Smoked Steaks in Avondale

And now for something completely different. At this restaurant the staff gives you a little cooking lesson with the drinks order. The steaks here, we learn, are cold smoked, cooked sous vide to one of three temperatures (medium rare, medium, “juicy well done”) and then finished on the grill. I don’t think I’ll review this restaurant, but if I did there are two parts to the story I find interesting.

The first is food cost. The kitchen manages to offer a reasonable facsimile of a steakhouse experience at half the price you’d pay in a place that bragged on its 800-degree broiler. A teres major steak clocks in at a mere $19, and while I don’t really love that “better living through science” texture of sous vide meat, it is tender and juicy. But other items are also a bargain at this price-aware (and very busy) new restaurant. If there were a bar here, I’d want to sit at it for a martini and a $15, 16/20 shrimp cocktail. The owner clearly understands that guests are looking for a meal where can drink and eat well but keep the check under $100 a head. But man, the food cost must cut close to the bone.

The second point of interest for me is the neighborhood, Avondale. I feel like I’m beginning to see the emergence of a new kind of Avondale restaurant that stands in sharp contrast to the neighboring Logan Square restaurants. The latter are refashioned storefronts with patios spilling out onto the streets and lots of foot traffic. That former are refashioned warehouses, not evident unless you go looking for them, hidden oases behind old brick, with ample nearby parking (this spot has a lot). Avondale restaurants remind me of Atlanta restaurants.

Aside from the shrimp cocktail and the decent steak, I didn’t have a great first impression of the food. Like many Chicago restaurants, everything is so unrelentingly rich, even a salad wrecked by an excess of fried (and slightly rancid) shallots. One exception was a cauliflower steak that looked grand on the place and sang with smoke flavor. It might be a bit cumbersome as an entree, but made for a fun appetizer.

West Loop Wine Country

Whenever I find myself in some place like the Napa Valley or Aspen that has been long populated by the lifestyle rich, I feel like it’s very easy to walk into a restaurant time portal. Ask about a place that locals like, and you will find yourself in a kind mid-1990s American bar and grill. There will be balsamic vinegar and fresh goat cheese, beds of whipped potatoes or risotto on which to prop hot-off-the-grill entrees, and lots of sturdy cabernet by the glass. I think this is the whole vicarious vacation vibe that a big local restaurant group is going for with their new Fulton Market spot.

I met up with folks there for a nightcap after having dinner in a very different kind of restaurant, and its expanse of blond wood and creamy yellow lighting made me squint; it was a little like coming out of a club and finding myself at a California Pizza Kitchen in a suburban mall. The wine list was an expansive and multi-page document in a hard cover, and it seemed comprised almost exclusively of California bottle. There wasn’t a whole lot of that natural wine funny business, no sirree Bob.

We only ate a pizza — a Cal-Neapolitan style that looked a little thin and slight and tasted great. The pliable crust was tangy from its ferment and well salted, and the simple Margherita toppings top notch. Not sure I’d go back for glazed salmon on a bed of grits or a $32 burger, though it could be fun to explore the wine list.

No Pix: The Taco Place

The tacos in the Hamptons place opened up near us. I had reviewed the one in West Midtown Atlanta and called the food what it was but kinda got into the whole well appointed patio and quenching margarita thing. 

We tried out the one here. You can either order and pay in the QR-verse or you can fill out paper chits, like you do at cart-less dim sum. Love it.  We went with the chits and my one small issue here was that I put an L instead of a check mark next to the fried oyster taco, but the taco arrived not on the crisp green leaf of L that I wanted but instead on a really leathery corn T. Anyhow, the three small fried oysters were truly not bad even if everything thing else about the taco was. 

There’s a lot of talk of duck on the menu, as well as cauliflower and falafel and sweet sesame-soy glaze. Any of the principals can be served not in tacos but instead over a small bowl of beady brown rice adorned with matchsticks of raw, multicolored red pepper. If I recall right, the company launched in White Plains, New York, which tracks. 

The tone of the menu nods in a non-explicit way to diners who are more concerned with portion, healthfulness and satiety than with the pursuit of flavor. It is like a meal from the Whole Foods hot bar with two big bonuses. First, this a sunny place, not just the patio also the inside, which gulps in the open air and street energy. It reminds me of a certain Logan Square restaurant, but without the douchiness. Second, the margaritas are built for folks who crave icy, shaken citrus cocktails. They also come very quickly: the guy across the bar asking if you’re ready for another round is now the ToastTab app on your phone. 

I suspect we’ll end up going there more than I’d anticipate. I also think I’m going to end up ordering a salad with a side of rice and a double order of fried oysters, and never let the word “taco” enter my head. 

Dinner in a Restaurant

Arlene and I are not known for our attention to detail, so the fact that we just assumed Father’s Day was June 14 and made plans for dinner out — well, that would come as no surprise to our friends. Under normal circumstances, we might have rebooked the reservation, but there is no normal or new normal. There is now, which wasn’t like last week and won’t likely be anything like next week.

So we did what people are doing now. We pre-ordered and prepaid our meal, and then we arrived for dinner on the patio just as the temperature was flirting with a dip below 60. A server moved our two-top under the one functioning heater, and brought us a bottle of hand sanitizer. Another table came and shivered nearby. Within three minutes we had a tall and pretty salad with macerated strawberries, marcona almonds and shavings of that purple-tinged drunken goat cheese along with a cazuela of super-rich brandade and thick toasts. We reminded them that we had ordered a bottle of wine. “The rosé, was it?” 

The waiter opened it tableside in gloved hands, ripping at the intransigent plastic foil over the cork with a dull corkscrew blade. We pulled up our masks and had the conversation. On our end: You good? Happy to be back at work? Are people here okay? On hers: Thank you for coming out to support us. We appreciate you. We’re happy to be serving you. 

A busser dropped off a water pitcher and two glasses, and backed away. His eyes were smising. We drank our rosé and dipped bread into the brandade, which had grown lukewarm. We picked the strawberries out of the salad. A hot-rodder in a black sports car tore down the street outside. The wind picked up. 

Another waiter appeared with our main course, paella. There was no room at the table; could we move inside? “Of course!” The other group was at the table by the open garage door. We sat far from them at the dining counter, usually so packed and blaring, now just us. “You’re the first guests to sit here since the shutdown,” she said. “I’ll dance on it,” I said, never at a loss for a dad joke. 

We ate our paella, a restaurant version. If I were to guess the prep: precooked rice was spread over a greased pan and blast roasted until something like a soccarat formed. Along the way some fat shrimp, nuggets of morcilla and asparagus spears joined the party. Before serving the cook finished it with generous dollops of aïoli. The latter was too much for me. The rice was plenty oily already but so good; I kept hunting around the pan for the right crunch-edged mouthful. 

Looking at the back of the restaurant, it reminded me of times I’ve worked in food pantries. Tables had been pushed together like deployment stations; one group had the to-go orders, another the wines and beverages. Masked servers milled around; they were all busy but I could sense something a little tentative in the process. They were learning how to work this room, to run bags out to people in idling cars, to attend to the five customers inside while keeping their distance.

We bagged up our ample leftovers and sat a bit longer. Should we go home and watch “Da Five Bloods?” Sure. We slipped out the door and were halfway up the block when we heard our waiter call out. “Hey,” she said, “Thank you for coming.” 

Catching up on weeks of cooking

~Pork and kimchi soon dubu

When I started this blog, I was posting fast and furiously, drunk on the notion that every stray cooking thought coming out of my head could find a home in writing. I was also drunk on the rediscovery of cooking as therapy, stress reduction, self care and sharing. It began to feel like the various parts of my lifetime as a cook — from the obsessed kid, through cooking school and professional restaurant work, through raising kids and writing about food for a newspaper — was there in front of me, time flattened so that I could choose the flavors and obsessions from different periods and integrate them into a singular approach. I was also in love with the new routine: mix a proper cocktail or smoke a little weed, peer into the fridge that I had stocked with quality meat and produce, and let the spirit of the moment determine the direction, the Zen of the moment determine the outcome.

This was working. My food had not been so good in a long time. It felt purposeful, correct to the weird timeless time of that never ending now of quarantine. I was practicing what I had long preached: all good things in moderation, animal protein moved from the center of the plate, variety and color as a pathway to satiety. I had my fling with a certain junky stoner treat, but I was mostly cooking very clean. The pantry got organized for the first time, and long stashed grains and beans got used or chucked.

I rediscovered some things about how I really like to eat. I really like having a salad every night, like I did when growing up, and I whipped up massive batches of both French vinaigrette and Japanese ginger-carrot dressing. I’ve never been someone to keep a lot of meat in the freezer (or the house), but with vacuum sealed cuts of meat from local farms that last a week or longer in the fridge, I could choose it to complement the rest of the meal, not vice versa. The first CSA box I received at home was such a great treat I started dancing around the kitchen to Stevie Wonder and shoving spinach in my mouth. Yes, I’m weird, I know it.

Most of my spices were too old, but the thing is I don’t like to cook with a lot of spice. I do like to cook with a lot of onions, olive oil, fresh thyme, garlic, shallot, black pepper, white pepper, red pepper. I was using more fish sauce and mirin in non-traditional ways, and I bombed through so many bottles of yuzu juice.

I experience my first freak-out for ramps because I now get them. Here, it’s the really the only marker of spring, one of the few fresh things you can cook with that tastes of the season and only the season, of that nonending now that was then. Ramps in everything!

Maybe I was feeling my mojo coming back. I was tasting more than just shoving food in, thinking about it as I cooked and making the right adjustments on the fly. I wasn’t making overly large amounts, and I wasn’t letting “simple” come out as one dimensional, underseasoned, unlayered. Building flavor starts the minute the onion hits the oil, and if I didn’t know what to cook, I’d start with an onion.

I had some thoughts about what I was cooking that I wanted to share here, but it hasn’t been the time in this country. I’m very fortunate to have access to such good ingredients and to be able to take pleasure in them and share that pleasure. But this has been the time to engage the world in a different way, to listen to some hard truths that I know but maybe don’t feel as much as I should. I need to be made uncomfortable, to see that the benefits of my life may and should be taken from me.

Now, this new now, I want to share. Sharing with anyone who makes it this far into my blather. If you are reading this, you are witness to my notes to self, and I thank and appreciate you.

I was thinking of sharing a number of pictures of food here, but this feels like a good place to stop. I think we’ll have pork belly and kimchi soon dubu for dinner with a little brown rice on the side.

Spinach Ravioli and Stray Thoughts

Inasmuch as I promote this blog, I advise friends and acquaintances on Facebook of a new post. But I worry that this single act makes my writing performative and self promoting. I like to think of this space as journal that I leave lying around for anyone to flip through. To my benefit and perhaps detriment as a writer, my experiences of writing different newspaper columns blurred the boundaries between internal dialogue and communicating with strangers. Obviously, I wanted may column readers to appreciate the text, but it was the need to produce copy that pushed my writing into a more honest place, away from flattery, performance and cliche. 

Okay, fuck this shit: ravioli. Last night I made ravioli for dinner like I used to as a cooking student and line cook in the 1980s, when ravioli was boss. I staged at Le Pavillon in D.C., where the kitchen was famous for its small lobster-filled ravioli in a chive beurre fondu. They were plump, taut, ruby-red, little bite-sized treasures. 

Lots of places had lobster ravioli at the time, sometimes in color-striped pasta. (If not lobster, it usually contained some awful mixture based on sun-dried tomatoes.) I remember once having a rav party where friends and I made a hacked version using gyoza wrappers. Maybe it’s coming back? Lobster dumplings are the signature dish at S.K.Y.  here in Chicago. Do formerly popular dishes come back in a pandemic? Should I be making sardine ravioli? No, gross. 

Maybe there will be lobster ravioli in my future, but for now I am more than happy with the spinach ravioli I made for dinner last night. The three of us ate four dozen in a simple tomato sauce with a green salad. 

For the filling, I used the curly-leaf spinach that came in my produce box from The Chef’s Garden (the gift that keeps on giving, like Hanukkah presents for a week). I also had the last of the kale from the box that needed using up, and I’m glad I did. It gave the filling some interest. To start, I finely chopped the kale along with a couple of nice foot-long green garlic shoots attached to sprouted cloves (also from the box) and sweated it in a good-God gob of butter. In went the washed spinach, and once it had wilted and most of its juices had evaporated I hit it with some crème fraîche and let that cook down and evaporate some. It all went into the food processor with salt, pepper, nutmeg, grated parm and two Triscuit crackers. 

For the pasta, I eyeballed half measurements of this recipe from chef Jennifer Jasinski in Denver; it seemed like a lot of water, but the dough came out very supple and ideal for ravioli. I rolled it out to 5 on the KitchenAid pasta sheeter and for the first time ever, used the ravioli press I’ve had for 20 years. I’d normally just form the ravioli with cutters, but the press seemed like a quick way to make a lot of smaller, uniform dumplings, which is what I was envisioning. 

The sauce presented a dilemma. I didn’t want to make a butter sauce in order to keep the richness and calories at bay and let the flavor of the nice veggies be more upfront. I had one small tomato and a handful of dubious, wrinkled grape tomatoes, so they went into a pot with some butter (some butter is okay, just not all butter), shallot and thyme. I simmered it covered until the tomatoes were jammy, added a bit of water, simmered longer, zapped with an immersion blender and strained. Thin, bright, clingy. 

This made for quite a satisfying dinner with the last of my salad from The Chef’s Garden. I even made a second round for dessert. The pasta had such a different texture — lighter, stretchier — than any of the commercial versions that I’ve bought over the years and has made me lose my taste for ravioli. 

More to come. Maybe even lobster! 

This recipe is from memory, not tested with exact measurements.

Spinach-Kale Ravioli Filling

• 2 cups curly kale, washed, destemmed and minced

• 1 tablespoon mild garlic, minced (leave out or use shallot if the garlic is harsh)

• 2 tablespoons butter

• 6 cups spinach, washed and destemmed

• 1/3  cup crème fraîche or cream, or 2 tablespoons cream cheese

• 1/2 to 1 teaspoon salt

• 1/4 teaspoon grated nutmeg

• 1/4 teaspoon grated white pepper

• 1/2 cup freshly grated parmigiano reggiano or grana padano (use less of another cheese, which may be too salty)

• 2 Triscuits or other crackers, crumbled. 

Saute kale and garlic in butter over medium heat. Add spinach, turn up heat to medium high, and stir to wilt. Wait until the spinach expresses its juices and those juices start to evaporate before adding cream. Let reduce, stirring frequently, until cream has all but disappeared. Transfer to food processor and add remaining ingredients. Blend until smooth. Taste: it should taste nearly too seasoned. Add more salt if not. 

Use in fresh pasta dough or wonton wrappers or gyoza skins. 

Too much cream, an inspiring box of produce, a potato gratin challenge and a verbal pickle recipe

The seeds for last night’s dinner were sown a few days ago when Arlene took my shopping list to the market and came back with a quart of heavy whipping cream. “It’s the only size they had left,” she said. I used the few tablespoons I needed, snuck a bit of cream into other dishes for a few days and realized that I had a lot of cream ready to go bad. So I helped it along. The liquid went into a clean glass jar with a spoonful of yogurt stirred in. I covered it with the most porous, un-maskworthy tea towel in the kitchen and let it sit out overnight. the next day I had a lot of crème fraîche, which would keep. I figured a use would eventually reveal itself. I screwed the lid on the jar and popped it into the fridge. 

Fast forward to yesterday when an unbelievably gorgeous box of produce arrived at my door.* It was from The Chef’s Garden, an Ohio farm that until the crisis kept Michelin-starred restaurants in micro greens and other tender young vegetables. Now in order to survive they’re doing home deliveries, which I couldn’t recommend more. In the box were two clamshells, one filled with pea tendrils and the other with young arugula (past the sprout stage but before pubescent leaf variegation). These two, mixed in a salad bowl with the best oil and vinegar in the house (walnut oil and Banyuls wine vinegar) and a sprinkle of salt, had to be the star voice in that evening’s meal. Playing backup was a quick pickle made with the small, sharp green and watermelon radishes from the box. I followed a recipe as best I could remember from a convo with Linsey — salt, rice vinegar, red pepper flake, ginger, garlic, soy sauce and a good bit of sugar. 

The only protein I had in the fridge that wouldn’t try to upstage the salad? Yes, eggs. I made a mushroom omelette. I hot-seared cubed button mushroom in oil in the bottom of my cranked-to-infernal Dutch oven in oil, then finished them with butter, garlic and some of the fennel shoots and baby basil from the produce box. They were so good we all ate spoonfuls like an amuse before dinner, but the rest went into the omelette with some shredded gruyère. 

Now came the component of the meal that went straight to the geekiest geekitude of my curious cook’s mind. I wanted to make a potato gratin, but since there was cheese in the omelette, I really didn’t want to make the superrich, bubbly, gooey, cheesy kind of gratin, but one that was more about the potatoes. 

I remember interviewing a great Atlanta maître d’ named Claude Guillaume many years ago for a story I wrote on gratin dishes, and he told me he grew up eating a dauphinois glazed with crème fraîche rather than cheese. With this thought, I wanted to run naked through the streets of Syracuse. 

I also upped the ante by giving myself the challenge of preparing a gratin that would cook through with ever covering it, letting crust and caramelization sneak into the crags of loosely scattered potatoes. I’d need high heat, a wide-but-shallow baking dish and thick, skin-on slices of a potato variety that would keep its integrity. Yukon Gold. 

I sliced seven or eight potatoes and tossed them in a large bowl with about a cup and a half of the crème fraîche, which I had seasoned to a pitch with salt, white pepper, nutmeg and garlic. Stupidly but not deal-breakingly-so, I added some slivered green onion that contributed little flavor but burnt on the top. I buttered the dish, laid about a third of the potatoes down and scattered a handful of shredded gruyère. Three layers, finished with the remainder of the cream from the bowl drizzled over the top. 

I had the oven preheated to 400 and after about 10 minutes was worried that it would brown too much before cooking through, so I cranked it to 500 for another 8-10 minutes. It came out really well, and after everything else on the table was gone, it continued to be immensely pickable. I liked this first draft enough to want to try it again, playing with the temperature and the proportions to get the best and best tasting crags. 

And as good as it was, nothing could beat the flavor of that salad. The rest was cooking, that was spring.

*A quick note on my personal ethics. I’ve known and been friendly with Lee Jones from The Chef’s Garden since I visited his farm for a story I wrote in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He sent me the produce as a gift. I don’t feel comfortable recommending a product I didn’t pay for, so before writing this post I went online and sent the exact same box to my brother. I’m sure I’ll be ordering plenty more. Also, YOU’RE WELCOME, ROBERT.

Crisp chicken thighs with rice pilaf

The bread baking thing has been fun. After getting some advice from my best baking expert, Linsey, I’m going to try an autolysed then kneaded whole-grain boule. The fact is, though, we don’t eat a lot of bread. We do eat a lotta lotta rice. I always keep short-grain Japanese rice (Hitomebore if I can get it), short-grain risotto rice (carnaroli, which doesn’t risk pastiness like arborio) and long-grain jasmine rice, which I find similar to basmati but a bit more versatile and easier to cook — i.e., you can fuck it up and it still comes out pretty well.

And since I had stock again, my thoughts turned to long-grain rice pilaf. In cooking school, we learned the basic recipe: sweat diced onion in butter, add rice and stir to coat with fat, add stock, bring to a boil, cover, simmer 17 minutes, rest. 

This has long been my jumping-off point for the chicken and rice dish I use for feeding sloppy groups, like when a bunch of kids would stay for dinner. It goes like this: 

Saute bone-in, skin-on chicken pieces in hot oil in a braiser, use some of the chicken fat in the pan to saute onions, whatever veg is around, and spice mixtures based around my own stupid American ideas of foreignness, a.k.a, “Do I feel like going Indian or Mexican tonight?” 

I then fry the rice in this goodness, add the stock, being careful to deglaze the pan, put the chicken pieces back in and cover it to cook. When it comes out well, there is fluffy rice and tender chicken, particularly welcome in the white meat. When it doesn’t come out well, there is gummy rice and chicken good enough to forgive it.

I had a package of thighs that needed cooking, so I set to work. After sauteing them, I figured these nice pieces of dark meat should be finished on a rack in a roasting pan in the oven, where they’d come out plenty juicy and have crisp skin. 

Then I looked at the nice, browned bits in the braiser and thought, “Do I feel like going Indian or Persian tonight? Maybe both.”

The skin was super crispy, but my lighting skills suck

Rice Pilaf

More than other starches, rice depends on the vessel it’s cooked in. I love using my braiser because it has a wide surface area (best for long-grain rice, which needs to separate) and a heavy lid that keeps the steam in. If you make rice pilaf in a saucepan, you’ll need to add a touch less liquid and would do well letting the rice come to the boil, covering it, and sticking the whole thing in a 375-degree oven to bake, provided you have an ovenproof handle.

• About 2 tablespoons butter, oil or chicken drippings

• 1 small onion, diced

• 1 medium carrot, diced

• 1 large garlic clove, smashed but not cut up

• 1 heaping teaspoon mustard seeds

• 1 1/4 cups long-grain rice

• 2 cups chicken broth

• 4 green cardamom pods, smashed

• 1 pinch saffron, ground and dissolved in a little hot tap water

• 1 handful dried fruit (I had white mulberries, but would’ve done raisins)

• 1 handful nuts (I had roasted pistachios, could totally see toasted almonds)

• salt and pepper

• Cilantro or parsley to finish

Heat the vessel over a medium flame and saute the onion, carrot and garlic clove for 2-3 minutes with a little salt and pepper. Turn up heat, add the mustard seeds. As soon as the seeds pop, add the rice and stir until it glistens and looks like it might toast. Add the stock, scrape the bottom of the pan for any crusty bits. Add the cardamom, saffron water, fruit and nuts. Taste the broth. If you don’t detect salt, add some more. Bring to the boil, cover and reduce heat to a simmer. Cook for 17 minutes. Turn off heat and let rest 10 minutes. Sprinkle on the greenery and get your yum on. 

On keeping enough stock, white-cooked chicken and a salad to remember

Cooking night after night is like biblical genealogy. One dinner begets another the way Paul begets Sarah (or whomever, sorry, haven’t read the big B in a while). Let me catch up on a few recent dinners, a chain of events that resulted in a salad I will love for time immemorial.

When the crisis started I had a freezer full of homemade chicken and turkey stocks. It all disappeared into beans, soups and stews, and I’ve been having a hell of a time finding chicken backs and wings. So one day I decided to prepare Chinese-style white-cooked chicken with the idea that the poaching liquid could be fortified and do double duty as stock.  

You can find a lot of recipes for white-cooked chicken online: It is basically gently poached whole chicken that emerges soft and juicy, with a faint but pure chicken flavor. After poaching the chicken in salted water with a splash of cooking wine*, you shock it in ice water to stop the cooking and firm up the skin that I think gets that kind of chewy, bouncy “Q” texture that many Asian people love (think boba, mochi and pho meatballs). What makes it is the sizzling ginger-scallion sauce that goes on top. 

We ate the white meat, saved the dark for another use and jacked up the poaching liquid with all the vegetable trimmings, herbs and weird little onions I need to clear out of the fridge. Result: oddly but appealingly salty stock. 

None of this stock made it into the freezer. Feeling flush with the fresh stash I made a risotto for dinner that I flavored with pulverized dried porcini and topped with garlicky roasted button mushrooms. Risotto is a weird date: it’s hard to stop eating (like pizza), and it doesn’t like to play second fiddle to a main-course protein as much as we like to force it into that role. It has to be the meal. What it needs is a statement salad. No greens, cherry tomatoes and half-moon cucumbers in vinaigrette, but a salad that demands a bit more attention. 

I had a bunch of Tuscan kale (cavolo nero, king of the brassicas), which can be the base green for a cool salad. There wasn’t much else, but I did have some really big carrots that could be cut into thick ribbons on the Benriner mandoline. Inspired by my friend Chandra who recently talked about pickling onions, I decided to give the carrots a quick pickle in white wine vinegar and salt; they were sweet enough that I didn’t want to add sugar. Then I started rooting through the pantry to see if I had any nuts that weren’t rancid when a container of dukkah (a Middle Eastern mixture of herbs, ground nuts and spices, meant to serve as a dip with olive oil) caught my eye. 

The salad was starting to at least sound interesting, though I worried that the flavors would be too sharp if I made a vinaigrette. So I went to the Hidden Valley. 

Actually we don’t have ranch dressing. But I mixed together some mayo and buttermilk and tanged it up with the orange, vinegary juices expressed by the carrots after sitting in their salty solution for a few minutes.

Speaking of salt, Have I got a garlic tip. Roughly chop a big garlic clove, cover it in a generous pinch of salt and let it sit on your cutting board for 5 minutes. The 12-year-old in me wants to add a parenthetical (it’s just like salting a slug!). You can then just smash it with the back of a knife into limpness and juices, scrape all this into a tea strainer and then steep it in the dressing. Beautiful garlic flavor, no stinging, bitter little bits.

I loved the creamy, mild garlic dressing against the slick, tangy carrots and the rough, nutty dukkah. I think this recipe would work just as well with ground nuts, cornbread crumbs or panko toasted in butter if you don’t have dukkah. 

The next day we got an order of food and I put the whole chicken on the grill propped up on an open can of flat Diet Coke. Ain’t gonna waste beer. I was looking forward to the first grilled dinner of the season and really looking forward to the smoky stock I’d make from the carcass. I had some cabbage to braise and leftover cornbread to turn into a pan of dressing. Since I didn’t have any stock, I flavored both the cabbage and dressing with chicken bouillon cubes I had put in the order for emergencies. I wish I could show of my real-people bona fides, stop it with the snotty food boy and say that bouillon cubes are just fine in a pinch and made me nostalgic. Alas, I thought they were disgusting. It wasn’t that nice, faint but true chicken flavor of the white-cooked bird but rather the fakey chicken flavor of Cup O’ Noodles and Chickin in a Biskit crackers. I have about a gallon of stock for the next few days. 

Giving my kale a happy ending

Tuscan Kale Salad

• 1 large carrot

• 3 tablespoons white wine vinegar

• Salt

• 1 large garlic clove

• 1 bunch Tuscan kale

• About 1/4 cup buttermilk

• About 1/4 cup mayonnaise

• 2-3 tablespoons dukkah

First, quick pickle the carrot: Cut it into 6-inch lengths and cut wide, meaty ribbons with a vegetable peeler or with a mechanical slicer, such as a Benriner. Place it in a bowl with the vinegar and about a teaspoon of Diamond Crystal salt. Toss well and set aside for 10 minutes. Roughly chop the garlic and just cover in salt. 

Wash the kale and tear nice bites of the leaves from the stems, which you can discard. Put the wet kale pieces into your salad bowl, grab a couple-three paper towels and really give the kale the full Massage Envy deep tissue treatment. It is fun, and you’ll end up with perfectly dry leaves with the kind of limp texture your tongue will read as silky. 

Mix the buttermilk and mayo. If you don’t have buttermilk, plain yogurt or half and half is fine. Whisk in the expressed carrot juice until the flavor is what you like. Scoop up the garlic and place it in a tea strainer. Crush it with a spoon over the dressing bowl and then place in the dressing for about 5 minutes. When you take it out, push and scrape to get all the juices that pass through the strainer. Toss it all together, adjusting the flavor with salt and carrot juice, throw in some dukkah and yumbo your night away.

*Here’s another tip: keep a bottle of white vermouth next to the stove. Since it’s fortified it doesn’t go off. It subs in for Chinese cooking wine (as does dry sherry, which I enjoy drinking too much to make sure to have around) and sake. It cuts right through the smell of fish, and it makes the best butter sauce. It seems to like leeks and shallots more than plain white wine. 

Turkish eggplant salad

So many of the dishes I make again and again were once shown to me. Some of my favorite moments as a food writer were spent with readers in their homes, learning about the dishes they feed their families or, if they were chefs, customers. 

I cannot remember his name, but I spent a wonderful afternoon once with a really cool Turkish guy who had married an American CDC researcher, put his own career on hold and decided to open a little Turkish cafe in Decatur. I remember him telling me, “Decatur is so beautiful! Not the architecture — that is ugly. But the spirit of the place is beautiful.”

I had gone to him to learn lahmanjun — a kind of flatbread that involved making a yeasted dough and a spicy minced lamb topping. It was a good, if involved, recipe. But the lagniappe was the roasted eggplant salad he prepared with a couple of knives he brandished like drumsticks in a performance of “Wipeout.” 

I have since made this eggplant salad seventy eleven zillion times, enough so that it is my own recipe now. I make it as the main dish for a vegetarian dinner at home, and I make it as a pre-dinner snackum when guests come over. I suspect it is no longer actually Turkish as I may have left out a key ingredient and added a suspicious one. I don’t know.

My best advice to anyone roasting eggplant is this: Get it nice and charred over the flame (or electric burner — it works), enclose it in a Ziploc and put it in the fridge overnight. The skin will slip off without any burnt fingers, the bitter juices will have all oozed out, and the smoky flavor will have intensified. See?

Split the eggplant and remove any large seed sacs if you’re so inclined. Chop it into glop. For one medium eggplant, add about 1/4 cup of diced red onion, 2 slivered scallions, 1 crushed garlic clove (maybe two) two or three tomatoes on the vine (cut at the hemisphere, seeds plucked out, diced), lemon juice, salt, a pinch of cayenne, about 1/4 cup of minced parsley or mint, and a megaglug of olive oil (let it bloop twice). Taste and adjust with salt and lemon. It keeps well, but will need a glug more of oil if it stiffens up after too long in the fridge. 

We had it one night with salad, roasted potatoes, toasted pita wedges and hot sauce. Then we binge-watched “Shtisel” and went to bed, ready for another day of weird life.

Pandemic Cooking Diary

Hello, hello. I have a blog, and this is going to be a weird, long, convoluted entry that, I promise, will end with a good recipe for lentils with a little steamed spinach and quackage on the side. Strange times make for strange first blog entries.

My original intention for this space was to write critically about dining in Chicago. I have a way I approach the subject that, with respect, I think this city needs more of. I don’t like to share opinions publicly until I’ve made multiple visits to a restaurant. This, to me, is fundamentally important. It is both too easy to be charmed at first glance and give a pass to obvious flaws, and also to be overly critical and not see below a familiar-seeming surface. First impressions are fine, but they are just that. 

I enjoy writing essays, but they too often get in the way and push a review into the realm of storytelling. Essays pair well with recipes but rarely benefit reviews. I care about the backstories of restaurant owners, but I feel like so many dining reports today have a hard time establishing a trustworthy critical tone because they are at heart feature stories and profiles. 

I think measured criticism is always constructive, and honesty is the driver behind effective writing. If a writer is truthful and probing, knows their subject matter and does their research, always has the reader in mind and soul searches enough to keep feelings about a chef or restaurant owner out of the picture, then they will find that knife edge that makes for effective critical writing. 

Okay. That’s off my chest. So, coronavirus.

Spinach in the steamer

For the foreseeable future I’ll be using this space to keep track of my home cooking. After spending so many years as a newspaper food columnist as well as a reviewer, I do like to share my cooking. Facebook has been a good place to do this, but I worry that I’m doing it so much these days that it’s starting to come off as thirsty — i.e., doing it more for the likes and social media profile raising rather than for the pleasure of reaching out to friends and colleagues. 

But the benefit of home confinement has been its effect on my cooking. I feel like I’m really integrating the different chapters of my past as a cooking student, pantry cook, line cook, chef, traveler, ex-pat, dad to a young family, dad to teenagers, even my way, way back-there past as an unpopular fat kid who came home after school and attempted cooking projects out of his mom’s “Women’s Day Encyclopedia of Fine Cookery.” I made marshmallows.

I’ve been cooking so much and establishing the kind of daily rhythm in my kitchen that has long been missing. I cannot keep enough onions, anchovies, carrots, thyme, spring onions (yes, the roots are in water), ginger, garlic and bacon. The white vermouth has moved from the bar where it never was put to work making martinis to the stove, where it cuts through the smell of fish and subs in for Chinese cooking wine and sake. 

I’ve been buying meat from Local Foods, a market with a butcher that sources meat from the best local farms and — so, so important — vacuum packs each item individually. It keeps fresh for so long. That way, I can start with the veggies and various bits and bobs that need using up and then decide on the protein.

I’m making lots of crusty, craggy bread and almost no desserts. (But eating ice cream, Oreos and tangerines, and making nice yogurt parfaits midday.) So much miso soup and rice. 

I’m toggling back and forth between Japanese-style and Western-style meals. The former is usually a variation on ichiju sansai — three random, differently prepared dishes served with rice, soup and pickles. So satisfying and such a good way to cycle through leftovers. The latter has generally consisted of plates of pulses, vegetables and protein with flavors that go together. 

I’m so grateful that the 18 months I lived in Japan has so marked my cooking life, but my basic idiom is Mediterranean. I’ve been making so many soffritos and so much mirepoix — starting the evening with carrots, onion and celery sizzling in a pan. I’m really spending the time that I had stopped allowing myself over the years, letting the vegetables shrink and color in the oil, letting the tomato paste fry, and the garlic, or bacon, or anchovy, letting the flavors deepen and built. 

That’s how the meal pictured came together. It started with the lentils. I had a bag of curly-leaf spinach that was so good steamed and finished with a dab of butter and some salt. I espied a vacuum-sealed bag with two legs of duck confit that I ran under the broiler until the skin crisped. Finally, leaving the broiler on, I cut the heel of my homemade bread into croutons and spread them with the dregs of some not-very-good goat cheese. This unplanned meal came together well enough that it seemed worth a trip to the cellar for a nice pinot noir. 

Braised Lentils 

2 strips bacon

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 small onion, diced 

1 medium carrot, diced

1 stalk celery, diced

1 sprig thyme

1 tablespoon tomato paste 

1 teaspoon Dijon mustard

about 2 cups lentils, rinsed and picked over

about 5 cups chicken stock

salt, pepper and MSG to taste

Place bacon in a large sauteuse, cover with water and bring just to the boil over heat. Take out bacon and dice. Wipe out pan, return to heat and add olive oil. Add diced bacon, vegetables and thyme sprig. Cook, stirring now and again, over medium-low heat for a good 20-30 minutes, until veggies have shrunk and turned the palest tan. Add tomato paste and fry. Turn up heat a smidge, and just when onions start to brown, hit them with the chicken stock. Scrape the bottom of the pan and add the lentils. Bring to a boil, reduce to a good simmer with the cover on. Add mustard and seasonings. Check and stir periodically. They should be tender but still firm enough to hold their shape, and they should have absorbed almost all of the stock. If they need more stock, add more and continue cooking until yumminess happens.