Grilled Corn and Poblano Pepper Soup

I love soup. So does Craig.

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

It worked like this:

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

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

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

CROUTONS

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

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

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

Recovering oneself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'm looking at it right now.

Yogurt

Gosh.

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

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

:) Sorry. Calming down now.

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

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

Stop looking at me like that.

Go buy yogurt now.

Small Dishes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s the way eating should always be.

Cookbooks

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

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

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

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

Here are a few things from this last book:

Harlequin Crusts

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

Casino Relish (hot)

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

Mushroom Meringues

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

Assorted Appetizers served on platter

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

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

Rosemary Raisin Blog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So If Not Buffet Service, What Else Is There?

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

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

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

So if not buffet service, what else is there?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disadvantages:

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

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

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

and some disadvantages:

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

There. Does that help?