a sharp knife if that’s all you have), cut the dough into 1” strips.

Transfer the dough strips from the bottom sheet of wax paper to a COLD, greased cookie sheet. You can put them fairly close together on the cookie sheet because there won’t be much spreading as the cheddar straws bake. Repeat this until you’ve used all your sheets of dough (or until you’ve run out of cold cookie sheets). Return the filled cookie sheets to the refrigerator until you’re done with this process.

If you don’t have enough cookie sheets to transfer all the dough strips at once, you’re going to have to bake them as you go. In that case, cut only as much dough as you are ready to bake at a time and return the remainder to the refrigerator. You’ll have to wait to cut and transfer more dough strips until your cookie sheets have had a chance to cool completely – COMPLETELY. Cool them in the refrigerator, if possible.

It’s important to keep the dough and the cookie sheets cold until they go into the oven. If they aren’t kept cold, the cheddar straws won’t be crisp and that will be hideously disappointing.

Bake the strips, one or at most two pans at a time for 10 minutes in a 400 degree oven or until golden brown. If you bake two pans at once, switch them halfway through baking to ensure even browning.

When the cheddar straws are done, remove them from the oven and transfer them (carefully – a fine metal offset spatula is good for this) to a rack to cool completely. It’s important that they cool completely before you store them, otherwise they will lose all that precious crispness you worked so hard to achieve. Store these in an airtight container. I suggest you make these no more than a day in advance – if possible, bake them the day you intend to use them.

As I’ve written elsewhere here, when I first came up with the idea for Gorgonzola Shortbread, I thought an original idea. Then about 10 minutes later, I Googled the name and found a page of entries discounting my claim of originality. Whatever.

We used to serve these with a sun-dried tomato relish. Fabulous. The yield is roughly 72 shortbreads if you use a 1.5” cutter.

Gorgonzola Shortbread

1 pound gorgonzola cheese, crumbled (use Gorgonzola Piccante or domestic Gorgonzola for this. Gorgonzola Dolce is too creamy)
4 ounces cold unsalted butter, cut into 1" cubes
1/2 teaspoon salt
pinch chipotle powder
3 cups all-purpose flour

Combine the above in the bowl of a food processor. Pulse until roughly the consistency of bread crumbs. Alternately you can cut the ingredients together with two knives or a pastry blender. Either way, the end product should have that bread crumb consistency.

Add just enough ice water (without the ice) by tablespoons until the dough can be gathered together. The more water you add the longer you’ll have to bake them.

At this point, the dough will be a depressing greenish grey. Don’t be discouraged. This is still a good idea.

Pat the dough out to a 1/4” thickness and cut with a round 1.5” cookie cutter. Transfer shortbreads to an ungreased cookie sheet.

Bake at 225 degrees for an hour and a half (or even longer - until they're fairly dry). You bake them at this temperature to dry them out without browning them too quickly. This achieves the lovely shortbread texture that we’re looking for.

When the shortbreads are nice and dry and just a little brown, transfer them to a rack to cool completely before storing in an airtight container. Again, it’s a good idea to wait to bake these off until you’re ready to use them, but you may bake them the day before without losing too much of that lovely dry, shortbread-y texture.

Hot Dish Macaroni and Cheese

noreply@blogger.com (Daniel C. McGlothlen) — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 05:18:00 +0000

Margaret McGlothlen (my mother) took eleven years off from working at the bank to raise me through what she and dad figured would be my formative years. During this time she forced herself to cook. She hated it and she wasn’t very good at it. In fact, she was a pretty bad cook. She was usually comfortable with how bad a cook she was except when she felt she had to entertain guests with food. When that happened, she was at once frightened and cranky.

One of a handful of dishes she could make infallibly and without a recipe was Welsh Rarebit. If you’ve made that dish then you know how weird it is that a non-cook would have success with it above all others because Welsh Rarebit breaks* easily. It breaks so easily that hardly anybody makes it anymore. Hers never broke. Ever. And she made it traditionally, which is to say that hers was only stabilized with a bit of egg yolk and contained no starch.

Welsh Rarebit (hers anyway) is a beer-flavored cheddar sauce served over toast points, crisp strips of bacon and tomato slices. That’s the way she made it and it still gives me pleasurable goose-bumps to think about it.

Well. She was and is my angel. I miss her and I love to talk about her. This dish is one of the ways I talk about her. When I was creating the formula for Hot Dish, I did it with her in mind: I added beer to the cheese sauce in tribute to her Rarebit.

On a more, you know, self-aggrandizing note, Rebecca Denn of the Seattle PI named Hot Dish’s Macaroni and Cheese the best in Seattle. This was in an article about the state of Mac and Cheese in our area restaurants, which she generally deplored as either too fussy or too bland. She loved ours. That was a pretty exciting day around the shop. I wish I could have found that article online but no luck.

Hot Dish Macaroni and Cheese

-for Margaret

1 pound penne pasta
½ cup unsalted butter
½ cup flour
2 cups whole milk
¾ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoons Spanish Paprika (smoked, “piccante”)
1 pound extra sharp cheddar cheese, freshly shredded
½ cup beer (pale ale)
½ cup bread crumbs
¼ cup parmesan cheese, freshly shredded
½ teaspoon Spanish Paprika (smoked, “piccante”)
1 tablespoon olive oil

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Cook pasta in plenty of rapidly boiling, salted water until al dente. Set aside.

Melt butter over low-to-medium heat. Add flour. Cook flour and butter to make a blond roux. I like to cook roux for 5 – 8 minutes, so this is done slowly. It shouldn’t get brown, only tan. It’s important to cook the roux thoroughly, though, so as to minimize the flour taste in the sauce.

Whisk the salt and paprika in a little bit of the milk until the seasonings are well-dissolved. Stir this into the rest of the milk and add this resulting mixture to the cooked roux. Raise the flame to medium heat and cook as for a very thick, smooth béchamel (white sauce, n'est-ce pas?).

Add the cheese in small portions, whisking thoroughly after each addition. Add the beer.

Combine the cheese sauce and pasta. Smooth this mixture into a greased casserole dish.

Combine the final four ingredients. I like to use home made bread crumbs for this now, but at Hot Dish we used store bought (yes, the stuff in the big cardboard tube). Sprinkle this mixture over the macaroni and cheese.

Bake for about half an hour or until golden brown on top. Don’t over-bake it. It’s possible that the cheese sauce will break* if you do that. Really.

If you truly want to honor my mother, get yourself a bag of miniature chocolate bars – the size you give away at Halloween. Milky Way or Mars Bar. Take one of the bars out of the bag and cut it into fourths. Wrap three of those pieces of candy bar individually in cling wrap and store them in the refrigerator. Eat the fourth piece for dessert. That’s what Margaret would have done. Usually while playing solitaire at the kitchen table.

* A cheese sauce is said to break when the fats and solids in the sauce separate and leave a gloppy mess.

What's For Breakfast (part two)

noreply@blogger.com (Daniel C. McGlothlen) — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 18:00:00 +0000

Feeding Frenzy In The Morning

Breakfast food cookery came slowly and of necessity to Feeding Frenzy. It wasn’t a specialty in the beginning. In fact, at first I didn’t think much about breakfast foods but the demand grew and over time we got pretty good at it. We had lots of regular breakfast business clients. Some of them continued to call literally years after Feeding Frenzy ceased operations as a catering company.

There were a few Feeding Frenzy dishes that found their way onto the Hot Dish menu: the olive oil carrot cake, the rice-and-cheese balls (actually called “bolinhos de arroz” and we served those at Brasil, too), the tomato soup, the hummous and, of course, Bob Dip. But probably the most useful Feeding Frenzy item to find a home at Hot Dish was the cream scone.

We sold a fair number of scones at Hot Dish, but mostly we used them as pacifiers. On Saturday and Sunday mornings, the length of time that customers spent waiting (for seats, for orders) could be pretty awful. But a grumpy family could be placated with a plateful of free scones as if by magic.

We got this recipe from Bernard Clayton’s lovely book “Complete Book of Small Breads” (1998). The job of making Feeding Frenzy scones somehow always fell to Craig and he can make them in his sleep now. The instructions here are basically his – and clearer, I think, than the original. The addition of orange zest was a Hot Dish elaboration. I’m not sure who suggested it first but it was a brilliant idea, although these are pretty amazing without it as well.

My final admonition before diving in is this: don’t overcook the scones. Soft and even a little doughy is better. These are cakier than the scones you're probably used to.

Cream Scones

2 cups all-Purpose flour
½ cup cake flour (“Softasilk”)
½ cup sugar
2 teaspoons salt (fine sea salt preferably)
1 tablespoon baking powder
2 tablespoons orange zest
8 ounces butter, unsalted, cut into cubes
3/4 cup heavy cream, chilled
1/4 cup milk, chilled
3/4 cup currants
1 egg, beaten with 1 teaspoon cream, to glaze

Craig always does this in the food processor. The mixture must be done in quick, short bursts to keep the particles intact, not blended into a solid mass. You can also cutting the butter into the dry ingredients by hand (which is a neat trick involving two knives). Once you’ve done that, you can finish mixing the scones by hand or with a mixer. But these directions are for the food processor which makes the whole thing quite easy.

Measure the dry ingredients into the work bowl of the food processor. Pulse to blend.

Scatter butter cubes over the flour mixture. Pulse until it all has the consistency of bread crumbs.

Pour the liquids through the feeder tube while pulsing the processor. Stop immediately when the dough forms a ball and cleans the sides of the bowl. Immediately. Craig says “immediately” and he MEANS immediately. If you go past this point you'll have what our lovely friend Mara used to call "scookies".

Do not knead. Dough will be soft and moist. Place on floured work surface.

Spread the currants over the dough and work in by hand. Flatten the dough into a 1" thick sheet by hand or with a rolling pin.

Use a floured dough cutter to cut out the scones and place them onto a greased cookie sheet.

Brush with egg wash. Cover the scones on the cookie sheet with plastic wrap, making sure not to leave any scone-y surface exposed to air. Refrigerate them overnight (or at least two hours) to allow the dough to relax.

Remove plastic and re-apply egg wash.

Bake at 400 degrees for 20-25 minutes.

When they're done, which is to say golden on top and a little darker on the bottom, take them out of the oven and place them on a rack to cool. Scones are VERY FRAGILE when hot.

My favorite egg dish is a Tapas dish and is called Tortilla Espanola. It’s often served in the afternoon, but I love it for breakfast. Basically it’s a sort of potato frittata.

The ingredients are simple:

2 pounds of waxy potatoes such as Yukon gold potatoes
2 tablespoons of finely chopped onion
Olive oil
6 eggs
Salt to taste.

The instructions are tricky. Slice the potatoes into really thin coins – 1/16” thick. Use your mandoline if you have one.

The next step is to cook the potatoes. I usually sauté/fry them with the onion in olive oil until they’re golden brown. Recently, though, I read an old Spanish recipe that called for deep-frying the potatoes instead. Genius. That would be perfect. My potato coins would be uniformly brown and crisp.

If I did deep fry them, I’d sauté the onions separately and add them to the potatoes later (after the potatoes are fried, obviously).

Either way, drain the potatoes and onions well. You can reserve the olive oil. Let them cool a bit (but they don’t have to be cold for the next step).

In a bowl, beat the eggs with enough salt (somewhere between a teaspoon and a teaspoon and a half is right for me). Add the potatoes and onions and mix well.

Fire up a clean 8-or-9-inch frying pan (a heavy-bottomed one with rounded sides works best) with some of the reserved olive oil – enough to coat the pan. You want it fairly hot but not smoking.

Add the eggs and potatoes to the pan. It should sizzle – a lot. If it doesn’t sizzle this won’t work. Now that you’ve got the eggs in the pan, it’s almost as though you’re making an omelet. Shake the pan to keep the eggs from sticking. Keep the eggs moving and not sticking. You can run a rubber spatula (actually a high-temp silicone spatula) around the edges, lifting a bit. Do not STIR the eggs.

When the tortilla is golden brown on the first side, take it off the heat. Place a nice, big plate (with a larger diameter than the pan) on top of the frying pan and invert the contents onto the plate. The less-cooked side should be face down on the plate. Now add a little more olive oil if needed and slide the less-cooked side back into the pan, still face down. This can be a messy step. Be careful.

Cook that side until it's golden brown, too. Serve it warm. Serve it cold. Serve it room temperature. A little fresh ground pepper over it. Serve it any way you like but serve it to me, okay?

Torta 42nd Street

This is an invention of mine. It’s a rustic torta. I didn’t invent rustic tortas but I invented this one. What’s a rustic torta? It’s sort of like a composed quiche. VERY simple. Incredibly popular dish from Feeding Frenzy. I made it at a party recently and as usual it disappeared.

Prep:

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

3 Granny Smith or other tart baking apples – core, peel and slice them into 1/8” rings.

1 sweet onion. Peel and slice this into 1/8” rings as well.

½ pound or more of a crumbly gorgonzola cheese – preferably real Italian Gorgonzola Piccante, but we used to use domestic for business and people loved it anyway.

3 eggs, a cup of heavy cream and salt and pepper to taste. Whisk these together in a bowl. Beat them until frothy.

Instructions:

Line a well-greased 9” tart or pie pan with puff pastry. I use store bought puff pastry. Don’t be a hero. Be like me. Use the store bought. I get mine at work. Good stuff. Leave it on the counter for a few minutes and it will be thawed enough to work with. When lining the pan, the edges of the pastry don’t have to be smooth or fluted or anything. With puff pastry, ragged edges look cool and handmade. By the way, the one in the photograph was made using a pie plate. I inevitably use a tart pan instead now. Much prettier.

Into the lined tart shell, layer half the apples, half the onion and then half the cheese. Repeat. It’s nice if you can do the layering in a pretty, tartlike way, but don’t sweat it. At the end of the layering process you should have a nice, tall mound.

Now, carefully and slowly, pour the egg mixture over and into the layered ingredients. Carefully and slowly because it's so easy for all the egg mixture to end up all over your counter. Let the egg mixture find all the cracks and crevices. If you need to, lift some of the top layer of filling up a little bit to allow it to distribute more evenly.

Bake in the preheated oven until golden brown and well-set – it can take 40 to 45 minutes, depending upon your oven.

I like this best at room temperature. Craig likes it best hot out of the oven.

The basic template (lined tart or pie pan filled with stuff and bound with beaten egg) can be used for almost anything to good effect. Use your imagination.

And don’t forget about breakfast. Most important meal of the day. Until lunchtime.

What's For Breakfast? (Part One)

noreply@blogger.com (Daniel C. McGlothlen) — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 07:34:00 +0000

Hot Dish began life, conceptually, as a breakfast joint. And there’s an argument to be made that it’s what we did best - except for everything else we did. Anyway, it seems only right to start these articles of recipes from my professional cooking life with breakfast foods from Hot Dish. An article will follow that will explore the same subject as approached by Feeding Frenzy (by the way – that’s where the scone recipe properly belongs even though we served them at Hot Dish). And so:

Breakfast At Hot Dish

The Good Stuff

First of all, as much as I’d love to take full credit for what went right at Hot Dish a lot of the credit fell squarely on the shoulders of the ingredients we used (while I was there). I’ll take a moment to mention a few of the more interesting breakfast ingredients now.

We used 100% maple syrup. After I left in July, 2007 that changed. They started using Mrs. Butterworth’s syrup. Hand to God. Mrs. Butterworth’s syrup. If you don’t think that people can tell the difference between the real thing and the fake thing – well, you’re wrong. Don’t cut corners on this stuff. Use Mrs. Butterworth’s if you honestly prefer it, but don’t pretend to yourself that it’s as good as maple syrup. My partner Craig is from New Hampshire. I thought he was going to have an aneurysm when we discovered they’d made this particular change. He’s okay now. A couple years of therapy, a few glasses of wine – he’s right as rain.

We served Greek-style yoghurt. It was alive with flavor. I mean really, literally alive. And it lit up your mouth. The one we used was Greek God’s honey yoghurt, which is a local brand. But there are all kinds of brands, including ones imported from Greece. Everybody has their favorite.

We cracked every egg we used. Fresh that morning. Go ahead -go ask your typical egg house line cook if they do that. Not even many of the old-timers do it anymore. We did. We had to jump through some hoops to do it, though. The King County Public Health department tried to end the practice but we switched to pasteurized whole eggs and they gave us a variance. Crisis averted. Thank god. I can taste the difference between a fresh egg (even a pasteurized one) and liquid eggs out of a carton and I'll bet you can, too.

We served our vanilla-glazed grilled smoked pork chop at both breakfast and dinner. We cut the chops from kasslers (smoked pork loins) that we got from Bavarian Meat Company. This is a wonderful pork loin. Just the right amount of fat. Just the right amount of smoke. We made a vanilla simple syrup and we dropped the chops into that and let them soak for, oh, a day or so at least. Then we grilled the chops to order – for grill-marks, mostly, and to heat them through - basting them frequently with butter. Were they good? Are you kidding me?

The recipe for simple syrup goes like this: equal parts sugar and water. Combine these in a saucepan and heat, stirring all the while, until the sugar is completely dissolved and the water is absolutely clear again. Add vanilla extract to taste. Use enough vanilla extract to turn the syrup the color of fairly strong tea. Don't boil it. Let it cool completely before adding the meat to it. Refridgerate the loins while they soak.

By the way: you get the chance, try the bacon from Bavarian Meats. Tom Douglas is using it, I hear. It's amazing. I tried to get it on our menu but was over-ruled.

One of my favorite breakfasts at Hot Dish was the Greek omelet. This is how we made it:

We made a folded omelet in the usual way. Just before folding it we spread it with hummous and then filled it with fresh spinach (not cooked – not even wilted), feta cheese and sliced kalamata olives. Fold. Serve with fruit and potatoes. Or not.

I added the hummous to the mix when I was typing out the original menu. I sat here in front of the same computer I’m sitting at now wanting to separate our Greek omelet from everyone else’s without making it fusion-y – and the inspiration just fell into place. The hummous was like a missing link. By the way, my recipe for hummous is right here.

Since leaving Hot Dish, I’ve discovered Ajvar (an Indo-European pepper and eggplant spread). I spread that onto my Greek omelets along with the hummous now and the results are spectacular. I use hot Ajvar, but mild Ajvar would work just as well. By the way, you can get Ajvar at PFI. As I sit here, I realize that I want to squeeze a little fresh lemon juice over the fillings just before I fold the omelet. You try that at home. Lemme know how it goes.

And then there was Oatmeal.

Rebecca Denn said in her review of Hot Dish that we really should have called the oatmeal something else. It had transcended its essential oatmealiness and needed a new name. Never mind. It was oatmeal. I'll admit it was pretty over-the top. This is how you make it:

Use 1 part steel cut oats to four parts very lightly salted water (1/2 teaspoon of salt for every quart of water).

Combine these ingredients in a saucepan. Bring to a boil, stirring occasionally. Reduce to medium heat. Simmer for 30 minutes or so, again stirring occasionally. When it’s a nice, thick oatmeal consistency, spread it no more than an inch thick onto a shallow baking pan. A jelly roll pan will work. Cool the oats completely in the refridgerator. So far this is something like making polenta for grilling, right?

Now bear with me while I digress slightly. This is what’s in my lemon curd: 12 large egg yolks, 2 1/4 cups granulated sugar, 6 ounces unsalted butter (very soft), a pinch of salt, 9 fluid ounces lemon juice and 2 tablespoons lemon zest (finely grated). I can’t emphasize enough that the eggs should be fresh, the butter should be sweet and unsalted and the lemon juice should be squeezed just before you make the curd.

Here are the instructions for the curd: in a saucepan, cream together the eggs, the butter and the sugar. When I say “cream together”, I mean that I want you to mix them together until they form an homogenous and smooth glob. Do not beat air into the mixture. You want use the sugar and butter to protect the eggs from the cooking action of the lemon juice, which you add only once the creaming together of the first three ingredients is done. When you add the lemon juice, also add your pinch of salt.

Slowly, patiently heat the pan, stirring all the while and using a candy thermometer to gauge the curd’s progress. Stir deeply into the corners with a heat-resistant “rubber” spatula (I think most of these are actually silicone now). Keep stirring until the thermometer reads about 205 – 210 degrees. Don’t let the curd turn into scrambled eggs. Don’t beat air into the curd. Stir it gently but thoroughly and for goodness sake don’t let it get too hot too fast.

When you’re done it should be thick enough to coat the spatula – and a lovely translucent yellow.

This is the point at which you add the lemon zest. If you add it before you cook the curd, it will turn orange and you don’t want that. It looks funny. Add the zest at the end. But don't forget the zest.

Pour your curd into a nice shallow dish and let it cool in the fridge. Once it was cold we stored our curd in a squeeze bottle. That worked pretty well.

So now we’re ready to make Hot Dish Oatmeal. You take yourself an 8 or 12 ounce ceramic gratin dish. Or whatever nice, ovenproof individual serving bowl you have handy. Line it with a generous puddle of lemon curd. How big the puddle should be is your call. If you’re trying to duplicate Hot Dish Oatmeal, just use your best judgement as to how much lemon curd to use. Then add about 50% more.

Now cut your chunk (or slab) of steel cut oats. Our oat chunks were in the neighborhood of 3” wide by 5” long by not quite 1” tall. Whatever size your oatslab is, set it tenderly onto your lemon curd pool. Bake it like that until it’s warmed through. It takes about 10 or 15 minutes in a conventional oven at about 350 degrees. It takes much less time in the microwave oven and it’s very nearly as good – just wrap it in cling wrap prior to heating it if you use the microwave oven.

Once it’s hot, take it out of the oven and sprinkle it with dried cranberries (plenty of them – this is a Hot Dish breakfast you’re making) and then drizzle the whole works liberally with crème fraiche (which you can purchase from most higher-end grocery stores now). If you don’t have crème fraiche you can use good yoghurt (see above) or sweetened sour cream. But get the crème fraiche.

A final note: you might like your oatmeal a little chewier. I do. In that case, use three parts water to one part steel cut oats. Otherwise the instructions are the same.

Gingerbread Pancakes

These guys were rock stars. They really were. None of the reviews mentioned them, but they had a huge fan base among our guests. And when I mentioned on my Facebook page that I planned to post Hot Dish recipes, the Gingerbread Pancakes recipe was requested almost at once. So here it is.

But before I give the ingredients, I think it’s fair to mention that it’s a better dish if you use fresh ginger in place of the dried ground ginger. Fresh ginger lends the dish a nice citrus/spice bite that it just doesn’t quite have with the stuff in the jar. We used the stuff in the jar at the restaurant, though. You decide: do you stick with authenticity or do you improve the dish? If you use fresh-grated ginger, remember that it is actually milder in some ways than dried. You can increase the amount used up to (and even more than, if you like) 4 to 1, fresh over dried. It will change the end product, so you might want to experiment with it a little first.

Anyway: Gingerbread Pancakes

3 eggs
1/4 cup brown sugar, firmly packed
1/2 cup buttermilk
1/2 cup water
2 tablespoons molasses
1/4 cup brewed coffee
1 3/4 cups flour (the precise conversion we used was 1 5/6 cups but who measures like that?)
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 teaspoon ground clove
2 teaspoons cinnamon
4 teaspoons ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/4 cup butter, melted
1 or 2 tablespoons milk

Cream together the eggs and brown sugar. Add the buttermilk, water, molasses, and coffee, and stir until smooth. Set aside.

In another bowl, combine the remaining dry ingredients and whisk until thoroughly mixed.

Combine wet and dry ingredients with the melted butter. Add just enough milk to make a pourable batter – if necessary. Make these just exactly the way you would ordinarily make pancakes. Use a nice, hot, well-oiled cooking surface. At home we use a cast iron griddle that Craig seasoned with rendered fat from Prosciutto di Parma and that's what I suggest you use, too.

Serve with custard sauce (crème Anglaise – see below) in a cruet on the side. People will ask for maple syrup, too. Go ahead and give it to them - in a cruet on the side. Real maple syrup though, or Craig will jump all over your case about it and you want no part of that. Oh - and while you're at it, use real butter, will you?

Custard Sauce (crème Anglaise)

3/4 cup half and half
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 tablespoons sugar
2 each large egg yolks
dash salt

Combine ingredients in a saucepan. Whisk over medium heat, scraping the pan occasionally, until somewhat thickened. Cool.

I'll take our attention from breakfast for the moment and focus it on dessert long enough to talk about Ginger Poofs. The affable, frankly adorable juvenile delinquent who practically lived at Hot Dish – sometimes as a server, sometimes as a dishwasher, sometimes as a carpenter – came up with the genius idea of dropping the batter for Gingerbread Pancakes into deep fat and cooking them as fritters. HOT deep fat is necessary (at least 350 degrees F) and the whole thing would work a little better if the batter was just a little drier. So back off the liquid ingredients just a little if you make the fritter version of this recipe.

The results, called Ginger Poofs, are ridiculously good. We dusted them in confectioners sugar (although I think I’d have preferred superfine baker’s sugar instead) and served them with Whipped Cream. They’d have been great with berries. They’d have been great with a little lemon curd. They’d have been great with ice cream.

If you don’t mind the mess, try them at home. Serve them hot.

This would be a good time to acknowledge the suggestions and creativity of many of the Hot Dish staff. Their contributions were invaluable.

One final note? This isn't diet food. But that’s between you and your cardiologist.

A New Direction

noreply@blogger.com (Daniel C. McGlothlen) — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 12:38:00 +0000

I've decided to post some of the recipes I've developed or adapted in my professional life in the food industry. I've decided to do it here. I'm hoping that this will, among other things, jumpstart some serious "research and development" time in the kitchen as well as give new life to my food writing.

For those of you who don't know me well, I have co-owned two restaurants and a catering company. The first restaurant was a Brazilian restaurant - the first in Seattle. It was called Brasil. This was in the latter half of the nineteen eighties. The food was as authentic as we knew how to make it. My partner in business and life at the time was the late Romilson Medeiros who was originally from Rio de Janeiro. It was his taste that guided us. There were other chefs in that kitchen, from the US and from Brazil, but mostly it was Romi who was the arbiter of what was representative of his Brazil and what was not.

My role, predominantly, was to adapt Romi's vision of "Brazilian-ness" for the commercial kitchen in the United States with the ingredients I was able to cobble together - some of which we imported ourselves. We made relatively few concessions to American tastes - but were well-recieved by the Seattle food press (who knew little of Brazilian cookery at the time). I still have Brasil's "recipe book" and will quote from that. I also have a fairly large collection of both historic and modern Brazilian cookbooks in Portuguese and in English. I expect that I will be sharing some experiments from these as well.

We also served some Portuguese cuisine at Brasil (Caldo Verde, Bacalhau a Gomes de Sa, Coxinhos de Galinha). My experience with this cuisine, though, was mostly informed by the fact that I lived in Portugal for some time right at the close of the eighties. I will certainly be sharing some Portuguese recipes here.

My other restaurant was called Hot Dish. I was executive chef there from April, 2006 (we opened in May, 2006) until July 2007. This was a different kettle of fish entirely. Our intention with Hot Dish was to create accessible, middle-American comfort food with the best possible ingredients. I created the menu and the recipes that we opened with myself. I tested the dishes on my friends and at "soft open" events. We got some pretty good press - but the important part is that I was (and am) proud of the food we created there. I have the Hot Dish "book" as well. I'll be quoting liberally from that. I'll also be presenting some adaptations of Hot Dish recipes that I've had rattling around in my head for some time.

By the way, Hot Dish closed in December, 2007 - five months after I left. In those last months, the recipes I created for the restaurant were significantly altered for cost-and-labor-saving reasons. Those changes will obviously not be reflected here.

Finally, I'll be posting recipes from the Feeding Frenzy files. Feeding Frenzy was the catering company I started with Craig (my life partner for the last 15 years) in 1999. Together we ran it (with me as chef and Craig as "project manager") until we were offered partnership in Hot Dish in 2006.

Feeding Frenzy was a dream project in many ways. It was just Craig and I doing the work so we never worried about labor costs. We heavily promoted small dish foods from all over the world - tapas, mezze, antipasti, salgadinhos - even dim sum. Samosas and pakora. Nibbles of all kinds. These are all notoriously labor-intense preparations but, as I say, we didn't care about that much. We also did a huge amount of big entree work (because you have to do big entree work if you're a caterer) and most of those recipes just fell out of my head as we were working the jobs. It was a high-wire act a lot of the time and that made it a delightful experience.

Anyway. Stay tuned. This should be fun. I won't say I'm not nervous about posting this but I've decided that the fun of sharing recipes far outstrips their value as intellectual property. I hope to hear from you as you try things out. Or perhaps you have some special requests? Give me a shout.

Grilled Corn and Poblano Pepper Soup

noreply@blogger.com (Daniel C. McGlothlen) — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 00:26:00 +0000

I love soup. So does Craig.

Tonight we had a soup I devised while shopping at the Columbia City Farmer's Market.

It worked like this:

Husk and clean 6 ears of sweet corn. Grill them, basting them all the way with melted butter. When they are well-browned, cut the kernels off the ears and into a large soup pan.

Wash and then grill about two or two-and-a-half pounds of poblano peppers until well-blistered. Remove and discard the stems and seeds from the peppers. Completely puree the cleaned peppers in the blender with two cups of half and half. Add this mixture to the soup pan with another two cups of half and half.

Bring to a low simmer. Season with salt, cumin and oregano (preferably Mexican oregano). Simmer for 10 or 15 minutes until flavors are well combined. Serve with croutons (see below) and fresh, chopped tomatoes - ours tonight were Amish Paste tomatoes. Very rich.

CROUTONS

I made the croutons from bread I'd made last night specifically for this purpose. The bread was a wheaten cornmeal/rosemary bread that I'd seasoned liberally with cumin, oregano and hot Spanish Paprika (yes - the smoked kind). I toasted and then cut the bread into smallish cubes, and tossed these in a hot, oily pan with a lot of crumbled Kotija cheese. Kotija doesn't melt but it does brown and stick somewhat to the bread. I scraped all the brown crumbs of cheese from the pan and served those as well.

There was heat from the peppers; sweetness from the corn and tomatoes; crunch from the bread and corn; richness from the half and half and the brown butter made in the corn-grilling process; a sort of salty sponginess from the cheese. As a dish, it was earthy and vegetative - mostly it was green. It was caramel and spice. It was hearty.

For dessert we're having fresh raspberries and vanilla ice cream.

Recovering oneself

noreply@blogger.com (Daniel C. McGlothlen) — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 15:53:00 +0000

I had stomach flu this last weekend. So I disappeared from the restaurant, stayed in bed and ate nothing from Thursday at about 1 PM to Sunday at about 4 PM.

Which isn't to say I didn't have any nourishment. I had a little juice. I had a little M.F.K. Fisher. Thank goodness. She keeps me pretty full.

Sunday afternoon, I asked my saute cook to make the following rice pudding:

1 cup of white rice; 2.5 cups of vanilla soy milk; just a bit of salt; perhaps a teaspoon of sugar; a handful of raisins.

It was lovely. It was medicine. I had two small doses of it that night. They sat beautifully, tranquilly in my belly and I was better immediately.

Yesterday, I ate more rice. Plain rice, this time - a bit of salt, a very little bit of pepper, a handful of thyme. Oddly, I also craved a handful of olives. So I ate a handful of olives. They were delicious. My weak tummy trembled just a bit under their weight but said nothing of consequence.

Today, I thought I'd mix it up a bit. My belly is still very tired but now hungry for more substance. I'm at Hot Dish. It's Tuesday, so we're closed.

We make our steel-cut oats like polenta here. We cook it slowly in water with just a bit of salt and then spread it a couple of inches thick into long, narrow pan. When we serve it, we cut a slab off the larger slab, bake it to order with lemon curd. Then we sprinkle it with dried cranberries and drizzle it with creme fraiche.

Obviously THAT wasn't going to work for me today. All that butter and egg. All that sugar. Absolutely not. But I wanted a little roughage in my roughage today. So I cut myself some oatmeal, baked it off plain. I drizzled that with vanilla soy milk, sprinkled it with cranberries and then just a very tiny bit of turbinado. Perfect.

I blame Lynne Rossetto Kasper for what happened next. I've been listening to old episodes of The Splendid Table online. It's nice. It's eavesdropping on people having conversations about food. The episode I was listening to featured Soyoung Scanlon who is a young cheesemaker in California. She talks about cheese the way I eat it and smell it. She talks about milk and cream the way some of us talk about our homes and our lovers.

I had to have some cheese. Fortunately, I was here at the restaurant and I have some cheese. I have good cheese here. Among several wedges and wheels is the one I most often site as my favorite cheese. A ridiculous claim, actually (how can one have a favorite cheese?), but the cheese is good. Dorothea is a mild, complex goat milk Gouda from the Netherlands. They add potatoes to the goat milk before they pour it into molds. I've written about it here. It is a surprising cheese that just keeps giving deeper levels of flavor.

I've been avoiding dairy, for the most part, since I got sick. Avoiding fat, actually. On advice of friends and a couple of doctors (who, come to think of it, are also friends).

Nervous, I slunk into the kitchen to pull out the little red-rinded wedge of Dorothea. The cheese inside the rind was pale cream. I unwrapped it gingerly. The smell was like coming in from the cold. I sliced a very thin wedge. Perhaps half an ounce. I lifted it in my fingers to the plate and the flesh of the cheese was appealingly dry and very slightly crumbly. I carried it on its plate to the bar where I type this.

I'm looking at it right now.

Yogurt

noreply@blogger.com (Daniel C. McGlothlen) — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 08:04:00 +0000

Gosh.

If you get the chance to try Greek Gods Yogurt (from Mountlake Terrace, Washington), do so. It's better than good. It's rich and light at the same time. It's flavorful without killing your palate with culture. The Hermes variety (with honey) is pretty much perfect with granola and stuff. We have it at Hot Dish but it's being sold elsewhere. LOTS of places, obviously.

Wow. I just went to their website so I could creat a link to it more easily. They have more products now! They make hummus and feta cheese now! And Tzatziki! Are you KIDDING ME?!?

:) Sorry. Calming down now.

Anyway. There have been some minor availability problems (Costco has tried fitfully to carry them but their demand was too great at the time for these guy's facilities. I still haven't seen them back at Costco. But look for them.

Amazing. No, I'm not getting paid for this.

Stop looking at me like that.

Go buy yogurt now.

Small Dishes

noreply@blogger.com (Daniel C. McGlothlen) — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 06:08:00 +0000

It is 1989. I sit in a comfortable chair in a bar not far from the Parque de Retiro in Madrid. I drink a glass of red Rioja and munch olives. The air smells of fresh-grilled sardines, of garlic, of ripe cheese. The earthy taste of Tortilla Española lingers in my mouth. Just now I wonder why I would ever want to leave this place.

I did leave it, of course, and came home to the United States. I came home to our stodgy, entrée-centered food culture. Perhaps we have a puritanical fear of the pleasures of the table or perhaps we are too busy to take the time to enjoy those pleasures. Either way, we have for most of our culinary history kept a pretty efficient table. I use the word “efficient” in the most pejorative way possible.

Until fairly recently, we focused our menus upon dishes that filled us up quickly. Meat and potatoes loomed large in the American kitchen. Convenience foods not only answered the needs of the busy cook, they also ensured that dining was orderly and fast. We are less concerned with how these things taste than with how much time they take out of our lives. It is no accident that the United States is the home of fast food, of the power bar, of Lunchables.

Never mind. A cure for our irrational fear of the slow and delicious is here. It has been in our midst, in restaurants and homes, in a small and unobtrusive way for many years, but its proponents are starting to get noisy. Count me as being among them.

A small digression: There is a thing that happens at buffets – weddings, corporate receptions, birthday parties, it doesn’t matter. It happens at buffets. When we open the buffet line to the guests, they rush at it like starving aquarium fish at the first sign of brine shrimp. They dash through, piling up salads and meat and potatoes (and whatever else they might find) on huge plates. The huge plates are intended to comfort the hungry.

The guests line up at once as though they believe that this is the only moment in which their appetites may be satisfied. There is a feeding frenzy, I’m afraid. It isn’t social or particularly pleasurable. It is, I suppose, expedient. It gets the eating part out of the way quickly so that everyone can move on to the next part of the event. I will set aside, for the moment, that it is “the eating part” that usually is the most expensive part of any event. It seems illogical to me that people should want to rush through it.

What if, instead of the mad dash to get the food in and over with, we had a paradigm shift and decided that eating could be part of the entire evening? What if, in addition to the shaking of hands and the dancing and the speeches, we also shared foods that woke our senses, lifted our spirits and enhanced the moment? What if the “eating part” wasn’t an obstacle to be overcome, but a seamless part of the experience of spending this time with those we love or, at least, like fairly well? What if we conspired to get rid of food lines at our celebrations?

There are, all over Seattle, a number of restaurants that feature not so much different foods (we have all gotten fairly used to seeing regional or “ethnic” foods) but different approaches to dining. These places are serving everything from Tapas (from Spain) to Dim Sum (from China), Salgadihnos (from Brazil) to Mezes (from the Middle East and North Africa) – sometimes all in one place.

All of these are “small dish” foods. They allow us to consider (and order) foods on a morsel-by-morsel basis. We just had the plate of assorted cheeses? Hmmm… perhaps something with marinated vegetables might be good now. And then perhaps a small gratin of wild mushrooms. Then maybe a truffled broth.

The point is that this style of eating allows us to respond to our appetites in a small, incremental way, in a sensual way. And, interestingly enough, nearly all of these traditions come from cultures with warm climates where life is of necessity slower, less efficient. The food is fresh and prepared on the spot. You have to wait for it. You want to wait for it. And while you wait, you talk to your friends, you nuzzle your lover, you sip your wine, you watch the pretty people pass on the sidewalk, you savor the memory of the dish you just sampled.

There are a few catering companies, like ourselves, for instance, that have taken to heart this approach to dining and are presenting events which discourage or even disable the horde mentality of most buffet events. We do this in a number of ways:

We take a moment at the outset of the evening to educate the guests as to the sort of dining experience they can expect
We split the buffet into several tables
We offer only smaller plates, 6 or 8 inches at most
We periodically add fresh all-new items to the buffets and remove old ones
We mark the dishes with attractive signs that clearly explain each that the guests encounter
We are less concerned with ensuring that each guest gets one of each menu item and more concerned with providing a truly engaging diversity of menu items
Each menu item fits the definition of a “small dish” food – it can be eaten in a matter of a few yummy bites

A little prosaic, yes. Sorry it reads so much like a textbook. But that’s basically our manifesto, our game plan for taking the lifelessness out of event dining. And it works. We have done a number of weddings and corporate events in this manner and in every case people responded as though they had never really eaten before, as though totally surprised that event dining could be a source of pleasure instead of merely being a chore to be gotten out of the way.

It’s the way eating should always be.

Cookbooks

noreply@blogger.com (Daniel C. McGlothlen) — Mon, 07 Feb 2005 21:00:00 +0000

I've slowed the pace of my cookbook-buying in the last few years. It's a matter of self-defense, really. The time came when our house and our catering office bulged with cookbooks. The collection outgrew the many bookshelves we own and began to crystalize in teetering stacks on every horizontal surface. Finally I realized I had to winnow some books, those which were more collectible than functional, into boxes which crowd our attic spaces.

Nowadays when I buy a cookbook, it's mostly to support some research project such as the one I undertook a year ago for a spate of English teas we were catering. That effort added a dozen or so often rare and almost always slender books to the collection. We now abound in heirloom recipes for seed cakes, scones and little crustless sandwiches.

But the sight of an out-of-town used book shop makes me weak in the knees. I particularly savor the tottering musty kind you find in old, rural settings. The best kind are the ones begun decades ago in small buildings to which additions have been heaped, creating strange burrows of warmth and bookish intimacy. On vacations we usually ship books home from every stop. Even day trips in the car find us sniffing around for cookbooks.

This last weekend, for instance, when we joined some friends in Lincoln City, Oregon we used the trip down and back as an excuse to find several nice, little bookstores along the way. In Portland, of course, we stopped as we always do at Powell's Books for Cooks in the Hawthorne neighborhood. And in Lincoln City itself we found one, Robert's Book Shop (3412 SE Hwy 101, Lincoln City, OR - (541) 994-4453), that was really special. I came away with some treasures, including the great Hilda Leyel's little book "Puddings", a couple of books on Mezes (small dish eastern Mediterranean foods), a book on the cookery of Caracas and an exceptional little book called "A Book of Hors D'oeuvres" written by an American named Lucy G. Allen and published in Boston in 1925 .

Here are a few things from this last book:

Harlequin Crusts

Saute oblong cuts of bread, spread with horseradish butter and over that place rows of chopped green pepper, pimiento, sifted egg yolk, smoked salmon and green pepper.

Casino Relish (hot)

Cut thin slices of boiled ham into small oval shapes. Spread one slice of ham lightly with dry mustard and then with Col. Skinner's Chutney. Cover with another slice of ham and grill quickly in a hot pan, using some fat from the trimming of the slices. Place these upon thin slices of bread which have been cut the same size and sauteed in olive oil. Serve hot.

Mushroom Meringues

Peel and break into small pieces one cup of fresh mushrooms. Cook them in two tablespoons of butter and season with salt and pepper. Mix one tablespoon of heavy cream with one slightly beaten egg yolk, add to mushroom mixture, and cook until thickened. Spread on rounds of sauteed bread, sprinkling freshly grated parmesan cheese over the top. Over that heap stiffly beaten egg white to cover entirely the muschroom; sprinkle Parmesan over the egg white and place in the oven until the egg is set and slightly browned. Shake paprika over all and serve.

Assorted Appetizers served on platter

The arrangement of appetizers given in the accompanying photograph is as follows: in the center of the platter is a mound of sardines. Grouped around the sardines alternately are four cubes of salmon masked with heavy mayonaise with one shrimp garnished with a tiny sprig of parsley on each cube, and small portions of Salad Relish arranged in four small lettuce cups. At each end of platter is another salad cup and in the intervening spaces are four artichoke bottoms which have been marinated in French dressing* and filled with Czecho-Slovak pickles. Around the outer edge are six half slices of lemon with notched edges, each garnished with three tiny diamonds of cooked beet. Here and there is a half a pickled English walnut which is not only a relish but sets off the colors of the various hors d'oeuvres.

* Note from Daniel: the French Dressing refered to here isn't the strange tomato dressing sold in bottles under that name in this country but is a fairly simple vinaigrette.

Rosemary Raisin Blog

noreply@blogger.com (Daniel C. McGlothlen) — Mon, 17 Jan 2005 11:05:00 +0000

On Saturday Craig and I celebrated our eleventh anniversary well and a day early with brunch at Cafe Campagne. Craig had the Omelette choisy (French-style rolled omelette flavored with herbs and filled with escarole and chèvre served with choice of Parisian ham or fruit sausage; he had the ham) and I had the Oeufs en meurette (two poached eggs served on garlic croutons with pearl onions, bacon and champignons in a red wine and foie gras sauce served with pommes frîtes). They were both as decadent and delicious as they sound, but what lit us up, aside from the Champagne and Cassis cocktails (which lit me up a good deal too much for a Saturday morning), was the rosemary raisin toast.

Now, we like rosemary a lot. We have an embarassment of rosemary growing in our front yard. You have to fight past bushes of it to get to our front door. But we use a lot of it. Witness our rosemary and garlic roasted pork loin, for instance. There's even a photograph of my rosemary cornmeal bread on the Feeding Frenzy website (go here and click on "Appetizers" and then on "Breads and Rolls"). In summer we grill over rosemary wood. We use branches of it as an air freshener in our house. But I have to admit that I was impressed by the stroke of pairing rosemary and raisins in bread.

So we ordered it. When we actually tried it the bread exceeded my expectations. Frankly, it exceeded my imagination. It was light, moist and sweet-but-not-too-sweet; warm and lightly crunchy without being chewy. It didn't need butter. It needed only to be eaten. It made wonderful breakfast toast. And it made me want to make more time in our cooking schedule to experiment with bread baking.

I don't do a lot of bread baking anymore. It's something I love to do, but, frankly, we don't sell a lot of our own bread and so I don't bake a lot of it. I am thrilled that a visionary bride has ordered our cornmeal rosemary loaves for her wedding this year, but it's the first time a bride has done so. But now this rosemary raisin bread at Cafe Campagne was an inspiration to me so I sat down tonight to work out a little plan to make some for ourselves. Perhaps for breakfast tomorrow morning, since we have our granddaughter spending the night.

I'm not much bothered about "recipe theft". There really isn't such a thing. Anybody with taste buds and experience can replicate pretty much anything anybody makes and folks who make food for a living are used to their creations inspiring cooks to try them at home. But when I have what seems to me to be a new idea, I'm always curious how new the idea is.

So I Google it. I use as keywords the basic ingredients of my idea and what basic form it takes. I confess I was a little disappointed that there was nearly a whole page of references (seven entries) to "Gorgonzola Shortbread" when I had that particular epiphany only a few hours before. And I was pleased when "Sweet Potato Pissaladiere" didn't turn up any (although "Sweet Potato Pizza" does turn up entries). I was surprised (although in retrospect unjustifiably so) when I found the huge number of hits generated by the word "torta" when combined with "gorgonzola" and "apples", as in our Torta 42nd Street (which you can find a photograph of here, if you click "Main Courses" and "Egg Dishes").

Anyway, I Googled for "rosemary raisin bread" and found that Cafe Campagne's secret (which was about to become mine) was already shared in a reported 43,000 hits. I'm still going to make the bread. I'll let you know how it goes.

Oh, and if any of you really thinks highly of the idea of seeing how new your new ideas are, check this out. Turns out there's practically nothing new. But as long as there's rosemary raisin toast things will work out just fine.

So If Not Buffet Service, What Else Is There?

noreply@blogger.com (Daniel C. McGlothlen) — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 19:12:00 +0000

So I spoke with literally dozens of brides-to-be and mothers of brides-to-be at the 2005 Seattle Wedding Show who felt that buffet lines are a terrible way to treat one's guests. Most had buffet horror stories to tell - the Dauphine Potatoes ran out and had to be refilled a quarter of the way into the guest count; somebody's aunt sneezed right over the Baron of Beef carving station; the line of hungry guests extended out of the dining hall, into the foyer and then out into the street.

I feel your pain, really I do. But let me review a couple of the good points of buffet service before we dispense with it altogether:

a much smaller staff is required than for any other style of service; literally a fraction of the labor cost
it is actually a pretty social way to handle food service; standing in line is an icebreaker, even if it is annoying
guests choose not only what foods they want but how much they want as well
the hot food is hot and the cold food is cold when your guests plate up

So if not buffet service, what else is there?

In most people's wedding reception experience, the alternative to buffet service is fully-plated service. The food is loaded onto plates by the kitchen staff and then distributed by the dining room staff. There are advantages here, too, obviously or else people wouldn't keep suggesting it:

Portions are strictly controlled, so there's not as much wasted food
Plates can be "composed" - arranged in decorative, even artful ways
The elderly, the disabled and the very young don't have to stand in long, slow-moving lines
it keeps people at their tables so that they don't themselves get entangled in the more complex parts of the evening's events
an organized, usually more rapid way to get people into the dinner hour

But there are a few downsides to fully-plated service:

the staffing requirements go up exponentially. You not only need more staff on the service side, but you need a lot more staff in the kitchen to plate the food up as quickly as possible
the food doesn't stay as hot in the delivery process as it does with any other style of service
your guests don't get to choose what they'd like to eat or how much they'd like to eat
while buffet service might be annoying, fully-plated service isn't any better than emotionally neutral

So - what are the alternatives to buffet service and fully-plated service? In fact, there are a couple.

The one I would urge hosts of dinner parties to consider first is family-style service. In this case, our staff brings and leaves large dishes of food to the table and the guests pass them. Think "Chinese Restaurant" service or "Buca di Beppo"... something like that. Advantages:

requires less kitchen staff than fully-plated service
food arrives hot and stays hotter in service dishes
food arrives quickly without the hassle of long buffet lines
all the guests are involved in a more communal, intimate dining experience

Disadvantages:

requires a lot more service staff than buffet service (although not more than fully-plated service)
a lot more dishes to rent and service pieces are a bit more expensive to rent than plates and flatware
a little more difficult to pull off for large groups because rental companies frankly don't carry large quantities of service pieces. It can be done, though... and we have done it.

The other alternative is called service a la russe. Most of us haven't traveled in the kinds of rarefied circles where service a la russe is common, so I'll explain it. From the first edition of the Larousse Gastronomique: "In service a la russe the guests at a party are divided up into groups of 10 or 12 people, varying according to the total number, each group being served by one waiter." The waiter brings service dishes, each with enough food for all his guests and, depending upon the formality of the event, either the guests serve themselves from these dishes or the waiter serves them. This is more than a few steps up in terms of luxury from the other kinds of service I mention. This too has some obvious advantages :

requires less kitchen staff than fully-plated service
food arrives hot and stays hotter in service dishes
food arrives quickly without the hassle of long buffet lines
the guests are treated to the kind of individual service most only rarely see

and some disadvantages:

requires the most service staff any of these options
a lot more dishes to rent and service pieces are a bit more expensive to rent than plates and flatware
a little more difficult to pull off for large groups, once again because of the rental situation but also because it's simply hard to find service staff experienced in this sort of service. This too, though, can be done.

There. Does that help?

Success Into The Cheese (from a poem by James McIntyre )

noreply@blogger.com (Daniel C. McGlothlen) — Thu, 06 Jan 2005 22:15:00 +0000

Note from July 23, 2009: I see that many of the links in this post are now dead. Sometime I might revive them. Not now. Sorry about that. For much more of my writing about cheese I recommend the Cheese Library at the Big John's PFI site

The Seattle Wedding Show is coming up, provided it doesn't snow too heavily or blow too hard. The weatherman is predicting exactly that sort of weather, of course, but mine is an optimistic nature. Today I planned my cheese board.

I always like to have a cheese display for folks to sample because cheese is the one food guaranteed to get them to stop at our booth long enough to look at our other offerings. I also like it because it is an opportunity to show how useful my food knowledge might be. You love cheese? Allow me to show you ways to love it better. There are certainly worse reasons to hire a caterer than because he knows about food.

Anyway, I do these cheese displays often enough that I thought I'd start this journal with an overview of some of the cheeses we display often enough to call them regulars. There is, though, nothing regular about any of these. In fact, the thing that strikes most about the cheeses we display on our board is how unfamiliar and yet strangely how very familiar each of these is.

British Cheeses

Abbeydale: A Double Gloucester (an English orange) to which onion and chive has been added. This is essentially a brand under which Ilchester sells their Cotswold - but this is a wonderful, fragrant Cotswold; a rich and authentic cheese.

Cashel Blue Insanely yummy blue cheese from Ireland - Tipperary, in fact. Unique, really, it leans a little toward the gorgonzola end of blue cheeses if anything. Distributed by one of the most reliable British cheese exporters, Neal's Yard Dairy. Every one of the cheeses I've found with their name on it has been outstanding.

Ilchester Beer Cheese: Sometimes known as "Taverner", this white Somerset Cheddar is made with strong ale. It makes me think of my mother's Welsh Rarebit (which I recreate with almost no provocation). Bring it to your nose - the smell is intoxicating.

Pepperton: This is a white Stilton crusted in crushed black peppercorns. White Stilton is more or less the same as the Stilton we know except that it has no veins of blue mold running through it. The difference in taste is dramatic. White Stilton is creamy and rich - and slightly sweet which makes it a brilliant dessert cheese. In fact, you can find white Stiltons flavored with fruit such as lemon peel, mango and papaya. The peppery version of this cheese is popular is made by Coombe Castle, I believe (although it is no longer listed on their website.

Shropshire (or Blue Shropshire): Powerful cheese - and perhaps a bit startling for Americans when they first look at it. It's an orange blue cheese and it bites back. In a good way.

Stilton: There are a lot of Stiltons out there. This is the great white blue of England - the "King of English Cheeses". It's a strong, complicated cheese that pairs well with Port and fruit and still goes just fine by itself on a cracker, thank you very much.

Spanish Cheeses

Ibores: A wonderful goat cheese from Extremedura the rind of which is rubbed with Spanish paprika, which is smoked, by the way (I LOVE Spanish Paprika, but that's another story, probably). This would be a good time to mention that Spanish goat cheeses make believers out of people who don't think they like goat cheese (usually people whose only experience with them is of Chevre, on pizza).

Idiazabal: A buttery Basque sheep's milk cheese, often lightly smoked. Their website describes it as "intense". I'm not sure I'd describe it that way. I usually offer it up as a mild, smoky cheese. This stuff is, obviously, so subjective.

La Alberca: This is a sheep's milk cheese, actually made from the milk of the same sort of sheep as produces the milk used in Manchego (see below), that's crusted with rosemary needles before being aged. The result of this treatment is a cheese that is somehow bright and buttery all at once.

Manchego: This is a classic cheese. We see it enough in this country that not everyone familiar with it realizes that it is Spanish or that it is made from sheep's milk. It's slicable, so we put it on our sandwich platters, too. Mild to nicely aged - Manchegos are almost always the most popular cheeses on the board.

Murcia al Vino: The drunken goat! A mild goat's milk cheese that is twice bathed in Spanish red wine during its ripening. It actually is even better than it sounds.

Tetilla: A wonderful, mild cow's milk cheese from the northwest of Spain. The name, which means "nipple", refers to the shape of the cheese. At room temperature it becomes creamy enough to spread on toast.

Valdeon: Strangely, Spain's most famous blue cheese, Cabrales, is not easily available in this country. Fortunately, we have Valdeon. It is also made in the Picos de Europa region. It also is mainly made from cow's milk, but contains goat's milk. It is wrapped in chestnut leaves which make a wedge presentation quite pretty. But the important thing is that it, like Cabrales, is a big mouthful of cheese - a very strong blue that can stand up to about anything you might pair it with. Valdeon (or Cabrales, when we can get it) turns up in our Crema de Queso con Conac - Cheese Creamed with Conac and then allowed to mature. This simple preparation creates a spread for crackers that is quite simply explosive.

Dutch Cheeses

Beemsterkaas: This is Craig's favorite cheese ever. It's an incredibly ripe, sharp and firm Gouda. I've had clients tell me it's something like eating caramel. It's chewy and crystalline and dark and earthy all at once. Not slicable when it's very ripe. But it's a great cheese experience in big old shards on a cracker.

Dorothea: In the food world, sometimes the best things are the things that seem the weird when you first hear about them. The Dorothea cheeses may qualify. These are goat "goudas". The original one was made with, among other things, potato skins. The result is mild but complex. A snow-white cheese in a blood red rind. It's magic. There's a newer Dorothea variation (apparently there are a few) made with Marigolds. It's not a novelty cheese. It's also quite complex - and wonderful.

French Cheeses

Crottin de Chavignol: A happy little (very little) ball of goat cheese that tastes a bit yeasty to me. It's bitter when it's new so let it age.

Fourme d'Ambert: A classic, creamy and stinky blue. They've been making it since Roman times. It's made from cow's milk and is matured in humid cellars.

Affidelice au Chablis: Expensive. Quite expensive. Worth it. It's a soft cheese, creamy to the point of becoming liquid at room temperature, but strongly flavored. It's washed in Chablis.

Italian Cheeses

Cacio de Roma: A creamy, creamy sheep's milk cheese. Mild to the point of being completely innocent. But one keeps wanting more.

Caciotta Del Boschi: A Sheep's milk cheese, made with Porcini mushrooms, champignons and black truffle. Can you imagine? So decadent you wonder why the EU isn't sliding headlong into the most horrible depravity. But, no - it's only cheese, after all. Very good cheese.

Pecorino Crotonese: A nice, firm sheep's milk cheese from Italy. My friend at Pacific Food Importers thinks it's the new Manchego. It is fairly inexpensive and, yes, it is delicious. It's made by Sini Fulvi, the same creamery as makes Cacio de Roma.

These are just a few of the cheeses we love. The list is confined to things we often put in big, sexy chunks on our slab of butcher block we keep just for this purpose. I'll be adding other cheese as we go. Cheeses I love to cook with (where would I be without Bulgarian Feta, for instance?). Other wonderful table cheeses (have you tried Valencay?). And some brilliant American and Latin American cheeses that can not be ignored by the serious cheesehead.

So. More to come.

By the way: how does one get these cheeses? Well, we get a lot of ours by the wheel from DPI Northwest - a wonderful resource but they're a wholesale operation. If you're in Seattle you can get most of them, pound at a time, at Pacific Food Importers. You can get a lot of them online at igourmet - even at Amazon.com (on their beta food site - I think it actually works). Whole Foods, nationally, carries a lot of these cheeses, but at a somewhat inflated price. If you have a hard time sourcing them for yourself, e-mail me.

Welcome

noreply@blogger.com (Daniel C. McGlothlen) — Thu, 06 Jan 2005 03:35:00 +0000

We've decided to join the world of food bloggery. We're doing this both to review our own food work, scholarship and pleasure and that of others. This might include menus served, cuisines/recipes/ingredients discovered, restaurants sampled, suppliers employed, blogs and cookbooks read and online resources explored.

Certainly this won't be a regular feature of our catering website. We'll contribute to it when we have time to contribute to it. This means postings more than likely will get thin in August and December.

I'm looking forward to sharing our food world view with you all. Welcome to Feeding Frenzy.

By the way, this is Craig and Daniel. Daniel, the fellow writing this, is the big furry guy on the right.