Wednesday, February 23, 2011

The Grocer's Daughter's Biscuits

The grocer’s daughter was tall. Her hipbones met the cutting board countertops in her Yonkers kitchen. It looked out on the abandoned lot between hers and other tenements built by WPA. The coldness of her kitchen, the bite of the linoleum floor, made her shuffle from foot to foot, softy tap dancing away sands of sleep.
February can be a hard time, an unforgiving month. Even the sun becomes prodigal. The grocer’s daughter’s heard the north wind whip through her neighborhood’s scraggly trees and thin alleyways. She bent at her over’s portal and lit it with a set of bar matches, creased and crumpled.
Run the oven at 425°. Run the oven hot and fast first thing in the morning.
Her oven was slow to warm; wary as the sun caught behind thick stew of low, sea grey clouds. The grocer’s daughter sprinkled flour on her countertops absentmindedly, distracted. The warmth of sleep was leaving her body, the chill of East Coast morning was beginning to draw sharply across her skin. She kneed the oven lovingly, with pinball body English, and the oven deliciously exhaled warmth and hope.
That is the nature of biscuits.
The grocer’s daughter drew concentric circles in the loose flour. She stopped suddenly, rubbing the back of her elbows. Caressing, really. She cut the butter down, halving piece after piece, her knife raking acceptably small cubes to the side.
The grocer’s daughter believed in self/sifting. She ran the butter and flour through her hands, rolling the butter between her thumb and forefinger. The cold butter leached the warmth in her pink palms. She paused to linger over a pinch of sugar. She stopped to make a wish on the baking powder. She stopped again to banish shame and regret with a healthy pinch of salt. She reflexively stopped, and licked her thumb.
The salt tasted like Savannah, like the coast of Georgia, were the ocean and the land fall in love, day in and day out. Her oven began to warm the low hanging air in her Yankee kitchen. The mixture in her bowl began to look like the cornmeal. The sun broke though the clouds, through her thick northern paned windows, into her kitchen, warming her ankles and calves.
She slowly poured the milk into a well she had dug into the center of her grandmother’s porcelain bowl.
They got it all wrong, she decided as she turned the short, flat wooden spoon around and around, gentle as a canoe paddle, steady as a gondolier.
The got it all wrong when they said breath, and when they said dust.
They got it wrong when they told that story about that man with that beard who blew into that other man’s nose.
Before ribs. Before floods. Before February. Before Winter.
It was milk that got poured on earth and that’s what sprung life. It was milk, round and cold and velvety, that fell on Adam’s dust and brought forth life, or at least biscuits.
The grocer’s daughter transferred the wet, sticky dough to the counter. It pulled back affectionately when she pulled her hand away.
She had been scolded and chided for using a roller; but she knew that she would over work the dough by hand. She would worry it to ruin. She used a wooden roller to press the dough, stretching her back, feeling the roller's phantom. She was no longer in Savannah, and would make biscuits as she pleased.
She used a coffee cup to cut the biscuits out, ignoring more precautions and soothsayers. The grocer's daughter, even this early in the morning, knew her own mind.
She baked the biscuits in her ancient but fast oven, in the cast iron skillet she had bought in Chinatown, and held clung at her side on the long train ride back uptown, upstate, home to Yonkers.
Twelve minutes is long enough to remember to stand up straight. It is long enough to learn how to count to 20 in almost any language. Twelve minutes is long enough to remember what it was like to be in love, and to remember that the heart heals. Twelve minutes is long enough for biscuits to bake.

INGREDIENTS:
2 cups flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar
1 TBS Baking Powder
8 TBS Butter
3/4 CUP Whole Milk

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Beet&B.Sprout Salad

The beet is a Trotskyite, a wool skirt wearing Sarah Lawerence girl with a babuska’s headscarf. Under its peasant soil, its muddy topcoat, the red flesh vibrates, singing socialist love songs. The beet is sentimental, cresting manic on waves of sugar highs. You will find yourself nostalgic as you wash away some one else’s soil, some one else’s pied a terre. It is impossible not to wonder where the beet came from, when washing away its history, when stripping away its regionality. It is equally impossible not to consider your own history, your own regionality, and the odd bits of dirt and soil clinging on for dear life. The beet, as both Sonny&Cher knew, goes on.

The Brussel Sprout has an attitude; like the Lollipop Guild. I imagine them speaking in unison with Brooklyn accents and Borscht-belt high kicks. They’ll scatter across your counters, roll beneath your refrigerator. Don’t get mad; they’re just having a good time. They’re a hoot, Brussel Sprouts.

Each is strong individually and doubly bright when complimented with the other. Imagine Marlene Dietrich & Groucho Marx. Or Beatty & Keaton.

This salad is romantic in a kind and sweet, 70s epic “Reds” kind of way. It is strewn together from side dishes from previous meals and made into a salad that can be picked at for days to come. It pretends to be pragmatic, but really it is about how good it tastes … right now.

That’s the thing about roasted beets and brussel sprouts, they don’t look back. Sure, you may get weepy while skinning the beets; but the act of eating is totally encompassing. The flavors careen across your palate, excited as love can be, giddy and speedy. The tartness of the balsamic vinegar is accented by the smoke in the roasted vegetables. Reminiscence is left in the preparation, where it belongs.

INGREDIENTS:
• Left Over Roasted Beets - 3-4, diced.
• Left Over Roasted Brussel Sprouts - 1-2 handfuls, halved
• Balsamic Vinegar – ¼ cup
• EVOO – 2 TBS
• Salt – 1 TBS
• Fresh Ground Black Pepper
• Fresh Dill, chopped, about that much

INSTRUCTIONS:
I love second chance food. I love how optimistic it is. I love that second incarnations are natural in the world of food. Though the act of roasting beets is wholly fulfilling, though the smell of a fresh roasted beet has the kind of juju behind it like to call out like Cassandra; on the second day, having cooled into a satin skinned, lush body, the next-day beet dices easily and will make you feel like a badass with your knife skills, which is always nice.

Halve the brussel sprouts. The top leaves will strip away slow and deliberate as Salome.

Toss the diced beats with the halved brussel sprouts. Use the shiny metal bowl that is really slidy. I find that listening to Louis Prima is a good idea in situations like this.

The beets will begin to stain the exposed white halves of the sprouts to a blushing, Hester Prynne red. The beats themselves will begin to look like the guilty and sexy side of a bruise.

Add the vinegar and respect it for the potion that it is. Don’t tell me vinegar isn’t magic. Vinegar, itself, is a second chance. Add the oil, knowing it to be olive tears.

The salt and the pepper, each, should be added with as much panache as possible. When or where else, really, do you get the chance?

Dill always seems like a grandmotherly cheat, some Eastern European wool over eyes kind of thing. I was always suspicious of what was being shrouded behind this cold war seasoning. But when I started eating fresh dill all of my paranoia was washed away on the immediacy of flavor that comes from fresh dill. Fresh dill reminds me of the sweet parts of Watership Down.

In the end the ingredients will blend through strata of sweet and savory leaving a joyful gang of flavor.

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Chicken Noodle Soup

The sickness had come upon me quick and all encompassing, much like the ice storm that preceded it. I was taken to the mat fast, disoriented with a full body ache, and surrendered quickly to vivid fever dreams.

Like all fever dreams this one was scary and disconcerting, with sharp dips and swells of volume and texture. Circus mirror perspectives. Gypsy Jazz Violin players, long legged & sharp hipped. The air had that ozoney taste of vertigo.

In this fever dream, at this State of Anxiety Fair, there was a beautiful woman dealing out fortunes from a pack of European cross-hatch-backed playing cards. She was shimmering, given the light, the weave of silver and gold in the thin gauze of the scarves around her head, her waist. The jewelry on her fingers and bracelets running the length of her thin arms caught the light from the soft white electric bulbs lining the trellis above.

The hand lay before her, unfolded. She looked at me with a kind despair, exhaling for me. She reached out with her pale fingers and held my face in her palms.

“Oh,Honey,” she said, “You gotta stop looking for the past in the future.”

I woke in a start, cold and hot. It was close to the part of dawn that suburban doves pay attention to. A snow had fallen and was still fine and untouched. It was in this perfect still moment that I decided to make Chicken Noodle Soup.

The Lesson of Chicken Noodle Soup is the key: Everything you need to fix you is right there in front of you. It is the alchemy of leftovers that gives chicken noodle soup its mojo. More to the point, even in a fevered haze is it possible to take the odd bits of your life, things forgotten but not discarded, and make use of them. The act of making use of them is the act of healing, it is the act of getting better. Each ingredient heals an individual wound. Each ingredient warms a cold corner of the soul. That is why soup tastes like that.

RECIPE
Ingredients:
• Chicken Stock– 4 Cups
• Shallot (chopped)- 1
• Carrots (sliced)– 4-6
• Mushrooms (sliced)- 1 cups
• Celery (chopped) – 2 stalks
• Potato (cubed) - 2-3 small
• Black Pepper (freshly ground) – 10 turns
• Salt – 2 TBS
• Thyme – 1 TBS
• Oreganp – 1 TBS
• Cream of Tartar – 1 Tsp
• 2 left over,baked chicken breasts (cubed)
• 2 handfuls wide egg noodles



Like every other recipe it begins with washing your hands. This is an especially loving gesture at the tail end of a cold, fever still lingering in the dried corners of your eye. Before a piece of food is touched, before the pots come out from the cupboards or the spoons are flexed or waved like wands, hot water pours from the faucet. Its steam betrays the coldness of the floor, the chill of the room. The stream will also make you breathe deeper as you scrub to the forearm.

Each of these vegetables are the loose bits rummaging around. The carrots that didn’t make it into the feta salad. The Shallot that missed the date with the parsnips. There are always more potatoes.

Chop the shallot first. Its tears are sweeter than its even its sister Vidalia. The smell will hang in the wet air, sweet and sharp as the back of a debutante’s knee.

Each peel of the carrots reveals a brightness of orange, crisp as Tibet. For years I would slice carrots for speed, for flash of the steel and for careening percussion of my knife against the beaten cutting board. Still slow from the sickness, at ease and lingering sleep and kitchen steam, I sliced each carrot evenly and slowly. Each oval fell in even thickness, tumbled over like a herd of coin. It was soup, after all, and there is no rush. It was morning, after all, and there was no need for cacophony.

Slice the mushrooms more slowly than the carrots. As you breathe with each slice the dense smell of the earth hidden in the mushrooms will be released from its flesh.

Celery is hilarious. Just listen to it when you slice it. I mean, come on. Hilarious. Celery isn’t too proud to laugh at itself. The smell of celery is cashmere sweaters and bloody marys.

Cube the potatoes after having peeled them. As the skin comes away from the potato, moisture beads its ivory flesh.

The very root of optimism lies within chicken stock. It is in the corner of everyone’s cupboard. I love that hope spring, ultimately, from the marrow in the bone.

Get the Big Pot.

Bring the Stock to slow boil on a medium high heat. Don’t rush the boil. Don’t rush anything. You are still sick after all, and time moves wonkily for the fluish. You may find yourself leaning into the pot, over the pot, splay legged with your hands propped on either side of the stove as you being to find yourself breathing, slowly, ingesting the vapor. You are on your way to feeling better.

Add: shallots,carrots,mushrooms,celery,&potatoes.

Each of these, remember, is from some other meal. Each was the discarded object of another’s affection. Chicken soup is that kind of catch all home for those memories still rattling around the present. Resolution, after all, is salty.

When you add the spices do it with pronouncement. Do not let the oregano fall into the pot as if it slipped over the side of a gunwale. Toss is like it is pixie dust, magic powder, voodoo juju. Imagine Tom Waits is your witch doctor. It is that kind of soup.

With the addition of each spice let some piece of your past go; that is how you make room for the future. It is easy to do when you are weak from a cold, hazy from bad sleep, twitchy from fever dreams, high on chicken stock.

Do the same when you dice the chicken breast as add it to the pot. Do no linger on the memory, turning it over and over like some weird fetish. Simply surrender it to soup.

Reduce to low simmer and cover with a crooked lid, allowing the stream to escape into you kitchen’s stratosphere.

Let it sit on the back of your stove and let it cook for an hour. A nice hot shower and a lovely cup of tea fit nicely into this fortuitous space of time.

Add the noodles a half an hour before you intend to eat.

Eat it slowly and breath evenly.