Corn glorious corn chowdah

Oh to hear the food pundits you'd swear there's no good fresh corn to be had this summer.  Maybe it's because I grew up on Long Island, where beautiful bicolor summer corn is a tradition, but I can't imagine slogging through the hot months of July and August without a few good ears of corn gracing my table.

One of my best childhood memories was being sent to the front stoop with a bag of unshucked corn and a section of the newspaper (NYTimes of course!) to lop off the greens and silk before the ears were thrown in a huge stockpot of boiling water. That first bite of crisp sweet corn...eating across the rows like a typewriter...ah, summer!

A pre-Shabbat trip to Fairway netted 6 beautiful ears of bicolor corn just begging to be eaten. Today I woke up craving some kind of fresh corn chowder and knew I had to accomplish this task before the day was over.

So here's my take on a simple, quick Corn Glorious Corn Chowdah:

1 onion
3 celery stalks
2 medium carrot, peeled
2 medium Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled
1 tbs unsalted butter
1 tbs EVOO
2 medium cloves of garlic
3/4 tsp dried dillweed, or 2 tbs fresh dill
1 tsp sea salt
Freshly ground pepper to taste
4 cups of vegetable stock
2 1/2 cups freshly cut corn (ok, so if you have to cheat, thawed frozen kernels)
3/4 cup 1% milk

Chop onion, celery and carrot. (I used the food processor and the chopping blade) Heat the butter and oil over medium heat in a large stockpot. Add the onion/celery/carrot mixture and cook until soft, 3-4 minutes. Chop 2 garlic cloves and add to mixture, and stir frequently, and cook for another 3 minutes. Season with salt, peppers and dill. Peel and cube the potatoes and add to pot and stir. Add the vegetable stock and bring the mixture to a boil, then reduce heat to simmer. Allow to cook until the potatoes are just tender, not mushy. Add the corn kernels and continue to cook for 6-8 minutes.

Using an immersion blender (I LOVE THIS), blender or food processor to puree the mixture until fairly smooth.Add the milk and heat through. DO NOT BOIL!!!

Enjoy in a big bowl with crusty bread and garlic butter, and dream of summer.

Charcuterie? Not for me, but....

Here's an interesting article from The Forward about kosher charcuterie. As a poultry-only eater, I don't really have an opinion...and having never eaten "the real thing" I guess I'm not missing it, either.

What do you think????

The Kosher Cure

Reinventing the Meaty Jewish Charcuterie Tradition

DANIEL KRIEGER

More Than Deli: The charcuterie board at the Prime Grill borrows from French tradition.

By Devra Ferst

Published July 18, 2012, issue of July 27, 2012.

• MULTIPLE PAGES

Holding a thinly sliced piece of prosciutto between two of her fingers, Marina, my Italian host mother, declared, “Dai, provalo!” Come on, try it!

It was my first night living in Italy for a semester abroad, and I arrived as a kosher-keeping vegetarian. I hadn’t eaten any meat, let alone pork, for nearly four years, and staring me in the face was an eager Italian woman holding out a slice of cured hog.

In that moment, I took a leap of faith. I figured that the phrase “When in Rome…” seemed particularly apt, even if I was living in a small town several hours north of the capital.

The prosciutto was supple and salty with a hint of sweetness. It practically melted on my tongue as the fatty edges left a lingering silken feeling in my mouth.

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As I ate the meat, I felt — like so many other modern American Jews who have struggled with kashrut observance — guilty and seduced by one of the kitchen’s most profoundly intense flavors.

Successfully imitating the flavor and texture of cured pork is ironically the Holy Grail of many a kosher chef. There are enough stories of chefs trying to make kosher bacon taste like pork bacon to fill a book (or two, or three). But, until recently, few kosher chefs explored what I experienced in Italy — the world of salumi, known more commonly by its French name, charcuterie.

The word charcuterie roughly translates as “cooked meat.” Curing meat to preserve it is a culinary tradition that is as old as the Roman Empire. French cooks and butchers transformed the custom from necessity to delicacy. Customarily, charcuterie includes numerous varieties of cured pork — like air-dried sausages and prosciutto — as well as pâtes and bresaola (an air-dried salted preparation of beef). The meats are often served thinly sliced with only the simplest accompaniments — bread and sometimes mustard, cheese, cornichons or olives.

Today, innovative chefs like David Kolotkin at Manhattan restaurant The Prime Grill, who added a charcuterie board to his menu eight months ago, are trying to create a kosher equivalent of the carnivore’s delight. Kolotkin explained: “I’m always trying to give my clientele flavors they can’t have.” And he does a good (though very salty) job of that.

Kolotkin’s 12-inch-wide wooden cutting board is artfully topped with house-made meats like air-dried salami, spicy pepperoni and beef bresaola that are sliced so thin they appear shaved. A rich veal country-style pâte, a small ramekin of whole grain mustard, a few gherkins and spicy cherry peppers and a basket of grilled bread round out the traditional presentation.

Jose Meirelles, chef and owner of Manhattan’s Le Marais, who long ago added a kosher charcuterie board to his menu to mimic the one he offered at his old non-kosher French restaurant, Les Halles, echoed Kolotkin’s desire to make the flavors of charcuterie accessible to kosher diners.

Other chefs see charcuterie differently. “As a chef I don’t think it’s my job to trick someone,” Chef Chaim Davids told me in a telephone interview from Jerusalem. When Davids opened the now-shuttered Bay Area restaurant The Kitchen Table in 2009, he dubbed a platter of cured meats like Tuscan salume and maple-cured lamb breast a “koshuterie plate.” Instead of trying to mimic the flavor of pork, Davids celebrated the flavors of the meats he could use. As a chef who came to religion later in life, Davids told me: God created the flavors as they are and “your job as a chef is to not screw it up.”

Perhaps no chef of a kosher restaurant is as intimately familiar with the flavor of pork as Michael Solomonov, who will open the kosher restaurant Citron and Rose outside of Philadelphia later this summer. Solmonov, chef of the acclaimed Israeli restaurant Zahav is also the owner of Percy Street Barbeque — whose menu includes a country ham plate, along with pork cheeks, belly and ribs. (Because Solomonov owns a non-kosher restaurant, he will technically “consult,” and not own, Citron and Rose in order to stay with in line with kosher restrictions.)

Citron and Rose’s team will be “experimenting with different kosher salamis and sausages, air-cured loins of beef, duck and goose. And probably some plays on chicken liver,” he told me in April.

Despite Solomonov’s experience with the hog, he won’t be looking to recreate its flavor. Rather, he is working as part chef and part culinary preservationist looking to revive disappearing recipes and customs of Jewish charcuterie from Europe.

On a recent research trip to Jewish restaurants and butcher shops in Budapest and Paris, Solomonov sampled goose breast prepared like bresaola in a private home. In Paris at a Jewish charcuterie shop in the Marais neighborhood, he snacked on cured veal breast and at another stop sampled luscious chopped liver topped with a balsamic gelée. These dishes and others will inspire his menu at Citron and Rose.

When I spoke with Jewish food historian and writer Joan Nathan about Jewish charcuterie she explained that Italian and French Jews developed their own traditions of kosher charcuterie, substituting goose, duck and at times beef for pork. Jews who moved to Alsace between the World Wars created a particularly rich tradition of cured meats. In “Quiches, Kugels and Couscous,” Nathan’s most recent cookbook on French Jewish cuisine, she quotes the 1929 book “Gastronomie Juive”: “Enter a Russian or Alsatian Jewish pastry-charcuterie shop and see beautiful beef tongues, pink and velvety smoked meat or pickelfleisch veined with yellow fat, preserved goose breasts… salamis and pyramids of sausages.”

Throughout Europe, Jews developed their own traditions of cured meat. And, while deli has reigned supreme in the arena of Jewish cured meats in America, that wasn’t the case as recently as a century ago, according to David Sax, author of “Save the Deli.” When waves of Jewish immigrants arrived in the 1880s and ’90s they brought with them numerous types of smoked and cured meats from different homelands. “The German meats were different from the Polish meats and so on,” explained Sax. But things changed: “It was all about quantity and scale. Cured goose and duck… gave way to beef because it was more plentiful here.” Both the deli and the communities’ tastes evolved.

Sax went on to say that the difference between deli and charcuterie is like the “difference between erotica and pornography: You know it when you see it.”

Chef Mark Spangenthal, of Kutsher’s Tribeca, a contemporary Jewish restaurant in Manhattan, has created a savory bridge between the two curing traditions, perfectly suited for the forward-thinking American Jewish diner. His “deli charcuterie” platter includes house-cured beef and duck pastrami, smoked veal tongue and spicy salami that arrive thickly, though carefully, sliced on a wooden board. “We treat it like charcuterie, but it’s delicatessen meats,” he said.

The flavor of these Jewish charcuteries may be different than what I tried that night in Italy, but when done well, they are just as luscious, profoundly full of flavor and seductive as a mouthful of that prosciutto — only without the guilt. So now I say to you, “Dai, provalo!”

Devra Ferst is the Food Editor of the Forward. Contact her at ferst@forward.com and on twitter @devraferst

Sort-Of Persian Squash

So it's shaping up to be another unbearably hot weekend, one likely to be spent in air-conditioned splendor hiding from the projected 99-degree day tomorrow.

What could be better than being a guest for Shabbat dinner this evening? NOTHING!!!! Thank you, thank you, thank you, nice neighbors (and you know who you are, dahlings) for the wonderful invitation. And to top it off, we're having fish and yummy sides and salads.

Peeking into the way-back machine known as my refrigerator, I spied a package of cubed butternut squash SCREAMING to be roasted and brought with tonight. 

Here's what I plan to do in the half-hour before we walk upstairs: 

                          ***Toss the squash in a drizzle of EVOO, and lightly salt and pepper.

                          ***Add a small handful of chopped scallions.

                          ***Spread on a parchment-lined cookie sheet and roast at 350  for 12-15                           

                                minutes until soft.
     

                               

And here's where the Sort-Of Persian comes in, my little skeptics. I'm removing the roasted squash to a nice bowl, drizzling it with honey, adding 1/3 cup shelled unsalted pistachios that I will toast in a frying pan just until the fragrance comes up, and 1/3 cup dried cranberries. 

Have you figured out that the Sort-Of is because I added the cranberries? I don't think they're native to Persian cooking, but who can resist the beautiful color and tart taste?

Happy eating! Shabbat Shalom!

The scene of the crime

 Here's a snapshot of Viking Stove. Just imagine the Nice Jewish Girl.

Oh Matza Brie, Oh Matza Brie

It's that egg thing again! Some like it hot. Some like it room temperature. Some like it scrambled, others prefer pancake-like. Some like it sweet, others like it savory.

This morning, I was bored. BORED. BORED. BORED with matza brie. I knew I had to (pardon the expression) scramble things up.

So, I opened the cabinets and pulled out dried cranberries and pecan halves and klp vanilla. Then I opened the refrigerator and pulled out the aforementioned eggs, a teeny weenie tiny amount of 2% milk, and my trusty quart carton of egg whites.I ran 2 1/2 boards of matza under warmish water and crumbled the chunks into a large bowl, adding 4 eggs, 1/3 cup of liquid egg whites (equivalent to 2 eggs' worth), a splash of milk, a dash of vanilla and quick-quick-quick across to Viking Stove.

I scrambled things around in a frying pan shpritzed with vegetable oil spray until the matza-egg concoction was softly set, then scattered a generous handful of the dried cranberries and pecans. A few more turns of the spatula and VOILA - a yummy, filling, invented breakfast.

So my advice to you is open your cabinet and see what can shake things up!

Great Article on Italian Jewish Cooking

Thought I'd share this great article from The Huffington Post:



Fabio Parasecoli Associate professor and coordinator of food studies, New School - NYC

Italian Jewish Food: Between the Global and the Local
Posted: 04/11/2012 3:02 pm

A few years ago, I decided to celebrate a Jewish friend's birthday by cooking a special meal: the whole menu was composed of Italian Jewish recipes. I was just beginning to discover the ethnic and regional varieties of the American food mosaic, but I was already aware that the Jewish specialties of New York City are quite different from the Jewish culinary traditions I know from my native city of Rome. Before moving here, I had never heard of bagels, lox, or knish, let alone gefilte fish. I thought it would be a nice surprise for my friend -- born and raised in Brooklyn -- to be exposed to something totally different.

I made caponata, an eggplant and pepper, sweet-and sour relish that probably originated in Sicily in the Middle ages, when the island was a Muslim province; Mantuan-style squash tortelli with a sage sauce (I must admit I bought those, as I did not have the time to make them from scratch); and baccalà alla livornese, a salt cod stew in tomato sauce from the Tuscan port town of Livorno. No desserts, as I can't bake to save my life.

Although not a Jew -- or a cook -- myself, I was raised in Rome and worked there for a food magazine. It was virtually impossible to overlook the Jewish community's contribution to Roman menus, with dishes such as carciofi alla giudia (artichokes deep-fried in olive oil), anchovies with curly endive, and the fantastic desserts -- above all the ricotta and sour cherry pie -- that I could buy two blocks away from my office in Portico d'Ottavia. This area is the heart of the old Jewish neighborhood, a previous ghetto.

Ghettos -- the first arising in a Jewish neighborhood of Venice in the fourteenth century -- were abolished only after the Italian unification in the 1870, when Jews were given citizenship and civil rights. Until then, each community had developed its own foodways, based on their provenance, their past, and the surroundings in which they lived. As such, Venetian Jews cooked and ate differently from the ones in Turin, in Livorno, and in Rome, each enjoying foods that were the result of centuries of movement, displacement, negotiations, and survival.

The Jewish Sicilian community that had thrived under the Muslims, for instance, was forced to abandon the island in 1492 after it became a Spanish dominion and the kings of Madrid decided to expel all the Jews from their territories. As they took refuge among communities in other Italian states, they quickly spread the techniques and ingredients they had borrowed from the Muslims, including eggplants, spinach, and sugar. It seems that the Jews were also among the first to experiment with new crops coming from the Americas, like squashes and peppers, which the rest of the population considered too lowly or strange.

For many American Jews, both of Ashkenazi and Sephardic descent, the culinary habits of the Italian communities are curious and exotic, even if they adhere to the laws of kashrut, the laws of dietary purity. These differences are an intriguing example of the many dynamics that shape food. Jewish dishes and traditions have been able to evolve over time and space precisely because the communities that created them were able to engage in a resourceful dialogue between the local and the global religious requirements and changing environments, even under duress and in exile. A closer look at the brilliance and complexity that resulted should make us think twice about rigid definitions of "authenticity," one of the buzzwords in today's food world. The discovery of the richness and variety of Jewish cuisines in the U.S. and around the world will be the focus of a panel that will take place at The New School in New York City on April 24. Research on these topics is expanding, also because the subject matter is always changing. The living traditions of Jewish cuisines around the world will continue evolving. Let's hope that legitimate and understandable attempts to protect their past will not limit their future.

For more of Fabio Parasecoli's work, visit The New School food blog The Inquisitive Eater.

Hey! Hag Sameach and Happy to Be Back!!!!!

Wow. it seems like forever since I posted here regularly, and I'm happy to be back. I took several months off from blogging (and you know I missed you terribly) following hand surgery in late October followed by 3 months of intensive physical therapy. I'm happy to be back at the keyboard,and even more importantly, delighted to be back at the stove!

And now, it's mid-Pesach. This is the time of the week I start daydreaming about pizza...cupcakes...French bread...Carvel...just about anything that's chametz and has not even one trace of matza meal. I even ran off to the doctor prior to Pesach for an important blood test because I knew these 8 days are chock-full of eggs, eggs and more eggs. More on that in a subsequent posting.