Beauty is an Understatement!

At first glance these desserts may seem innocuous enough for the Sabbath, but don't let them fool you. Take a taste. Beneath the surface, fruits of the bough and vine entwine in Bacchanalian ecstasy...

Torta Magdaleina- Grandma's knitted cap of marzipan complete with handmade roses gives in to a flirtation with marsala soaked genoise and apricot jam.


Crema Bacchia- The tentative surface of this delicate custard belies the sparkling conviviality of the eggs, cinnamon, cloves and Muscato di'Asti inside.

Of Bone and Blood

While attending a Jungian lecture on divine feminine and masculine archetypes where the audience was asked to participate by providing examples of commonly accepted traits and themes of each, I was picked to give an answer. Bored by the surprisingly pedantic answers from the group about men being active and women passive, I scratched this out on a scrap of paper on my knee:

A woman is like a mushroom. Most of her lies underground just as the mushroom's myceliae do, deep down with the roots of trees and plants, in silent facilitation of their processes up-taking nutrient and water from the soil. It is a symbiotic relationship she participates in with the plant, and one could not live without the other. She forms a vast underground web-like network unseen by man, save for when he stumbles by, kicking over a rotted log, exposing her ubiquitousness. She presents herself to the above-ground world as a mushroom, the fruiting body of her sex, only when the timing is right to release her spores, when conditions are amenable to her survival; indeed, to her thriving.

Tagliatelle al Barbaresco

My classmate and I looked across the table, staying put after the above dish was eaten. "I feel like I'm underground" she said. "No way I'm getting up after that" I agreed. It was the sauce that held us, sinking down in our seats. It was comprised of Dolcetto d'Alba wine, butter, shallots, agaricus and porcini mushrooms and parsley with an extra quarter cup of wine added in the last minutes. And with the final seasoning, I tasted blood in the sauce.

At the table, we discussed the wine from Barbaresco, with a taste like a ruddy complexion, hardy enough to carry the other ingredients on its back from the saucepan to the table, and the splash of fruit added at the end. The mushrooms were like meat, soaked with the deep burgundy sauce. Robert commented how you could taste the unfolding of earth to herb to fruit. We wanted to know where exactly this deep red came from and consulted his copy of the World Atlas of Wine. Turns out the grape grows on chalky, iron-rich soil, which speaks of bone and blood.


Composta di Verdure in Maionese


Lamb Patties with Apple & Polenta



Ciambellone Bolognese and Crema Bacchica

Mama's Tears

With our baby-bird spoons, tasting and seasoning Mama's soup.

She cried out when you came into the world, when you were plucked like a full ripe fruit from the impossibly small slit between her legs. She wiped a droplet from her cheek when you ran up to give her the four leaf clover clutched tightly in your chubby hand. Then when you ran away, or off to college, to the army or into marriage, her tears flowed unequivocally for joy and grief alike; for a Mama knows these two faces well, stamped indelibly on the one real currency of life.

The great universal solvent, water, and salt, nature's catalyst, join in a teardrop to flow in a release of emotion, becoming tiny agents of expression and relationship: I thought, flicking another pinch of salt into the bolognese sauce to lock in the latest level of flavor. We've discussed the role of salt in cooking a lot lately. "Salt is not an idea," Robert punctuated with a spoon in his hand, "Start with stock and vegetables and taste it. You can't taste anything! Add salt and suddenly: There's the sweetness of onion, carrot, celery, and the stock becomes a foundation beneath them."

Like tears' movement of emotion, there is a dance between the liquid in a sauce and the salt we use to season it that allows the ingredients to express themselves more fully. If a sauce has three ingredients and the third isn't found, adding salt will help bring it forward and meld them together. Salt is added in stages to lock in flavor as sauce develops, so that as it nears completion only minor adjustments are needed. Sprinkled on top of simmering vegetables, salt facilitates the release of water and bitterness so the starches can break down into sweet sugars.

Remember Mama when you season. She cried over your pot many times watching you develop!

Robert's Potage aux Haricots et aux Champignons Sauvages, perfectly seasoned.

Florentine Desserts

Photo by Christine Grimsby

Early morning in Florence in 1991, painting the Duomo's parabolic silhouette haloed by the rising sun's rays; its mass of marble and tile still cool from the night before, shadowing laundry lines tethered beneath its arc with their white sheets held drooping like damp flags, awaiting their daily surrender to the afternoon heat that comes in two or three hour slices between buildings in winter.

The same morning while walking in Boboli Garden, I stopped to admire a paving pattern of narrow stones and imagine the agile fingers that painstakingly pieced them together, when I saw a figure behind a line of cypress. Moving silently as a cat, it was a woman practicing Tai-chi. I didn't think her human, save for exhalations coming at regular intervals and hanging about her like a mist; her hands sliced clear paths through it and the still December air.

Zuccotto- Genoise in paving pattern, soaked with rum syrup; Cream filling punctuated by the crunch of almond and hazelnut praeline.

When in Roma...

My Roman friend's name is Lavinia, which means "Mother of the Italian Race." She is all that and more: Extraordinarily brilliant, funny, passionate, incisive and loves above all things, to dance. I have supped at her table many nights; she is an indulgent cook and friend. If you happen into her circle of light, you will be blessed. I joined Lavinia and her mother for breakfast one morning and captured the elegance of her table in the photo above.

We were in Rome today at the studio and I thought of these two beautiful Italian women. I want to cook for them someday soon and return the blessings they have bestowed on me...


Carciofi alla Romana


Gnocchi alla Romana


Braised Lamb with Eggplant Fries

Ze Art for Ze Heart

The original David must've held a tart aloft. This orange tart bears an exquisite ruff of crust.

Like Michelangelo's David, the tart is a pedestal being, rising from the relative obscurity of its origin in humble ingredients to embody perfection. It is said that David was pieced together from various castings in an attempt to find the ideal physical form. The same could be said for the construction of a tart. Butter, sugar, egg and flour are the basic construct and the filling options are endless: Lemon, orange, marmalade, walnuts, chocolate, just to name a few. Tomorrow, week two of our two week Italian culinary tour begins. Though we've crossed the border and are now firmly in the arms, kitchens and perhaps even the museums of Italian mamas, part of us remains in France. I know this because a tart always ends up on the table alongside the Italian dessert. We just can't seem to give up on le beau ideal.

Walnut above, and Orange Marmalade below.

Veni, Vidi, Vici

She came, she taught, she matched the menu. Robert's friend Marietta Sisca came to class to show us a thing or two about making gnocchi. She arrived wearing a purple sweater and white pearls just as the radicchio chicetti were spooned onto plates with sweet and sour cippolini onions and porcini stuffing. While snacking on chicetti, we watched as she demonstrated kneading, rolling, cutting and rolling the dough again with verve. Gnocchi is only potato, flour and salt, so one must arrive otherwise equipped for success: With common sense, a big heart and a flair for rolling the little buggers, all of which Marietta has in abundance.

I had Bolognese sauce on the brain when I woke up this morning. We made a fantastic lasagne with it in class last week. Figured I would get a pot started late morning, maybe buy a pasta maker to fit my new mixer and try and recreate it and invite a neighbor or two over. Went to the market and that's when all hell broke loose. Spotted star anise next to the nutmeg. Pear clafouti! Oranges and fennel...do I have white wine vinegar left? Think simple: Oh yeah-broccoli soup!

This is my first menu made outside of class; I'm a bona-fide beginner. The dishes come from all over the map, but each one was a success in it's own right and I even made minor improvisations to a few:

Toasted Broccoli Soup


Pissaladiere de Nice


Pasta with Bolognese Sauce


Friend Caught Licking Plate


Lemon Orange Tart with Candied Orange Peel



Pan de Genoa with Orange and Star Anise Syrup- They asked, Is the syrup Amaretto?

KitchenAid

I found a KitchenAid mixer waiting patiently at my doorstep when I came home from class yesterday, the doormat draped over its white nose like dog ears. Well, just what are we going to do with you? I thought, picking up the thirty-pound lug and bringing it inside. My bachelor friend, Jack, had made this offering to my bachelorette kitchen, saying it had held down his fridge long enough and would have better use on mine now. I put it on the dining room table and began to clean the enamel machine made in Ohio in the 1970's

I called Jack to thank him and tell him he would be the recipient of the first good thing made by the machine. "I'm thinking of making dinner sometime this week, you around?" I asked, trying the switch. "We're in Italy now at the studio, so the main course will be a pasta with meat sauce or something like that" I lured, knowing he had just posted a gross picture of a piece of meat he had grilled on Facebook. It was aptly named the 'Bacon Explosion'.

The gleaming white mixer easily took its place at the center of my dining room table and practically begged me to take it for a spin. I relented, grabbing the keys and headed for the market, arrogantly thinking I could make two Pan de Genoa quickly, one for a birthday party a few hours later and the other for Jack.

Two hours later there was only one Pan de Genoa in the oven, due to a miscalculation at the store and I had a dilemma: Who gets the cake? In gratitude to Jack I had promised first dibs from the machina, but I had mentioned dinner later in the week. I also wanted to make a nice offering for the birthday. I couldn't do both, though. It was getting late and I reasoned that the birthday party was probably well under way, beers sloshing and tongues being made numb from wine. Would they be able to feel the texture of this cake made from ground almonds leavened by egg and taste it's delicate orange flower water perfume? Who would most appreciate this cake at this time?

Some things are sacred. The gift of the mixer had been given, sparking inspiration. Now a labour was to be returned in kind, a labour of gratitude to appease the gods. This is what people did before usury, before market economies: They gifted one another a few bushels from their harvest in return. As I pulled the fragrant cake from the oven, I knew again my life was to be about this kind of natural harmony. It is like music, which is like making love, which is like cooking. It is all about preparing the container. Time and timing. Staying present. Abandoning oneself to awe. Essential humility.

The decision had already been made. Jack? You won't believe it! I've already made something with the mixer. A beautiful cake. Come try it!

We sat at the table with the mixer as a centerpiece eating slices of cake and drinking coffee. I regaled him with tales from the studio, including the one about the vinegar chicken that made me cry: I had taken a bite of this extraordinary chicken and saw a countryside scene for a moment and then felt a sudden sadness and great sense of gratitude at the same time as the tears flowed. Once they subsided, Robert told us that the chef who devised the masterpiece we were eating had committed suicide. The story was intrinsic to the recipe. We made a toast to Bernard who figured out how to make cream sauce without cream, then gave his life for it.

Jack's eyes were wet. He had a story too. An old family friend, Wally, had called him the day before. He had recently turned 100, they hadn't spoken for years. They talked for maybe twenty minutes, reminisced and said goodbye. Wally passed away minutes later.

He recalled taking Wally's Sunfish out as a teenager and crushing the boat's daggerboard on the reef and the good-natured man waving it off saying he'd done it himself a million times; the image of the old Navy admiral's six foot two frame, bent over with age and squinting at his well-worked pointilism painting, making tiny dots and looking up to pause and wave at Jack with his brush.

Just painting, Jack! he called, Just painting!

Cassoulet

Working, Together

Too bad Studs isn't around, he would be a great lunch guest at the studio. He'd be entranced by the spectacle of our motley group of characters dropping down from the heavens or off the street and into Robert's kitchen, being rendered by his tutelage into something useful and beautiful for the world. Sometimes things don't go smoothly and as my mechanic friend says when things don't go right at the garage: "Some days it's just elbows and assholes." Get distracted and another skillet of onions burn. Sometimes we get frustrated with ourselves, sometimes with each other. In the end at the table, everything is gorgeous: The food, the wine and US. Each day a grain of irritation becomes a pearl and from the rough diamonds are plucked!

Harmoniously Hollandaise

Bedazzled!

Ornament and Crime

Oranges and almonds surrender their skins to be candied for a higher cause: Dessert!

Bedecked

G. dressed to match la table de Provence.

Begemmed

Pork Loin and Confit of Vegetables with Beaumes de Venise
-Vegetable water and the balmy breezes of Venice become sauce for faceted lozenges of turnip, carrot and whole cippolini onions. A sweet zephyr in winter.

Bejeweled

Frozen Nougat with Rasperry Coulee and Candied Orange
-A dessert you could wear to the opera.

40 Days of Fish

Darnes de Saumon a la Creme de Laitues

Well, it's not exactly forty, but given the fact I've bypassed fish on the menu most of my life (see previous post, "A Fish Story") it would seem we've prepared quite a lot in a few short weeks! A friend of mine once joked "As a Pisces, maybe you don't like eating your own kind." At the time I thought maybe that was the case, but after cooking with Robert, I feel differently. Now I believe I was just waiting for the proper introduction to preparing my Piscean friends. Thanks to Robert my culinary horizon has widened to include denizens of the deep. Now, after a surfing session at the Oregon coast or windsurfing on the Columbia I'll be inspired to make a little salmon steak or sole cakes like the ones pictured above and below. Bon appetit, mes petits poissons!

Sole with Saffron Sauce & Ratatouille Compote, top; Sole Cakes with Garlic Sauce & Ratatouille, bottom.

A Fish Story

Me in front of the woodstack, circa 1986. Six-pound Largemouth caught on a fly rod.

"Grab it by the sides, like this," he said, banging the cricket cage against his knee and what looked to me like a thousand skittering, twittering, hopping insects fell to the bottom, then jockeyed for their old positions on the screen. He reached in and expertly tweezed just one between his thumb and index finger. "Now, take your hook with the other hand and insert it in the neck just under the jaws and come out through the abdomen," he continued as I watched the impaled cricket grasping the shank and attempt to climb higher up, presumeably out of danger. "Lively bugger. That should catch a big fish!" my dad exclaimed as we cast our lines toward the shore from a rowboat on the Ziels's pond.

Nort and Virginia Ziels were a sweet elderly couple my parents befriended when I was a kid and we made monthly excursions to visit them on the outskirts of our hometown. They owned acres of apple, pear, peach, apricot and walnut orchards. Bordering the orchards was a forest of oak and hickory that needed occasional thinning. Collecting wood and fallen fruit was a family affair. We heated our house with it in the big stove in our basement and wrapped the fruit in newspaper and stored it in the canning room to eat all winter. My dad would cut the wood and my mom and sisters and I would stack the rounds in the truck. At home, dad would split the rounds and we would place the quarters neatly so they could be stacked, sometimes up to eight feet high.

I remember being transfixed by the inch wide longitudinal scar on my father's midthigh, worrying it might get cut again as he ran the chainsaw; by the pungent green smell of oak biting my nose as cleanly as the blade on the wood and the fear and exhilaration that accompanies dismantling such a magnificently rooted creature into bite-sized chunks befitting the maw of a stove. After filling the old Chevy almost to the axel's breaking point and the cab with a few bushels of fragrant apples, we would fish for large-mouth bass, bluegill and crappie on one of the Ziels's ponds.

Dad banged the cricket cage again against his scarred thigh. "Now you try," he said, handing the cage of indescribably stinky-sweet bugs over to me. Eventually I mastered my fright and their unpredictable jumpiness and successfully fixed one to a hook. After that I was officially an independent fisherwoman, just like my mother and two older sisters.

Once our stringer was full, we headed back to the main house and found Nort reliably in his old green leather chair smoking a pipe with Sam the smelly bassett hound curled at his feet. Sam invariably bayed, announcing our entrance and Virginia hurried from the kitchen wiping her hands, yelling in her shaking voice "Hush Sa-am! Sa-am, hush!" We stayed for dinner and afterwards while the adults talked I amused myself watching the raccons on Virginia's feeder ouside, looked for hawks through binoculars or spied spiders spinning in the window mullions, webbing both the inside as well as the outside. Virginia either didn't care about dusting much or she was a real nature lover. I think both were true.

Nort introduced my father to fly-fishing, chamois cloth shirts, gum boots and L.L. Bean. It was because of him that we made a pilgrimmage to Maine every summer in the VW camper my grandma imported from Germany on her way back from working in the Peace Corps in India in 1965. We were a completely self-sufficient family of five in that van with it's pop-top cot made just for my sisters to fight over, a sink, and a 100 lb. yellow and blue canvas tent with it's red striped flap. The whole ensemble, including our afro-permed hairstyles and my dad's lambchop sideburns made us look like a gypsy caravan. We have Super-8 video somewhere of those six or seven summers spent at a campground in Casco Bay, just outside of Freeport.

We befriended a Mainiac family, the Ferrins, who fished for a living. Milt and Dee took us out on their boats, launching from Boothbay, back when the harbor was edged by disentegrating shacks of the fishing industry and before mini-mansions and Pottery Barn took over. They shared all the best spots with us, where to find lobster and crab and Milt outfitted us with clam hods and pitchforks so we could dig when the tide went out. The Ferrin's introduced us to clam-bakes and soccer, two experiences Midwesterners lacked exposure to. My family was thrilled. They love seafood. I, on the other hand, never have. The smell makes me nauseous.

I enjoy fishing as an instinctual pastime, hunting and gathering to feed others. Give me a rod and I will catch a fish for you, clean it and figure out a way to cook it. But please don't make me eat it. Fish and seafood has never tasted good to me. "Just try it," my family cajoled me endlessly as a child. This taunting went on for years, yet I remained content with the items at the bottom of the menu.

Until two weeks ago when I ate fish that Robert had prepared and liked it. I had told him my fish story, then stepped out of the kitchen for a moment. I returned to find him smearing a salmon colored paste on a slice of toast with a funny knowing look on his face.

What's this? I asked, stuffing it in my mouth. Pause. Mmmm...Mmmm!

Salmon Rillette, said he.

End of story.


Me and a Jack, caught with squid from a pier in Florida, circa 1983.

Le Briochette

The expiration date on the yeast in my cabinet read 'Use by Oct. 02.' Despite its age, the yeast exhaled into the warm milk bath as if relieved for having been released from its captivity on the shelf for the past eight years of the Bush Administration. I wondered whether or not it would have the strength to bubble through the flour cap I was about to place on top of it, though. I suppose I felt a little like the yeast and Obama: There's no going back now. I dumped the flour, set the timer on the oven and placed a plate over the bowl, just so I wouldn't be tempted to poke at it like an expectant mother. Then I waited and hoped.

Speaking of mothers- I'm not one, except maybe to the gardens I design and build for a living. I'm a tough-love kind of garden mother, tending to the soil first, choosing appropriate plantings and then stepping away to let the glory of nature do it's thing. Of course I come around to check on the kids and make sure they aren't getting out of control or in trouble, but I don't fuss when they aren't coloring inside the lines. So why, then, am I hovering over this lump of dough gestating in a bowl?

Because this is my first creation outside the fold of the studio, and it's stressful as hell not having the shepherd around. I'm tempted to peek inside the bowl, so I mop the floor first. What's happening now? I fret, standing on a chair, cleaning the top of the fridge. I obsess: Will my baby brioche rise past the confines of it's ignoble conception in my kitchen to assume its rightful fluffiness and golden crusted crown?

The yeast proofed, so I pulsed the egg, salt and a little sugar and then dumped the slurry in the cuisinart. I added a third of the butter and the dough looked more runny than I remembered it in class. (Could it be because I don't have a set of measuring cups and MacGyvered my way to 8 oz. of flour?) Well, it wasn't quite right but it wasn't too far off. I remembered how Robert 'fixed' dough by sprinkling flour and I did the same. That was better, so I continued to add the rest of the butter. The motor on my JCPenney machine began to bog down as the dough developed a stranglehold on the blade. Uh-oh. I switched it off to check, but no matter- the dough was perfectly creamy.

The dough rose and the little bun went in the oven. I watched her continue to rise inside and the top turned golden pretty quickly. I was afraid it would burn before the bottom was done, so the heat was turned down. I'll have to make temperature adjustments to the recipe to account for my oven, for sure. After the brioche came out I should've let it cool more so the crust would separate from the pan. Unfortunately the sides were slightly shredded by my impatience. Good news is the texture was good and so was the flavor.

Tomorrow I'll buy measuring cups and more yeast so I can make two loaves at once. Maybe I'll walk a slice over to Robert and see what he thinks of my little love child.