8 cake: rosemary remembrance
06 Nov 2011 2 Comments
in cake, recipes, sweets Tags: butter, ophelia, rosemary, rosemary cake, rosemary for remembrance
“look at my flowers. There’s rosemary, that’s for remembering. Please remember, love. And there are pansies, they’re for thoughts.” ~ ophelia, Hamlet
this cake usually emerges on new year’s eve, when poetics honor the turning of the clock in the dead of winter, remembering, letting go, renewing, hope. So delicious, this simple loaf has been in request since the snow fell on the green leaves of Brooklyn. Arising from my long lost nigella cookbook collection and resurrected by mouth from my favorite kitchen witch, in a sultry reading of the recipe from her copy.
ritually, i try to peel the apple skin away in one curling strip with a paring knife, then slice pieces of flesh off one apple into a small saucepan where two tablespoons of butter is melting. Break in two small sprigs off rosemary. These were grown in a big blue-green ceramic pot on our porch. Add 1 tablespoon of sugar— superfine for élan, turbinado for ennui. Zest one lemon over the pile up; slice it and squeeze in the juice from half. Cover and simmer until the apples begin falling apart, stirring every few minutes. Turn off the heat and let sit.
butter and line a loaf pan with parchment paper and butter it again.
meanwhile, in your best big bowl, beat together two sticks of butter (minus the 2 tablespoons for the applesauce) with ¾ cup of sugar , matching the kind you put in the apples, which you can also beat in once they’re not steaming hot.
beat in three eggs, one at a time. Add a shot of vanilla if you are feeling it. Beat in two cups of all purpose flour sifted together with two teaspoons of baking powder. A heaping teaspoon of sea salt if you used the coarser sugar. Pour the batter into the loaf pan. Place a long, fine sprig of rosemary down the center of the cake. Sprinkle the entire top and spring with superfine sugar.
pop in the oven and bake for a little over three quarters of an hour, until a golden crust forms and the center is set. Remove from the oven to a cooling rack to rest in the pan for a few minutes. Flip, turn again onto a serving plate. This is one of those cakes that can quietly join you for breakfast, dress up for dinner, and accompany tea through the week if you can keep it. Make two.
fire escape salad
21 May 2010 2 Comments
in beans & lentils, greens, recipes, vegan, vegetarian Tags: Brooklyn, catnip, container gardening, cooking, gardens, herbs, home cooking, italian cooking, onion, rosemary, sage, salad, sustainability, thyme
come as you are!
the trouble with writing about salad is that making salad is not really cooking but assembling. Yet, these are essential ensembles. Consider this your salad reminder— salads make a fine meal from a cool kitchen. With global weirding subjecting us at random from this day forth to the heat formally relegated to the official months of summer, the oven’s days are numbered. Even off the shaded garbage courtyard, this Brooklyn apartment kitchen can get hotter than crêpes suzette come summer. Maybe the possibilities of salad make hot weather an ideal time for wooers-not-cookers to court; salad can be high on haute and low on technique. What matters most is the freshness of the goods, and the whole rainbow of plantdom is pretty much a candidate. It goes without saying that salad is really good for you.
this salad thrills because it is composed mostly of bounty off our fire escape, where we’re nurturing a container garden of lettuce and herbs, plus catnip for the miraculous flying cat, the K. Pidds.
the k. pidds
in scavenged tubs, two kinds of lettuce are putting out sails of green and red leaves. After harvesting greens the size of my hand, the still unfurling centers promise more salad to come. I hope to add Tom Thumb and Little Gem. If we add rocket, soon we’ll have mesclun.
authorities claim the key to a gorgeous salad is well-rinsed and gently, thoroughly dried greens. Simple oil and vinegar dressing clings to dry leaf sides. In Unplugged Kitchen, Viana la Place not only feels “a keen excitement” when she sits down to eat a dish of beautiful green leaves, she writes: “Harvesting lettuce leaves in the garden right before supper creates a romantic vision, but it also allows us to derive the full benefits from each ruffled, fragrant leaf.”
a heartfelt Italian cook, Viana delivers 25 recipes for lovely salads, including beloved veggies: purslane, artichokes, beets, and old fashioned potato and nasturium salad. As I nod to her here, she gleefully shares “salade fatigue” by 1960s fashion impresario Simonetta, an Italian in Paris and a Snob in the Kitchen:
many of Simonetta’s salads, including this one, call for the salad to “season” for an hour before serving. For Simonetta, a salad must be fatigué, “tired,” to be good; it must be “mixed, beaten, and drunk with its dressing.”
current food fashions have veered away from greens besotted with dressing but beaten and drunk have a certain camp appeal. She recommends whacking towel wrapped greens against the counter to tenderize them, also a satisfying way to call forth the essential oils in herbs going whole leaf into salad.
fire escape salad
our herb garden includes spicy or Greek basil, a diminutive cousin of the towering Italian type classically paired with fresh sliced tomatoes and creamy mozzarella in mid-summer. Also tiny, forest green peppermint. Lime basil, with slender, petal-thin leaves. Sage that has since been menaced by the weather and lost its leaves but seems to be reviving. Creeping thyme, lots of it, my favorite.
rosemary too, which is now only three branches strong but with care will become a bush and burst forth with fragrant purple blossoms. Those will go in the salad too. Rosemary needles, with the resiny toughness of an evergreen (though it’s a member of the mint family), are better cooked, even for salad. Bringing me off the fire escape and into the pantry for staples that made this salad a meal.
cannellini beans cooked with one healthy branch of our little shrub and a bit of salt and fresh ground pepper. When boiled tender, drain the beans in a colander and toss with a pour of olive oil, salt, fresh pepper and handfuls of fresh herbs. While the beans cook, slice a red onion very fine and soak the shreds in ice water for at least 10 minutes to take the bite out. Marinade in balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper for as long as you like.
in your biggest, best salad bowl, gently combine the beans and onions with your greens, including that succulent lettuce and fresh herbs. Just lift the onions out of their marinade with a fork. Despite Simonetta’s preferences, the vinegar soaked onions and oiled beans will carry plenty of dressing into the salad. Croutons are nice, and grated parmesan. Serve with crusty white bread toasted and sliced, along with a plate of very fine olive oil with a pool of honey in its center, sprinkle with sea salt and a crank of fresh pepper. Trust me.
Mashed potatoes
01 Dec 2007 Leave a Comment
in potatoes, recipes, vegetarian Tags: comfort food, rosemary, sea salt, vegetables
Scrub and quarter a pile of potatoes; use about 1 ½ spuds per person. This pseudo recipe works with 4-5 potatoes; adjust accordingly. An earnest entreaty here: use organic potatoes so you can leave the skins on with an easy mind. In fact, thanksgiving is a perfect holiday to build a meal entirely on your local green market’s organic bounty – find this holiday’s best spirit and celebrate the real harvest of your community’s farmers. If you are lucky enough to have a garden or a window box, cook what you have grown with your own hands and love from the spot of earth you are caring for. Sorry for the preachin’—back to potatoes! Yukon golds are buttery and pretty in the mashing.
Boil the potatoes in a pot just big enough to hold them covered with water, about an inch of water over the tops of the potatoes. Boil until soft, about 10-15 minutes; poke with a fork to tell.
Strain the potatoes, and rattle them around in the strain to begin the mashing. Dump them back in the hot pot, and mash them with ¼ stick of butter and about ¼ cream. Wooden spooks, big forks, or the potato masher hand tool are all effective mashers. The gadget specifically for mashing spuds (essentially a handle on a flat disk with holes of some sort) is one of the few specialty tools I own, and it has more uses than one would first presume: cookie dough, hummus, applesauce, and- obviously- myriad mashed root veggies are all cake beneath the smooshing grid of the mashed potato masher.
Thanksgiving mashed potato up-grade: In a mortar and pestle, grind together sea salt, fresh rosemary needles, red pepper flakes, and black pepper. Stir into the spuds. Serve. Eat. Nap.
