Cukes and Cukes Alone

Dear reader, I'm back! And I missed you. I'm sorry I was gone so long, if I were a lover I'd totally break up with me. Fortunately, I'm just your friendly food writer and intrepid eater... hopefully we can rebuild our delicious trust!

In LA we're at the tail end of a heat wave, ugh, and the only food I can think about while sweating is... cucumbers. Cool and refreshing, our long green friends came originally from India or Thailand (locales that know unrelenting heat!) and have been cultivated for thousands of years by grateful panting people.

I like that these humble, low-cost veggies can be transformed into fancy finger sandwiches for wedding showers.

Some friends and I hosted a wedding shower tea for our friend Tanya. It was a delightful soiree:










Because Tanya is of German descent, I also made tea sandwiches with very dark pumpernickel bread: I smeared them with whipped cream cheese (it's easier to spread), draped some smoked, wild-caught Alaskan Sockeye salmon (wild-caught has a brighter color, tastes better and lived a happy fish life until it got hooked) and topped each with a dill sprig.

(That's me worrying that I didn't make enough... and I always make too much.) The colors popped and livened up the fairly monochromatic cucumber sandwiches, they tasted great, and I like including elements of people's heritage into shower celebrations. That stuff matters when you're creating a new family.

So thanks for checking back in, my friends! I've got plenty more to say and eat as soon as it cools off. We'll be chowing down again soon.

What a Cook Wants, 20

The Way To Cook
I spent a summer on Nantucket as a personal chef for a grumpy, demanding woman named Mrs. Bingham who had a marvelous house~ with an untouched tricked-out kitchen!~ tucked deep into the sand dunes with its own private beach. Our neighbor was the Kennedy compound (if only they'd dropped by!), and my housemates were two very spoiled but sweet Scottish terriers.
The only problem? I didn't really know how to cook. Sure, I'd worked as a short order cook at college, waitressed at a place where we made Caesar salad tableside (I still make the best, baby!), and I'd nearly perfected the microwave Egg McMuffin, but it turned out this lady was able to get tables at NY's most luscious restaurants and loved poached salmon and crème brûlée.

I had no idea what crème brûlée was.

I had never poached a salmon.

After we discussed the first menu I stood in the kitchen alone, my heart clanging against my ribs. I knew I was a good cook, knew I could channel my Pop-Pop's palette and read a recipe as well as anyone else, but I was beyond my skills. I was screwed. My throat began to tighten, but then I noticed the shelf. There were books on it, and one of them was Julia Child's The Way to Cook. That title held promise, and Julia delivered. She was precisely what I needed, and as the summer continued I grew more ambitious with homemade tarragon mayonnaise (there's a reason the French call it a sauce!) and an apple crisp that made Mrs. Bingham the toast of the dinner party circuit.
Her style was so accessible and friendly, she was fearless as she dismantled raw ducks and shucked oysters; she wasn't intimidated by the thought of poaching a huge 4 pound salmon fillet. I borrowed her courage.
I suppose I borrowed it again when I started this blog. My title is an homage, even though no one gets it. I realized I could help people find the joy and fearless pleasure in eating, just like Julia did for me with cooking.
Which is all a very long-winded way of saying this cookbook would make a great gift. For anyone.
$26 for this 512-page tome. It changed my life. How many books do that?

I Came, I Comme Ça, I Chowed Down

I recently attended the opening of Comme Ça, chef David Myers' newest venture. (see above and below)

Myers has beautiful eyes and a smoldering intensity (but perhaps more pertinent to this blog!) is a cuisine-forward, thrilling chef to behold. This is his second venture after Sona, a restaurant I love dearly. What I like about his cooking is that it gracefully dances that razor-thin line between
1. advanced, intellectual dishes and
2. food that is actually delicious and accessible.
Most chefs who fall into category 1. completely forget about 2. I love having my brain stimulated while I eat, but ultimately the pleasure that matters most is in the mouth.
But I digress, dear reader, back to Comme Ça!

The focus of all restaurant openings, oddly, isn't the food. Openings are basically an amped up catering experience (seriously, there was a catering truck out back, though to his credit it did belong to Myers), which is ok because the purpose is not to dazzle the palette but rather convince everyone there that This Is The Place To Be! Look at all the cool kids! So hopefully they'll tell their friends, and more cool kids will come (like these gals).

Standard-issue LA Hotties, exhibit A






Comme Ça's opening was quite successful to that effect: it was crammed with hipsters young and grey, well-cut suits and too-cool-for-school $60 t-shirts, a few dedicated foodies, other talented chefs, and a lot of folks eager for free drinks.
And the drinks were superb, oh my goodness. I'd never had scotch with anything other than soda (P.S. I hate scotch, the smell makes me want to hurl), but their fabulous 'Penicillin' with scotch, ginger, lemon and honey made a believer out of me. Sweet Lord, it cured all my ills. Likewise, the 'Rumble' with rum and bruised blackberries was its own modern art, gorgeous in the glass and jiggy on the tongue.
The restuarant will be an LA brasserie, something this city sorely lacks, though I can only assume (and hope!) Myers will put his own tasty twist on the classic French dishes. I was delighted by his Salad in a Spoon. Frisee (I like to think of them as thistles), lardon~though they seemed suspiciously like tiny cubes of pork belly, yum~ and a delicate hard-cooked egg, all in one perfectly assembled bite? Tory heaven.
There were also crusty, lusty breads from Boule, Michelle Myers' gift to the LA pastry (and chocolate!) scene:
But perhaps my favorite part was the 3 cheese stations: goat, cow, and bleu! Excellent cheese is always the right answer:
That tasty bit had butter, a nutty bleu who's name I forget (somebody had one too many Penicillins!), and was drizzled with honey. Decadence of the finest sort.

Let's see, final credits... all the photos here were taken by Victor Rodionoff and pilfered by yours truly from MetroMix (thanks guys!). And look, I even made it into one of them! Yes, I am famous now, very exciting.
>Slightly-more-eclectic LA Hotties, exhibit B

I'm the juicy one, second to right. I can't wait to eat there for real, they open their doors to all tomorrow. Bon Appétit fellow Angelenos!
Comme Ça
8479 Melrose Ave.
323.782.1104

A Spot of Tea? or June: TTM, Part II

Dear reader, at long last, please enjoy this photo essay of the lovely English Tea I catered for the bridal shower my talented friend Debora threw! Her daughter was about to wed and move to London-town, so they wanted a traditional tea in the English style. Debora is of Mexican descent, and many of la familia and guests had never experienced the joys of tea sandwiches. Ay dios mio! So I made elegant cucumber and very pretty smoked salmon treats, using the only rye bread worth eating in L.A. (how I long for the fanatastic Jewish baking of my youth):
I also created super-girly strawberry and coconut tea sandwiches cut in the shape of flowers, naturally.
Mmm, and worth a mention was the fantastic fruit salad of Honeydew, Mango and Raspberries with Lime and Ginger. I've noticed when trying out the foods of another culture that though novelty is exciting, we all do better when there are also a few familiar elements. I found this recipe (thanks Cook's Illustrated) and thought, perfect! Mango and lime will be comfortable ingredients. And look at how beautifully it turned out! That is some sexy summer fruit.
I try not to overextend myself, so I hired my exceptionally gifted baker-friend LeeAnn to make chocolate-cherry and pear-ginger scones, as well as raspberry-marzipan and lemon-poppy muffins. Sweet Lord. (Those are my delicate cucumber sandwiches in the background. The secret is to mix in the tiniest bit of blue cheese, it makes them mysteriously interesting.) I find great eating (and catering) is often in the details: for this event I served only decadent Irish butter for smearing on the scones and muffins. Though these touches directly subtract from the bottom line (American butter is so much cheaper!), it's this attention to delicious, best-quality ingredients that differentiate good from f***ing fantastic. Why put in all that effort to turn out merely "acceptable" food? When people take a bite and I see their eyes pop out of their head because they didn't know it could taste so amazing, then I am successful.

So lastly here is yours truly, tired but pleased, shortly before the guests arrived. The flowers were arranged by Boriana, who I bet could trounce Martha in a Floral Goddess Smackdown any day. I cannot over-emphasize the importance of a beautiful table; it makes the food more appealing and guests prettier when beside it. (And please note, dear reader, how my outfit matches both the decor and the food. Oh that's no accident, I think of everything. Thanks, obsessive tendencies!)
I served a fabulous smoky black tea from Edinburgh (oops! ran out of English) in mismatched teacups. Guests got to choose their own, and many had been in Debora's family for generations~ a lovely touch. What a pleasure to help celebrate love and families coming together.

Growing up I often felt I didn't have a culture, that mine was standard American WASP; it didn't feel like anything special, or different. Like being surrounded by trees and not recognizing you're in a forest, sometimes I can't see my life clearly until I'm outside of it. I didn't appreciate the excellent Englishness of all the showers I got dragged to as a kid until I put this one on myself. I saw people say, "Cucumber sandwiches?" with wrinkled noses, or "What are those triangles?" as they pointed to the scones. Then their faces would break into bright smiles and I'd hear, "Ooooohhhhh" as they nibbled; I thought yes, this is the food of my people. Thank you, stuffy ancestors, for all the deliciousness you handed down to me. Cheerio!

June: The Tastiest Month I

Oh dear reader, I am touched we are still together! This is a level of love and devotion (and probably grumbling tummyness) I cannot imagine, you are the *best* dear reader ever. Thanks for sticking around, I missed you guys!

So then where did I go? Basically, I worked almost every day in June and very nearly killed myself in the process. Some fantastic food came out of my manic over-achievement, but I'm still exhausted. How exhausted? Here's an actual photo of me taken July 1st:



But today I took a long nap, shaved (that fur was out of control!), and am ready to share June: The Tastiest Month, which shall come in 3 installments. We can pretend it's a Dickens' novel, except I won't make you cry with boredom nor will I demand a useless 'compare and contrast' report at the end.

Part I will largely be told by others: it's hard to say nice things about myself, and luckily I don't have to! Mid-June I had the good fortune to teach a cooking class for the birthday party of Len Wein, a super-cool and jolly guy who, among other things, created the Swamp Thing and New X-Men comic book series. I had such a good time reading Swamp Thing as a kid... it is remarkable how the Universe operates, isn't it? What a gift to be able to offer some fun back to him. Christine Valada, a devoted foodie and Len's lovely wife, hired me as a surprise for his party. Their kitchen is mid-remodel, so she wisely chose the class, "You Can Grill That?"
Yes dear reader, you *can* grill a salad! We were outside the whole time and grilled appetizers, a main course, salad and dessert. And pizza, check it out:

Christine and Len wrote flattering things I am incapable of saying, please check out their blogs for a full report. Len offers a thorough review of the menu and I think felt and perfectly expressed my whole purpose in pursuing this delicious path: food has magical power to bring people together (and at times heal them too). He totally picked up on that, yay! I feel successful. Christine took great photos and detailed the course of event beautifully! Check 'em out, and stay tuned for Part II: an English tea!

Whew! I'm back.

The Best Soufflés Ever

Yeah, I said it. And if you try these soufflés, you will fully agree. This recipe was originally developed by Sarah Tenaglia, one of the geniuses in the Test Kitchen at Bon Appétit I had the great good fortune to work with and learn from. I've lightly modified this recipe for my own purposes, but if it works for you it's all because of Sarah's great wit and skill. I served these as the sexy finale for a very fancy dinner party I catered and everybody went berzerk. They thought I was a goddess.

And let me add, I'm not much of a baker. I'd only made soufflés once before with brownie-like results. This recipe is so foolproof even I was wildly successful; I like these better than most restaurant versions. If you were afraid to give soufflés a whirl, today is your day. And do it now, while you can still get your hands on blood oranges.

Remember: if you're worried they won't puff, use slightly smaller ramekins. The batter's got to go somewhere, and in a smaller dish there's only up!

Blood Orange and Dark Chocolate Soufflés
serves 6

1/2 cup sugar
2 tablespoons grated blood orange peel
10 ounces bittersweet (not unsweetened) chocolate, chopped
5 large eggs, separated, room temperature
1/8 teaspoon salt (measure it out, this is baking)
1/2 cup semisweet chocolate chips

1 cup chilled whipping cream
1 1/2 tablespoons blood orange juice (from the one you zested earlier)

Preheat oven to 400˚F. Place six 3/4-cup soufflé dishes on baking sheet. Mash sugar and blood orange peel in small bowl. Stir chopped chocolate in medium bowl set over saucepan of simmering water until melted. Remove from over water; whisk in egg yolks, 3 tablespoons blood orange sugar and salt (mixture will become thick). Beat egg whites in large bowl to soft peaks; add 3 tablespoons blood orange sugar and beat until stiff but not dry. Whisk 1/3 of whites into chocolate mixture to lighten; fold in remaining whites in 2 additions. Don't over-fold (something I tend to do). Fold in chocolate chips. Spoon mixture equally into dishes. Bake until softly set and puffed, about 14 minutes.
Meanwhile, whip cream, 4 tablespoons blood orange sugar and juice to firm peaks in medium bowl.
Top warm soufflés with cream, then sprinkle with blood orange sugar. Serve to lusty applause.

The textures are amazing: the supple, warm near-cakiness of the soufflés with the softness of the (barely pink) whipped cream and roughness of the damp blood-orange sugar-- it's some of the best foodsex around.
I need to get out more.