Viking Sunday Dinner

Nice pear, miss.

Holy crap - the pears right now are INSANE!  Get down to your local grocery, food co-op, whatever and lay hands on as many Bartlett pears as you can find because, baby, they are in season and they are superhumanly delicious.  Throw them in a paper bag on your counter for a day or two until they dent slightly when you press a finger into them; you'll be able to smell the juicy ripeness practically bursting out of them.

Best option here for a winter dessert?  A pear shortcake, with slightly salty oatmeal biscuits, pears very briefly sauteed in brown sugar and butter, and softly whipped unsweetened cream.

Drooling now.  Must find dishcloth.

I am a pig for salt.

On a whim, I picked up a $15 bamboo salt box at Crate and Barrel - and once I started cooking with it I was completely hooked on the whole concept of a box, a cellar, a pig, or any kind of little container for your salt.

 

It's hard to put my finger on why I like this little pool of salinity sitting on the stove so much. I think it's more or less the act of actually touching the salt itself.  No matter how many fabulous appliances you may have or desire, I do think that the foods that are the most special and give us the most pleasure are the ones that we've spent some time actually touching with our hands.  A bit of basil, carefully sliced and sprinkled by hand over a ripe tomato, becomes as luxurious as caviar.  A braided and dimpled loaf of homemade bread has a heft and chewiness that echos the musclepower put into kneading it.  A pastry crust's delicate fluting speaks of the fingertips pressing and prodding it into shape.

Rubbed between my fingers as it tumbles into a basic pot of pasta, I feel like salt gives me a echo of that same satisfaction - the joy of the handmade, in miniature.

While I love the swing top and clean lines of the keeper pictured here, there are lots of other nice options out there if you want to get your hands salty.

• Emile Henry has a classic pig model in lots of basic colors.   
• Nigella Lawson's version is matte black and curvy. 
• Williams Sonoma has a few versions, including a miniature maple box, a rather country piggy, and a positively Provencal version that's frankly way too much money for a box to keep salt in but never mind. 
• This black marble one is intense, like something you picture Michelle Pheiffer's character in Scarface using to store her drugs.

And speaking of which, be warned: all this playing around with salt will definitely tempt you to upgrade to the hard stuff.

Saucepan popcorn

I feel like I almost forgot there was a time when popcorn didn't come in a microwave bag and covered in mysterious (but let's face it, sometimes delicious) goo.  Then a couple of weeks ago I was in the grocery store and saw a plastic tub of organic popping corn, hard little topaz-y nuggets with the slightest hint of translucence, and I remembered you can do this in a saucepan, on your stovetop.  And then I thought about olive oil and sea salt and I got really excited.

Two things here: 

1. Make sure you don't use more popcorn than your saucepan will hold, or face popcorn apocalypse!  For a 1 1/2 quart saucepan I use about three tablespoons of unpopped corn, so basically 1 tablespoon = 2 cups popped corn.  Measure your pan first with some water if you're not sure.
2. Keep moving.  Throw a little oil (olive, canola, ooh sesame might be good!) in the pan over medium-high heat and let it start to shimmer.  Drop in your little corns and slap the lid on tight.  Holding the lid down with your hand in a nice solid potholder, let the corn sit on the heat for a few moments, then give them a vigorous shake.  Repeat this every 10-20 seconds; you'll start to hear some popping within a minute.  Keep shaking and resting for about a minute or so more; you'll use your ears principally to tell when they're done.  If it's been more than 5 seconds without a pop, take it off the heat right away!  Better a few unpopped kernels than a burned mess.

Season with sea salt.  Eat and revel in your Luddite-ness!

Vegetable Pot Pie

Principal among the traditions that I'm talking about in this blog is Viking Sunday Dinner.  I'm not sure exactly how the Vikings came into the picture, actually.  All I really know is that when we moved into our new place last winter we were trying to save money on restaurants, so we started having folks over on Sunday evenings for dinner.  We're both from families that said blessings before dinner, and Donovan can say a mean blessing in Low German, but we ended up settling on some vaguely Norse blessings thanking Odin and Thor for their gifts, because that seemed the most ecumenical.

Whether you do a blessing or an animal sacrifice before dinner, it's enormously gratifying to crack into a savory pie in the middle of the winter; this one is good for your vegetarian friends too (though vegans will be s.o.l).  It's a modified version of one from the brilliant Silver Palate Good Times Cookbook.  While warming, it also has some lovely summery qualities that make it really appetizing in the dead of the winter, with eggs, lemon, herbs, ricotta and parmesan setting off the fleshy, almost meaty quality of the mushrooms and tomatoes.  My version makes it wicked easy by using frozen spinach and canned tomatoes.  This recipe makes about six servings, but honestly it's almost impossible to make too much of this, as it's also incredible cold the next day for breakfast. 

I like to make this in a square spring-form pan, but any baking dish that'll hold 2 quarts works great.  The key with this recipe is to drain all the veggies so they're not too wet when they go into the pie, or it won't keep it's shape.

• One recipe basic pie crust
• 1 pound bag of frozen chopped spinach
• 10 oz package of mushrooms, cleaned and sliced
• 28 oz can of diced tomatoes
• 1 pound of ricotta cheese
• 1 cup grated parmesan cheese
• Juice and zest of one lemon
• 1 teaspoon salt
• Freshly ground black pepper
• Some butter (good to have on hand)
• Chopped herbs (basil is particularly nice if you have it, but parsley works too)

Make and chill the pie crust in the fridge for at least an hour.

Stick the frozen spinach in the microwave-safe bowl and cover with plastic wrap; cook for about 5 minutes until it's hot and steamy, then sling it into a colander in the sink and let it cool and drain.

Saute your sliced mushrooms in about a tablespoon of butter or canola oil and a heavy skillet.  Keep the heat low; the mushrooms will start out excruciatingly dry, then get really wet, then start to dry out again as the moisture evaporates.  Cook them to about this point, then transfer them to a bowl to cool.

Open up and drain your tomatoes and set them aside.

Combine the ricotta in a large mixing bowl with four beaten eggs, the chopped herbs, the parmesan cheese and the lemon juice and zest.  Season with the salt and a few good turns of the peppermill.

Now for the assembly!  Preheat your oven to 375 degrees.  Get your pie crust out of the fridge and cut it into two slightly uneven halves.  Roll out the larger of the halves and line your baking dish with it.  Spread about half the ricotta mixture in the bottom of the dish, then layer in the cooked spinach, mushroom and tomatoes.  Top with the rest of the ricotta mixture, then roll out the rest of the pastry to top the pie, crimping the edges together with a little water to form a tight seal.  Cut a few vents and slap that baby into the oven!  It'll bake for about an hour.

Serve with a sauvignon blanc and a leafy green salad.

What's the Hellbelly? And why are we posting notes from it?

The Hellbelly is a 5 and 1/2 quart Le Creuset cast iron dutch oven.  It is a minor household diety, and from its depths springs nourishment.  Fear and respect the Hellbelly.

Basic pie crust

When my brother was trying to impress the girl that he met at Burning Man by bringing her apples that he grew on his backyard tree for them to make a pie together (I'm serious), he turned to me for advice.  This is, pretty much verbatim, the e-mail I sent to him on pie crust.  It makes a really nice pie, either sweet or savory - and he's still with the girl, whatever that tells you.

This may be more crust than you need for a basic two-crust pie, but it's traditional to have some extra dough that you can roll in brown sugar and bake as little cookies.  Or stick in a ramikin and top with a beaten egg and some cheese for a microscopic quiche.

• 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon sugar
• 1 cup (2 sticks) cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces (I actually like to use 50% butter, 50% Smart Balance; there's a nice rich/light thing that they do together
• 1/4 to 1/2 cup water

Mix the dry ingredients, then use a pastry cutter to cut the butter and shortening into the dry ingredients until it's about the consistency of cream of wheat (you can also do this with two knives... or your clean fingers, just basically rubbing the butter into the flour).

Put in a couple of tablespoons of cold water and mix (gently) until pieces of dough start to appear; you can pull out the dough as it shows up. It'll be crumbly. You can keep adding water until it's all dough, but again you WANT it to be crumbly, not wet at all, and you want to be very gentle with it; if you stir too much, you activate the glutens in the wheat too much and then it gets chewy (like bread) not flakey. There should be some flour left over in the bowl when you are done, probably.

Wrap it all up in some plastic wrap and pack it gently into a ball, then stick it in the fridge for about an hour.

Take it out, cut it in half and roll it out on a floured surface - a couple of pieces of wax paper are also useful here; you can put the dough between them and roll them on your counter, if that's easier. Roll it until you have a rough circle, about a inch bigger than your dish on all sides. Gently flip or slide one circle into a buttered pie dish, then roll out the other one and let it rest while you get on with the filling.

Intentions

Donovan and I were staying with some friends who were borrowing their grandmother’s place on Cape Cod for the summer. Life on the Cape that week consisted principally of waking up very late, gathering lazily around the kitchen table for brunch and coffee, then spending a long afternoon at the beach. Dinner would slowly come together over the course of several hours, with lots of intermissions for cocktails around the fire pit.

As we pulled into the Trader Joe’s parking lot in Barnstable one of these lazy afternoons, with a list that consisted of basically three items (wine, lamb, tomatoes), Donovan said, "I think this is exactly the kind of thing I’m up for right now."

"How do you mean?" I asked, pushing my oily sunglasses off my nose.

"Just… relaxed. Good friends. Eating and drinking and talking and bullshitting late at night. Nobody throwing-up drunk. Great food. It feels comfortable, for us. It’s like it’s the right kind of..."

"Social life?" I suggested.

"Ew, really? But, yeah, something like that… at the right time."

He squinted into the afternoon sun, and we went into the store to buy some lamb and wine and tomatoes.

What I’m shooting for in this blog is suggestions to get you to that moment - not so much the lovey-dovey aspect (although there may be some of that, sorry), but the general sense of well-being that comes from hitting the right note in the way that you eat, that you drink, that you get down with your friends – and then building traditions around that moment so you can do again and again, with old friends, with new friends, with your partner, and by yourself.