Juneuary

Sometimes the old, simple recipes are just what the doctor ordered. For me, that often begins with a trip to the farmers' market. This time of year in the pacific northwest is known, with some rue, as Juneuary - for those who don't know, spring and summer ar rather relaxed about when they decide to arrive. It's the time of year when from day to day it could feel like winter, spring, or summer, and so it's the right time of year for food that incorporates flavours and textures from all of these seasons. And it's at this time of year that we start to get tender young asparagus and the first morel mushrooms of the season. Asparagus, in some ways, is the very symbol of spring: the first energetic shoots of a plant that fly from the ground just when the weather is warm enough and the days long enough to spur the first imaginings of summer picnics. At the market this week the asparagus were particularly fine and fresh and so I bought a small handful. A old reliable spring dish is blanched asparagus with Hollandaise sauce - tangy, bright, aspirational. Though to me, Hollandaise is also very much a winter food; it's a part of big breakfasts on cold, rainy Sundays and its cousin, Sauce Béarnaise, is peerless as companion to a fine steak, preferably cooked over a fire and eaten while watching at fresh snowfall. So you see, I already had the makings of a lovely Juneuary dish. And then I passed the wild mushroom stand. And saw (and smelled) this year's first morels.

Morels taste of the loam and forest - at once reminiscent of both musky, humid summer and also earthy, hearty winter food. The first morels are exciting - as asparagus ushers in spring, so do morels usher in summer. The fact that these milestones appear simultaneous here in western Washington, well, I suppose that's Mother Nature's sense of humor. But it does allow for some delicious combinations. In short, this evening for dinner I had fresh asparagus with morel Hollandaise sauce. Simple, easy, but it almost defines luxurious eating. Warm, beguiling, at once crunchy and velvety, tangy like the spring weather, rich like a winter feast, and bright like the summer sun. You may have heard of truffled Hollandaise before - this similar, but not as wintery. The only thing you have to do is cook the morels in the butter you melt for the sauce and then whisk them along with the sauce as you slowly thicken it. I used the Joy of Cooking recipe for "Whole Egg Hollandaise" as the base.

Happy Juneuary, everyone!

The Chef in the Hat

This story begins with a hat. The particular hat is wide-brimmed and made of straw, in the Panama fashion, with a black ribbon band, and is slightly discolored here and there because it is certainly the hat of a working man. And this particular working man is certainly good at his job and loves what he does at least as much as he loves and is inseparable from the hat. So inseparable are the two that Thierry Rautureau is known, simply, as The Chef in the Hat.

The chef and his omnipresent hat appear in various places in and around Seattle food culture - he has a restaurant, Rover's, and shows up weekly or so on local radio (I can only assume the hat is there, too.) But occasionally he shows up in random and unexpected places, like demo-cooking in Whole Foods one afternoon a while ago. I happened to be walking by the fish counter while he was setting up at a table nearby, preparing to make something I only assumed would be delicious (despite the fact that, at that time, I had no idea who he was!) The whole situation was quite amusing becasuse he seemed to have been left completely on his own with none of the staff to either aid or accompany him. When he needed a utensil, he went rummaging through the supply drawers behind the fish counter and generally had the run of the place.

He was in a rather jovival mood and, thus, seemed happy to put up with me hanging around pestering him with questions for the half-hour or so it took him to create Halibut with Bacon, Ramps, and Morels. More on the recipe in a minute, but I would first like to thank the man for sharing his love of food and his other random stories, like about his old pan, the knife someone made for him, and the rest, all while working with a single electric burner and an eclectic set of utensils to create something that tasted all the better because of everything besides the food (which, itself, was excellent.) He is evidently a man who loves food, loves making food, and loves making food for other people - all of which I appreciate very much.

But the fish, the fish!
First, butter is a wonderful thing. Eating too much of it can get dangerous, but, by and large, it is good for you. Second, bacon is also a wonderful thing. Health benefits debatable, but flavour incomparable. Third, the morel is a wonderful thing. (See a pattern?) Mushrooms plucked from the forest floor have a rather nasty reputation for causing conditions that generally tend toward death, but the ones that don't, such as the morel with its deep and complex taste, can be magnificent. Fourth, the ramp is a wonderful thing. The bastard child of the leek and the garlic, with a growing season of about 2 minutes, use them if you can get them or you'll be seriously missing out. And halibut is a wonderful thing. Cooked well it embodies all of those qualities of which other fish rarely attain but few - it is light and flaky, but at the same time soft and moist, rich and meaty. Perhaps a seeming piscene contradiction-in-terms, but I do not jest.

The sample cooked that day by The Chef in the Hat was delicious and clearly well-practiced - the halibut flaky, the sauce rich and buttery, with the smokiness of bacon, the earthiness of the morel, and the savory tang of the ramps. Unfortunately, I was only permitted one small mouthful (maybe I snuck a second - I cannot recall...) Fortunately, I was given the recipe and, better yet, had seen it made by practiced hands - almost like cooking with your grandmother, though in that case you rarely get a recipe, just the eternal answer, "When it's enough."

I've tried this recipe twice now. The first time I overcooked both the fish and the sauce, so while the taste was right, the texture was off. The second time, being a bit more gentle with the heat and a bit more thoughtful about why each step in the recipe was proposed, success! Try it. You'll like it.

Some things I learned from and about this recipe:
1. When finishing this sauce (and others like it) only boil the sauce for a moment at the very end to make all the flavours and textures harmonize - too much boiling at the end will make the sauce oily and lumpy.
2. Halibut especially, but I would guess other fish as well, cook very well when partially poached and partially baked. I used vegetable broth with the butter and few bits of bacon for twice as much fish as the recipe dictates and it still came out really well.
3. Don't underestimate your dutch oven (or similar) pot - it can work miracles.
4. Be gentle.


BAKED ALASKAN HALIBUT WITH MORELS, RAMPS, AND SMOKED BACON BUTTER SAUCE
Transcribed from the recipe leaflet I picked up that day in Whole Foods.
The Chef in the Hat also has a book of recipes, if you like this one.

5 oz Applewood Smoked Bacon, cut into quarter-inch pieces
8-10 oz Ramps or Small Leeks
8 T Unsalted Butter
4 oz Morel Mushrooms, cleaned and halved (or quartered, if large)
2 t Shallots, minced
½ t Garlic, minced (or 1 t if using leeks instead of ramps)
¾ t Thyme, minced
1¾ C Fish Stock (I used vegetable stock and it worked well, too.)
1 lb Halibut, skinless fillet, cut into 4 portions
Salt
White Pepper, freshly ground
2 t Chives, minced

Garnish: Beet Oil

1. Cook the bacon in a medium skillet over medium-high heat until crisp and brown, 5-7 minutes. Drain bacon and set aside, reserve the fat if you like.
2. Trim the root-ends of the ramps and cut each ramp in half where the white gives way to the green leafy tops. Cut the white portions into ¼-inch pieces and leave the green leaves whole. (If using leeks, trim to the white and pale green portion, halve crosswise and then cut into ¼-inch-wide strips.)
3. Preheat oven to 350°F.
4. Heat 2 T butter (or you can include some of the bacon fat) in a medium skillet over meduim-high heat until melted and slightly nutty-smelling. Add the morels and sauté for 30 seconds. Add the white of the ramps (or all the leeks) with the shallot, the garlic, and ½ t of the thyme. Sauté, stirring often, until the ramps begin to soften, 2-3 minutes.
5. Add ¾ of the bacon, the ramp greens, and 1¼ C of the stock. Bring just to a boil and then turn down to a simmer to reduce the volume by three quarters, 8-10 minutes.
6. Add another 4 T of butter, swirling the pan so it melts creamily into the sauce. Keep warm over very low heat.
7. Put the remaining ½ C of stock in a large ovenproof skillet and warm over medium heat. Whisk in the remaining 2 T butter and add the remaining bacon and ¼ t thyme.
8. Season halibut with salt and pepper and place them in the skillet. Spoon some of the cooking liquids over the fish and bake until the halibut is just nearly opaque through the center, 5-10 minutes depending on thickness of the fish, basting with cooking liquids once or twice.
9. Pour halibut cooking liquids into the pan with teh sauce and bring just to a low boil. Stir in the chives and season with salt and pepper.
10. To serve, spoon some of the bacon, ramps, and morels onto warmed plates. Top with halibut pieces and spoon the remaining sauce over top of the fish. Drizzle beet oil around and serve immediately.

My notes:
1. Cooking times took a little longer, but that might be my range and oven, and the fact that I used twice as much fish.
2. It reheats marvelously.

Not pretty, but...

What I made for dinner tonight seems like a really good place to start this conversation because, well, I just finished making it and am currently eating it.

My dinner this evening actually began life a number of weeks ago, around the time I was finishing Barbara Kingsolver's new book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle - a delicious read in many ways, not least because of the recipes. At the time, one of the most iminently seasonally-doable recipes was the weighty-sounding Asparagus and Morel Bread Pudding, which was instantly appealing because the name contained the words 'Asparagus,' 'Morel,' 'Bread,' and 'Pudding.'

Off I went to the West Seattle Farmers' Market, with intent to procure the necessary ingredients (I had convinced some friends to come feast on the results later that day.) Given the season and given the weather I thought I was golden. Alas, I was informed I was two weeks too early for asparagus - too cold a spring, courtesy of increasingly fickle Pacific Northwest weather. The farmer even went so far as to call his wife at the Ballard market to ask if she had seen any over there, but no luck. And yet, I was undeterred. Early-spring greens were abundant, even such things as flowering kale - looking fresh and springy with its small yellow flowers and tasting, the farmer said, like a cross between broccoli and asparagus, only a bit sweeter, at which point he tore off part of a stem and handed it to me to eat. He was right - good evidence, I suppose, that farmers are the true 'foodies,' knowing the taste, use, care and value of everything grown, from germination or infancy to harvest.
I decided to experiement (which, so you will find, is something of an inevitability when I cook) and to substitute half flowering kale and half fiddlehead ferns for the asparagus in the recipe, chopped to about the same dimensions as recommended. Fiddleheads are a teaser for asparagus season, resembling a very mild asparagus in taste even if they do look rather alien - like coiled tentacles... Morels were, thankfully, easy to come by, if astonishingly expensive. These were fresh, tender, and some as big as my fist, and they smelled like a rain-doused forest fire. An almost-purple pumpernickel loaf completed the shopping and off I went to assemble.

I think I used too much bread. Of course, this also meant that I had to approximately triple the cheese (though I might have done so anyway - more on cheese some other time.) But it also meant that I had a lot of volume and my baking dishes weren't big enough. My pudding came out about 2 ½ inches high and took an extra 30 minutes to cook, so I think a shallower pudding would cook through more quickly and also have more delightful crispy bits.
Regardless, despite my substitutions and experimentation, the verdict? Delicious. Soft, springy, earthy - serious comfort food. Also, I ended up with enough for an army, so it is a good thing that it both freezes and reheats well and is a versatile platform for elaboration. Which brings me to my dinner tonight.

I arrived home famished, for whatever reason, and racking my brain for what to make that was a| quick, b| delicious, and c| warm, as it was about 50F, dark, and raining in Seattle, despite it being 21 May. My freezer yielded the answer - I still have about 6 servings (good-sized 3" x 5" x 1" blocks) of the bread pudding put away against just such a rainy day, even after feeding 3 people, sending them home with an extra serving or two each, and eating the leftovers for lunch for a week! But inevitably, when reheating something that is, by nature, a little soft and soggy, that soft and soggy something becomes even more so. Feeling slightly decadent, I defrosted the bread pudding in the microwave and then fried it in butter - only about half a tablespoon, though. Frying the slices of bread pudding dried them out a bit and made the outside crispy again, though perhaps that's an obvous benefit to frying anything. The intoxicating smell of browning butter and bread made me crave some caramelized onions, too, so I chopped up a small yellow one and tossed it in the pan with the bread pudding, and then left the onions in the pan with a pinch of salt to brown and soak up the rest of the butter and jusces after taking the bread pudding out.

Cooking, especially in anticipation of what I know will be a really tasty meal, always makes me happier and also a bit silly and creative, so by the time I was finishing up the onions I had a real zinger of an idea. On the suggestion of a friend, one of the things I had tried when the bread pudding was fresh was eating it with maple syrup. Definitely a good idea, but also definitely very sweet. Today, that sweetness sounded appealing again, but I wanted to spice it up a bit. After taking the onions out of the pan, and with the pan still hot but off the heat, I poured in a few tablespoons of maple syrup. The syrup bubbled and boiled a bit, getting a little darker, at which point I added about a tablespoon of Cholula hot sauce. This addition caused more frothing as I heated the pan a little and mixed it all together, and once it was mixed to a slightly cloudy dark brown I poured it over the onions and crispy bread pudding. I shaved a bit of aged gouda (bought at the Seattle Cheese Festival) over it all and I just finished eating it - warm and rich, soft, but with crispy bits, earthy yet tangy, and sweet, but with a spicy edge to keep on warming after the plate is cleaned.

It may not be pretty, but not bad for one pan and a bunch of leftovers.

ASPARAGUS AND MOREL BREAD PUDDING
(see the recipe at http://www.animalvegetablemiracle.com/BREAD%20PUDDING.pdf)

My notes:
1. Use more cheese. How much more depends on you.
2. Make in a baking dish that allows for a thickness somewhere around 1 ½ inches.
3. I love rosemary, especially the smell, so I dropped a few sprigs on top of the just-finished pudding to add to the already intoxicating aroma.


SPICY MAPLE GLAZE
This recipe is done entirely to taste - use your favorite hot sauce and add more of it if you like it spicier. This mixture is a good starting point.

6 T real maple syrup
1 T Cholula hot sauce

To a heavy, nonstick (which I prefer not to use except for extremely sticky things) pan that is already at medium temperature, add the maple syryp. It should immediately start to bubble - if not, raise the heat a little but be careful not to boil the syrup too much. (I started with the hot pan off the heat so I could better judge how vigorously the syrup would boil without extra heat - you can always place the pan back on a hot burner for a moment to get things rolling.) Once the syrup darkens in color and begins to really froth, make sure to stir well and add the hot sauce - the boiling will subside. Once well-mixed, bring to a frothy boil again and then immediately pour over the favored food, be it waffles, pork chops, or ice cream.