Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch

“[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

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

'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

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

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

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

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.