Say It With Me Now: Duck Ham!

It's really a shame that this is probably the single most uninspiring food photo that I've ever posted, because it doesn't do justice to the wonderful root vegetable soup and duck ham that I made yesterday.

"Duck ham" is quick-cured duck breast. I just love saying it. Duck ham!

The idea is that you wrap a duck breast in a mixture of kosher salt, sugar, garlic, thyme, and black pepper for 24 hours and out comes something like a very young prosciutto. Since the recipe for duck ham(!) doesn't involve an oven or a stove, it might be tempting to say but it's raw, it's raw poultry. Danger. It's not raw though -- it's cured.

Here's the thing: the definition of "cooking" is manipulating ingredients chemically. I don't know if that's what it says when you look "cooking" up in the dictionary, but that's what chefs mean when they use the word. When home cooks talk about cooking they're pretty much always talking about heat. But curing is cooking too: salt and sugar draw the water out of meat (osmosis, heard of it?), and dehydrated meat cannot host bacteria, because bacteria need water to survive. Ergo, the meat is safe to eat.

Once the duck was done curing yesterday, I sliced it as thin as possible, but to be honest it was still a little bit too gummy and wet for my taste to eat plain (none of you will be surprised to hear that The Viking sucked it down just fine). But it was perfect as a compliment to the rustic, earthy roasted root vegetable soup.

Root vegetables, roasted almost to the point of burning along with a duck or a chicken, are some of my favorite things to eat in the fall/winter months. This soup captures exactly that flavor in liquid form, which shouldn't be a surprise given the ingredients (root vegetables; chicken stock). Somehow, it was still amazing to me how complex and evocative of a mid-winter dinner the soup was. It's roasted chicken and root vegetables for people who are too lazy to chew. Relatedly, this would be amazing as baby food.

Both recipes are from Tom Colicchio's Think Like A Chef. If you want the full recipes, I encourage you to buy the book here. If you want the executive summaries, see below.


Duck Ham

Remove most of that fat from a duck breast, leaving just a thin protective coating. Mix 1 cup Kosher salt, 3 Tablespoons sugar, 1 Tablespoon thyme leaves, 1 clove minced garlic, 1 Tablespoon black pepper. Put half the salt mixture on a piece of plastic wrap, lay the duck breast on top, and cover the breast with the remaining mixture. Wrap tightly and refrigerate for 24 hours. Remove from the fridge, gently rinse the breast, and pat dry.


Roasted Root Vegetable Soup

Put some oil in a big stew pot (think 5 - 6 quart). Peel, slice, and add the following: 1 parsnip, 1/2 bulb fennel, 1 carrot, 1 small butternut squash, 1 leek (white part only), 1/2 granny smith apple, 1 clove garlic. Let veggies soften, add a knob of butter and a sprig of thyme, let soften further. Add 3 cups of chicken stock gradually, bring to a simmer, and simmer partially covered for 40 minutes. Then puree, thin with another cup of stock, and salt and pepper to taste. Sherry is not called for in the recipe, but indeed would not be out of place.

Nuts For Pumpkins

What is it with Americans and the pumpkin?

Pumpkins have a special role in this country: they're not just a fruit, they're a seasonal mascot. We carve faces on them and call them Jack O'Lanterns (in an earlier post I mentioned our October visit to see 4,000 carved, illuminated pumpkins), we chu(n)ck them, we compete to see who has the biggest one.

In addition to all of that, we just love to eat them, in every conceivable form from pumpkin beer to ice cream, soup, lattes, pies, breads, pastas, and beyond. This is unique. In other countries, there's not so much fanfare. The humble pumpkin is just another type of winter squash.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining. I love pumpkins! Nothing gets you into the holiday season like eating something made with pumpkin. Unfortunately for the home cook, they're a real pain to prepare. Almost anything you want to do with a pumpkin involves peeling it, removing the guts (which smell putrid...what a wild contrast there is between raw and cooked pumpkin. God bless the man or woman who first thought to cook something as smelly as a pumpkin), cubing its flesh, cooking it, and pureeing it.

Canned pumpkin puree is widely available (two different brands are pictured above), but I've been told by chefs that there's "no comparison" between pureeing a good pumpkin yourself and using the canned stuff. One of these days I'm going to test it out by making side by side pumpkin soups, breads, and pies comparing fresh vs. canned pumpkin.

Yes, one of these days, right after I back up my hard drive and alphabetize our DVD collection.

Here are some fun facts about pumpkins:

-Out of the seven continents, only Antarctica is unable to produce pumpkins.

-As one of the most popular crops in the U.S., 1.5 billion pounds of pumpkins are produced each year.

-The town of Morton, Illinois, the self-declared pumpkin capital of the world.


And here's a summary of this week's pumpkin consumption:

-On Sunday night, Halloween, I drank Smuttynose Pumpkin Ale (very tasty, pictured above) and we watched lesser-known Hitchcock movies - specifically, Stage Fright and The Lady Vanishes.



-On Monday night, I made pumpkin soup, and I used a real pumpkin to do it. Isn't it pretty? Almost too pretty to eat, I think. Almost.

When it comes to tackling whole pumpkins, there are a couple of things that will help you out: a very sharp knife, and a Smuttynose Pumpkin Ale. Once I survived the tedium of peeling, gutting, and cubing the pumpkin, the rest was a piece of cake. The soup turned out to be very tasty, thanks in part to 1/4 cup of shaved Parmesan added in at the end, which lends a richness and tang (the recipe calls for Gruyere, but I didn't have any on hand, although for whatever reason I always seem to have a cache of half-used domestic Parmesan in the fridge). The recipe is from Fine Cooking, it's very healthy, and can be found here. In retrospect, I think the soup would have been even better if I added sherry. Every soup is better with sherry.




-Last night I made pumpkin bread, using canned pumpkin, and it wasn't very good at all. Just flat. Dull. By the time I finished eating a slice this morning, I had already forgotten about it. I don't know whether to attribute that to a shortcoming of the canned stuff, or the fact that I decided to "wing it" instead of using a recipe. Probably a combination of the two.

And that, friends, is the pumpkin report.

Recipe Edits: Campanelle with Sausage, Pumpkin, & Cavolo Nero

Pictured above is the pasta with pumpkin, sausage, and cavolo nero that I cooked for dinner last night. I dunno, it was okay. The Viking thought that it was phenomenal but I suspect that's just because he was long overdue for a home-cooked meal.

I was out of town at the end of last week and in that short amount of time, The Viking had already begun to go feral. When I returned to the apartment on Saturday I found the shards of a broken espresso cup strewn across the floor, peels, cores, and bones of various foodstuffs scattered about the dining area, and evidence of what I believe to be early attempts at toolmaking. All that was missing was the cave paintings. Maybe if I had stayed away an extra day.

Anyway, I think what my Early Man was responding to in last night's dinner was the flavor combination, which I agree was appetizing...but given a few small changes in execution, the dish could have excellent (not to mention easier). Raw squash/pumpkin is punishingly difficult to peel and dice; the sausage was overcooked and rubbery from sitting in the pan too long; the kale had a slippery, boiled quality most closely associated with seaweed; the whole thing was bound together in a watery broth that I could have been reduced down to better effect.

Most of the time we choose recipes because the ingredients sound good: sausage, pasta, cavelo nero, pumpkin. What's not to like? The actual flesh and bones of the recipe, though, may not be all that inspired. That's why it's always important to read fully through a recipe before beginning to cook, making substitutions or changes in technique as you see fit (or, looking for a new recipe using the same ingredients, if the whole thing just doesn't seem right). A recipe ought not to be the boss of you. It should just be a guideline, open to your changes and interpretations.

I'll use this recipe as an example. I'm not going to include the source, because I don't mean to pick on its creators - but here's how I might have done things differently, if I could do it over again.

Pasta with Pumpkin, Sausage, and Cavolo Nero

Kosher salt
1 lb. sweet Italian sausage, casings removed if using links
1 Tbs. olive oil (optional
1 medium yellow onion, chopped
3 cups 3/4-inch-diced peeled, seeded pumpkin 1 small pumpkin or butternut squash, halved
1/4 cup dry white wine
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp. dried Marjorem a pinch nutmeg
1-1/2 cups lower-salt 3/4 c. chicken broth
10 oz. cavolo nero kale (aka Lacinato, black, or dinosaur kale), trimmed, ribs removed, leaves cut into 1-inch pieces
8 oz. dried campanelle pasta
1/2 cup grated Parmigiano-Reggiano; more for serving
Freshly ground black pepper

Their instructions:

Bring a large pot of well-salted water to a boil over high heat.

In a heavy-duty 12-inch skillet over medium heat, cook the sausage, breaking it up into small pieces with a wooden spoon, until mostly browned, 6 to 8 minutes.Push the sausage towards the edge of the skillet and add the olive oil if the center of the pan is dry (this will depend on the amount of fat in the sausage). Add the onion and cook until golden and the sausage is well browned, about 8 minutes. Stir in the pumpkin, wine, garlic, and marjoram and cook until the wine evaporates, 3 to 4 minutes. Add 3/4 cup of the broth and cook until the pumpkin is almost tender, about 8 minutes. Add the kale and the remaining 3/4 cup broth, cover, and cook until the pumpkin and kale are tender, about 4 minutes.

Meanwhile, cook the pasta in the boiling water according to package directions until al dente. Reserve 1/2 cup of the pasta water and then drain well. Add the pasta to the skillet with enough of the pasta water to coat the pasta and vegetables generously. Stir in the Parmigiano and season to taste with salt and pepper. Serve with additional Parmigiano.


My Instructions:

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees, and place pumpkin halves cut-side down in a baking dish. Cook for 30-45 minutes, until a knife can be inserted fairly easily into the pumpkin. Remove from the oven, cool, remove peel, and cut into 3/4 inch dice. Set aside.

Bring a large pot of well-salted water to a boil over high heat.

In a heavy-duty 12-inch skillet over medium heat, cook the sausage, breaking it up into small pieces with a wooden spoon, until well browned, 8 to 10 minutes. Remove sausage from pan with slotted spoon and set aside.

Add olive oil if the center of the pan is dry (this will depend on the amount of fat in the sausage). Add the onion and cook until golden, 6-8 minutes. Stir in kale, wine, garlic, nutmeg, salt, and pepper, and cook until the wine evaporates, 3 to 4 minutes. Add chicken broth, bring to a simmer, and cook until kale is tender and broth has reduced to half, about 4 minutes.

Meanwhile, cook the pasta in the boiling water according to package directions until al dente. Reserve 1/2 cup of the pasta water and then drain well. Add the pasta, pumpkin, and sausage to the skillet with enough of the pasta water to coat the pasta and vegetables generously. Stir in the Parmigiano and season to taste with salt and pepper. Serve with additional Parmigiano.

I Think We Should All Have A Chair Like This

This past week we got a taste of family life. Ours friends The Vegetarian and The Botanist visited us in NYC along with their Munchkin, which provided not only a much-needed excuse to cook with vegetables, but a fascinating window into the habits and customs of those small people that we call babies.

The Munchkin likes: The Big Red Barn and other board books, puppies, fries, bananas, Swedish children's music, farm animals of all sorts, stuffed animals > she is.

The Munchkin does not like: Having her face and hands cleaned, socks, bedtime, strange men.




On to the vegetables. First up on Tuesday night was this vegetarian tagine. It was not dissimilar to the tagines that we ate throughout the mountains in Morocco, which didn't have much in the way of meat in them either. This one featured turnips, carrots, chickpeas, and lots of sweet potatoes. The tagine itself was wonderfully flavorful, likely due to the fact that all of the spices were toasted whole and then ground immediately before use (finally, a reason to break into the spices I bought in Marrakesh!). I was distracted by the limp texture and dull flavor of the couscous that I served along with it, but nobody else seemed to mind.



On Thursday I cut up root vegetables (beats, turnips, radishes, cool purple carrots, regular carrots) and roasted them with sea salt, black pepper, and olive oil. I also made an herb and Parmesan risotto, and for dessert, apple crisp. For the non-vegetarians, I cooked flounder en papillote (read: in a foil packet) with sun dried tomatoes, olives, and dried thyme and oregano. This remains the easiest and most hassle-free method of cooking fish that I have yet to discover.

Then came the weekend. We headed out to stay with my mother in the Hudson Valley in order to show The Vegetarian, The Botanist, and their Munchkin a proper Northeastern fall. This meant taking in a spectacle of over 4,000 individually hand-carved, illuminated jack o'lanterns, a hike to the top of Monument Mountain famously walked by Hawthorne and Melville (but never, I don't think, by a jet lagged 13 month old), a hayride, many pumpkin foodstuffs (pancakes, pasta sauce, fudge), lunch at an old fashioned burger shack, and much, much more. Somehow I didn't see fit to take pictures of any of these wonderful activities -- I need to get better at that.



When we returned to the city on Sunday night, The Vegetarian and the The Viking were responsible for dinner. This marked the second time The Viking has ever prepared dinner for me, so needless to say, I was excited. The menfolk went out on a hunting/gathering expedition to Wholefoods, and brought back two big bags of groceries including but not limited to soup, bread, an heirloom tomato the size of a kickball, and Icelandic yogurt (because who can resist yogurt from Iceland?). Then we all drank a middling Malbec and ate insalata caprese, vegetable soup, and tortellini with pesto (served in a souffle dish, shown above). It was a fabulous meal, largely due to the excellent company, partly because I didn't lift a finger.

Now The Vegetarian, The Botanist, and The Munchkin are all gone. It's sad and silent in the apartment and once again the cooking has come to a temporary halt.

I'm Stearing Clear Of Heavy Machinery

Hello from soggy England! I'm in no condition to be writing right now, having spent the past 13 hours in transit, having slept for only 2 or 3 of those hours, and having taken a dose of over-the-counter sleeping medication too small to put me to sleep but just large enough to partially incapacitate me. Nonetheless, I'll try my best to string a few sentences together, because I really am so behind in telling you about last weekend's kitchen antics.

Last Saturday night we had The Viking's cycling team over for cocktails on the terrace. For them, it was a rare opportunity to socialize in a spandex-free environment; for me, it was a chance to attach faces to names and to corroborate The Viking's dubious-sounding claim that when he leaves the house at 5:45 every morning, it really is to ride a bike in circles around the park and not to hold up convenience stores or do drug deals or similar.

A cycling team is the perfect audience for an eager cook, consisting of the sort of stringbeany, twitchy men that need to eat almost constantly just to keep up with their raging metabolisms. Aside from the typical spread of assorted party foods (chips, dips, cheese plate, whathaveyou) I had two homemade items: roasted tomato, mozzarella, basil and brioche 'sliders,' and peanut butter and Concord grape jam sandwich cookies.



I was really worried about the brioche (this might be an overstatement. I really worry about the fact that I don't contribute to a 401k; I was somewhat nervous about the brioche.). I've never made it before and, well, given my track record with breads, I think I had legitimate cause for concern. Luckily the rolls came out of the oven soft and fluffy, and if not tasting exactly like the brioche that I'm used to, they did at least taste good. The 'sliders' (for the record, I think the word 'sliders' sounds trendy and ridiculous but I don't know what else to call these. Sandwiches? Canapes? I don't know.) were summery and fresh, wholesome without being heavy, which is exactly what I was going for.

As for the cookies: I have nothing but good things to say about the jam-making experience. I've been told before that "there's nothing to it," but only by the same type of people who say that there's nothing to knitting and there's nothing to refinishing your own furniture, so people who apparently have a higher threshold for tedious projects than I do. But there really is nothing to making jam. You heat the fruit with some lemon juice and sugar, strain out the juices, and then simmer the fruit juice on its own for 10 minutes or so. Then you wait for it to cool. That's it! And you have jam that is so, so much better than the store bought stuff.



When I saw Concord grapes at the greenmarket last week my mind immediately landed on jelly, and from there it drifted to peanut butter. Ergo peanut butter and jelly sandwiches -- hold the bread. I thought that they would be perfect for the gaggle of small children in attendance, but in the end it was their moms and dads that oooo'd and aaaahh'd over the cookies with a plainly nostalgic glow.



On a different subject, but before I forget it, sad news about our tomato plants: after having almost perished while we were in Morocco and then made a miraculous recovery, this week the tomato plants were stricken by tomato hornworms that have managed to eat every last leaf and most of our ripening fruit within a space of 72 hours. The Viking has had his eye on those tomatoes for over a month and is indignant; I don't really care about the tomatoes and mostly just mind being outsmarted by an invertebrate. This gardening stuff is hard.

How Pizza Turned Into Jerusalem Artichoke Risotto (By Accident)

I get a lot of questions about my cooking habits. Questions, and general puzzlement, and facial expressions that seem to say, "But why did you make your own salsa? Did that really seem like the best use of an hour of your life?"

Well, first of all, I don't have children. That frees up lots of time and creative energy right there. Second of all, the cooking sometimes happens by accident.

Take Friday night. I called The Viking utterly exhausted from the work week, and the conversation went something like this:

The Viking: What are we doing for dinner tonight?

Me: I don't know. I'm exhausted. I'm definitely not cooking tonight. Definitely not.

The Viking: OK, well we should just order pizza. Go home, put your feet up, and we'll order a pizza.

Me: Perfect.

And then my thoughts went something like this:

I'll just stop by the grocery store for some paper towels and OJ, on my way home.

...Now that I'm at the grocery store, I might as well pick up a frozen pizza. That will be cheaper than ordering pizza.

...But frozen pizza is so unhealthy, and it's never any good. As long as I'm here I might as well buy a chicken to roast. That's barely cooking.

....Ugh, look at this industrial, mass-produced chicken. It's so disgusting. I cannot, in good conscience, buy and eat this chicken.

....Hey look, arborio rice! I could make risotto, I even have Parmesan and white wine and chicken stock in the fridge. I haven't made risotto in ages. I'll just make really easy risotto and be done with it.

...Actually, I have those Jerusalem artichokes too. I wonder how you cook a Jerusalem artichoke? I wonder if you can make Jerusalem artichoke risotto...?

Fast forward to 9 PM, at which point I was pureeing sauteed Jerusalem artichokes in a food processor and folding them into a risotto with herbs and pancetta.

It was my first experience with Jerusalem artichokes, which are neither artichokes nor are they from Jerusalem.



They're a tuber that looks like a cross between ginger and a massage tool and tastes like a cross between a mushroom and an artichoke. Pureed and mixed into the risotto they in fact did add an earthy compliment to the smokey pancetta and full-bodied Parmesan. All in all, it was a nice dish.

Nicer than an evening on the couch with a beer, a slice, and an episode of Mad Men? That's up for debate.

The Best Apple Pie You've Never Baked

The Viking always gives me a hard time about Labor Day. In America, unlike anywhere else in the world, we bookend summer with the two holiday weekends of Memorial Day and Labor Day. It’s all very neatly delineated: summer is over after the holiday weekend. That's it! It’s Tuesday, September 7, everybody out of the pool. Trade your white trousers for corduroys, put away the grill, close up the summer house. To those who did not grow up observing Labor Day, this exactitude of seasonal change (two weeks before the seasons technically change, no less) seems silly.

But the thing is, somehow fall always does manage to arrive right on cue. Yesterday morning on the way to the train station in East Hampton, it was 55 degrees, mist was rolling off the fields, and we stopped for three families of wild turkeys to cross the road. The light has changed. The air has become dry. The first apples, a half peck of Mackintoshes, arrived in this week's CSA box and I baked my first apple pie with them this weekend.

You probably know by now that I am not fond of New York summers. Maybe I'm doing something wrong but I don't like the sultry heat, the purposelessness, and most of all the Manhattanite diaspora that seems to occur each June through August. But fall! -- poignent, elegant, fall -- is my favorite time of year. It's a time for making stews, watching the leaves change, and take bracing, bare-sleeved runs in the crisp mornings.

Maybe this is why the delineating line of Labor Day has so much significance to me, far more than turning the corner from one calendar year into another on December 31. New Years always seems arbitrary, a dividing line between snow and gloom and...more snow and gloom. But Labor Day marks the transition between summer insouciance and fall industriousness. It's the start of the harvest.

Today feels like the right time for reflection and resolutions. Here are some of mine:

-Go to bed by 11 PM, not 1 AM, on weeknights
-Learn to bake the perfect bread
-Drink more water and less coffee
-When people introduce themselves to me, attempt to remember their names
-Finally begin training for that half marathon that I’ve been threatening to do
-Write handwritten thank-you notes
-Learn to sharpen my own kitchen knives

As I mentioned earlier, this weekend I celebrated the start of fall with a homemade apple pie.

Given that my father grew up on an apple farm, I've eaten a lot of apple pies in my day. Apple crisps, buckles, crumbles, tarts, and galettes too, but mostly pies. My grandmother was almost never without one in the house, and while I know that her pie apple of choice was the Mutsu, somehow no one has been able to track down her recipe. It definitely did not pass down to my father: when he made pies for us as kids, he used storebought crust and a simple filling of apples, sugar, and a little cinnamon. Those pies tasted wonderful to me because they were made by dad, but by the time I was a teenager I started looking for my own version.

Over the past decade I've tried every recipe I could get my hands on, and the one I use now is a slightly adapted version of one that I originally found in Saveur. It is the best apple pie I have ever eaten. And yes, you DO need to make the crust from scratch.

Classic Apple Pie

Serves 8

For the crust:
2 1/2 cups flour, sifted
2 tbsp. sugar, plus more for sprinkling
1 tsp. kosher salt
18 tbsp. very cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
1 egg, lightly beaten

For the filling:
6 apples, preferably Mutsu, Bramley, or a mixture of Cortland and Granny Smith, peeled, cored, and cut into 1/4" pieces
3/4 cup sugar
3 tbsp. flour
2 tbsp. apple cider vinegar
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp. kosher salt
1/4 tsp. freshly ground nutmeg
1/4 tsp. freshly ground ginger

1. To make the crust: Combine flour, sugar, and salt. Add butter and work with hands until the flour resembles coarse meal flecked with pea-size pieces of butter. Continue to mix with hands, sprinkling in a total of 6–8 tbsp. of ice water one tablespoon at a time, until the dough begins to hold together. Transfer dough to a lightly floured surface, divide in half, and form 2 dough balls. Flatten each dough ball slightly to make a disk. Wrap disks in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 1 hour.

2. Heat oven to 425˚. Roll out each disk of dough on a lightly floured surface into 12" rounds. Fit 1 round of dough into a 9" pie plate.3. To make the filling: In a large bowl, combine apples, sugar, flour, vinegar, cinnamon, salt, ginger, and nutmeg. Transfer filling to the pie plate, brush edges of pastry with some of the egg, and top with remaining pastry round. Trim edges with a knife and crimp with your fingers. Brush top of pastry with remaining egg and sprinkle with a little sugar. Using a knife, make 4 slits in pastry top and poke with tines of a fork.

3. Transfer pie to oven and bake for 20 minutes. Reduce heat to 350˚ and continue baking until crust is golden brown and a knife inserted into one of the slits slides easily through apples, about 40 minutes more. Transfer to a rack and let cool for 2 hours before serving.