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Liver and Onions

2012-01-31T18:30:00.000-08:00

"Stanley slowly peeled an onion. He liked eating them one layer at a time." -- Holes, by Louis Sachar
"Is it possible to fall in love over a dish of onions?" -- The End of the Affair, by Graham Greene

The Duck and Pork Terrine, buttoned up in bacon.

One of my favorite things about prep work is the way the projects lull me into a reverie about the past, about food in general, and the underpinnings of a life spent in the Industry. The grisly tasks especially, like prying pig cheeks apart from a frozen, 60 pound mass of them in the bottom of the back sink, or searing duck livers in a rondeaux sitting on a knee-level flame, one arm thrown up before my face to protect myself from spatters –the grisly tasks especially encourage a wandering mind.

The terrines are perfect examples. We make two different types: Duck and Chicken Liver, and Pork and Duck (that one has pistachios and is wrapped in bacon). The name “terrine” refers to the vessel in which the mixture is cooked – and because it is a French-style offering, the mixture could be just about anything: finches with raisins, goldfish and chanterelle, horsemeat and black walnuts. You name it. Grind it up, put it in what is, for all intents and purposes, an elongated meatloaf pan, cook it or not, and call it a Fancy Appetizer. Pairs wonderfully well with wines from the Côtes du Rhône.

Both terrines are time-consuming processes, but the liver terrine leaves me with bits of ground liver in my hair and smeared across my cheeks. Globs of it spatter my glasses as I pound it through a fine-mesh sieve. When I leave work after making the liver terrine, I am followed home by cats; the next day there is a feline cotillion on my front stoop, so many cats that I wonder if they are bearing an invitation for me to attend Dogwarts School of Seeing-Eyed Dog Trainers. (A girl can dream.) As messy as it is, however, this Fancy App is also fairly simple:

Liver Terrine
5 lbs duck livers
5 lbs chicken livers
Salt and Pepper
Olive Oil to cook

1 ½ c chopped shallots
2 Tbs minced garlic
1 c Madeira
1 c Brandy

2 lbs butter, cubed
1 c heavy cream whipped into soft peaks

You will also need:
A large saute' pan
A Robot Coupe, Cuisinart, or, God help you, a Food Mill
A 24” Terrine, sprayed and lined with Cling Wrap
Some Fortitude

(Please note the batch size of this recipe; home cooks should scale back.)

Heat the oil in the pan. Meanwhile, blot any blood from the livers (dry flesh sears better) and liberally sprinkle salt and pepper across the organs.

Carefully place the livers in a single layer across the bottom of the pan. This should be pretty fast and furious – you want a nice brown exterior, with a bit of rose left in the center of the liver. When you are satisfied with your sear, transfer the livers to a large mixing bowl.
Add some shallots and garlic and sauté gently for about two minutes. Deglaze with some of the booze. Let this reduce until the bubbles are the size of quarters. WATCH CAREFULLY.

Spatulate this mixture into the mixing bowl with the livers.
Repeat process until all your livers are seared, all the garlic and shallots have been sautéed, and all your booze has been reduced.
Throw the butter on top of the meat, etc. in the mixing bowl.

As the butter softens, set up your Grinding/Pounding Area. I like to have the full mixing bowl on the left of the prep counter, the Robot Coupe (Robo Cop) in the middle, and an 8-qt. cambro cradling a chinoise on the right. I also make sure there is a place to set the liver-filled chinoise down as you transfer the finished mixture into yet a third container. You’ll work out a system – you just want to avoid introducing any grainy bits of the ground mixture into the container holding the finished mixture.

In stages, grind the liver mixture, transfer it into the sieve (chinoise), wrap your arms around the base of the cambro and smash the hell out of the mix with the base of a 6 oz ladle to push it through the fine metal mesh. Careful! This is when the liver dance really starts to get messy!

Repeat process until all the mix has been grounded and pounded.

Wash face and change apron.

Someone, you or a kitchen elf, should have already whipped the cream and lined a sprayed terrine with plastic.
Fold the cream into the smooth liver mixture. Taste to correct for salt. Some people add a drizzle of Truffle Oil at this stage. I do not.

Pour into the lined terrine and wrap the plastic over the top of the loaf. Label, date, refrigerate.

After it sets for at least 24 hours, serve in slices with a drizzle of fancy olive oil, some North Atlantic grey salt (kidding! Any large crystal salt is fine), a dollop of dijon and crustinis. A tuft of salted, oil-drizzled herbs, especially chervil and parsley, is nice with this. Makes approximately 110 portions.

See? Piece of cake.

During the course of the terrine's preparation, I snack on bits of seared livers and, without fail, the flavors of iron, earthy-nuttiness and Mailard caramel take me back to suppertime, circa 1978: Liver and Onions. Whether in the Poseys' house or down and across the way at the neighboring Kugel household, Liver and Onions was a dinner fixture, at least twice a month during the good times, and I have a very clear recollection of putting it down as my "Favorite Meal" during a Fourth Grade Survey.

This reminiscence is spurred forward by the almost unbearable onionyness of the back kitchen. As this is (ostensibly) a Cajun-Creole house, we go through about 50 gallons of Trinity – onions, green peppers, and celery – a week. Also, everything is cooked with garlic, and garnished with chives or scallions, or fried shallots. Or fried leeks. So the prep list is usually heavy on the alliums. It is interesting that lillies, the flowering cousins of onions and garlic -- are so heavily perfumed: Victorian ladies living in a tannery town.

On the really bad days, when the list dictates filling a 22 qt container with diced onions, and another one with sliced onions, along with 12 qts of green onions, and 20 pounds of shallot brunoise, the kitchen fills with fumes and we weep as though watching “War Horse.” We gasp and stagger and clutch at our faces. We are inconsolable.

The smell comes from sulfuric compounds that the onion pulls up from the soil – “sweet” onions are grown in less sulfury areas. These sulfuric compounds are held in storage areas and can only be released if a certain enzyme turns the key. This enzyme is released when the knife cuts through the onion’s skin and damages the enzyme’s storage vacuole– think of a jailor who, finding his office destroyed by an unseen, terrifying force, rushes from cage to cage, freeing the sulfuric monsters within…There’s something about this that reminds me of “The Chronicles of Riddick”…. Sure, we could have probably helped our cause by chilling the onions first, but we didn’t and now we are in the grip of a terrible alliumic sorrow.

The sulfuric stink is so different from the pleasure derived from a whiff of onions cooking in butter, a smell I associate with comfort and warmth, hearth and home. (Listed as one of my "Favorite Smells" in the same Fourth Grade Survey, along with Thunderstorms, Lilacs, and the Pads of a Dog's Foot.) If you are running behind in your preparation for a dinner party, get the onions started in butter and your guests will walk into a home redolent of promise. To achieve really good caramelization, go low and slow for a while to “melt” the onions, then bump up the heat – a little – and don’t stir very often.

Liver and onions is one of those dishes you don’t see on menus very often anymore. This could be because the liver is the body’s filter, and to be good it needs to come from an animal that wasn’t pumped full of antibiotics and growth hormones during its short trip from birth to butcher. Also, I don’t like tasting the nasty metallic flavors of adrenalin and fear hormones that flood the creature’s system as it nears the end, flavors much more apparent in the liver than in the flesh. Abbatoir terroir. But, better livers can be found if one cares to try. In Seattle there are enough small butcheries, not to mention a certain prediliction toward better food, that finding a plump liver from a happy calf who died while laughing over a slice of blueberry pie is not outside the realm of the possible. Once in hand, I’d dry the organ, season it and set it aside. Then I’d start the onions in butter and get changed for company. As the calf’s liver is not the only liver to be tended to, I’d also make a martini.

When the onions are almost done and company had arrived (more martinis), I’d sear the liver over a pretty high heat, quickly on each side. Serve with caramelized onions, a simple salad, buttered bread, wine, and stories about shared history. My favorite flavors.

The New Year

2012-01-01T13:31:00.000-08:00

“So that’s winter too!” he thought. “You can even like it!”
- Moominland Midwinter, by Tove Jansson

We could hear shots from where we stood on the ridge that ran through the mud flats. As the late afternoon dusk gathered in the damp yellow weeds and the wind drove another volley of raindrops through the tangled banks of wild roses,the bushes bare but for clusters of red and black hips that rattled and swayed, we could see the flock of ducks rise from the estuary on the shores of Skagit Bay. More shots.

The five of us convened on the path and weighed the pros and cons of continuing toward the rocky “haystacks” that rose from the Bay, or returning to the car and from thence to La Connor for a beverage and a snack. The rain drops spattered across my glasses refracted my already terrible low-light vision into a series of star-tipped bluish blurs. But I wasn’t necessarily ready to head in – the fresh air was delicious and I felt as though the sticky winter joints in my brain were loosening up a bit with the walk. And the shots were far off and not aimed toward our little group, probably, as we'd left our pet duck, Waddles, back at home. We continued along for another hundred yards and passed a low-lying field strewn with silvered logs, as though a giant hand had flung a handful of twigs from the water inland. To our right, we could just see the water of the Bay, to our left, the muddy fields of Skagit Valley stretched to the base of the Cascades.

The hunter approached along the isthmus, a mallard dangling from his left hand, his Labrador close by his side. The duck looked soft and terribly broken by the shot and long fall. Floppy. The dog was having trouble restraining herself from putting the duck’s head in her mouth. She was a young retriever.

In another era, one in which duck hunting was more for provisioning and less for semi-idle sportsmen, I’d like to think the dangling duck would have been roasted, served with rosehip compote, a stuffing of farro and roasted parsnips, and accompanied by a wine as clean and mineraly as a goblet filled with cold, wet stones.

Farro is an interesting grain. Also known as Emmer Wheat and sometimes mistaken for Spelt, Farro was cultivated by humans in the Near East, through North Africa and Europe until the heyday of the Roman Empire when durum and other bread-making wheats took the stage. McGee posits that Farro was probably the second grain to be cultivated, after Einkorn Wheat, the offspring of a chance mating between Goatgrass and Wild Wheat, which was the result of a blind date set up by Cattails. Farro is enjoying a renaissance right now, appearing on menus and in Farmers' Markets everywhere. The nuttiness of the grain is a great foil to roasted meats or fishes, and it takes to the addition of cranberries or tree nuts quite well.

I looked out at the muddy fields and continued musing while the others chatted with the hunter. He had been surprised to see us out there.

In a few months, the flat, wet fields will become vast squares of color as the tulips come up. As the weather warms even more, the Skagit Valley will yield tomatoes, peppers, greens, onions, potatoes – pretty much all the produce we’ll use in the restaurant this spring and summer could come from one of these farms. And then next fall, we’ll have squash and root vegetables, again, from the same farms. But right now, at the closing of the year, the fields are empty and bare but for puddles reflecting watery blue light.

The hunter walked back to the parking lot. We waited a moment to put a bit of distance between our little group and the man with the dog (and the gun) before heading back to our car. The sky darkened into the gloaming, the rain picked up. I was glad I'd worn wool.

As we walked, we talked about New Year’s Eve plans, what our Januarys will look like, what we wish for ourselves and our families for this next year. I thought about what I had planted in the past twelve months and what might, with some pruning and care, become a source of sustenance. The projects that need to be finished, and others that have yet to be begun.

I also thought about the work week: There isn't a busier corridor for a restaurant than the week connecting Christmas and New Year's -- a very Merry Isthmus! This is the week during which the differences between working in a kitchen and working in an office become more glaring. It's a flat-out run for much of the week, and the containers of prepped items vanish almost as quickly as I can make them. While there is no real danger -- except to my sanity, my hands, and my lower back -- the feeling that we are under attack never really goes away. (It's actually pretty fun.) But I am a fool to make plans for New Year's Eve, as wonderful as the evening sounds my Prep List will almost surely begin the peculiar, predictable stretch toward infinity as the night grinds along. Most likely I will be pulling 60 pounds of semi-frozen pig cheeks apart and dusting them with curing salts until 11:50. While my friends pour Champagne, I will crouch among the linen bags and dry goods, changing from my messy whites and sticky clogs into hose and a dress.

The walk drew to a close and we piled into the car and left the mud flats. The drive back to La Connor took us past farmhouses that were the very archetype of cozy: Warmly lit windows, a sense of community and preparedness for the long hunker ahead. I could almost smell the bread baking, the duck roasting. The farro over a slow simmer on a back burner, stirred occasionally with stock added as necessary.

As we drove into town, I realized that no matter how the actual New Year's night plays out, I am going into 2012 with a feeling of promise, as though the year ahead were a prepped field yet to be planted. I'm looking forward to the growth.

Giving Thanks

2011-11-24T14:18:00.000-08:00

"Is that butter?" I asked her. -- City of Thieves, by David Benioff

Not a bad start to the day: there's a slug of whiskey in the cup of coffee to the left of my computer and a glass of champagne within easy reach of my right hand. The heady smells of thyme and rosemary curl up from the corners of the room, apple and pumpkin pies are ready for their baptism of fire, and the whiff of giblets simmering in stock on a corner of the stove wafts to the fold-out table where I am writing – the larger table was moved already to prepare for our hungry crowd. A small fennel frond is stuck to my slipper, and there is a gradual up-swell of activity in the kitchen as we check items off the list and tackle the ambitious menu. I should probably be chopping shallots or peeling poblano peppers.

Except, nothing about this feels like work because, every once in a while, the front door opens and another friend steps out of the Damp Dark, a Pacific Northwest specialty, shakes off their umbrella or gortex, and joins us around the hearth.

When I moved to Seattle in 1998, I fell in with a small group of Connecticans. A shared love of butter helped cement our friendship and this year marks the thirteenth Seattle Thanksgiving. A baker’s dozen – although, given the number of pies we’re making today, we should switch the apostrophe – a bakers’ dozen years.

(And I really do need to get started on the sweet cheese tart with gingered pears. Not to mention the yams.)

There have been rental homes on rivers and vacation homes on Whidbey or Lummi Island. There were dogs for many years, then none. There is one here today, which is a nice addition to the strata of controlled chaos, another player in the concerted effort to bring a feast to the table in a reasonable amount of time. The dog keeps the floor clean, especially nice because, after a decade of child-free debauchery, there are small hands everywhere this year, decorating cookies and sifting flour, feeding morsels to a gentle canine who is scared of the two cats.

Like a very soluble molecule, our Thanksgiving group is not always made from the same elements: I’ve missed a few years, my younger brother is in Quito right now instead of sitting at the table, doggedly peeling apples for pie. But the level of constancy among us continues to astonish me – here we all are, again, and right before dinner, when the warmed plates hit the table and we somehow manage to find room for seventeen different salads on the table or sideboard, we’ll join hands and go around the table to give mention to those things for which we are thankful. Because, in the midst of the relentless changes, losses, and joys that life brings there is the hearth, there is the family made from family-born and family-chosen.

What am I thankful for?

This.

Thank you.

A Sticky Topic

2011-10-14T12:00:00.000-07:00

“So how’s this for a guiding principle: The work is more important than the personalities. We can be friends but let's not be sweethearts."– Young Hearts Crying, by Richard Yates

Well, Friends, today is October 14th and we all know what that means. That’s right. Today marks the 64th anniversary of the sound barrier being broken during level flight by Charles [Chuck] Yeager. If you’ve seen the movie “The Right Stuff,” you probably remember the scene when Sam Shepard, as Yeager, slightly squinty eyed in that delightful Shepard way, contorted his body to fit into Glamorous Glennis, the orange Bell X-1 that hurtled them both into aeronautic fame and now hangs from the ceiling of the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum in Washington D.C. In the movie, just as Yeager slides the cockpit door closed with a sawed off piece of broom handle (two of his ribs had been broken in a horseback riding accident), he asks for a piece of gum from the Flight Engineer. He made the gum look so delicious that I had to wonder for a moment – is gum the Right Stuff?

Whether this delightful scene occurred in Tom Wolfe’s book, the source for the movie, I don’t know – I haven’t read it. But I do know from reading my McGee that gum has been considered delicious by humans for thousands of years:

“Europeans and North Americans chewed the relatively harsh resin of spruce trees; and the Maya chewed chicle, the latex of the sapodilla tree (Achras sapote) ten centuries before it was commercialized in New York City.”

Now, I’d learned about the chicle tree a few years ago during a trip to Guatemala with my Father and Stepmum. As we wandered around the jungle covered ruins of Tikal, ducking beneath tree branches mottled with white growths – perfect camouflage for a waiting boa constrictor – our guide pointed out a fairly nondescript tree and told us that it was chicle. Always a fan of meeting ingredients in their native form, I was delighted when, not a minute later, he pointed out another tree and asked me to smell the trunk. Never one to shy from smelling a tree, I leaned up to the bark and took a deep whiff. What was that? Apple pie? Beeman’s gum? A really good Dark and Stormy? Christmas time? Nope. It was an Allspice tree.

I may have been the only one in the group to find the proximity of these two trees as fascinating as I did, but truly, Friends, I believed in that moment that I’d cracked the Gum Code. That long-ago, one of the Mr. Wrigleys visited this jungle, took a look at the two trees, pulled a cigar from between his teeth, and announced, “I believe we have found a remarkable convergence of materials, see…perfectly suitable for manufacture of a Chewing Gum for pilots and other wizards of invention!” I suppose this could have happened, but let's not forget that the Maya were snapping gum (a punishable offense back then) long before the New York City sidewalks were bespeckled with flattened disks of chewed and spat out Juicy Loot. We have to thank for that a certain Thomas Adams, a New York inventor who was introduced to chicle in 1869, added sugar and that was that. The Wrigleys and Fleers followed soon after. And while clove, licorice, teaberry, sugar and sassafras were all early gum flavors, there's not much evidence pointing to an allspice version of the chewable tree secretion. The only Gum Code I cracked was the origin of the name "Chicklets."

There’s not a lot of gum chewing in kitchens. The last thing you want is a customer finding a piece of chewed Double Yumm in their pizza crust. The. Last. Thing. Sometimes customers place their chewed gum on the edge of a bread plate, especially in restaurants that offer only cloth napkins. When the gum goes through the dish machine, the hot water smears it all over everything: a sticky, minty plate coating about four molecules thick, impossible to remove without acetone. And while I don’t recommend sticking gum to the bottom of the table or the underside of a chair, I do urge the dining public to refrain from sending their gum back with their other leavings. This work is already tricky without having to also ferret out nail polish remover.
I'm reminded of Glamorous Glennis often during a shift because the burner I cook most everything on is a single, double-ringed gas eye of fire. When I sear livers in a rondeaux, my face is directly above the popping organs and fat, while my apron dangles just inches away from the tongues of fire that lick the bottom of the pot. This is a useful device for cooking enormous batches of stocks, gumbos, soups, beans, and also for shooting people across the sky.

Kitchens are – restaurants are – arenas in which daily dramas play out, dramas in which every employee must bring the Right Stuff because every employee runs into barriers and boundaries: the language barriers between the Spanish and English speakers; the boundaries of professional regard/disdain that exist between the Front of House and Back of House. The right stuff in a kitchen might mean having your station set up and backed up before service starts. But every shift is about pushing personal boundaries, learning something new, braving the demon that lives in the fire, and putting a perfect sear on a piece of halibut. This kind of Stuff comes from wanting, wanting to be the best at a station and not caring who knows it, wanting to be a part of a team, wanting to seamlessly present perfection on a plate.

Today is my favorite day for indulging in these personal reflections, a chance for me to unwrap delicious, fresh-flavored dreams and start chewing on them until next year. Were I to offer you a piece from the fresh pack of dreams, I would also offer this: There is, there must be, a certain grace, a humility that comes with knowing that there will always be those better and worse than you at your job, and that without the entire crew working together, nobody’s gonna fly.

Fall Menu, 2011

2011-09-19T13:42:00.000-07:00

We would never call inexplicable little insights “hunches,” for fear of drawing the universe’s attention. But they happened, and you knew you had been in the proximity of one that had come through if you saw a detective kiss his or her fingers and touch his or her chest where a pendant to Warsha, patron saint of inexplicable inspirations, would, theoreticaly hang. – The City & The City, by China Miéville

We’ve reached the season when I begin to cast about, assess the work completed during the year versus the work yet to be done, and shake my head at the predictable results of doing the math. I begin to eye my sweaters with a certain anticipatory fondness. I oil my boots. This used to be the time of year for new pencils, protractors, compasses, and Trapper-Keepers™, items supplanted over the years by knives and Sharpies™. Here in Seattle, the sky shows off its cheeriest colors: Orphanage Grey, Bedlam Bedding, Paper-Pulp Pewter, and the days become acutely, palpably shorter.

For me, these depressive forces conspire to make eating in good company, already a true pleasure, an absolute must. And if you’re in the business of feeding people, this is the time of year when you can safely ramp up the butter and cream, sprinkle on a bit more cheese, and help a brother mammal out with his layer of fat. When I was writing a new menu every three months, for my last job, this was the time of year when the narrative thrust behind the food was the most graspable for me, when I was most able to articulate to cooks, servers, customers and management the idea that food is story, and story is food. Maybe because Autumnal food is often the result of community efforts like harvesting, and putting produce up, and that telling stories to pass the time during the tedious, necessary work to preserve enough food for the winter is simply part of the human experience.

At its best, menu writing felt like channeling, as though a great swirling collective Memory of Meals had gathered, storm-like, on the horizon, and I had only to set out pots to catch whatever fell from the sky. At its worst, however, menu writing was like a scene from the latter half of Danny Boyle’s "127 Hours," hours 85 through 119, perhaps. Most often, writing a menu meant a prolonged idyll among ideas about food and geography, time and people and gatherings, surrounding myself with books detailing whichever region’s food I was pitching, weighing the various menu items according to how much whimsy, accessibility, deliciousness and prettiness they had. And then I turned the menu in to the higher-ups and waited for the inevitable changes. Not everyone thinks whimsy needs to be on the menu.

I could not talk about menu writing without including a favorite bit from an early chapter in John Lanchester’s ridiculously delightful book, The Debt to Pleasure:

It seems to me that the menu lies close to the heart of the human impulse to order, to beauty, to pattern. It draws on the original chthonic upwelling that underlies all art. A menu can embody the anthropology of a culture or the psychology of an individual; it can be a biography, a cultural history, a lexicon; it speaks to the sociology, psychology, and biology of its creator and its audience, and of course to their geographical location; it can be a way of knowledge, a path, an inspiration, a Tao, an ordering, a shaping, a manifestation, a talisman, an injunction, a memory, a fantasy, a consolation, an allusion, an illusion, an evasion, an assertion, a seduction, a prayer, a summoning, an incantation murmured under the breath as the torchlights sink lower and the forest looms taller and the wolves howl louder and the fire prepares for its submission to the encroaching dark.

That pretty much sums it up, and includes the word “chthonic,” which I never get to use. Ever. Although future hangman games may be spiced up accordingly.

As some of you may know, I am a reader. I am also a re-reader. I will revisit a story over and over again, despite the teetery stack of books not-yet-read, books-not-finished, and books-I-should-read-but-probably-won’t. In some cases re-reading is a retreat, a way to escape immediately from day to day kitchen life that doesn’t involve whiskey, a trap-door to another world. Sometimes a re-read recontextualizes events in the daily life – a clear case of the subconscious reaching out and shoving a book into my hands when that story is the one I most wish/need to hear, or a story containing an element previously ignored or unnoticed, simply because that detail wasn’t (yet) pertinent. Those moments of discovery are to me what the glint of something shiny in the sand must be to a beach-dweller, who believed his stretch of sand well-combed. And sometimes the only impetus is sentimentality, the indulgence of the desire to stroll along familiar paths, to run my hands over touchstones from my youth, to console myself that I am still the same girl who cried until she had hiccups the third time through Where the Red Fern Grows. All of these books have become a part of my subconscious’s library, a place I’d like to imagine cozy and fire-lit, without the overflowing file cabinets and piles of papers and dubious sense of organization employed by my conscious mind.

So, come menu-writing time, all these books – fiction, non, atlases, picture books, cookbooks – all those ideas, places, pictures, and thoughts, are at the disposal of the Subconscious, who, still in pajamas, eating a piece of toast with peanut butter, sipping a nice cup of coffee, puts together a little something and sends it up to the Worker Brain, who skipped breakfast and is running late but who will nevertheless recognize the value of the idea behind a Hemingway Menu, featuring foods from Spain, France and Africa…and look. Worker Brain missed the bus. But there is an Idea in hand.

As I’m no longer in the business of writing a Fall Menu for an actual restaurant, I asked my Subconscious if I could take a look around, maybe see if I could come up with a Clog Blog, get a little work done. The reply was vague, the directions terrible, but I did find my way to a library where two books sat on a coffee table. Interestingly, it was the same coffee table we had in the house I grew up in. There was a note, but I couldn’t read it, so I turned my attention to the books.

The first, The Sugarloaf Mountain Cookbook is a community cookbook, printed on humble brown paper, bound the way things were bound in the ‘70s, with a black plastic spiral. The recipes were contributed by women who lived on the mountain where I grew up, some of whom suffered from a late-season overabundance of zucchini, others sharing tips about high-altitude cooking (a science lesson for another time). This cookbook is an especial favorite because my mother did the illustrations – when I wander through the pages I’m not really looking at the food, I’m looking at pen-and-ink evocations of my childhood.

The other is never too far from my thoughts. I’ve read it over and over again, each time taking away something new – the trials and tribulations of leadership, the buoyant force of hope and optimism against the oppressive forces of fear and ignorance, the value of teamwork, the sometimes pleasantly surprising outcome of talking to strangers, youth surrendering to old age, the usefulness of Story when a group’s cohesion begins to disintegrate. And lately, as Seattle’s urban landscape more and more includes chicken coops, which means that hutches can't be too far behind, I can’t help but think about the deliciousness of rabbit.

I left the Subconscious library with a draft of “The Watership Down Menu.” Along with such items as “Owsla in a Blanket,” “Pipkin Surprised,” and “Chervil Chimichurri,” the menu would include Beer-Braised Hindquarters, with Roasted Swedes (rutabagas) and Flayrah Thlayli, with an especially hoppy beer and a nice tuft of lacinato kale and radicchio. Perfect for a Fall dinner with friends.

Recipe #3: Frog Pond Pasta with Salsify Slivers

2011-08-17T14:13:00.000-07:00

“Wasn’t it made clear that civilization is not an end in itself but a theater or gymnasium in which the evolving individual finds facilities for practice? And when it comes to themes, how about the – but wait a minute. Hold on. I’ve been trapped.” -- Still Life With Woodpecker, A Sort of Love Story, by Tom Robbins

A couple of weeks ago I ordered a pound of salsify and brought it home so I could experiment with different recipes. What a lark, I thought, cooking for fun!

As a single person, and not an especially domestic one at that, I must confess to a slight sense of the Why-Would-Yas when I visit my tiny kitchen with its orderly row of hanging pans, the sink empty of all dishes but this morning’s coffee mug: why would I mess this up to cook for myself? This is a question directed toward one of my arachnid roommates, a long-legged spider crossing the ceiling, too busy to answer. She’s probably on her way to confront her terror of being trapped, yet again, in the bathtub. (Note to self: check tub before taking out contact lenses.) Because I cook professionally for hundreds and hundreds of strangers, I don’t spend much time feeding myself, though when I do, I garnish the plates – self-loathing is not the issue here, it is more a matter of fatigue and my innate unwillingness to take a busman’s holiday: thinking about cooking for one makes me feel tired enough to just go to a restaurant.

Anyway, I’d managed to convince myself that this would be a good experiment, so, as always, I turned to the cookbook shelf and began digging for information.

Escoffier, naturally, had some recipes tucked into the Larousse Gastronomique. You know how he gets. And McGee illuminated the family relationship that exists between salsify (Tragopogon porrifolius), scorzonera (a.k.a. black salsify), burdock (a.k.a. gobo) and other members of the lettuce family, including thistles (a.k.a. artichokes) and sunchokes (a.k.a. Jerusalem artichokes) and talked a bit about fructose chains and carbohydrate stores, so there was that. Online sources were keen on the above-ground appearance of salsify, because it looks so much like a fluffy dandelion when it has gone to seed. On a recent walk around town, as I passed stands of feral fennel, rosehips ready for jams and teas, nettles sprung up in vacant lots, chestnut trees that will litter the ground with sweet knobs of proteins and carbohydrates in about six weeks, blackberries galore and fruit trees, productive but twisted from age, I reflected on the usefulness of knowing what salsify looks like above ground, should one ever have to forage for food in a post-apocalyptic Seattle. Arriving home after said jaunt, I confronted the as-yet-untouched bag of salsify languishing in the corner of my half-fridge. It was time to knuckle down and have some fun, dammit.

In appearance, salsify resembles a well-chewed stick abandoned by a forgetful Labrador. In name, Salsify may as well have been one of the rabbits left behind to fend for themselves in the Sandleford Warren, along with his glum, mathy friend Celeriac, and the long-lashed doe, Lamb’s Quarter…

And then the truth hit me.

I didn’t care about salsify. The most fun thing about it was its Latin name. I prefer the knobby, humble sunchoke and the sweet cynar flavor of artichokes. Hell, I prefer lettuce. But, I didn’t want the roots dissolving into a loosely contained pool of brown goo in the fridge (how wasteful) so I continued marching along.

Salsify is also known as “oyster plant,” which does nothing to inspire me, either – as much as I love oysters, I do not think about the details of molluskular anatomy and texture as I devour half a dozen Kushis in as many minutes. Perhaps it was a mark of the times that canned salsify was labeled “Oyster Plant,” as though sophistication was but a crank of the can opener away. As though a root that tasted of oysters was good news to the homemakers of yore. At last! All that goodness trapped in an easy-to-use canned form!

I mention yore homemakers because in my desultory search for either a recipe for salsify, or a new angle from which I might view the root and maybe even catch my ankle on something inspiring, I turned to Favorite Recipes of America, a collection of cookbooks made charming by age, sentimentality (my sister found them and gave them to me), the food, the photos of food, past owners’ pencil ticks next to some of the recipes, and the surprising amount and quality of ephemera that slips from between the cookbooks’ pages as I flip through.

I could digress, thinking about what it must have meant to Mrs. Antone Zelasko, of Tamaroa, Ill., to have her Illinois State Fair winning recipe for “Pineapple Secrets” included in a Volume I: Desserts, including party beverages. Or the frisson of pleasure that must have tickled Mrs. Sheryl Beckmann, Home Economics Teacher, Coleman, S. D., when her recipe for “Heart Stroganoff” found a place in Volume II: Meats, including seafood and poultry. Mrs. S. A. Hunt, Jr. of Columbia , S.C., must have been delighted when her recipe for “A Man’s Salad” was selected from the many offerings at the Favorite Recipes Food Fair for Volume III: Salads, including appetizers.

(Having read this last recipe – Lettuce; Pickled beets, sliced; Hard-boiled eggs, sliced; Bermuda or red onions, thinly sliced; Mayonnaise. Make bed of crisp, very green lettuce. Place slices of pickled beets on lettuce, adding slices of hard-boiled eggs and onion rings. Top with mayonnaise. Lemon juice may be substituted for mayonnaise and asparagus for beets – I have to wonder what one does with A Man’s Salad, either the beet or the asparagus version, when one has finished its preparation. Should I leave the salad outside on the porch and peer through the curtains, ready to pounce? Shall I place a plate next to a concealed pit and watch from a blind up in the trees? And what do I do if I catch one? To each her own, whispers the spider as she disappears into a corner.)

These women, their communities, their food: all so evocative of time and place. If one truly wanted to avoid writing about salsify, one could go on at some length about the sense of connectedness that forever comes from sharing recipes, and how, through these collections, one can catch a glimpse of lives – the newly wedded Mrs. Garrett Ballew, stationed on Eglin Air Force Base, Fla., writing about “Veal With Vegetables,” perhaps her mother’s recipe, tucked into a hope chest and pulled out when Mr. Garrett Ballew brought some of his pilot buddies and their wives over for dinner. Or the Midwestern wholesomeness and hint toward the proximity of a decent kitchen garden, maybe a small orchard….maybe a few hens…seen in Mrs. Chris Jacobs’, Topeka, Kansas, recipe for “Cauliflower and Apple Salad,” from Volume III, a salad recipe made more notable by the absence of gelatin, a key ingredient to many favorites, including “Celery-Pepper Congealed Salad,” by Virginia L. Langston, Baton Rouge, LA. Please do not bring that salad to my next dinner party.

Of course, that’s what these cookbooks are for – the sheer number of contributing Home Economics Teachers is a dead giveaway – these books are meant to assist young people, almost exclusively women, with the making of home and keeping of family, with developing a sense of community, and the delicious sense that comes from cooking and sharing the feast that one is contributing to the greater good – that sharing actually is caring. These are “Tuna Unusual” casseroles (Mrs. John J. McHugh, Salt Lake City, Utah) carried to homes struck by tragedy. These are celebratory “Marshmallow Christmas Wreaths” (Sue A. Arnhold, Denver, Colo.) handed out to earnest carolers.

If I wanted to really stray from the salsify path, just wander right off into the woods, I could describe the section in the back of each volume that introduces the reader to Foreign Foods, like Mrs. Charles M. Thomas’ (Dover, N.J.) recipe for “Sjomansbiff,” and how the increased availability of certain ingredients in the heartland, combined with the culinary adventurousness of military wives, made dishes like “Nasi Goreng ” available to homemakers besides Mrs. Edward W. Sznyter, Jr. (Officers’ Wives’ Club, Honolulu, Hawaii). And then I wonder whether the... what? condescension? contempt? comraderie? we might feel toward our community cookbook-contributing forebearers and the evolving definition of "Conventionality" have anything to do with our attitudes about food.

Instead I try to stay on track.

Volume V: Vegetables, including fruits yielded results. Tucked in among recipes for “Sweet Rutabaga” (Fran Mollet, Conde, S.D.) and “Baked Spinach” (Elizabeth Curry, Home Economics Teacher, Marianna, Fla.), there are two recipes for salsify.

Mrs. Kenny Lehto, of Burbank, Cal., gave us “Boiled Oyster Plants,” which sounds tempting in a late Medieval sort of way, and Louise Hunt, of Kevil, Ky., offered “Salsify Casserole” (which was conspicuously absent from Volume IV: Casseroles, including breads), a wintery dish of oyster plants – canned or fresh— layered with crumbled crackers and then baked with salt, pepper, margarine and milk. If it were nuclear-winter cold outside I might try this, perhaps with a bit of shaved nutmeg and a bit of goat cheese. I’d also use butter instead of margarine, but that’s how I roll.

But it isn’t cold outside. It’s high summer here in Seattle, with temperatures rising well into the high seventies, the city sluggish beneath the heat. The patch of dirt outside my apartment has yielded a bumper crop of nasturtiums, mint, thyme, rosemary and various inedibles. It would be fun to try to incorporate some of these ingredients, as well…..

This train of thought is interrupted by the phone’s quiet announcement that a text message has arrived. And look! An invitation to a dinner party! What fun! I am galvanized, utterly relieved that I won’t be cooking salsify for one. I feel ready to participate, contribute, cook for others in an unpaid capacity! I look around to tell the spider, but she is nowhere to be found, not even in the obvious places like shoes and hairbrushes.

Without her vote of confidence, then, I text back an offer to Bring A Dish to share. Because suddenly I did care about salsify, after all.

Frog Pond Pasta with Salsify Slivers
1 box pearled cous cous or pastini
¼ cup olive oil, plus 2 Tbs for drizzling and 2 Tbs for cooking
1 Tbs lemon zest
1 tsp Rosemary, picked and finely chopped
1 tsp Lemon Thyme, picked and finely chopped
3 Tbs Mint, chiffonade
1 English Cucumber, peeled, halved, sliced on a medium bias
½ cup dried Cranberries, rough chop (currants would have been better, but I’m fresh out)
½ a Shallot, brunoise
½ # Salsify, peeled and “whittled” into slivers (if you’re not cooking these immediately, keep them in a lemon water solution to prevent browning)
1 tsp fresh cracked Black Pepper
1 tsp Red Sea Salt
5 Bug-free Nasturtium leaves and blossoms

1. Cook pearled pasta/cous cous until just done. Drain, spread in a thin layer on a cookie sheet or shallow baking dish, drizzle with 2 Tbs of olive oil and cool completely in the fridge.
2. As the pasta cooks, heat 2 Tbs of olive oil in a frying pan and cook the salsify slivers until golden brown, about 4 minutes over medium-high heat. Remove from pan and let drain on a paper-towel on a plate. Lightly salt while hot.
3. Combine ¼ cup Olive Oil, with herbs and lemon zest.
4. Assemble your mise en place.
5. Combine all ingredients – except for the Nasturtiums – with cooled pastini.
6. Dress and taste. Correct seasoning if necessary (this may need more salt if you like salty things).
7. Transfer pasta salad into a pretty bowl and garnish with Nasturtium Leaves and Blossoms in a whimsical, lily-pad sort of way.

Serves Six

Note: Almost any ingredient in this recipe may be substituted with an analog, though that’ll make it less frog-pondy.
Ms. R. R. Posey, BOH Booster Club, Seattle, W. A.

Mastering the Art of Classic Rockery

2011-07-20T13:14:00.000-07:00

"I'll never be
Your pizza burning..."
- The Stones

Every kitchen has one. Perched atop the metal shelving units that house the spices, tucked between buckets of dried fruits and legumes in the dry goods area, splattered with tomato sauce, smeared with buttery fingerprints and fuzzed by the ambient grease that saturates the air, the Kitchen Radio, battered nearly unto death, continues playing. Not so much like the band playing on the deck of the Titanic, more like the drums and pipes that lead young men into war.

How loud the music is played depends very much on the Management, and the time of day. In the incredible cacophony of a busy kitchen during service, where information is conveyed through either silent gesture or top-of-the-lungs shouting over the crash and clatter of the dishwasher, the endless retching of the printer, the Expeditor's commanding tones, pans hitting the stove, food hitting the oil, pans hitting the other pans in bus tubs on the floor, shouts of "Behind! Behind! Behind! Coming through! Hot! Screaming Hot!" or "Etras! Etras! Etras! Muy caliente! Cuidato! Etras!" as prep cooks and dishwashers wend their ways through the foxtrotting linecooks with refills of chopped garlic and portioned pastas, or to restock plates and grab filled-to-overflowing tubs of pans hot enough to melt holes in the plastic tubs before they reach the dishpit, the Radio isn't always heard, but knowing it's on is oddly comforting. Just as knowing a terrible thunderstorm is over because you can at last hear the busy gurgle of water in the gutters, we know the pounding service is over because we can hear the closing chorus of "Hotel California."

Left to their own devices, cooks will play the music a bit loud. (Of course, left to their own devices, they'll also be drunk before noon, smoke four packs of cigarettes a day, roll through a 300-cover night stoned to the gills, eat all the steak and crab, never refill the paper-towel dispenser or remove masking-tape labels from empty containers, never have a retirement fund set up, and never consider that the motivating force behind line cookery and the creation of beautiful food is nothing short of pure love.) Customers and servers have all experienced that moment upon approach toward the kitchen when the music from the dining room begins to compete with the music coming from the kitchen. These are the Borderlands, where servers and line cooks can mingle without fear of being mocked by their compatriots, and where customers behave erratically, suddenly unable to find the restroom or swerve to avoid a laden employee, as though their wits were addled by the competing gestalts. (In the decades I've spent in restaurants, only once in my experience has the dining room music synched with the Kitchen Radio. The song: "Don't Stop Believing," by Journey. So there's that.)

Past a line of demarcation, where you can no longer hear the dining room music and can only hear the Kitchen Radio, whether it is playing Mexican polka, death metal, KEXP, KBCO, or Classic Rock, past that point lies the Kitchen Proper, a land of flashing knives, 22-quart containers filled with onions, stocks, soups, sauces… and, on the burner, bubbles rise and pop through polenta, beans, rice, or caramel in rondeaux three feet across, as though the chef had put "Molten Lava with Magma Preserves" on the menu. Careful: that'll leave a mark. The music provides a sort of force-field around us, as well as a tempo and a soundtrack to the night's work, its tinny treble rising above the shouts of rage, the crash of pans, bringing us together around a slice of "American Pie."

In retrospect, my musical education seems to be a collection of well-timed exposures, gradual inoculations with catchy lyrics, a general impatience with Judy Collins and my own experiments with What I Like. That's probably not too unusual; everyone has a Collins Point. It's just science. Just as everyone has a moment when they discover the tuner on the side of the radio.

Christmas, late seventies: lazy plop of snow from branches, mess from burst pipes cleaned up. Santa had left me a clock radio! Musical independence! I could grow beyond Abbey Road, despite my whole-hearted love for "Octopus's Garden" (which I listened to about 100 times a day until late last week), and the disturbing, but fascinating, discordance of "Come Together." No more "Cat Came Back," except for during the deep melancholic days of late eight-year-oldness, when I needed a boost that Danny Kaye just couldn't provide. Instead, I turned on the radio to 56-KLZ, Colorado Countreyeeyee. My country music phase began, a time for which I remain unapologetic to this day. Despite the townkids' stubborn refusal to listen to anything but KIMN, I held on to my Eddie Rabbit records and Kenny Rogers lyrics until the turn of the '80s. And then, except for a certain fondness toward men with beards, everything changed.

I'll brush past the early days of the decade, pausing only to nod toward "Evita" and ABBA, both discovered when I lived with my father in Vienna, both of them currents that steered me toward Kitchens and Restaurant Work. Also, at one time or another, both helpful demonstrators of why I shouldn't sing publicly. My rock star dreams faded when people politely put their hands over their ears as I warbled along to "A New Argentina," although, much later, other hopes arose when I learned to grill an Argentine steak and was met with applause and napkin-waving.

By the middle of the decade, I was saving my babysitting money to buy cassette tapes by the Fixx, Big Country (only their first one), Depeche Mode -- to this day, the song "Somebody" makes my vision blur and my heart hurt -- Howard Jones, and did I mention the Fixx? My hair was short, my tail was long. My t-shirts were black. My shoes were jazz. As the inexorable slide toward the 90s, and college, began, I discovered Oingo Boingo, the Psychedelic Furs, U2, and while the noisiness of punk rock never quite grabbed me the way it did some of my high school crushes, I did take to the clever writing of the Dead Kennedys, the Suicidal Tendencies, and the Circle Jerks, and I did discover the Clash, a band that will forever be on my iPod, or whatever new technology we have in store for us -- a brain chip, perhaps.

Somewhere in there, the "Boyfriend Factor" began to crop up in listening habits, if not actual purchases. Robert Cray, Stevie Ray Vaughan. Later still: Dave Matthews, Sublime. All discarded, tossed overboard along with affection, concert ts, and the other jetsam of failed relationships. And my own taste emerged like a wet chick from an egg: the Weakerthans, Radiohead, Feist, the Fighters of Foo, the Cold Players, Tori Amos, Johnny Cash, M. Ward...

But a curious fact remained. With a few notable exceptions, I'd never purchased a single album, cassette, cd or single by Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, the Eagles, the Doors, Boston, the Rolling Stones, Rush, Blue Oyster Cult, 38 Special, Jim Croce, The Little River Band, or Crosby, Stills & Nash, and yet, I could sing along (quietly, really, practically under my breath) with hundreds of songs by these artists. Hmm.

September, 1987: I interviewed for my first Real Job (canvassing for SANE doesn't count. Never has anyone been less successful at anything). A friend had landed a job at Sea Galley, and her stories made restaurant work sound like great fun, so I'd narrowed my search from...well, actually, given the skill set of a 16-year-old, I guess I'd broadened my search from Babysitting and/or Weeding the Neighbor's Garden to include Kitchens. And I got the job!! And they were right in the middle of a run of Evita! Such fun. My first day, I pushed through the kitchen doors at Boulder’s Dinner Theater and into a bubble of Classic Rock: the Kitchen Radio was spinning yarns about Seeing the Southern Cross, Today’s Tom Sawyer, Godzilla Going and Going, and Mother's Little Helper. The Hobart dishmachine was crashing along in time (until the show started, when dishwashing became eerily quiet, a skill all kitchen employees should strive to achieve...just saying...), and I realized I'd been allowed into a circle that didn't welcome everyone, but, for those on the inside, there was nowhere we'd rather be. “More Than a Feeling,” indeed. These songs, at various volumes, in different kitchens form an intrinsic part of my restaurant experience.

If classic cooking is a convergence of ingredients and technique, the musical analog seems to be a combination of a band’s longevity and appeal, its “bandurability,” if you will. Epochs slip past and the same songs by the same bands are setting the tempo for the egg cooks’ mad scramble, the chef’s orchestration, and the prep cooks’ nightly playlist of tasks. Escoffier hums the Stones' "Satisfaction" as he tempers eggs into an Anglaise. The only difference is the gradual accumulation of bands that were, in my youth, just releasing records and are now being played on Oldies Stations. Makes me feel as though I should be carrying a cane. But you know, as I put on my dancing shoes (clogs) and get ready for work, it occurs to me that while Boy Bands may come and go, restaurants open and some fail, for me, through it all, kitchen work rests on the solid foundation of Classic Rock.

Dedicated to Brad Delp, who may have done it differently, or not at all, had he known how many Broiler Cooks his soaring vocals carried across the Rage.

Notes From the Prep List

2011-06-29T15:32:00.000-07:00

"The earth was soft and crumbling, with a scattering of the weeds that are found in cultivated fields -- fumitory, charlock, pimpernel and mayweed, all growing in the green gloom under the bean leaves. As the plants moved in the breeze, the sunlight dappled and speckled back and forth over the brown soil, the white pebbles and weeds. Yet in this ubiquitous restlessness there was nothing alarming, for the whole forest took part in it and the only sound was the soft, steady movement of the leaves." - Richard Adams, Watership Down

Peas came into season not too long ago, which means that Seattle's chefs are throwing handfuls of the legumes into just about everything, and prep cooks all over town have funny little green stains on their thumbnails. Fava beans were just moments behind peas -- a duo as frankly tiresome as two heiresses on a four-day martini bender. A restaurant as busy as ours goes through about four cases of fava beans a week. The trash overflows with green husks and feet tire from just standing in one place, shelling and shelling and shelling. But they are delicious, and the time spend shelling, blanching and hulling is great for strolling down the somewhat mossy and overgrown flagstone paths of memory.

My thoughts turn toward childhood, favorite destination for a wandering mind, and the Kugels' garden. Their patch was a regular smorgasbord for a pair of browsing children: strawberries, snap peas, corn pulled from the stalk and eaten raw. In the vines that climbed through the stand of corn, I'd catch an occasional glimpse of a sleek green zucchini surrounded by crumpled apricot-colored blossoms and know that the dread -- and wonder -- of vegetable breads was right around the corner, as almost every household on that particular shelf of Sugarloaf Mountain harvested enough of the squash to keep the elementary schools open through bake sales...kitchen counters were practically lousy with them.... The zucchini path beckons, so I shake myself back into the present and put on a pot of water to boil, salt it heavily (though not as heavily as I'm supposed to), and prepare an ice bath to shock the peas after their quick dunk in boiling water.

Guy recently planted peas on the back porch of his house, out where he parks the car, so he'd have a snack when arriving and departing. I've decided to try this idea as well, except I went for a blueberry bush instead of planting peas. Now I have to fight through a small flock of rapacious birds to reach my front door. Peas may have been the better choice.

Forced to choose between peas and fava beans, I will always choose peas. They are yummier, less steppy, and peas lack the power to evoke Anthony Hopkins’ portrayal of one of fiction’s scariest monsters. And then there’s favism, which sounds like the punchline to a joke about nepotism, but is actually one of those ancient enzyme deficiencies that may have at one point suppressed malarial parasites in red blood cells, but now just leads to serious anemia. Peas just seem cheerier.

A monkey could be trained to shell peas, though it would eat most of them. One doesn’t really want a monkey in the kitchen. Maybe a small child, though I don’t really want one of those in the kitchen, either. But there’s some kind of historical precedent there – back porch, long afternoons, dogs lolling in the shade of the arbor, many hands, both old and young, making light work. I think if we put an ad on Craigslist we could probably drum up some kind of multigenerational team of shellers. And then I look around the kitchen, at the very young pantry girl, the line cooks all in various stages of the late, late adolescence that we like to call “their Twenties”, the slightly wizened dishwashers who shell peas and hull fava beans between running loads of plates and silverware, and I realize that we already have a pretty good multigenerational/multinational shelling team. We could probably take this on the road. Sell tickets, even.

If I had my McGee with me here at work, and a better command of Spanish, I could tell the guys about the nitrogen fixing properties of legumes, that they are actually a fruit, not a vegetable, they are weirdly healthy for humans... I could tell them stories about legumes’ ancient cultivation – 9,000 years! Imagine that! I could even speculate about the co-evolution of legumes and humans. (And despite the work done by Gregor Mendel, we still haven’t managed to breed a pea that will open upon command.) I could tell them that four prominent Roman families (Fabius, Lentulus, Piso and Cicero) took their names from legumes (Fava beans, lentils, peas and chick peas, respectively). And perhaps most fun of all, I could tell my co-shuckers and shellers that beans and peas comprise the third largest family in the flowering plant world (after orchids and daisies) and, after cereals, they are the second most important to the human diet. That would lead to a treatise on the soybean, however, another path beckoning, another story left for later. Instead I mention that los dining room neccesitas mas chucharos.

Two quarts finished.

Left alone in the walk-in, the peas will rev up their little motors and start turning their sweetness into starchiness. After a day or two, tiny nubs appear, and the pea takes on the form of a sprouting seed, which is harder to throw into boiling water. Seems a bit sad to toss a tiny vessel of optimism into the pot. Invariably, at this point my thoughts turn toward the Siege of Leningrad, the food bank, and the scientists inside who starved to death surrounded by seeds and peas, while the city starved outside. This line of thinking leads to a furrowed brow, however, and one of the cooks stops next to me on his way back to the line from the walk-in and asks for a smile. I can do that.

The mind wanders. Risi pisi. Petite pois. Mushy peas. Split pea soup. Bags of frozen peas hardening into a solid block in the freezer, satisfyingly shatterable when a handful of green ice balls are thrown into a creamy bowl of macaroni and cheese. Gotta get your vegetables.

And look! The case of peas is shelled! We have but a meager three quarts for our labor, but I have the satisfaction of drawing a line through the item on the prep list.

The next item is “Roll Gnocchi.” Another path beckons….

Hold the Mayo

2011-05-31T15:23:00.000-07:00

Vincent: ...you know what they put on french fries in Holland instead of ketchup?
Jules: What?
Vincent: Mayonnaise.
Jules: Goddamn!
- "Pulp Fiction," by Quentin Tarantino

My relationship with mayonnaise began with all the promise of young love: Obsession, wild cravings, and, at last, a midnight rendezvous on the moonlit kitchen counter with a large spoon and a jar of Hellmann's®. I remember taking as large a spoonful of mayonnaise as a six year old girl could. My childhood affair with mayo ended somewhat violently that night, and if I dwell on the memory, I feel a bit woozy with regret. But time healed that culinary injury and I now name mayonnaise my favorite condiment. Although by the end of this piece that may no longer be the case.

The other day, my buddy Guy looked up from reading a menu description of a sandwich served with basil aioli and asked me, “So, when do we get to go back to just ‘mayo’?” The question made me wonder, have we reached a point in the evolution of diners where it is safe to assume that aioli equals mayonnaise in popular understanding? How different are they really?

Well, both are emulsifications – a temporary union between two substances that have nothing in common (water and oil, for example), brought together by a third substance (the emulsifier) (how’s that for a super hero name?) that helps the other two get along and can therefore create a sauce that is greater than the sum of its parts, but is still, by its very nature, unstable. What sounds like a stressful relationship is made more so by the fact that the oil droplets have to be whipped, beaten, pounded, shattered into a billion smaller droplets very slowly to allow the emulsifying agent time to do its work….

Without spending too much time describing the molecular structure of mayonnaise, think of a huge stack of clove-studded oranges piled up in a swimming pool filled with water. The cloves are the yolk’s emulsifying granules which break up and gamely surround the dispersed oil droplets – the oranges – sinking their oil-loving tail into the oil droplet while their positively charged “head” sticks out into the “continuous phase” (the water) of the emulsification and simultaneously repels the other droplets so the structure doesn’t collapse into a runny, oily pool. (The clove-studded orange provides a useful visual image, but it is a flawed analogy because the oranges would remain discrete objects with the removal of the cloves – they wouldn’t flow together to form a huge orange, even though that’d be cool. Instead, think of a screaming group of three-year-olds standing next to a pool. One by one, the group is separated into the pool where they are fitted with water-wings. It takes forever to split up the children, especially the sets of twins. Finally, the toddlers are all paddling around, unable to get too close to each other. That is an emulsification of children and pool, aided by the water wings. Remove the inflatable arm bands and the children cluster back together in their original state of being a screaming group.)

Aioli is traditionally made with garlic and oil, using a mortar and pestle, sometimes stabilized with bits of bread (as in the Greek skordalia), or potato (a situation in which the starch is acting as the emulsifier). In Spain, the Catalans put great store by their Allioli, which is perhaps the pinnacle of a garlic and oil emulsion, as it historically contained no other ingredients. According to one source, however, the time-consuming method of pounding the garlic and adding the oil drop by drop is falling out of favor in the modern world of the Cuisinart®, and egg yolks are starting to be used as a way of stabilizing the garlicky paste.

Mayonnaise is an emulsification of oil that uses eggs (really the yolks, which are themselves an emulsion of fat in water) to stabilize the final product. Unlike a charmingly rustic aioli, mayonnaise is eminently French, with all that that implies. Reading about the furious debate that surrounds the origins of the sauce, especially its name, spurs in me an almost irrepressible urge to end every sentence with some French flair: Some say the name comes from the French victory at Mahon (“Oo la la!”), others say the name “magnonaise” and claim it is a derivative of the French verb “to stir” – manier (“But how can zat be? Zere are zo many stirred sauces!”), while a third story holds that the name comes from the old French word moyeu, which means “yolk of egg.” (“Oui, oui! But ov courze!”)

All the restaurants I’ve worked for in the past decade make their own aioli (or mayonnaise), flavored with garlic, sometimes lemon or basil or chipotle (not all at the same time). But there was a time when I worked in houses that ordered mayonnaise in large quantities – the five-gallon container. On the big buckets that arrive at a restaurant’s back door, there is a warning about drowning hazards with a small drawing of a toddler tipping headfirst into the bucket; I can’t help but think, every time I see the picture of that clumsy, curly-headed child falling face-first into the bucket, that drowning in mayonnaise would be really awful, worse than drowning among pickles or blocks of feta cheese. Although the latter is a very close second.

In any case, the mayonnaise/aioli story is not without a narrative thrust – one can imagine the boat routes taken around the Mediterranean, and the ancient Roman’s proclivity toward planting olive trees and vineyards on every shore they landed upon was certainly an unforeseen benefit of imperialistic expansion. The world is criss-crossed with such migratory patterns of foods. These are the lines of history, exploration, and exploitation: not just the Roman’s spread of olive oil and vineyards, but also the Portuguese and Spanish bearing the chained-up flavors of Africa to the New World, and back again…

Guy looks up from his sandwich and interrupts me to ask where Miracle Whip fits into the mayonnaise-aioli story.

Well, okay. Let’s take a look.

As with the origins of the name “mayonnaise,” there seems to be some debate about the where the name “Miracle Whip” came from. Sources tend to agree, however, that this tangy emulsification hit the marketplace during the Great Depression, when folks could no longer afford the luxury of real mayonnaise. Miracle Whip® is going through a bit of a renaissance, right now, with advertising campaigns that highlight the fact that this “salad dressing” really isn’t for everyone. I’ve always liked ads like these, and it’s tempting to “Like” Miracle Whip® on Facebook™, even though I really don’t like Miracle Whip® in real life, especially not on french fries.

The migratory pattern of ingredients in this country is not unlike the spread of olive oil around the Mediterranean. So, the spread of mayonnaise in America began in New York City when a German immigrant named Richard Hellmann opened a deli. The popularity of his wife’s mayonnaise eventually led Richard Hellmann to open a mayonnaise factory (the American Dream!). A west-coast company called Best Foods® decided to jump on the mayonnaise spread-wagon, and voila! Hellmann’s® became the mayonnaise east of the Rockies, while Best Foods® held down the market to the west of the Continental Divide. Best Foods® eventually bought Hellmann’s® and, rather than try to force one brand on the entire country, the company retained the two names and tied them together with the Blue Ribbon familiar to all American mayonnaise eaters.

It is at this point in the story that I began feeling genuinely woozy, as though I'd kicked over a rock to reveal the squirmy things beneath it, and black helicopters will appear over my little house one night.

Large-scale corporate acquisition is not unlike the spread of the Roman Empire - just as Miracle Whip® belongs to the global behemoth Kraft®, Hellmann’s®/Best Foods® lives beneath the Unilever corporate umbrella.

Guy takes a sip from his cocktail and asks, “Unilever?”

Unilever is an enormous corporate empire, with a very friendly website, where they tell us that they are spending some time and money on things like Sustainability and Non-Evil Corporate Practices, for example, the large-font announcement that Hellmann’s® mayo is moving toward using only cage-free eggs. (There are some wild rumors flying around that Proctor and Gamble might acquire Unilever; you heard it here first.)Unilever places its origins in the late 19th century, when a guy named William Hesketh Lever invented a new kind of soap “to make cleanliness commonplace” in super-stinky Victorian England. Over the next one hundred years, Unilever acquired food brands such as Ben & Jerry’s®, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter®, Klondike®, Knorrs® and others. Unilever’s personal hygiene department went on to include not only Lever’s 2000®, but also Axe®, Suave®, Noxema®, Dove®, Vaseline® and more. What these products have in common, besides the oft-touted hair conditioning effects of mayonnaise, is that they are all manipulated fats and oils.

Closing my eyes I can see huge vats of products in various stages of emulsification, vats filled with tallow and gelatinous materials trucked in from rendering factories all over America. Some of this mixture will be poured off, fragranced, and formed into soaps. The rest of it will find its way into supermarket freezer aisles, salad dressing sections, and the spread area. In this nightmarish factory, the idea of a clumsy, curly-headed toddler drowning in a vat of mass-produced mayonnaise suddenly seems much less funny and much more like a Sinclairian metaphor for early 21st Century living.

Granted, this is a somewhat irresponsible oversimplification of the process, and I must confess that a recent midnight rendezvous with my small jar of Best Foods® produced a very delicious fried egg sandwich, but I may begin making my own mayonnaise. Step off the grid, as it were. I’ve tried this twice – the first time produced a vile, runny concoction that forced me to take to my bed for half an hour, the second time yielded a delicious spread, perfect for turkey sandwiches. As long as no one asks where the turkey comes from.

Rapini, Rapini

2011-05-18T15:51:00.000-07:00

“…And is this the upshot of your experiment?” – Rappaccini’s Daughter, Nathaniel Hawthorn
Yesterday I spent a good chunk of time poring through books – cook books, gardening tomes, collections of fairy tales – trying to find a direct correlation between Rapunzel and rapini. We’ve started using the latter on a few of the spring dishes and part of my workaday routine is blanching and shocking the greens, a task I find impossible to complete without eating at least 30 of the raw, leafy stalks, and then another 10 of the post-blanch lot.
The flavor of rapini, aka broccoli rabe, isn’t the tame chlorophyll-heavy comfort-food flavor of broccoli. Rather, rapini has a bitterness to it, a hint of wild, craggy slopes where only lavender and stunted pines can compete with the greens, and the only mammals are feral goats. At least, that’s what it tastes like to me. I crave the imaginary cheese made from the imaginary milk of these particular goats, because the calcium-rich greenery also has a hint of sweetness, and a genuine robustness that would come through the cheese extremely well. Ah, the terroir of cheese. The imaginary bees pollinating these lonely, rock-strewn fields of rapini and lavender would produce a honey that would pair exceptionally well with the imaginary cheese.
As you may recall, Rapunzel’s mother spent her confinement in a room overlooking a beautiful garden of “rapunzeln”, which the gravid woman craved in huge quantities, and her husband, not wishing to develop a sty because he denied a pregnant woman her wish, crept over the wall in the dead of night and robbed their neighbor’s garden. Unfortunately, their neighbor was a witch and all kinds of trouble come from stealing a witch’s vegetables. But I think Rapunzel’s mother craved calcium and folic acid and that’s why she kept fainting and carrying on.
Anyway, there I was, on the sofa, coffee close at hand, going through the indices of 40 different books trying to find a strand that would tie the tale to the kale – from McGee I learned that rapini belongs to the sprawling Brassica family (Brassica rapa), which, in addition to kale and rabe, includes cabbage, collards, cauliflower, mustard, arugula, radishes, rutabagas, turnips and more. What a family reunion! Delicate Watercress chatting with plump little Brussels Sprout, Rutabaga wondering whether he was in the right place – so many leaves! – and there’s Horseradish, sitting alone in the corner. Not entirely unlike other family reunions I’ve been to, actually.
Had I not been taking a break from the Internet the search would have yielded results a bit faster. As it was, I did track down a book version of the fairy tale in which “rapunzeln” was also called “lamb’s lettuce.” Back to McGee – lamb’s lettuce is our friend mâche, also known as “corn salad.” Not misleading at all. Imagine asking a grocer for some corn salad. She would point you directly to the deli case.
“No, no, I mean lamb’s lettuce.”
Blank look.
“Ok, how about some mâche?”
A smile, a nod toward the stacks of plastic clamshells containing a living bunch of the fragile greens. But at $26/lb, the point is moot.
Today I decided to fire up the ol’ Dell and take a turn around the interrooms. No more dilly-dallying around with “books” and “libraries.”
Somewhat unsurprisingly, my search yielded mixed results. There is a plant called “rapunzeln” (Campanula rapunculus) that has edible roots and leaves, with a slight radishy flavor. Aha! So, while not a Brassica, Campanula rapunculus may be some far-flung relative, uninvited to the Brassica reunion. Perhaps a long-held grudge exists between the two families. The Campanula family is all about bell-shaped blue flowers, which I mention for two reasons: one is that, while we don’t eat a lot of blue food, and I'm not sure a pregnant woman would have craved rapunzeln, a garden filled with blue flowers must have been very beautiful to look down upon; and, two, upon following up the “lamb’s lettuce” lead, I discovered that corn salad nee mâche nee lamb’s lettuce is part of the Valerian family (Valerianella locusta), which is notable for its small BRIGHT BLUE FLOWERS. Aha!
So maybe the Brother’s Grimm took an even older cautionary tale which simply mentioned a garden filled with blue flowers and then they, being Northern Germans and therefore accustomed to seeing fields of Rapunzeln flowers nodding in the breezes, nibbled by sheep (whose milk would produce a cheese with slight almond notes, a bit of a grass flavor and a clean, slate-like finish), simply plugged in the name of the local blue flower. (Here in Seattle, our common Bluebell is also known as “Squill.” And I don’t care how pretty she is: no prince would ever stand at the base of a tower built by a witch and call up to the princess, “Squill, Squill, let down your hair.”)
I happen to have a copy of Die Märchen der Brüder Grimm here with me and the garden is described thusly:
…der voll der schönsten Blumen and Kräuter stand; er war aber von einer hohen Mauer umgeben, und niemand wagte hineinzugehen, weil er einer Zauberin gehörte, die große Macht hatte und von aller Welt gefürchtet ward.

They go on to talk about the schönsten Rapunzeln that was bepflanzen all over the place, but there doesn’t seem to be any mention of blue flowers. So where does this lamb’s lettuce business come from? A faulty online translation page that mistook Macht for mâche? That doesn’t make any sense. Mâche hails from France, where it grows close to the ground on the edges of fields browsed by dewy-eyed French cows (who would produce milk that would make a soft, slightly sweet cheese, hints of strawberry in the nose and finish).
There may be more digging to be done in the Grimm garden, given the fact that we’re talking about plants that were cultivated in the 17th Century and have since been swept up in the bewildering swirl of taxonomy, but for now I think the obvious answer is probably the correct one: Rapunzel was named for rapunzeln, and lamb’s lettuce is naught but a herring in sheep’s clothing.
All of which has absolutely nothing to do with rapini, which I am craving powerfully enough to sneak into work on a day off just so I can eat a few leafy stalks. Perhaps I’ll just go to the store instead. Should you find yourself with a bunch of rapini, treat it as you would broccoli, or kale, or watercress. Rapini would not appreciate being treated like a Rutabaga. I would quickly sauté it with olive oil, minced garlic (watch the heat of the oil – garlic can burn ever so quickly), and a handful of currants that had been soaking in either balsamic or sherry vinegar. Finish with a knob of butter, a good pinch of salt, pepper, and crushed red pepper. If it were me, I’d also put salt-roasted walnuts on the cooked greens, and maybe a sprinkle of feta cheese. Enjoy with friends, a hunk of crusty bread, wine and stories.

Fortune Flavors the Brave

2011-04-28T13:49:00.000-07:00

“Ridiculous as it may be that I should expect so much for myself from roulette, yet I consider even more ridiculous the conventional opinion accepted by all that it is stupid and absurd to expect anything from gambling.”
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Gambler

In the closing remarks left pinned to the kitchen bulletin board at my last job, I declared my long-held belief that cooks are among the luckiest people in the world. This was an assertion unexpectedly supported by recent events on I-95 – among the survivors of the horrific March 12th casino-bus accident were two gentlemen, both in their fifties, who both listed their profession as “cook.” These guys were practically still wearing hospital gowns and blood-soaked socks when they climbed onto the next available casino bus, ready to escort Lady Luck back to the tables, back to the one-armed bandits. I’m not sure there is anything lucky about line cooking into your fifties, I’m afraid, or being on that particular bus in the first place, but these guys told the papers they were feeling lucky.

This is not the “opportunity meets preparation” sort of luck, the predictable outcome of diligent networking and having your answers ready when you are called upon. The group practicing this variety of luck usually has their retirement accounts set up, they wear slacks and/or blouses. They have expensive hobbies. They tend to be seen as lucky by the less organized and more covetous among us, but this isn’t the kind of luck that spares: this is simply good analytics, and chance has very little to do with their success.

The more you tease at the meaning of luck, the more slippery the strands become – there is a striking difference between the luck of preparedness and the luck the draw, there are those who are “lucky to be alive” and those who are “lucky to have never stepped foot on a casino bus,” there is chance, risk, gambling, odds-playing and the occasional stroke of luck that looks like benediction. You see this in kitchens all the time: there are cooks who are always prepared, their lists are completed, their mise is set up, their back-ups are filled and easily reached. The other cook, the one who was mostly ready before service, will play the odds throughout the evening – he might have only eight orders of mussels, but he knows the house hasn’t sold more than seven in one night since the dish went on the menu; a big part of his set-up is leaving several things to Chance, an unreliable employee at best, and, the occasional sauce notwithstanding, a really terrible line cook.

When the twelve top comes in at five minutes to close, both line cooks are already wiped down and ready to head out the door. Both line cooks see the twelve top, both experience a frisson of dread, followed by feelings of joyful good fortune when the seated group reveals they are only in for drinks and desserts (the bartender and pantry cooks might not feel so lucky). Chance and Preparedness head to the bar for their shift drink, making fun of the pantry cook on their way off the line. As their careers unfold, Chance will probably stay in the rank and file. Preparedness will probably go into management. Both will probably become alcoholics.

Luck manifests itself in odd places in kitchens. There are a million anomalies: weather, newspaper write-ups, a cook’s plantar wart acting up, and each anomaly acts as its own set of butterfly wings flapping in the walk-in.

But what happens when relying on luck – on chance – becomes a way of life? What happens when a good cook decides to become a professional gambler?

Let’s visit 1987 for a moment and take a quick look at a cautionary tale. And, no, this is not a way of steering the reader clear of the Chicken Cordon Bleu. For a frozen brick of chicken, ham and cheese, smothered in a Knorr’s powder-based white sauce, it really wasn’t too bad.

Back then, Boulder’s Dinner Theater's kitchen was staffed by four guys in their mid-to-late twenties, a couple of recent high school graduates, and one 17-year old girl with close cropped hair and a pretty long “tail” that she sported in honor of Rupert Greenall, the keyboard player for the Fixx. This girl caught the fancy of one of the cooks, a young man who happened to be working on his poker career. Every girls’ father’s dream. Over the course of the next few years, she learned one or two things about gambling, and graduated from college with some clear ideas about risk versus reward, luck versus winningness, and truth versus consequences. So maybe there was a little bit of imprinting, thinking that gambling and kitchens go together like a suited A-4 and an A-A-4 flop.

A good Chef is able to sift through disparate factors and come up with the number of specials you should run, the poundage of root vegetables necessary on any given evening, the projected busy-ness on a week by week basis. Restaurants, like any business built upon sales of a product and the vagaries of the public, are usually staffed by decent gamblers, a lot like the professional handicappers you see at the dog track, the older guy poring through the program with a yellow highlighter. A good Chef, like a good gambler, is a numbers player, a non-risk-averse adrenalin junky, who will only occasionally look to Chance to get the job done.

I was talking to my friend Guy about the relationship between gambling and restaurants the other day over a game of Seattle Six Dice, a game in which numbers players and riverboat gamblers can harmlessly splash around in a wellspring of luck; it’s a haven for us. He pointed out that Vegas rules apply to successful restaurants, too: The House always wins. A great Happy Hour is like a casino with loose slots – folks will come back and spend more.

In a recent Esquire magazine interview, Las Vegas Iron Chef Michael Seymon had this to say in response to the question, “Do you think part of being a good chef is being a good gambler?”

MS: Being a chef, you can't let yourself get stuck in waves of emotion, which makes you a good gambler. Any chef or restaurateur — when you're getting into a business where 70 percent of them fail — I would say is pretty good at risk-taking.

I wonder if he also feels lucky.

Luck may be no more than a matter of perception, which means you get to have as much as you can perceive around you. I believe that cooks are lucky, not because they are gamblers, but because there is something gorgeous about the impermanence of food, something about the disruption and subsequent consumption of a composed plate, that calls to mind the good fortune of glancing out of a car window to see a double rainbow -- transient beauty. I believe cooks are lucky – that I am lucky – because there is in what we do the occasional glimpse of the sublime.

And then a server bears it away.

April First: Breaking News

2011-04-01T14:19:00.000-07:00

Seattle, WA -- A.P. The New York Times announced today that it will suspend all food writing for the foreseeable future, in both the print and online versions of the newspaper, except for a little-known collection of online scribblings entitled, "Clogs." The news has stunned such food-writing luminaries as Ruth Reichl, and reports from the Lower East Side suggest that Gabrielle Hamilton, Chef/Owner of the spectacularly unappetizingly named "Prune" and author of the recent chefography Blood, Bones & Butter, was in fact, set back on the heels of her own scuffed and stained clogs. Mark Bittman, regular contributor to the food section of the paper, reacted to the news by buying a ticket to Oahu, saying only that he welcomed the vacation and looked forward to some good hot Hawaiian lunches. Seattle-based author of "Clogs," Robin Posey, was surprised by the news. Breaking away from chopping an enormous pile of green peppers and celery to speak to this reporter, Posey responded to the news with this statement: "How fun!" Posey recently returned to the kitchen world after a six-month hiatus. She has written "Clogs" in a sort of on-again-off-again way for more than a year. When asked how often the dining public can expect a column, Posey eyed the pile of vegetables and responded, "Well, more than before. But probably not daily." The New York Times was unavailable for comment.

Holding Fast

2011-03-28T01:47:00.000-07:00

"It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs - and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it.
It takes off a lot of anxiety."
- George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

Of all the vegetables in all the kitchens in all the world, why green peppers and celery? 22 quarts of each? I have a throbbing, quarter-sized blister where my knife callous used to be, the fingers on my left hand are a little bit numb and tingly, and my feet feel as though they’ve been bound and gagged, thrown into a basement, held for ransom, and forgotten. But you know what? Even surrounded by copious quantities of the only two vegetables in the world I don’t like, I am suffused with a peculiar joy. I got a job!

Just in the nick of time, too….I was running out of books to sell. In fact, the epigraph I wanted to use for this clog blog was in a book sold to buy three eggs, an onion and a pound of spaghetti. My cupboard was bare. Really, really bare, which meant I was using the fun, cheffy stuff in place of staples: Instead of crushed red pepper, kosher salt, olive oil or sugar, I was using imported pimenton picante from Madrid, Hawaiian red sea salt, Meyer-Lemon infused olive oil, and Tasmanian leatherwood honey. I had long since used the two remaining potatoes and the can of corn to make a thin, but edible chowder. I was wearing pants that hadn’t fit me for years.

I must confess that my efforts to find a job, while consistent and generally optimistic, did not represent a truly whole-hearted Job Search. Because really, I didn’t know what I wanted to do, and I was willing to become penniless in order to find out. Nothing really motivated me to work, neither fear nor food, and I didn't really expect anything to unless I were really and truly against a wall. And even then, I figured I’d probably be okay – we no longer have a Debtors' Prison, and my friends and family are known for their generosity. Anyway, I wasn't retiring. I was restarting.

One of the ancillary effects of taking six months off from any sort of regular paid work is that you start to question the value of doing anything you don’t want to do. Ever again. If most of those six months was spent on a boat, and most of that time was spent staring at the vast openness of the South Pacific, you can really wrap yourself around an existential axle. So when it came time to return to the land of the employed I spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about all the options: I could become a farrier, or a trapeze painter, or a world-renowned entomologist…. The job I should have been seeking with vim, vigor and artisanal vinegar was the job I was most reluctant to land: Chef.

There are chefs in the world who believe there is no better job. They are chefs through and through, with all that that implies, chefs who grew up wanting to be nothing else, the way other children grow up wanting to be dancers, professional athletes, or doctors – they are consumed by WANTING it enough to get it. I am not one of them.

I liked being a chef because I am bossy, creative, hard working, and I derive a real pleasure from feeding people. (There was also that set of pans Santa brought me when I was four and which I played with on dead stump stoves on our lower lot. That could be a smoking gun.) But, for a while now, the fear of being exposed as a fraud has had its own ill side-effects, most often manifested through teeth gnashing, a short fuse and the occasional public outburst. The day-to-day realities of being a head chef are exhausting: Charred flakes of adrenalin spinning through the blood because a customer got wheat instead of white toast, a pretty good appetite for nicotine and rye but little else, except for maybe a sandwich eaten quickly while hiding in the mop closet. The fact remains, however, that I have a decent career and a solid restaurant resume' -- it would be foolish to throw away my professional momentum.

I've worked in kitchens since I was 17. I love being a part of this enormous family, and, however tempting it might seem to quietly stock toiletries on the shelves of "Bed, Bath and Beyond", future restaurant hiring managers might see the decision as the professional equivalent of a facial tattoo. What I needed was a job that kept me in the family, taught me some new stuff while leaving time for taking long walks, reading copiously, experimenting with the Oxford comma, and writing. I wanted a life.

In the meantime, there was the not-insignificant problem of how to pay rent. I applied for Unemployment in the spirit of, "Well, it never really hurts to ask." Vestigial loyalty to the company I’d spent my thirties working for prevented me from describing the real reasons people quit being chefs in restaurants that serve breakfast, lunch and dinner and change menus every three months (mostly just a profound awareness that your life is being shortened by unfavorable Yelp reviews). So, when the letter arrived that explained why benefits were denied (according to my case officer, quitting a job to go sailing isn’t a good enough reason) I was disappointed, obviously, but a little relieved, too, because maybe NOW I’d be scared enough to get a job, any job, just get a job, girl. Also a little embarrassed – I couldn’t help but picture the good people at the Washington State Unemployment Office laughing their heads off when they heard about my claim, because they couldn’t see the whole picture – I didn’t quit to go lounge on a yacht in my bikini (I usually wore shorts, and there wasn’t a whole lot of lounging), I quit because I needed to step off the side of my known world. Because you know what, Unemployment Office people? I do know a good reason to quit when I see one and when I left that job, I know I couldn’t have made a better decision.

And that, plus $2.50, will get me a bus ride. So, I’ll walk, thank you very much. And keep mulling over what I want to do.

I continued baiting my little hooks and throwing lines into the water, thinking about the different kitchens I’ve worked in, all the different cuisines, the chef mentors I’ve known, the crews who have worked their asses off with/next to/for me -- a connection somewhere would ultimately emerge. After trying out in a couple different houses around town, my resolve to continue cooking was further weakened ("You want me to do what with the frog legs? All of them?"), and I went so far as to send out resumes to a few Development Departments.

Then one day the phone rang and I spent an evening working with the Prep Lead in the kitchen of a crazily busy new restaurant. He had been a chef for years and, as the night clipped along and we split up the list of stocks to make, vegetables to chop, gnocchi to roll, caul fat to temper, he said, "Make a little less, live a little longer." Occasionally I ran to get fries for the line, enjoying the reversal of roles (I spent years yelling, "Fries to the line!" the way other Professionals yell: "Oxygen!", "Suction!", or "Ammunition!"). At the end of the evening, I gladly accepted the Chef's offer.

Suddenly, I had a job, in a high-end Cajun-Creole house…what’s especially funny and wonderful to me is that when I moved to Seattle from D.C. in ’98, I worked in a Cajun-Creole house under the tutelage of Hilary “Hilbo” Craig, a grizzled Vet not two inches taller than I who ceaselessly encouraged me to stay in the culinary world instead of retaking the MCAT. He was a mentor and a friend. So when I slipped my clogs off that first night, tired but employed, I felt as though Hilbo had thrown in a good word for me during one of his smoke breaks in the alley behind the big restaurant in the sky. I felt grateful.

But green peppers and celery…really? Cajun-Creole is so easy to roux-in.

Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch

2011-02-23T12:13:00.000-08:00

“[Boxer’s] answer to every problem, every setback, was ‘I will work harder!’ ” – George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

Years ago, I attended a function in a 30th floor apartment on the Upper East Side, one of those places that astonishes because it isn't unique in that Big Bad City, despite the tiny balcony off the corner of the living room -- the building's bowsprit, where you could stand and watch the snow swirl up the canyons of Third Avenue. My memory of the evening brushes past brown kitchen appliances, along an olive-shag carpeted hallway lined by sagging bookshelves: Was this a retirement party? An 80th birthday? Couldn't tell you without a hypnotist. But I do remember snacking on appetizers built around the Ritz cracker, and striking up a conversation with another partygoer; the Chardonnay must have gone to my head, because I usually run a bit shy. I can also remember feeling rather clever at the time, because I was living in NYC and working as a w-r-i-t-e-r, a species that shares the same astonishing ubiquity in that town as 30th floor apartments.

"So what are you working on?" she had asked, after I'd tipped my hand, revealed my brilliance, etc. "Well," said I, sipping Ernest and Julio's finest, "I'm working on a piece called, 'Gelatin: the Other White Meat.'" I beamed. Although work on said piece had progressed only through the arduous process of coming up with a catchy name, I felt ready for Letterman. And then, in one of those coincidences that simultaneously evoke two feelings -- being happily swaddled in Zeitgeist, and a claustrophobic, almost fatal kind of self-boredom -- she revealed that she was a writer, too, and her last project had been a Jello™ Cookbook.

Well. You can imagine.

She was helpful and encouraging, but I wasn't ready to do much more than continue in the same vein in which I'd started: reading ingredients lists and feeling a sense of delicious dread when I spotted gelatin. Boy, talk about ubiquitous: lozenges, gummi candies, sauces, marshmallows, low fat ice creams and yogurts....

But let's step a little farther back in time, back to the day my relationship with gelatin really bloomed: Middle of June, 1980. Maybe '79. Down the road, across the valley and up a winding road from our little mountain neighborhood tucked into the foothills west of Boulder, there was a cluster of "abandoned" barns -- the galvanized roofs were rusted, the pine boards were silver and splintery, but the barns were still used to shelter three thick-coated, semi-wild, geriatric horses and their hay, an admirable solution to an equine problem usually solved with a quick call to the glue factory. The barns were on an expanse of land that had belonged to Ernie Betasso until 1976 when he'd sold the land to Boulder County to be preserved as Open Space. A true cowboy, the last of the lot, Ernie'd continued making his daily rounds until he died. The Betasso Preserve became the backdrop for all sorts of childhood hijinx, and there are gullies over there that should have been, by rights, the final resting place for my clumsy young bones.

The Betasso Preserve was my destination on that long-ago summer day, and after I'd hung up the heavy white receiver and untangled myself from 13 feet of phone cord, I announced I was going to play with my friend Heather. Snacks were an important part of these excursions and I had my eye on a new treat, an act of undiluted brilliance, an indulgence in my ultimate fantasy: Instead of water, or Country time, or red 5-Alive, I'd bring peach Jello™ ...in its liquid form.

Oh, how I looked forward to cracking the seal on my lukewarm dissolved-protein-sugar-water beverage! How I longed for that first, slightly viscous sip! The only thing missing was a hand-crafted crayon and magic-marker label reading Tepid & Tasty, or Gee, Your Drink Smells Terrific.

Heather was not impressed. Which was fine. More for me! I wonder, though, would I remember that day with such clarity if Ernie himself hadn't discovered us in one of the barns, where we were determinedly pulling a hay-bale apart? Maybe beside the point, but I sure froze up when that old cowboy walked through the barn door. I don't know who among us was the most surprised, but to this day, the smell of peach Jello™ brings on a suffuse guilt and an urgent need to pee.

I have other reasons for avoiding gelatin. Hospital food flashbacks from an early childhood bout of dehydration, my father's jokes about fast-food milkshakes (clutch chest, look at beverage with horror, gasp: "Flicka!"), the Summer 2009 menu's house-made marshmallows for the s'mores -- nothing smells more like a barnyard than hot gelatin mixed with corn syrup at high speed until opaque.

But is gelatin empirically nasty? Can a substance used to create the fragile diamond-paned windows for gingerbread houses be that bad? How can something associated with such beautifully old-fashioned words like "hartshorn" (deer antlers) and "Isinglass" (the swim bladders of fish) smell like a pig-wallow?

The answers are roughly the same for the first two questions, namely, it really depends on how you look at post-slaughter rendering processes, what your personal tolerance for horror is like, and how you decorate for Christmas. Without such processes in place, there would be no pots of paste for people to eat during sieges, no sense in licking wallpaper while the Germans try to get in. Without Germans there would be no gingerbread houses. Without our history of boiling bones and skin to extract collagen, there would be no humor in jokes about eating shoes. None at all.

The third question requires a little light parsing, but, basically the answer lies in the molecular structure of gelatin. Okay. So, think about your favorite sweater. If it’s old enough, there is probably a dangling piece of yarn you really want to pull but you don’t because you know the sweater will unravel. Take a closer look at the yarn: it’s made up of several long strands of wool spun together; if you really wanted to, you could tease it apart into a woolly pile. Don’t. Instead, now think of collagen – a tightly woven, fibrous connective-tissue protein that provides strength and elasticity to bones, tendons, skin and other animal bits. That collagen is made up of long strands of gelatin (chains of amino acids) which form a sort of yarn twisted into a triple helix. These three strands knit themselves together to form collagen, and like most proteins, they can be “unraveled” by heat. Unlike other proteins, however, gelatin doesn't curdle or break as it heats and cools. Instead, the strands group themselves into a loose, “woolly” pile that is remarkably stable, translucent, wiggly-jiggly, and – an added bonus to the cook – these bonds will dissolve again at a temperature roughly approximate to the inside of your mouth, releasing liquid and flavor along with a difficult to duplicate “mouthfeel.” Both hartshorn and Isinglass are collagen-y and were used back in the day to create sweet and savory gels, but the reason the powdered gelatin we used to make homemade marshmallows smells so amazingly, awfully porcine is because today’s gelatin is made not from antlers or from swim bladders, but mostly from pig skin. Along with the skin and bones left over from cattle slaughter and the odd, unlucky horse. But mostly pig. So, from that one animal we happily harvest bacon, ham, pork chops, and cafeteria-style desserts. It's going to be hard to change that system.

Substances like agar agar, pectin, and carrageenan will behave sort of like gelatin, but are actually carbohydrates, not proteins, so, you know, they’ll act a little differently, too. A story for another time. Which, perhaps, begs the question, why a gelatin story at all? Why now? And I think about writing, and living in New York, and a childhood in the mountains, and the answer becomes clear: three strands suddenly gelled.

Clogs Abroad, October 14th, 2010: The Peanut Gallery

2011-01-31T18:47:00.000-08:00

Foreigners cannot enjoy our food, I suppose, any more than we can enjoy theirs. It is not strange; for tastes are made, not born. I might glorify my bill of fare until I was tired; but after all, the Scotchman would shake his head, and say, "Where's your haggis?" and the Fijian would sigh and say, "Where's your missionary?" - Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad

We’ve pulled all the mattresses and seat cushions up to the sun-drenched deck and will sleep warm and dry tonight in the relative calm of the Port Resolution anchorage. Our three-day run from Fiji was rough and I am conscious of having passed through something – writing about it now seems meaningless...the height of the waves, the grace of the petrels as they danced across the steep sides of the swollen seas, the mahi-mahi we managed to catch in the early morning rain and bring aboard the pitching vessel... memories dimming to vignettes. I find it difficult now to convey my determined resolution to simply endure. Amazing what a little sunshine can do. Sunshine and the first cup of hot coffee in three days.

Port Resolution had very little in the way of provisions so I took the trip across the island to visit the public market, where fruits and vegetables were spread on the ground beneath the huge span of a Banyan tree. I was with Jodi, a young woman from sailing vessel Savannah, who had made the same passage as Victoria -- not just from Fiji to Tanna, but across the Pacific from Ecuador, where they had met. The photo files on Victoria are filled with pictures of Savannah's two-person/husband-wife crew and as we bump along the "road" that connects Port Resolution to the western side of the island, I felt my brief acquaintance with Jodi grow toward friendship. Few things bring people together as quickly as a drive around the base of an active, smoking volcano on a track that's no more than a thin span between ruts.

The market offerings were pretty standard. Of course there were bananas, tinier and sweeter than the ones at the Seattle Safeway. These South Pacific sweeties have just a hint of tartness and a whiff of vanilla. I once ate five of them in a single day. The papayas were huge, coarser and less sweet than their refined urban cousins I'd seen heaped up at the Suva Municipal Market in Fiji a week earlier. There were also the ubiquitous cabbages and carrots, anemic and juiceless tomatoes, one or two pampelmousse, a bumper crop of sweet potatoes portioned into woven palm baskets for easy transport back to the village and twists of fried dough wrapped in leaves for easy eating.

The piles of peanuts were a surprise, though. The first one I tried was shrunken and awful, difficult to crack open, and I would not have been surprised to find out that by eating it I had condemned myself to hives, or the growth of a hump, or a clubfoot. Magically repulsive. I was going to swear off peanuts forever but Jodi convinced me to try another. Much better. I'd never tasted a raw peanut before and the flavor was quite green, a lot like a very starchy English pea. Suddenly, the peanut's legume heritage was obvious. However, with the island dirt still clinging to the shells and the stems tied together with a short piece of blue baling twine, their resemblance to the peanuts of baseball games and Cracker Jacks was much less apparent. But I bought a bunch, excited to experiment with them back on the boat.

I decided to boil the peanuts in seawater, and finish them in the oven to dry out the shells. The anchorage was a little bit roll-y -- the swells from the open ocean occasionally rolled the boat enough to knock a glass off a table, enough to make cooking interesting and the oven devilishly difficult to light. I might not roast them.

As I snipped the peanuts off their stems and into the saucepan, I thought about how quickly something unfamiliar can resolve into the very picture of something known, something practically cliché. I felt as though I'd ordered a local dessert, something difficult to pronounce, probably impossible to replicate, and was then served a slab of apple pie. I started with a grubby bunch of knobby, knuckley things on stems and ended with a pot full of peanuts.

Peanuts hold a special place in the American consciousness and diet. The Giants won the pennant while shells accumulated around the spectators' feet. Open the Sunday morning funny-papers and there's Charlie Brown, stewing in unrequited love for the little Red-Headed Girl. Our 39th President was a peanut farmer in Georgia, a state whose history would have been radically different were it not for peanuts. The genius of George Washington Carver ushered in a new era of nutritious brown-bag lunches and afterschool snacks. The powerhouse composition of proteins, fats, sugars, vitamins and minerals made the peanut, and peanut butter, a staple for arctic and Antarctic explorers, Civil War soldiers, West Africans, Chinese, Peruvians....pretty much every culture that has had the opportunity to lean on the nutritional value and sturdiness of the peanut has done so. We have the Portuguese to blame, or thank, depending on who you ask, for the worldwide spread of the peanut. Discovered in Peru, taken to Africa, where it flourished, fed to slaves during the long sea voyage to the marketplace, slaves who planted them in the American South -- a greatly simplified version of events, but you get the idea. The popularity of peanuts as a shipboard staple probably explains why I ran across them in the middle of the South Pacific.

The pot on the stove is at a rolling boil now. As they cook, the peanut shells become more easily popped open, something any Georgia peanut farmer could probably tell you but it's as new to me as grinding cattails into flour, or making a foie gras foam. I'm about to put them into the oven, if I can get it lit...interestingly, the seawater is not instilling a terrific amount of salty flavor, but I think it would be a mistake to add any more salt as they roast. If they roast. I keep eating them as they boil. The green pea flavor has given way to a definite nuttiness. Finally, for fear of accidentally blowing up the boat, I decide against roasting the remaining peanuts and instead dry them on a tray, set among the cushions and pillows on the deck. I can leave them alone for only 20 minutes, then, with a good book and a glass of lemonade, I settle down into onto one of the slightly damp cushions and enjoy the rest of the peanuts in paradise.

Clogs Abroad, October 11, 2010: Pressure Cooker

2010-12-21T14:03:00.000-08:00

'Twas Brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves

And the mome raths outgrabe.
- "Jabberwocky", by Lewis Carroll,

from Through the Looking Glass & What Alice Found There

After three years of having all the answers, or at least knowing where to find them, I find myself in a world in which I know nothing: the tiny galley that serves "Victoria."

At least I know how to do dishes, I think, as I wash up the few plates and cups left from a meagre passage repast of grilled cheese sandwiches washed down with instant lemonade. Although even that wasn't true when I came aboard Victoria in Tonga -- young Thomas had to show me the procedure of pumping sea water over the dishes, washing and rinsing with seawater and then dribbling a few drops of precious fresh water over each dish. I grew to love the slight salty tang that clung to cups, as though every chilled beverage were a salted margarita, every hot coffee a play on salted espresso caramel.

A wave hits the bow, the boat swishes her tail and tips (nautical terms) way over to starboard, the washed plates go tumbling off the counter onto the floor, then we tip the other way, and I have to hold on to the side of the sink as I climb uphill to pick up the dishes, which are now sliding along the floor past me, knocking against the base of the swinging stove. Okay, so one step toward doing dishes, one step toward the drawing board.

As I chase the dishes, I keep one eye on a pot of leftover stew on the stove. Of course, the pot on the swinging stove is level the whole time, which is why the floor isn't covered with a hot mess, and why my arms and face aren't covered with terrible scalds and burns. The beauty of a gimbal! I'd draw a force diagram of if I weren't so worried about the right-hook-left-hook waves we might take at any time, which will lift the pot off the stove and really change the timbre of the evening.

Nobody is particularly hungry tonight anyway: the seas really started to hunch up beneath us earlier in the day, and the wind is singing through the rigging. But what do I know? Nothing. Except that the boys are probably hungry, and it's my job to feed people, so let the stove swing, let the waves crash: I will bring a meal to the table. Okay, not to the table (more sliding, more mess, food all over the floor, cups tipping over, forks getting lost in the settee cushions, lots of yelling and holding on). I will provide the option of a hot meal to those willing to eat leaning in a corner, or crouched on the stairs to the cockpit.

And the stew really is just what the doctor ordered. I lean in the corner and eat before starting my next watch, grateful for the warm core as I creep into the water-filled cockpit every twenty minutes to check our course and scan the horizon when the waves lift us above the troughs. That's what food is for.

There is something liberating about knowing nothing -- without the context of previous experience (and consequence) I'm free to believe that any meal is possible on a small swinging stove in the middle of the open ocean. I look out at the heaving sea and try to determine whether the waves have flattened a bit, maybe the wind is down below 35. At least it isn't raining, right now. If the seas drop, I think, as Victoria rises up and up and up on a wave and I look around, holding on as we surf down into the trough, tomorrow I will make a large, hot meal and a hot dessert. Roast lemon pepper chicken and pear cobbler....What could possibly go wrong?

Clogs Abroad, September 13, 2010: Hearts of Palm

2010-12-08T01:36:00.000-08:00

One ship is very much like another, and the sea is always the same. In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny. - Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

That can of palm hearts arrived earlier this year, a stowaway from another restaurant, one that had been closed: scuttled. I put it away on the top shelf of the Dead Stock area in dry storage, tucked behind a lifetime's supply of fenugreek. When Inventory rolled around, every 28 days, I put a small "1" in the Hearts of Palm row, month after month, just as I plugged in an astonishingly unchanged 4.5# of dried mint, left from the Greek menu of early 2008, and .002 of a 10# bag of Israeli cous cous, leftover from a failed black cod pitch, Cote d'Azur menu, Spring 2009. I finally used the cous cous in a fun little salmon special, the tiny semolina balls a jolly evocation of roe. The dried mint will be in dry storage until the end of time (thyme?), however, and the hearts of palm kept slipping through, until my last day at the Hi-Life.

See, the thing about hearts of palm is that they are not delicious in the usual sense. Their production is labor intensive and wild harvesting kills the entire tree, thus the charmingly old-fashioned name "Millionaire's Salad". In their cannedness they hold the same promise as artichoke hearts, pickled asparagus, water chestnuts and baby corn: ingredients from a cocktail party appetizer, circa 1978, soon to be featured in a retro-fancy Bloody Mary at your local brunch joint. I rate hearts of palm on a different scale altogether, one that measures the satisfaction found from eating bamboo shoots in food court Chinese at one end, to the splintery split of a well-chewed tongue depressor or popsicle stick at the other. Given the chance, though, I'll eat them straight from the can, one after another, as though I were plucking and eating woody shoots grown in slightly brackish water. Were I to try doing that in the kitchen, I'd have to hide by the mop closet and hunch over the can, gobbling up the white spears, Gollum-like, before anyone could catch me at it. Embarassing. Which is why I left that can alone.

Tonight I'm staying in a palm surrounded enclave, almost a week after the stowaway can of palm hearts was finally cracked open, finally mixed -- by another chef's hands -- into a beautiful salad of frisee, red onion, palm hearts, out-of-season pears, hazelnut vinaigrette...a salad greater than the sum of its parts. Tomorrow I'll fly from Nadi International Airport to the really rather remote Vava'U Group of islands in the Kingdom of Tonga. Once there, I'll meet my Uncle, Aunt and their twin 11-year-old boys, Patrick and Thomas. With them, I'll sail from Tonga to Australia on SV Victoria, a beautiful 41-foot Lord Nelson cutter. In almost every meaningful way I've jumped ship from my life as a chef in Seattle. Tonight will be my last night spent on land for a long time.

As I look around, soaking up the green, no water in sight, I reflect that palm trees need not be eaten at all -- they are perfect for waving fronds in gentle tropical breezes. But perhaps that's part of the appeal of canned palm hearts: they are culinary reminders of vacations involving sand and salt, stowaways from sunnier climes. That can in dry storage was one of those lucky stowaways that escaped detection until discovery brought an element of delivery: to safety, to land, to Deliciousness. I hope to be so lucky.

Chef's Log, June 6, 2010: Summertime, Sort Of

2010-06-06T17:22:00.000-07:00

The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles, it was a rain to drown all rains and memory of rains…. “The Long Rain,” from The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury

At some point during the eight or nine years I’ve lived here, I fell in love with Seattle's deep purple and green palette, so different from the brick reds and taxicab yellows of New York City; a world away from Boulder’s cerulean dome and post-snowstorm white. This place is undeniably damp, though, and called the Emerald City for a reason – the vines and creepers would dismantle the Smith and Columbia Towers in a matter of geologic moments were they not cut back often. But as we near the Solstice and have enjoyed two sunny days since, I don’t know, mid-February? instead of Emerald City, Jet City, or Rat City, “City of Skies the Color of Old Sheets and Wet Newspaper” might better capture my rain-fatigue. There is light in the sky until after10 pm right now – we really feel the planet wobble up here – but instead of long shadows and hours of apricot twilight, the days end with a pearlescent glow: the sky a worn blue duvet, the sun a dying flashlight held up behind it.

There was a recent day of sunbreaks and temperatures in the high 60s that we celebrated with another wonderful dinner in the Crown Hill garden: whole chickens split Argentine-style and grilled (they looked like unzipped suitcases, or some odd species of reptile; the ribcage looked like the roof of a monster’s mouth), a simple salad of tomato and cucumber, a torn hunk of warm baguette with butter and I couldn’t resist putting a dollop of mayonnaise on my plate. We built a fire in one of those iron contraptions they sell at Fred Meyer, and angled the picnic table out of the smoke but close to the warmth, which made all the difference. After dinner we enjoyed strawberry-rhubarb cobbler, straight out of the oven, with vanilla ice cream and a small, strong cup of Italian-roast decaf. The sky dimmed and finally darkened around 10:30 and there was a sense of satisfaction derived not just from the delicious simplicity of the meal, but also from being outside and wringing every last drop of light from the day.

In a month, as the days begin to shorten again, we’ll have summery weather. Better for everyone if we just tuck the memory of last year’s scorching June away and go back to the Seattle mantra that the sun will come back after July 4th. Okay, that’s fine. But while the rest of the country is beginning to see the first of the summer produce hit the market, I’m propping up the new Menu with ingredients either frozen in the fields last year or shipped from warmer climes. While I love a little whimsy in my food, I think irony has an unpleasant aftertaste and avoid using it; the unintentional irony of having such flavorless pickings to choose from when designing a menu based on abundance and bursting sweetness is especially bitter.

I think a large part of my impatience with this damn rain comes from the radical shift in Process that we began last winter when we changed the restaurant’s menu format from an exploration of the foods found in wine regions around the world and became a Seasonal American Grill. In the past three years I’ve Cheffed at the Hi-Life, I’ve brought up menus featuring foods from Argentina, Paris, Greece, Barcelona, the Pacific Northwest, Northern Italy, the Côte d’Azur, the Columbia River Valley, and Texas…. South Africa was conspicuously absent from the international wine region roster because no one wants a soggy newspaper-wrapped packet of fried calamari and chips. Also, Malay curries are muddy, and springbok is wicked tricky to source up here. In December 2009, following the sea change of two American menus in a row, we opened “Winter.” “Spring” ran from early March to late May, and “Summer” opened last Wednesday. You can guess where we’re going next, but I'm not ready to start writing "Fall;" I want to eat, drink and breathe Summer for at least a day or two before the lid comes back down.

The predictability of the new menu cycle is a fundamental difference in the game – menu development used to mean a few weeks of library visits, poring through regional cookbooks, a good amount of time spent online, many, many rough drafts of menus that had a seasonal bent on the regions’ food, and then a bit of a sprint near the end as we worked out the recipes, plate costs, verisimilitude and executability of the dishes in the real world, on the real Line. And then as soon as one menu was up, the cycle began again, starting with trying to figure out a wine region to “visit”, knowing that New Zealand, Chile, Lebanon, Stellenbosch, Upstate New York and the Rhine Valley were all off the table.

Leaving that rigmarole behind greatly simplified the menu development Process, but there was a new crop of challenges, foremost among them was that we were trying to test dishes that were wrapped around food that hadn't grown yet, let alone ripened and come to market. My first version of Serrano Stone Fruit Salsa featured Chilean nectarines that had all the flavor and juice of a jiffy-pack padded envelope. Pretty colors, though. A little cider vinegar and brown sugar, along with the Serrano’s clean hot bite, some diced red onion and chopped cilantro brought me within hailing distance of a flavor profile I could use. The next time I made the salsa, the only fresh stone fruit I could get my hands on was a white peach from, again, Chile. The flesh of the fruit was touchingly green, heartbreakingly tart, and had the snap of a Granny Smith. Difficult to imagine a fruit more different from the juicy, sensual succulence of a high summer local peach. I caught some deserved flak for even trying to use the South American fruit. So, until I start receiving the Good Stuff from Eastern Washington, I’m using frozen fruit from last year’s local harvest. You win some, you lose some.

A seasonal menu means also that we are more at the mercy of the elements. A windstorm wiped out a field of asparagus. The rainy weather in California means spot mold on the mesclun. Peppers and tomatoes are triple the price they will be in August as the Market struggles to supply the demand. Onions, onions, the very definition of cheap food for serfs and peasants, leapt from $12/50lbs to $50/50lbs. The ebb and flow of product and prices determines what I can or cannot put on the menu, or what I can perhaps only use for the hot minute the product is available: ramps are here and gone in a flash, sea beans and fiddlehead ferns are fun to feature, but I can’t order enough to meet the volume of the restaurant were I to put them in some sort of Summer Dish. I want cherries and apricots, but this rain is pushing the product later into the season.

Perhaps the greatest challenge I faced when we switched from regional to seasonal menus was the struggle to write the food. Writing a regional menu was always a bit like an exercise in pastiche we did in creative writing classes in high school – by writing in the style of Steinbeck, or Hemingway, or Bradbury, the young writer became acquainted with Voice, and once you can hear Voice, the path to finding your own is much clearer. Not necessarily easier, but clearer. Same rules apply to copying paintings, just brushstrokes instead of words. So, back in 2008, when confronted with a French menu due in two days, I needed only to use a French voice and zee food followed obediently. Now, after paring down the many voices that went into the Winter menu, refining and strengthening the notes that ran through the Spring menu, the Summer menu sounds like a cheerful, well-orchestrated chorus, the voices of Sous Chefs and supervisors ringing through as well as my own. And, as I watch customers knock the rain from umbrellas, strip off sodden hats and Gore-Tex coats that really should be in storage by now, and sit down to a summertime dinner of corn, peppers, watermelon, crab, and stone fruits, I can’t help but feel pleased that in a city with such a constant pitter patter of chefs’ voices, I can look out into a dining room filled with people listening to ours. Almost as nice as a sunny day. Almost.

Recipe #2: Nettle Tart With Goat Cheese

2010-05-03T16:39:00.000-07:00

I thought the gloves would be the easy part. We have two pairs that we use to stack wood in the shed behind the restaurant, a space that used to feel like a back yard but now, with the condos surrounding us with a fifteen foot high cement retaining wall, the space feels much more like the bear enclosure at the zoo. When the cooks split wood before service, the solid thunk-crack of the axe hitting wood echoes along the wall. It’s kind of a lonely sound, or maybe just evocative of the early morning silence of a post-snowstorm Colorado morning, and the meditative solitude that descends like a dome around any repetitive, physical task. Shoveling snow, raking gravel, pulling weeds. All tasks that require stamina, and gloves. But, I was hasty when I grabbed two of the gloves from where they were stuffed into the “v” of supporting beams in the shed’s roof, looking like nothing so much as a haven for Black Widow spiders, and found myself in the kitchen with two right-handed gloves and only 23 minutes in which I could run this experiment. It turns out that nothing is easy with nettles. Well, this recipe is pretty easy, actually.

Nettle and Goat Cheese Tart with Fennel-Frond Honey and Coarse Salt
1 T butter
1 medium shallot
Nettles, however many you can stand working with, up to a pound (pre-blanched, pre-picked weight)
2 eggs
2 cups heavy cream
½ cup crumbled goat cheese, or whatever cheese you happen to have dying in the refrigerator door.
Salt
Pepper
One scant batch Basic Pie Dough
½ cup honey
1 Tablespoon chopped fennel fronds
2 T coarse sea salt

You’ll Also Need:
A sauté pan
One 9-inch tart pan with fluted edge and removable bottom
A big pot of salted, boiling water
A big bowl of ice water
Tongs
A decent Knife

Method:
Put sauté pan over medium-low heat. Put butter into the pan. Slice the shallot into rings as thick as a plastic poker chip. Put shallots in pan with butter. Make sure the heat is high enough to “melt” the shallots, but not so hot that they will burn while your attention is elsewhere.

Set a large pot on the stove over high heat and bring it to a boil. Have an ice bath handy.

Put on gloves and confront the nettles. Consider and dismiss the feeling that you may accidentally kill someone with this folly. Look at the clock, think about the mountain of paperwork that still awaits before you can leave for your weekend, not to mention the towering wall of chicken that must be prepped and soaked in buttermilk for Sunday’s wildly popular Family Style Fried Chicken.

In batches small enough to ensure the greens are submerged (and thusly disarmed) in boiling water, push the nettles into the hot water. Pull them out a couple minutes later and “shock” them in the ice bath.

Scratch at the three or four red spots that have appeared out of nowhere on your hand. Wonder if your throat is closing. Watch the pizza cook strip a basil stem and feel a profound desire to be using that friendly, versatile herb, with its heady aroma and willingness to add deliciousness to whatever dish it is added to. Try to name the tune the pizza cook is humming, so happy is she to be working with basil. Look at the clock.

Pull the blanched leaves from the stems and coarsely chop the greens. Add them to the sauté pan with the shallot. Toss, toss, toss. Add salt and pepper. Toss.

Discard blanching water, which, by the way, is the color of marsh water. Clean up your area and assemble remaining ingredients. If you haven’t already made your pie crust, now is the time to rummage through the shelves in the walk-in until you find a small, leftover chunk of dough.

Scatter a bit of flour on your cutting board and roll the dough out. Drape over the sprayed tart pan and make it pretty. Using tongs, put the greens and shallots into the pan, making sure they are evenly distributed across the base of the pan.

Beat eggs with cream. Season with salt and pepper. Add cheese to this basic custard, and mix slightly – you want some of the cheese to be carried with the liquid, but you want some of it to stay on top, too, both to provide a strong “net” of proteins and fats across your tart, but also because it will brown and look really pretty, adding to the tart’s evolving appearance of edibleness. Pour over the greens, shaking the pan ever so slightly to make sure the liquid gets into all the nettle crannies. Put your tart on a baking sheet and slide it into an oven, 350 – 375 degrees – if it’s hotter, watch it a little more closely, but it should all work out. It’ll take about 35 – 40 minutes to bake. Check it after 25 mins.

Dash out of kitchen to talk about the menu with the two new servers. File some paper work on the new guy you just hired. Return to kitchen in time to help set up the area for the chicken prep. Push away sense of despair always brought on by the open box filled with sticky pink body parts and get ready to play Race the Clock with your A.M. Sous, a game that makes the chicken thing a lot more fun.

As you’re cutting backs from breasts, think about what you want to serve the tart with. I believe there is a strong narrative element to food, and that indulging in a little bit of free association while you’re making something new contributes to the overall gestalt of the dish; I find the images that burble up from the subconscious consummately interesting, if a bit elusive and hard to consistently convey on busy nights. So, a nettle tart with goat cheese. Fun to think about goats eating nettles, and that a trace of their flavor might find its way into the goat’s milk, and from there into the cheese. Honey and goat cheese are nice together. All rough rock wall, and long wooden kitchen table, spring time, hearth, home, rough patches smoothed over with a little sweetness. The honey is a bit like amber, and it would be fun to suspend something that looks like insect stings, or little green needles, in that clear medium, next to the rich opacity of baked cheese. Nice to use some of the lightly anise-flavored fennel fronds. Chopped into pieces as long as a pencil lead, mixed into the honey. And then a tiny scattering of coarse sea salt, to add flavor, but the tiny shards also bring to mind shattered glass, which is fun on a nettle dish.

Interrupt this reverie to check the tart, which is done. Explain to the pantry cook how you’d like it plated: on a small round, with half an ounce drizzled frond honey and a very small scatter of salt crystals, some of which should barely run into the honey. Direct her to the first aid kit when she mentions that she has a screaming pain in her wrist from where she rubbed it with a towel that may or may not have come in contact with the raw nettles. She’ll be fine, but given that the work place is fairly dangerous to begin with, what with all the fire and knives, you might feel a little bit tired from introducing the added risk of stinging weeds. Make a light quip about next week’s special featuring poison ivy pesto.

Put up a slice of the tart for the servers to try. Try it yourself. It is delicious.

Serves eight.

Not Nettlesarily

2010-04-28T23:47:00.000-07:00

We were lucky and had a warm, sunny day about a week ago, warm enough to grill some meats and eat outside in the Crown Hill garden, a space transformed by the completion of the mother-in-law cottage built during the past year. I was, as always, grateful to the point of giddiness to be fed by my friends. Cooks love to be fed. We passed the potato salad as the sky darkened and dabbled with different blues, the indigos and Prussians and cobalts of the clear Pacific Northwest sky at twilight. There was a brief interruption in our conversation about the New Normal – babies have started arriving in my little circle and our Sunday Suppers now feature much less wine and much more coo – when one of the neighbors strode through the backyard and over to the table and asked whether it would be alright if he harvested some of the greens growing in and around the gravel filled pit that forms one corner of the yard, which is still a bit raw from the construction.

After a friendly chat he shoved his hands into some gloves as he walked to the back of the yard and then yanked out the greens and pushed them into an enormous bag, larger than a California King Pillowcase. I went back to my potato salad and watched one baby discover a dangling thing that bounces and chimes, watched another baby take a spoonful of chicken and rice, and calculated that if he stuffed the bag full he might achieve a cooked yield of about two quarts. Not even. Six cups. But while you need a lot of picked greens to feed a family, anyone who has ever planted kale or chard in a two-person garden knows the plants produce and produce and produce until you can barely imagine ever again eating another slice of chard and ricotta tart with a drizzle of fireweed honey, or having another helping of pancetta flecked kale with garlic and a splash of sharp cider vinegar.

In any case, he had his work cut out for him because the greens he was pulling weren’t the friendly kind. They were nettles.

With the insouciance of the armed and dangerous, Stinging Nettles cover hillsides and thrive along roadsides and near the hidden brooks that spring from the granite Cascades. Some intrepid campers have been known to gather and boil nettles in their chipped blue enamel pot, tucked into the coals of the camp fire, to be served with fresh caught trout fried in drippings left from the morning’s breakfast of Dutch oven biscuits and boarbelly. Or, even better, why not take some of those leftover biscuits and break them up into the belly fat, maybe with a foraged spring onion and half of a windfall wild apple, and stuff the split, cleaned fish. Roast, and finish with a tablespoon-full of nettle pistou. I forgot my gloves so I will watch you cook from over here.

Nettles spill across the pages of books, as well: Rabbits creep through nettles, looking for does in all the worst places; Swedish fiction is practically overgrown with their spiny stems and leaves, and, although it’s been a while, I seem to recall some sort of nettle encounter in a Thomas Hardy novel, maybe Jude falls in a patch on his way home. You wouldn’t name a child Nettles, unless the poor creature was an orphan left on the Fens, raised by foxes and a blind one-legged soldier. And even then you might go with “Heather” instead.

Another book, the peerless On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, by Harold McGee, has this to say about nettles:

Nettles (Urtica dioica) are a common Eurasian weed that has now spread throughout the Northern Hemisphere. They’re notorious for their stinging hairs, which have a brittle silicate tip and a gland that supplies a cocktail of irritant chemicals, including histamine, for injection when skin meets needle. The hairs can be disarmed by a quick blanch in boiling water, which releases and dilutes the chemicals.

Well, that sounds delicious. I read on:

Nettles are made into soup, stewed, and mixed with cheese to stuff pasta.

Sure, and yet, I can’t shake the feeling that nettles are only to be eaten either at or right after the end of the world, a delightful post-Apocalyptic dish of spiny weeds boiled in brackish water with a good amount of gravel and a nice turn of coarse-ground ash.

And then there is this entry in the cheerful Greens Cookbook, by Deborah Madison and Edward Espe Brown:

These prickly greens are usually volunteers in the garden that make themselves known with their sharp, surprising sting when you are trying to weed. They are a wonderfully strong green herb with great nutritional value. Boiled in water, the stinging properties disappear, and the broth is rich, smooth and an astounding shade of green. The taste is hearty and deep and does, in fact, give the impression it could sustain one through an otherwise foodless winter. Use nettles in moderation – 1 or 2 handfuls for 8 cups of water. Nettle broth itself, with the addition of a few potatoes and cream, makes a robust and tasty soup. Soups made from the broth of boiled nettles have been known to support the lives of at least two saints – the Irish saint Columba and the Tibetan, Milarepa.

Those two saints might be surprised to find themselves in the same sentence, brought together by nettles. I imagine they both had some other things in common as well. Sackcloth and soot spring to mind. And of course, nothing says a good time like “an otherwise foodless winter.”

But I am intrigued by that “astounding shade of green.” And I remember the amazing soup I had of nettles and pork at last year’s Cochon 555, and the stewed nettles I’ve enjoyed at the same garden table from where I watched the harvest. And, given how much I’ve enjoyed my own little ravioli on the menu right now – a mix of cheeses and basil with no added histamine, maybe for Friday, I'll put together a neat little pasta packet of goat cheese, currants, roasted garlic and nettles. Seems like a good start for the dioica curious. Nettles are everywhere, all over Seattle, in soups, pestos, and pastas. On roadsides and riverbanks, vacant lots and backyards. I think I’ll give myself a dare and put some nettles on the chalkboard for Friday night. I’ll wear gloves and take notes.

Recipe #1: Dogs' Breakfast

2010-01-20T22:40:00.000-08:00

"...said Dingo-Yellow-Dog-Dingo,"... I've made him different from all other animals; but what may I have for my tea?" -- The Sing-Song of Old Man Kangaroo, Just So Stories, by Rudyard Kipling.

What indeed, O Yellow Dog?

Typically Yellow Dog, and his friend Big Black, had biscuits for tea, and elevenses, and midnight snacks, crunched up with doggy gusto. Breakfast was kibble with gravy, dinner was kibble with gravy and chunks. Delicious. But then there were those days when the big green bag yielded nothing but a handful of corn nuts and a quarter cup of greasy crumbs, the days when our New York economy, or the ferocity of the winter storm, or the laziness of a Sunday morning meant an improvised meal.

Were I to put the Dogs' Breakfast on the menu, the text would read something like, "Creamy Pecorino polenta with whole roasted tomatoes and two eggs, sunny side up." Maybe add a hunk of the brilliant house bacon my Sous Chef cured last week...maybe bring in a hearty rye bread to serve, toasted, on the side, with a knuckle of imported butter. That my father uses the term to describe a bad hand of cards is a good reason why I shouldn't menu the item; the heart quails at the thought of a customer reading the menu and wondering whether the Chef was offering roadkill, or something even worse. Dogs aren't picky.

The version that Yellow Dog wagged and waited for was more of a stirred affair, based on a recipe I learned as a child when conditions in our western Colorado mountain home were similar to those experienced 23 years later in NYC: the big green bag under the counter was almost empty and a store run wasn't in the cards until the next trip into Town, and if the snow didn't stop falling, well, at least we had a nice stack of firewood, and the dogs had a big jar of cornmeal and a shaker can of Kraft Parmesan. The many-legged throng in the kitchen when my mother made this for the dogs' breakfast was the canine equivalent of the excitement felt by Seattle foodies when a celebrity chef opens a new house in their neighborhood.

Here's one for the recipe box:

8 c cornmeal

16 c water

4 eggs

ripped up bread heels of whatever loaf is left

a nub of cheese

crumbs from the bottom of the dog food bag

ketchup or jarred spaghetti sauce

In a large saucepan, bring the water to a boil. Stir in the cornmeal. Ask the dogs to leave the kitchen. When the cornmeal has absorbed most of the water, step over a dog, stir in the eggs, the bread and the cheese. Tell the dogs to leave the kitchen. Divide the mixture between two medium sized stainless steel bowls and chill. Leave the dogs in the kitchen staring at the refrigerator door. Chill, stirring at least once every seven minutes, until the dogs' excitement becomes greater than your worry that the mixture will burn the roofs of their mouths. Sprinkle the crumbs over the top of the dish for crunch, garnish with a generous dollop of ketchup or sauce. Push through dancing dogs with bowls and place on floor. Serves two.

Both of them loved these meals, possibly perceiving these occasions as something special, possibly wondering which had been the Good Dog to deserve such a treat. I like to think so.

After Big Black died the time I spent with Yellow was a little bit blurred, distracted as I was by the dwindling size of my pack. When I found out on Wednesday that Yellow Dog was gone I thought about his speed, his joy at flight, whether he was tearing through the North Woods of Central Park or running with Black and Bear along the paths of Magnuson Park, or eating his food too quickly. I remembered his grin and his furrowed brow, and I wonder whether he and Black are enjoying a proper Dog's Breakfast now, rolling delightedly in offal that must really stink up Dog Heaven. I hope they have a bath and a biscuit before I see them again.

Currents

2010-01-18T18:27:00.000-08:00

"And one day he took flour and water and currants and plums and sugar and things, and made himself one cake which was two feet across and three feet thick." - "How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin", Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling.

Kipling has been much on my mind lately. Mostly because I've been musing on the possible long term effects of reading The Jungle Books and Just So Stories during early childhood moral compassing -- is it a good thing to identify with a cat who walks by himself? with a boy raised by wolves? Vain questions for a different blog. So, pushing the cat to one side, I read again about the Parsee and his cooking stove and his knife and his very shiny hat. And his cake. Two feet across and three feet thick. That is an impressive baked good.

The conspicuous absence of eggs or any leavening points to the cake being an extremely dense offering, as well. I'd like to posit that eggs (separated, the yolks combined with half the sugar, the whites beaten madly with the remainder until stiff peaks form, and then carefully folded into the rest of the batter) fall within Kipling's casual "...and things..." Possibly omitted because he didn't want to write a story about How the Meringue Got its Loft, or didn't want to explain the callouses on the Parsee's hands, there as a result of whipping egg whites by hand and using what sounds like a very dangerous cooking stove. Really, who could blame ol' Rudyard? But he did mention currants, and I have to concede that, more than tigers and mongeese and white seals, more than whale's throats or yellow dog dingos, the Parsee's Currant and Plum Studded Torte is Kipling's darkest thumbprint on my skin.

Currants showed up in different stories over the years, and they were almost always described as plump little berries, food for shrub hopping birds, or the main ingredient in jam. For a girl who ate her weight in chokecherries every summer, currants represented all the potentially tannic treats the world held in store. Currants sounded European and sophisticated, an impression reinforced by the first time I saw a cluster of the bright red berries: I was twelve, picking out a dessert in the cafeteria line at my father's office outside of Vienna. I was fresh from reading a Garfield comic in which he ate a whole fish and pulled out an intact skeleton and so I tried to eat the currants like that, popping the entire stem into my mouth. Disappointing showing. Too tart. Wipe tongue with napkin. Ignore grown ups' embarassment and feed a tiny piece of ham to the wasp climbing on the bottle of Riesling that sweats in the middle of the outdoor table.

And then, years and years later, I was a pantry cook at a spot on the Hill and lo and behold, currants! But different: dried and much sweeter; these were the Parsee's currants, these would be able to hold up to the extremely long cooking time a cake that size would require. I ate them all the time, in pastas and salads, loving the little sweet yin they brought to a salty spicy yang. The difference between the two kinds of currants seemed strange, but nothing that was going to keep me up at night. Since then I curbed my currant use, recognizing them, and nuts, as a comfort zone I had to leave if I wanted to grow as a chef.

That said, we do use currants in our oatmeal, and on our roast chicken. So, about every month I'll check in an order that includes a five pound bag of currants, or at least that's what it says on the invoice; the bag itself reads: "Currants. Contains: Raisins." Reading that I was at first reminded of another restaurant, long ago, where we had an ice cream container full of "Raisons" on the dry storage shelf. I never peered beneath that lid, figuring that it was up to me to find my own whys. But then, confronted with a bag of fruit that threatened to steal the sweet romance and mystery of the currant and replace it with the dreaded Halloween non-treatness of the raisin, I wanted to find out why. I wanted the raison.

A short trip to wikipedia held the answers, including the taxonomy, but the answer in Russ Parsons' How to Pick a Peach is much more charming:

"...currant fruits have nothing to do with currant raisins, which are made from the tiny Black Corinth grape, and if you say Corinth with the accent of a New York produce dealer, you will understand the root of the confusion. These are sometimes called Zante currants, which alludes to the Greek islands from which these grapes were first imported."

So there it was. The Parsee's currants are wee dried grapes, the currants used for jam are, um, currants. I recently used some White Currants on a Special and they had the plump transluscence of fish eyes. While I love Black Currant jam, I'm still not sold on the naked berries, unless ... a sweet dessert play on Salmon Roe Nigiri....rice pudding, red currants, wrapped in carmelized seaweed...but I suspect, O Best Beloved, that not even a rhinocerous would touch such a treat.

Chef's Clog, January 17, 2010: This Temperate Winter

2010-01-14T21:17:00.000-08:00

Most of the winters I've spent in Seattle are damp and dark affairs, with dreary waits in the drizzle for a bus that smells like damp wool and old Gortex. Typically I nod off, as the bus lurches through a darkness as dense as the one I'd ridden through 12 hours earlier, and suffer fitful visions of 1,243 egg shells being crushed beneath the feet of the cook dancing madly next to me. I wake suddenly and stagger off at Broadway and John.

Last year's winter was thrillingly snowy. I loved almost every minute of it. But this winter, the forsythia is already beginning to bloom. And the shy yellow flowers, peeking from between the spindly arms of the shrub, are messing with my menu.

Winter food is winter food because it's supposed to wrap us in a warm layer of fat, because evolution decrees that intelligence comes with near nakedness. The ingredients are pulled from the ground, or the freezer, or the summer harvest put up on pantry shelves. Nothing from trees or vines, except for kindling, because winter food requires slow cooking over a sustainable fire: as darkness comes earlier, the warmth and light from the cooking fire keeps the saber toothed cats at bay; 11,000 years later, the pot of stew Ma set to cook hours earlier is simmering over the hot iron stove and Pa is knocking snow from his boots, back from checking the livestock. Slow cooking too because the ingredients are tougher, harder to coax into edible form without a little liquid and fat. Shoulders and briskets, stews, hocks, potatoes and wrinkled apples. Thick gravy and copious amounts of cream. Bacon fat biscuits and berry jam.

Here's a menu item: Short ribs braised in porter over mashed potatoes with slivered Brussels sprouts. That's a reasonable winter offering. And as the East Coast continues to be bitten by storms, I can imagine those Chefs are using a lot of sausage and butter with their roots. But here in Seattle, in the middle of January, when I write my Specials I want to include tiny fronds of watercress or chervil, the fronds planted in a white bed of parsnip and pear puree; they would look like tiny green tendrils poking through the snow, an effect blurred but not obscured by the placement of a pancetta-wrapped tenderloin and some poached garlic slivers.

This temperate winter is making me impatient with roasting and baking. I want to pick and eat and grill over a short, hot fire. I want tiny green shoots and radishes the size of a marble. I want to bite the heads off of baby lettuces. I am voracious for spring.