by Kate Christensen | Jan 2, 2012
Seven years ago, my now ex-husband and I adopted a trembling, formerly homeless, possibly abused young dog. We named him Dingo, because that’s what he looked like – a skinny, wild, intelligent, aboriginal canine with enormous bat ears and almond-shaped brown eyes that bugged out slightly like a chihuahua’s, and an earnest furrow between his brows. He weighed a skeletal 27 pounds and was not housebroken and spoke no English and appeared to be unfamiliar with stairs, puddles, furniture, and domestic life in general. After he graduated from obedience school, we kept training him on our own. He was so eager to learn and so easy to teach, we figured he was a doggy genius, until it dawned on us that he would do anything – anything we asked of him – for food.
When we split up, we agreed to share custody of Dingo and have done so for the past three and a half years. These days, Dingo weighs a healthy 45 pounds, has gone grey at the muzzle, and is a mellow, well-mannered gentleman, but he remains as passionately, single-mindedly food-obsessed as ever. He has no sense of humor about food. He’s not one of those hilariously antic, clowning dogs who entertain for treats, nor does he beg with seductive whines and cute, obsequious expressions. He’s quiveringly aware of everything that happens in the kitchen. He knows his rights and exercises them without overstepping: he licks the beaten egg bowl, for example, and is always on hand to do so, but he doesn’t chew on cooked bones, so he never asks. Maybe because he grew up on the street, he won’t go near anything toxic: he has no interest in raisins, chocolate, onions, almonds, or avocado, even if they fall on the floor near him.
He understands that he’s supposed to lie at our feet while we eat, but sometimes, when it’s a meal he loves, especially chicken, he forgets himself. His nose nudges my thigh and I look down to see him sitting right next to me looking up at my plate, his face alight with quasi-religious exaltation, but he’s not begging, exactly. His feelings about food are so similar to mine, I can’t help feeling that there’s some sort of essential kinship at work here.
Coq au Rococo
This baroque, multi-step, multi-day recipe is a mash-up/amalgam of Brendan’s and my original separate chicken methods and is possibly Dingo’s favorite dish, item, event, and occasion, and also the love of his life, or one of them, anyway. He cashes in for days on end. Not only does he get the fresh chicken neck up front, later on he gets boiled giblets and carrots, and the next day, table scraps after we’ve eaten our fill a second time, and the day after that, cartilage and unusable but edible bits from the bird when it’s pulled from the broth, and the day after that, he gets warm soup broth ladled onto his kibble and he can lick our soup bowls clean. This recipe is very generous to people as well.
Preheat the oven to 475.
To the dog, give the raw neck of a large, whole chicken. Set giblets aside for now.
Cut into bite-sized pieces 3-5 shallots and half a lemon, peel still on. Put into a bowl and add a bunch of fresh chopped basil, 8 cleaned, halved baby bella mushrooms, the juice of the other half of the lemon, 8 peeled whole garlic cloves, and a big handful of good juicy olives. Mix well with olive oil, salt, and pepper. Stuff both cavities of the chicken with this mixture and place into a large, well-oiled roasting pan.
Peel 5 carrots, 5 parsnips, and 5 potatoes, and cut them all in half. Toss them well in salt and olive oil, then arrange them around the chicken in the roasting pan. Put whatever remains of the stuffing mixture on top of the vegetables.
Rub the chicken with olive oil. Put a chunk of butter on top and cover loosely with aluminum foil. Bake for 20 minutes, then uncover and turn the oven down to 350.
While the chicken roasts, put the giblets into a smallish pan with herbs, crushed garlic cloves, a quartered onion, and celery and carrot chunks. Take the limp juiced half lemon and pare and mince its zest and add to the pot. Add a dollop of red wine, and salt and pepper. Cover with cold water plus one inch. Bring to a boil, then simmer until the vegetables are limp, about 45 minutes. Strain the broth and use it to baste the chicken and vegetables during the last half hour of cooking. Feed the cooled, cooked giblets and boiled carrot pieces to the dog in whatever way you like. Make sure they’re not too hot.
When the bird is brown and crackling and cooked just to the bone and still tender, pull it out and put it on a carving board and let it sit for half an hour while the vegetables keep roasting in the pan. Pull out the stuffing; if it seems underdone, add to the pan in the oven.
Carve the bird and serve chicken pieces with root vegetables and stuffing to garnish. A crisp simple salad is nice afterwards – up to you.
Save the bones. Reheat and repeat this meal the next day, and on the 3rd day, strip off all remaining usable meat and trim and chop and set aside. Put the rest of the chicken, including all bones, into a big soup pot with onions, carrots, celery, parsley, garlic, herbs, lemon zest, red wine, and tomatoes. Cover with cold water plus one inch. Simmer uncovered, skimming as necessary, for 2 hours, then let sit for 2 hours. Strain through a colander over a second pot, pressing and turning the vegetables and bones with a slotted spoon to squeeze out all possible liquid. Discard the soup stuff. The dog will helpfully eat any cooked carrots and chicken scraps you might otherwise throw away.
Use the clear, savory-sweet, fresh broth to make a soup with potatoes and other vegetables and all of the chicken pieces the dog didn’t get. Garnish each bowl with a squeeze of lemon juice and a dash of hot sauce.
by Kate Christensen | Jan 1, 2012
Two years ago, on a sort of whim, and because we were lucky enough to have places to stay there, we spent the winter living in Italy. For the holidays, we stayed in Rome in Brendan’s friends’ apartment, a large aerie overlooking San Cosimato in Trastevere. We were dogsitting an ancient female yellow Lab. I don’t remember her name. We called her Mrs. Walrus because she was portly and philosophical — or (this was a popular theory) dumb. We took her down to the piazza in the creaky old elevator a few times a day and shuffled beside her as she made her lumbering but enthusiastic rounds. Her gnomic, sweet disposition struck me as something to emulate in old age.
On Christmas Eve, Brendan made a bollito di manzo, the traditional Italian Christmas meal, a shoulder roast boiled with vegetables and herbs for three hours. When it was done, he took the meat out and set it aside and cooked tortellini in the broth, soup to start. The meat was sliced and dressed in a salsa verde — a thick, savory sauce of blended hard boiled egg, anchovies, garlic, parsley, capers, and olive oil — and arranged on a plate with sliced boiled potatoes, tomatoes and hard-boiled eggs.
After dinner, we walked to midnight Mass at Santa Maria in Aracoeli to see the famed Gesu Bambino. It was a warm wet windy night. All the old cobblestones were gleaming, the river was wild and rushing, and everything was all lit up. In a tree by the Tiber, thousands of tiny birds crowded the branches, singing. We climbed a mountain of wet, slippery steps to the church and sat with a crowd of yuppified, bourgeois Roman families in the pews, all of us awaiting the Bambino. After the oddly cheesy, subdued Mass, he was finally released from his cabinet near the altar and grandly processed about the church. Brendan and I almost started giggling. He looked exactly like a dark, dried pineapple.
On New Year’s Eve, because we’d forgotten to make reservations, we landed in a cynical restaurant for an overpriced meal that gave us both intense stomach pains immediately afterwards – the condition of the kitchen and food-handling standards were nothing I cared to think too much about. Brendan had described the Roman New Year as a kind of Mardi Gras – wild decadence, fireworks everywhere, the city exploding with abandonment, people fucking in the streets, drunk and high and lost in pleasure. I had been understandably excited to see this, but we had to go straight to bed after that dinner; also, a thunderstorm with wind and rain competed with the fireworks, so being inside seemed doubly attractive. We crawled into bed, and the poor terrified Mrs. Walrus came with us. We fell asleep well before midnight and awoke the next day fully recovered, all three of us.
This year, because we spent Christmas in New York, we deferred the bollito until New Year’s Eve, which we spent in the New Hampshire farmhouse. We feasted as the sun set, and then we went to a bonfire in the woods and sat in the snow in wicker furniture talking to some neighbors. We came home and put Mississippi John Hurt on the record player over and over (and over; it’s a great album) as we shuffled together in ballroom stance by the revitalized fire. And we were asleep well before midnight. Traditions are important.
White Bean Dumpling Soup
Traditional or not, the tortellini soup was out, being loaded with dreaded gluten, so I made up a quick, easy substitute – most good inventions come on the fly, and this was as fast as it was good. I’m not a big tortellini fan – they’re too chewy, slimy, and dense. These dumplings are the opposite of those things.
In a Cuisinart, put 1 can rinsed white beans, 1/2 cup gluten free (or normal) herbed bread crumbs or plain bread crumbs plus dried or fresh rosemary, basil, and oregano, 1 cup flat-leaf parsley, 2 T olive oil, salt and pepper, and 1/2 cup parmesan cheese. Do it up till it’s a thick ground-up paste.
Put it into a bowl, add a beaten egg with ¼ cup half-and-half, mix well, then put a thick layer of (gluten-free or not) flour on a board and use the flour to help you mold it all into bite-sized little dumplings.
Bring a pot of fresh, hearty beef broth to a near-boil, then add the soft, pillowy little dumplings one by one. Simmer for 8 minutes. Scoop into shallow soup bowls and garnish each one with more parmesan cheese. Eat by a fire with Chianti, and follow with a bollito di manzo. (Serves 4-6 as a starter.)
by Kate Christensen | Dec 30, 2011
I was a Philistine where food was concerned until after high school. Although I hated it as a kid, I credit my inner palate’s eventual awakening at least partially to zucchini, a peculiar but versatile vegetable I now love, sliced into paper-thin discs and steamed in a little chicken broth, butter, and salt, or baked in a savory bath of cream, grated gruyere, paprika, dry mustard, and minced fresh tarragon. However, in the 70s, when I was a mid-sized kid, my mother would pull a hairy two-pound zeppelin from our alarmingly productive Phoenix backyard garden, and then she would fold it into a casserole with tofu and serve it to us horrified kids for supper. I spent my childhood in fear and loathing of the stuff.
In eleventh grade, I went to a Waldorf school in New York State, across the country from my family in Arizona. I had won a full scholarship, and I lived with my English teacher and did babysitting and housework, including cooking, in exchange for room and board, and waitressed at the Threefold Guest House for pocket money. I was a terrible cook when I moved in with that family and a better one when I left two years later, thanks to my fear of the disapprobation of the mother of the household, who made it clear that she thought I was a lazy, dim-witted layabout who ate too much and did too little to help her.
Although I made friends, I was homesick and lonely there. I ate so much I was soon chubby, a condition I had never experienced before even remotely. I ate anything, including, after my waitressing shifts on Sundays, the coarse, damp zucchini bread that issued forth from the Guest House kitchen as dessert. This stuff was wretchedly wholesome, granular with whole-wheat flour and sweaty with oil. Flecks of grated zucchini criss-crossed each piece like the thick cloth ribbons we used to make potholders with at day camp. I didn’t care; I ate it anyway. I missed my mother.
The turning point for me with zucchini came right after I graduated, when I was eighteen. I spent that year after high school in the dead geographical center of France, a muddy and otherwise nondescript farming region called the Allier. I lived at a place called La Mhotte, a Waldorf school and anthroposophical seminary for young adults, a crumbling, grand old chateau with drafty, radiator-heated, ancient dormitories built around a large bare inner courtyard. I worked as an au pair girl for two immensely kind, impecunious, scattershot, warm-hearted teachers named Vivian and Pierre. I took care of their four little boys before and after school and was expected to cook things for their family that I had never made before, with ingredients I had never seen before — mache, creme fraiche, a whole skinned rabbit. I learned to make soufflés and mousses, stews and soups from the unflappably British but resolutely French-transplanted Vivian.
Homesick loneliness had become so familiar by then, I hardly noticed it anymore. I leaned out the casement window of the della Negras’ kitchen in the evenings when I’d finished the dishes, weeping habitual tears of longing, a feeling so powerful it haunts me still, even now that most of its hopes have been fulfilled.
Every weeknight at la Mhotte, in order to help me learn French, I was invited to eat in the Chateau dining room with the seminary students, about two dozen beautiful, cool French people in their twenties. We all sat at a long candlelit table together; I listened to them jibber-jabber away and tried to imitate the way they ate, because they seemed to do it better, being French, than anyone I had ever observed at a table before.
We ate a lot of home-grown food from the biodynamic farm attached to the Chateau: vegetables and herbs, eggs and homemade cheese. One night the entire dinner consisted of only boiled zucchini, boiled potatoes, and homemade bread and cheese. They called the zucchini “courgettes,” but they didn’t fool me: I knew that stuff when I saw it. I sat down with disappointment and dread.
And then I tasted the zucchini. It was sublime, subtly multi-dimensional in flavor and velvety in texture, not like zucchini at all but some other fairylike, delicate thing of palest green, very fresh, with an herblike essence.
That zucchini woke me up. Food was not at all what I had thought it was, it had possibilities and qualities that I had never suspected. I began to pay close attention to food; I began to see it not as a substance to assuage hunger or homesickness, but as something to savor when it was good, like a well-written book or piece of music. Cooking came alive for me that year, too. I learned to taste.
Ratatouille
There are various approaches to ratatouille — some cooks sauté the vegetables separately and add them to the simmered tomato sauce, or layer and bake them, and some roast the vegetables first. I am lazy, no doubt, but I don’t think it makes enough difference to do this the labor-intensive way. I say, chop 8 cloves of garlic, 1 good-sized eggplant, 3 peppers of various colors, 4 medium zucchini, 2 onions, and 4 blanched peeled tomatoes and mince a lot of fresh thyme and parsley. You can also use basil or herbes de Provence. Heat ¼ to ½ (up to you) cup good olive oil in a 5-qt Dutch oven over medium heat until it shimmers. Put everything in with salt and pepper, stir, cover, and simmer for half an hour, stirring occasionally, adding another splash of olive oil if you want. If it doesn’t look done yet, cook it for a little longer. Turn off the flame and let it sit for half an hour. Eat it over polenta – and the next day, when it’s even better, eat it plain at room temperature as a side dish.
by Kate Christensen | Dec 29, 2011
I feel sheepish admitting this, but I’ve only recently noticed the sudden ubiquity of truffle oil. Wherever I go, there it is — on popcorn, in eggs, drizzled over a perfectly good hamburger (I just made that up, but it could be). For a long time, I didn’t notice. But after Brendan got violently sick from a recent dinner and could only mutter, “I’ll never eat truffle oil again. God damn that fucking truffle oil,” it occurred to me that yes, he’s right, that stuff is disgusting. A few days later, there it was again, hidden in our lobster sushi. The aftertaste, now that I’d been made aware of it, lingered unpleasantly for hours.
A casual investigation reveals that truffle oil is not made of truffles at all, it’s a synthetic amalgam of something called 2,4-dithiapentane, which doesn’t sound very appetizing or wholesome to me, plus organic aromas, sometimes from actual truffles, in an olive oil or grapeseed oil base. Why would you want that on your baked fish, or anything, for that matter? “Truffle oil” looks fancy on menus, but it’s sheer food snobbery, which always makes me weary.
Truffles themselves, as everyone knows, are those outrageously expensive, hard-to-find mushrooms found buried near trees, sometimes by trained pigs and, more recently, dogs. Brillat-Savarin called them “the diamond of the kitchen.” The whole point is that they’re rare. You don’t eat them in everything the same way you don’t wear diamonds every day — they’re for special dishes and occasions, a luxury. Shaved, with olive oil, chives and a little parmesan, black truffles elevate humble linguine to a gourmet feast.
Otherwise, in the absence of genuine kitchen diamonds, I’ll take an honest pea sauce on my (gluten-free, alas) pasta. It’s cheap, easy, fast, and simple, and it’s the pasta equivalent of chicken soup. It’s a traditional, typically Roman sauce, the base for osso bucco and many other dishes. Brendan makes it on raw nights, or after a long car trip, or when I’m under the weather. A big, rich, savory-sweet, nourishing bowl of it never fails to warm my bones.
Pasta with pea sauce
Make a soffrito: mince 2 peeled carrots, 2 celery ribs, and 1 large white or yellow onion. Heat olive oil in a heavy saucepan and add the vegetables. Saute them on low heat until they’re tender, about 15 minutes. Turn the heat up, add half a bag of frozen peas, no more than 1/4 cup vegetable broth. Cook 5 minutes until peas are tender. Add 1 1/2 cups Pomi chopped tomatoes, salt and pepper, and crushed red pepper. (It should be smelling deeply good by now.) Let it simmer vigorously on medium-low heat for 15 more minutes, until it’s thick. Toss with 1 lb. freshly cooked hot pasta (fettucine is best) and serve with parmesan cheese and more crushed red pepper. Serves 3, cures everything.
by Kate Christensen | Dec 28, 2011
In my late 20s and early 30s, I was a big drunk. I’m still a happy drinker (of red wine and good tequila, primarily), but I’m talking hard-core. I drank a little in high school, less in college, almost nothing in grad school, and then I started getting soused and blotto on a regular (almost nightly) basis when I was 27 and had just moved to New York and met a guy to get drunk with. We were both frustrated young writers who thought we were much smarter than we were, which engendered a kind of chaotic melancholy that needed blotting out.
I recently heard a rumor that some people can metabolize alcohol better than others. There’s an enzyme, apparently. I must have that enzyme in record quantities, because all this drinking I did seemed to have no effect on my health. Checkups revealed a robust, healthy liver. Hangovers were almost unknown to me except as a pleasant, muzzy state with life’s edges blunted — almost a better reason to drink than getting drunk the night before. I was a terrible drunk, in that I acted outrageously and stupidly; I imagine I was a pain in the ass, but I was too drunk to know it. I thought I was witty and carefree and madcap, oh dear. But I was a good drunk in that my body held up alarmingly well. I never blacked out; I usually remembered (alas) much of the night; I rarely got sick. And I always made it to whatever tedious, low-paying job I had at 9 the next morning, ordered a Western omelet sandwich on toasted rye with extra ketchup from the deli downstairs, downed a vat of coffee, and got on with my day, and then I did it all again the next night.
I once chugged most of a pint of Jameson’s in a stall in the ladies’ room of some club in midtown at some show, it could have been the Fall, it could have been Richard Thompson, it could have been the Mekons. (I can no longer drink Jameson’s at all, even though this was more than 20 years ago.) My sort-of boyfriend/drinking partner won tickets to shows from radio stations by being the 4th or 9th or 11th caller, due to an uncanny genius he possessed for speed-dialing, giving a different name every time — during that era, I saw almost everyone perform live at least once, usually for free, always shitfaced. For about five years there, I lived a life of loud music and a lot of booze, and then impersonal, physically demanding sex afterwards with more booze, and then I’d go to my mindless job the next day on the subway and walk home after work through streets crammed with people and shop windows and noises and traffic and smells —
I suppose I drank that way for the usual reasons, since I’m generally no different from the next person. I remember wanting desperately to escape myself, to flee the annoying chirpiness of my too-clear, too-verbal brain, so recently educated, so freshly imbued with the powers of literary analysis and writerly dogma. I was a bushy-tailed, arrogant, ambitious smartass who believed there was time for everything. I had never been bad in my life before, I’d been the responsible first-born daughter of a single mother, and as a kid I worried that, if I didn’t keep it together, it might all fall apart. In my late 20s, I finally realized that I didn’t have to pretend I could help anyone by being good anymore.
Last weekend, we had Christmas Eve dinner at our friend Rosie’s. It was one of those memorable meals that seem to surpass all prior experiences of the dishes in question — in this case, shrimp cocktail and Rosie’s signature rye whiskey with ginger syrup, Bitter Darlings, then a rare rib roast, gratin dauphinois, a Yorkshire pudding I couldn’t eat because it contained gluten but which everyone moaned over as they ate it, butternut puree, kale salad with pine nuts, a lot of excellent red wine, and then, amazingly, a gorgeous Stilton, chocolate, bread-and-butter pudding with cardamom that looked as good as the Yorkshire pudding, Italian cookies, vin santo, and glogg. We all went home feeling immortally, royally sated.
The next day at noon, Brendan and I walked down Broadway from our hotel to meet a friend at the Union Square movie theater. It was a sunny, mild day, and the city was quiet and empty. Before “Young Adult” started, we went to the billiards hall on 12th and 4th to have a pre-movie drink because nothing else was open. The bartender was idly sitting around. He perked up when we came in and populated the empty bar. Jami ordered a Bloody Mary. Brendan waited for me to order next, and then, for the next few minutes, I channeled a sober rendition of my bad old drinking self. I ruthlessly quizzed the bartender on his Bloody Mary recipe on the way to ordering one, and then, when I learned that he had no Smirnoff (my favorite vodka), I announced that long ago, I could tell the difference between 4 kinds of vodka in a blind taste test. He offered to recreate it then and there for me at no charge; I demurred. My skills aren’t what they once were. I explained the origins of the bet that caused me to train for this test, which I passed, and then I veered off into an interrogation as to what tequilas he had on hand, lambasted Cuervo Gold, which I will never drink again because it’s dirt, it’s disgusting, and then I ordered a Bloody Maria with the house well tequila, which the bartender showed me — a not-bad agave. Then I subsided, apparently out of gas. Brendan ordered a double shot of Don Julio on the rocks with fresh lime juice. And then, once again channeling the headstrong but dithering drunk I used to be and apparently still am, I changed my order to the same thing, but with the ice on the side because I like to slide it into the glass cube by cube as I sip. I could have gone on about the reasons for this, but he set our drinks in front of us with bowls of excellent potato chips, and then it was time to drink.
That glass of Christmas tequila, akin to the dinner that preceded it the night before, was the best drink I’d ever had, so good it simultaneously erased and buoyed my memory of all prior drinks. It was sublime, the ideal form of the Drink. The bartender, who was a good sport throughout all of this, got an enormous, deserved tip. I think he might have been sorry to see us go.
Yorkshire Pudding
I learned to make this dish from the Englishwoman I worked for when I lived in France. Back then, I could eat gluten. Made correctly, it emerges from the oven looking like a big popover/souffle, brown and puffy around the edges, golden and firm in the middle. On Christmas Eve, Rosie’s pal Annika made what might have been the most glorious Yorkshire pudding ever baked. Everyone confirmed this. I ate it along with them in my taste-memory. It was the imagined idealized form of the Yorkshire pudding. Taste-memory is a strong internal palate — I felt afterwards as if I’d literally eaten it.
The recipe: half an hour before the roast is done, take a large bowl, and in it, combine 1 cup all-purpose flour, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1 cup milk and 2 eggs, beaten. Mix until smooth. Remove the roast from the oven and spoon 1/2 cup of drippings into a 9×9 inch pan. Increase oven temperature to 425 degrees. Return the roast to the oven. Pour the pudding batter into the drippings and bake for 10 minutes. Take the roast out of the oven; continue baking the pudding for another 25 to 30 minutes. When it’s cool enough, cut it into squares and serve it with the best, most perfectly rare and tender rib roast ever made in Christendom and Jewry.
