Tomato Kumato

April 28, 2010

Haddock with Roasted Tomato Salsa

Filed under: Fish, Salad, cheese — emiglia @ 11:44 pm

When I was growing up, the Childhood BFF and I were inseparable. We met in preschool, and soon enough I was taking weekend refuge at her house–the home of an only child is like a sanctuary for the oldest of four, and I spent more weekends at hers than at mine, singing along to old Beatles’ records and riding around Bridgehampton in the back of her father’s antique Ford.

In middle school, though, we started growing apart, as middle schoolers tend to do, and by the time I went to high school and then college, I had nearly completely forgotten about our plans to be neighbors for life–college roommates and married at the same time, to live together and raise our children together forever.

It wasn’t until that summer–the summer four years ago when I was a waitress on Long Island, the summer I started this blog–that we got back in touch. It had been 7 years since we’d really spoken, but, lonely and bored without my boarding school friends, I tracked her down on MySpace (before the obsessive days of Facebook) and took a chance by reaching out and sending a message.

“Omigod,” I got back, what I now know as her constant refrain. She met the Hampton Jitney when I came in for my Tuesday off that week, and we sat at a table by the window in Starbucks for hours, finishing one another’s sentences as though the past near-decade had never happened at all.

After that, I was a staple at her house again, waltzing back in as though I’d never left. We spent our nights wrapped up in blankets in the pull-out couch in her living room, huddled together as we watched reruns of Everyday Italian and Unwrapped and 30-Minute Meals.

“How weird is this? That we’re both into food?” I asked. It was the summer after my attempts at recreating Italian classics, the summer after the Childhood BFF had started her journey into Japanese cuisine.

“I have to show you something,” she said, opening a browser window on her iBook. “I found this great site called Slashfood. It’s a food blog.”

“A what?”

Yep… four years ago, it was the Childhood BFF who introduced me to this world of Wordpress and macro settings and recipe writing, just like she introduced me to the world of John Lennon, uncooked pasta as the perfect snack, Baby-Sitter’s Club books, puffed rice with sugar, sleeping in on the weekends… The simple but important things in life.

Now, the Childhood BFF and I are grown-ups–long past the days we were inventing concoctions in the kitchen on our own fake cooking show (modeled after Jacques Pepin and Wolfgang Puck–she did the accents). We used dry ingredients–salt, pepper, sugar, vinegar, dry rotini–we weren’t allowed to touch the stove. We took handfuls of dry spaghetti when we went on drives with her parents, plotting our futures in the back seat. Sometimes, I let myself get lost in time for a little while, and when I come back, I have her over for dinner.

We text each other excitedly all day as we wait for the moment when we’re both liberated–she from school and me from work. We go to the Gristedes and peruse the aisles, finishing one another’s sentences yet again as we throw things into our basket.

We get home and make fun of one another, of the way we explain our motives in the kitchen, because we’re so used to being with people who don’t know, and we know. “I add orange juice to the roasted tomatoes-”

“Yeah. The sugar and acid. Like with a really good-”

“Tomato sauce.”

“You want these sliced or chopped?”

“Sliced. The texture is better-”

“For caramelized onions.”

It’s nothing fancy or haute cuisine–fish, tomatoes, bread and salad. But as we choke on our laughter and spear apples with gorgonzola, I remember eating dinner at her mother’s table, our “R-rated” carrot rounds slick with oil flying from our plates and onto one another’s, and I’m happy for moments like this, when I don’t have to worry about being outside my own head, because someone knows me well enough to climb into it with me.

Haddock with Roasted Tomato Salsa

2 cups cherry or grape tomatoes, halved
1 shallot, minced
1/2 red onion, chopped
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. olive oil
2 tbsp. orange juice
freshly ground black pepper
1 tsp. Italian seasoning

2 filets haddock
salt and pepper
1 tsp. olive oil

Preheat the oven to 300 degrees. Toss all the ingredients except the black pepper and Italian seasoning on a baking sheet, and bake until the tomatoes have released their juices and shriveled slightly, about 1 hour. Stir every 15 minutes, and if the sugars begin to burn, add a bit of water to the pan. When cooked, season with pepper and Italian seasoning.

Season the haddock on both sides with salt and pepper. Preheat a small frying pan over medium-high heat, and add the oil. Cook the haddock 2 minutes per side and remove to plates. Top with the tomato salsa.


Frisée Salad with Gorgonzola and Apples
3 cups frisée lettuce
1 apple, sliced
2 Tbsp. gorgonzola (or other blue cheese) crumbled
1 shallot, sliced
1/2 red onion, sliced

2 Tbsp. extra virgin olive oil
1 Tbsp. white wine vinegar
salt and pepper

Toss all salad ingredients together in a large bowl. Whisk the olive oil and vinegar together and season to taste with salt and pepper. When ready to serve, toss the salad with the dressing.

April 27, 2010

Mom’s Roast Chicken

Filed under: Chicken — Tags: , , — emiglia @ 5:47 pm

When I was in high school, one of my best friends, the Violist, had an ongoing struggle with artichokes.

She loved them, and whenever they featured on a menu, she wanted to order one.

“That’s nonsense,” her mother would say. “We can make them just as easily at home.”

I understand this rationale: I am staunchly against ordering things I frequently make at home–pasta with tomato sauce, salad with gorgonzola and pears, tuna sandwiches. I always order something new and different and reserve these dishes for my own kitchen and the much lower grocery store prices.

The only problem for the Violist was that the promised artichokes never graced her plate–once at home, her mother found them too complicated to put together, and my friend was left without the culinary bliss that is a perfectly cooked artichoke with a side of hollandaise sauce.

One of the dishes I have relegated to an only-at-home dish is roast chicken, but not because I find it prosaic, as the Violist’s mother found artichokes. Rather, I’ve found that the only person who can make perfect roast chicken with juicy white meat, perfectly cooked dark meat, a crisp and flavorful exterior and not a centimeter of greasy, flabby skin is my mother.

This recipe is one she has been making for years. She discovered that the secret was the pizza oven that she had commissioned a few years ago–now, we use it for much more than perfectly blistered pizzas: we also make roasted vegetables, steak tenderloin and, of course, chicken.

The recipe doesn’t have exact measures–I’m lucky I managed to get her to write a list of the ingredients on a Post-It. But you really can’t go wrong with garlic, lemon juice and olive oil, and I promise that even if the measurements are a bit approximate, the chicken is always out of this world.

Roasted Lemon and Herb Chicken
2 whole fryers, split (you can ask your butcher to do this for you, or you can do it yourself: with the chicken breast-side down, use poultry shears to cut out the backbone, and the chicken will lie flat)
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
1/2 cup lemon juice
zest from lemons
3-4 cloves garlic, minced
freshly ground black pepper
red pepper flakes, to taste
salt
a hefty handful of Italian parsley, chopped

2 bricks covered in aluminum foil

In a bowl, combine the oil, lemon juice and zest, garlic and red and black peppers. Place the chicken in a glass dish, and douse with about half the marinade. Salt the chicken and cover with plastic and refrigerate. Allow to sit for at least three hours and up to a day.

Cook the chicken in a pizza oven (or on the grill): remove from the marinade, allowing the excess to drip off. Grill bone-side down for 20 minutes, then flip and grill skin-side down for 10 minutes. Meanwhile, mix the parsley into the reserved marinade.

Remove chicken from grill and brush immediately with excess marinade.

April 20, 2010

La question de demenagement

Filed under: Uncategorized — emiglia @ 3:35 pm

In 2003, I flew to France for a week, and when I came back, it was 2004. It happens every year–this year, New Years was spent gorging on grapes (a Spanish tradition) on the floor of my friend’s Upper East Side living room while we watched That 70s Show which, grapes aside, is not too different from how I spend a normal evening.

But there was something surreal and odd in that night between 2003 and 2004–it was the first real French party I went to, and, still in my perpetually angry phase, I crossed my arms and watched as everyone else did an odd dance that looked to me like swing dancing, secretly hoping that someone would teach me how to do it.

Midnight came and went without fanfare, and we all curled up in sleeping bags to go to sleep–sleep, that is, until I was awoken by the words of a French boy repeating the phrase I had heard countless times since my first trip to France two years before. “C’est elle l’américaine?”

I rolled over and looked to see who had spoken. I was sleeping in oversized plaid pants with Eeyore embroidered on them, and my hair was flat on top from the bandana I had insisted on wearing. I’m sure I looked a wreck, but the boy came over anyway, and he started to talk.

I forget most of what he said–I can’t tell you how much I wish I could go back in time and be a fly on the wall during that conversation, and yet, if offered the chance, I’m not sure I would. Things that seemed deep and complex to my sixteen-year-old self would probably be trite to me now, and I like to let my teenage self keep her naïveté whenever possible. The one part I do remember is the quote he gave me from a relatively unknown poem by Baudelaire. I’ve never been able to find a hard copy, though I’ve made a part-time job of perusing collections by Baudelaire in used bookstores and at outdoor book vendors.

The quote?

“Je pense que je serai toujours bien la ou je ne suis pas, et cette question de déménagement en est une que je discute sans cesse avec mon âme.”

I can type it without thinking–it’s become a sort of mantra. I tried to translate it once with the help of my high school French teacher, but what we came up with never resonated nearly as much as those words did the first time I heard them, syrupy with sleep and surrounded by the intoxicating smell of too much cologne and cheap red wine and cigarettes that emanated from this boy, whose name doesn’t matter because, as far as I’m concerned, he no longer exists.

“I think that I will always be better there where I am not, and it is this question of displacement that I discuss constantly with my soul.”

It’s “displacement” that bothers me, but there’s no better word–not in English, anyway. It’s a feeling I have nearly all the time, although I’ve gotten better at ignoring it in recent years–that is, until all three of you who are still out there reading suddenly got bombarded by my complaints of missing the City of Lights.

It’s the feeling that makes me miss Paris when I’m in New York, that makes me miss New York when I’m in Cannes, San Sebastian when I’m on Long Island, Long Island when I’m anywhere with a beach that isn’t Long Island.

When it’s summer, I long for snow, and when it’s cold, I dream of the ocean. When I’m in the city, I long for the calm of Paziols, and when I’m in the middle of nowhere, I crave the thousands of hot spots in Paris and New York and Toronto that I never took advantage of.

It’s a feeling that makes me want to recreate experiences from one place in another, a sort of false memory that convinces me that it’s not all gone, that place that I left so easily a few months or years ago. It’s the reason I buy Jamba Juice on 86th street and make gratin dauphinois on Long Island at Christmas and carry endless packs of ramen to France only to stuff my suitcase with bottles of wine and bags of Carambars when I come back.

But Jamba Juice has never tasted the same since one opened near my Subway stop–I’d much rather leave it in San Francisco and settle for black coffee and a hard roll in New York City, though I steer clear of Tim Horton’s. Now that one has appeared on a Lexington avenue corner close to me, I don’t want to go in and remember what it was like to spend all night there in Toronto, watching my friend do magic tricks and observing the other oddballs who made the 24-hour coffee shop their nighttime haunt. Instead, I settle for a typical New York breakfast that I tried endlessly to find in Toronto, where late night Tim Horton’s bagels that tasted like bread replaced the paper white-and-grey cups that are omnipresent here.

When I left Toronto, I missed the endless falafel stands and bubble tea places and tried to find them in Cannes and in New York and was disappointed when I finally found what I was looking for to see that, like Disney world as an adult, it just wasn’t the same. Carambars and wine, for whatever reason, don’t taste the same here as they did in Paziols and Paris.

I’m trying to be happy where I am–really, I am. I’m excited to be in New York, to be exploring Brooklyn, which I never had the opportunity to visit in my three-week rushed stints back here over the past eight years. I’m excited to leave for Cannes in a few weeks, to show my brother everything that was my “normal” nearly three years ago. I’m excited by the prospect of seeing San Sebastian again–in the summer, this time, when I really can spend all of my time surfing.

I’m excited to go back to Paris, too, although mostly I’m scared: that I’ll miss it too much when I leave, that it won’t be as good as I remember, that it will be as good as I remember. I worry that the life I’ve carved out for myself in New York will be pulled away from me like my life in Paris was. I worry that I’ll forget to miss it all someday.

La question de demenagement is a tiring one, to say the least. My brain is cluttered and tired and looking forward to Cannes and the beach and the sea… but I think I’d like to put everything on pause for a moment to just be. If only I knew how…

No recipe today, but I do have this fun cheese to share–it came from my local supermarket in Paris and offers three cheeses made from different milks. The Parisian and I made a game out of guessing which was which and washed them down with rose on a sunny day like today, nearly exactly a year ago in Paris.

April 13, 2010

On a scale of one to ten…

Filed under: Pasta, Vegetarian Main Dishes — Tags: , , , — emiglia @ 1:48 pm

Growing up, this was my father’s favorite phrase.

“On a scale of one to ten, how do you think you did on that test?”

“On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate this pizza over Patsy’s?”

“On a scale of one to ten, where does this camp rate? How about the one from last year?”

I abhor that phrase so much that, when I dislocated my shoulder skating in high school and the nurse asked me how much it hurt, “on a scale of one to ten,” I almost punched her with my good arm.

“I don’t know!” I wailed. “It hurts!”

I’m not good with numbers–I never have been. There’s something to be said for the belief that your brain works in a certain way, making some things come easily–languages, writing, spelling in my case–and other things nearly impossible, like physics. (Izzy, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry for having physics-related meltdowns in your room nearly every night between 2003 and 2004.)

The point is, a scale like “one to ten” works well for my father, who has made his life revolve around numbers, working in finance for the past twenty years. As for me, the one who tried to send my first “novel”–21 typed pages of teen romance and drama closely modeled after the Alice books I’d just finished reading–to the address on the back of one of my Yearling Paperbacks, I can say unequivocally that a scale that revolves around words is much more useful for me.

For example… how much do I miss Paris? So much that, while watching Chansons d’amour on DVD late last night, I started crying when I recognized the cinema they went to. I sobbed when they pronounced the Chateau d’Eau metro stop. I craved the huge windows that pull in like French doors and close only with insistence and urging, windows that people open and smoke beside with an ashtray balanced on the rail, because everyone in Paris has an ashtray. Hell, when one of the characters shouted up to be let into a building and the other responded with a door code, I missed that.

I missed my door code.

I don’t know where that hits on a scale “of one to ten,” but I’d say it’s a lot.

Today, when going through pictures for my blog, I realized that my cache of Paris pictures is nearly empty. I have a handful left from the jardins de Luxembourg, a few from the parc Buttes-Chaumont and some from the Cite des Arts. There are a handful of the chateau in Chartres as well, but that’s not Paris. Not really–although at this point, it’s close enough. I’m nearly scared to post them–some is better than none.

I rode the New York subway yesterday reading a pilfered copy of The World According to Garp in French that I found on the bookshelf of my rented apartment years ago, and if I stared hard enough at the pages, if I held my breath to not smell the relative cleanliness of the New York subway and pretended I could smell that disgusting mix of stale urine and staler cigarettes, it was almost as though I were back.

I could remember jumping on the train to get back to my old market, the one in the 15th where, last year, I bought endive and ate them in the metro stop at La Motte Piquet-Grenelle. I bought bunches of asparagus with dirt still on them–last year, I mixed them with pasta and pesto. Last night, I picked some up at the Food Emporium, and my sister and I ate them roasted, slurping the skinny ones up like spaghetti. It wasn’t the same.

How much do I miss Paris, “on a scale of one to ten?”

Eleven.

Pasta with Pesto and Asparagus
1 lb. spring asparagus, the tough ends trimmed, cut in thirds
1 tsp. olive oil
2 cups dry pasta
3 Tbsp. pesto

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Toss the asparagus and olive oil together, and lay flat on a baking tray. Roast 15-20 minutes, until the tips of the asparagus are charred.

Meanwhile, bring a pot of salted water to a boil and cook the pasta until al dente. Drain the pasta, reserving some of the cooking water, and toss with the pesto, adding water if needed to thin the sauce. Add the asparagus. Eat on your Parisian balcony with a glass of white wine.



Roasted Asparagus
1 lb. spring asparagus, the tough ends trimmed
1 tsp. olive oil
1 hefty pinch salt
freshly ground black pepper

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Toss the asparagus, olive oil and salt together, and lay flat on a baking tray. Roast 15-20 minutes, until the tips of the asparagus are charred. Season with black pepper and eat hot with your fingers.


April 11, 2010

Spring Has Sprung

Filed under: Quickbreads — Tags: — emiglia @ 6:27 pm

I tend not to do things the way I was supposed to.

You’re supposed to stay at home for high school; I went away. You’re supposed to go to college and live in dorms, but I did that in high school and moved into my first apartment at eighteen. When you finish college, you’re supposed to finally move out, but I moved home, to the childhood bedroom I never had.

Most people major in something that will get them a job, and then they get a job. I got a job freelancing during college and then decided to do something completely unrelated to my major when I finally started going to an office. You’re supposed to be in a relationship with someone for awhile before asking them to move in instead of asking someone to move in so that you can start a relationship with them, but I did that too.

The list goes on… and I’m OK with it. Sometimes it gets tiresome, but most of the time, there’s a method to my madness, and I end up coming out at the other side doing well, or at least doing what it was I wanted to do, even if no one around me can understand why in the world I wanted to do it that way. I get a little thrill out of shocking people, anyway, and if I can’t shock them, I’ll settle for perplexing.

I miss out on some things: curfew, which I’m not sorry I missed, or frat parties, which I kind of am. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I’d gone to normal high school followed by normal college… would I still be the way I am? Would I still be so obsessed with proving people wrong all the time?

Probably not. Which is why no matter what I’ve given up along the way–more time spent growing up with my siblings, dorm life in college, the excitement of turning 21 and finally being able to drink legally (I’d been doing it for years in Canada and in France), the celebration of finally getting my new apartment instead of sort of falling into it (and the celebration of having someone move into my apartment instead of just letting it happen one afternoon, willy nilly)–it all seems worth it.

Now going against the grain is part of my personality, much to the chagrin of people around me. Although there comes a time every so often when people are pleased at my inability to follow the crowds, like on the hottest day any of us has seen in months, when I come out with pain d’épices.


Pain d’épices, for those who don’t know it, is a sort of French gingerbread, sweetened with honey instead of molasses. It’s typical in winter, around Christmas, so to have some sitting on the table as I wandered around Westhampton in flip flops is definitely out of the ordinary. But pain d’épices is sweet and delicious at any time of year, and whether you’re eating it warm out of the oven with spiced wine or toasted with cream cheese in the morning on your way to walk on the beach and see the first trees blossoming on the side of the road, I’d say it’s a worthwhile thing to have around.

Pain D’Epices

4 cups all-purpose flour
2 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
4 tsp. quatre épices (or 2 tsp. cinnamon and 1/2 tsp. each nutmeg, cloves, ginger and black pepper)
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 ounces butter
1 egg
1/2 cup honey
1/2 cup orange marmalade or apricot jam
1 cup water

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Spray a loaf pan with nonstick spray.

Combine the butter, egg, honey and jam in a bowl until light and fluffy. Add the water and stir to combine. Sift in the dry ingredients and stir until just blended.

Transfer the batter to the pan and bake 1 hour. Cool in the pan for 10-15 minutes, then remove to a rack and finish cooling.

April 8, 2010

Ceci n’est pas un bol de pâtes…

Filed under: Pasta, Vegetarian Main Dishes — Tags: , , , , , — emiglia @ 11:47 am

For those of you who have forgotten your French/took Spanish/don’t know about the juxtapositional Magritte painting, what I’ve written above translates to, “This is not a bowl of pasta.”

And it’s not. So I’ve ripped off a brilliant French artist, but not without due cause: Magritte philosophized through his famous painting–a painting of a pipe with the words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” painted below it. He explained that there was an emotional lack in the pipe painting, which, of course, was not an actual pipe: “Try and put tobacco in it,” he suggested to illustrate his point.

This emotional lack, however, does not exist in the “pasta” I made (though some may exist through the photograph, which implies pasta but does not follow through. Tease.) The dish I made, complete with a simple tomato sauce of onion, basil and Pomi, was served, not atop al dente spaghetti, as we are so accustomed to in this house, but tofu.

Tofu?!?

Tofu.

Shirataki noodles, to be more precise. I had heard about them for years, but I only picked up a pack whilst strolling through the supermarket one day, assembling my basket of pre-washed spinach and individual cups of Fage yogurt and all the other things that I didn’t even realize I missed at ED in Paris until I was confronted with the sensory overload that is an American supermarket. I grabbed a bag on a whim, took them home, and made spaghetti. And it ruled.

Shirataki noodles are marketed towards people on low-carb (ick) diets or those looking to sneak in a little extra protein, but I like them for what they are: snappy-textured spaghetti-esque noodles that are quick to prepare (rinse and zap in the microwave for two minutes), conveniently portioned, and the perfect vessel for a bowl of tomato sauce and basil.

Shirataki Noodles with Tomato-Basil Sauce
Those of you who remember the Marcella Hazan tomato sauce trend a few years back may recognize this sauce. I tweaked it for daily use–the other has too much butter for me to come to terms with on a Tuesday night–but I always go back to that one on special occasions. A copy of that recipe is available here.

1 package shirataki spaghetti
2 cups Pomi
1/2 onion, in tact, skin removed
1 tbsp. butter
salt and pepper
3-5 basil leaves, ripped

Heat the Pomi and onion in a saucepan over low heat. When the Pomi simmers, cover the pot and allow to cook, stirring occasionally, for 30 minutes. Remove from the heat and extract the onion half. Discard.

Stir in the butter, salt and pepper.

Meanwhile, rinse the shirataki noodles well and cover with about an inch of water. Microwave 2 minutes and drain. Toss the noodles in with the sauce and stir to coat. Serve in bowls and garnish with basil. Serves 2, although the photos serve none.

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