Bad Home Cooking

See you later, Peet's

Anyone who's ever lived in the San Francisco Bay Area has an experience with Peet's. Based in Berkeley, Peet's offered up the darkest, thickest, most hard-core cup of coffee you've ever tasted. It was a cup of joe guaranteed to make a man of you.

In a region where cafe life is a religion, Peet's was a cult.

I myself wasn't an acolyte. I appreciated its reputation, though, and I admired its fans. Honestly I could hardly take the stuff myself. I had to cut it by half with milk and even then it was too strong by half. I'm more of a diner-style cuppa gal myself. Still, drinking it was a point of pride. If I had to choose between a Starbucks and a Peet's, I'd always choose the latter. The Bay Area was my home for 20 years, after all. And Berkeley for four of those years.

Today comes news that Alfred Peet, the dutch immigrant behind the Peet's experience, has died. He was 87.

Go out and get some if you can. Drink it neat. To paraphrase Prof. Stafford Gregoire, a die-hard Peet's fan who I know is out in New York sitting Shiva over this turn of events, "I like my coffee like I like my women: black and bitter." Remember the man who helped start the coffee revolution, right there in Berkeley.

All about my gazpacho

In Pedro Almodovar's classic film, "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown," (1986) a woman violently chops up tomatoes, cucumbers and onions and throws them into a blender, along with the better part of a bottle of sleeping pills and I think a little piece of her finger. Another woman later comes along, a strangely beautiful woman with a nose like a Picasso painting, and drinks the mixture down. 

She promptly falls asleep at the next most opportune plot point.

What did she drink? I asked my editors, who were older and more sophisticated than I was, and who had taken me to see the film.

Gazpacho, they told me. Very common in Spain.

I've made gazpacho maybe four or five times in the ensuing 20 years. But I always think of this woman, full of passion and fury, in a brightly-hued kitchen, hunched over her vegetables, hacking them into chunks with a kitchen knife of alarming heft.

It's one of those kinds of dishes - simple and meant to be thrown together without another thought - that I so excel at ruining. So when I decided to make up a batch as an appetizer for my Spanish dinner party, I knew it wasn't enough to simply have a few tomatoes, a cucumber, an onion and some garlic taking up space on my cutting board. I knew I had to have a plan, a recipe. I knew I had to have some sort of tomato juice, too.

I emailed Julia and asked for her recipe. She'd shown me how to make it on my own the first time, after all. But what I got back was a message saying "Oh, a little of this and a little of that, you know, and a pinch of this and you're done!" It's been established that I can't do that.

So I turned to my new cookbook, The New Best Recipe, a tome published by the editors of Cook's Illustrated. Cook's is known for breaking down any recipe and virtually stupid-proofing it for you. I like that in a cookbook. This one also featured three full pages of exegesis on the art of gazpacho including illustrated instructions on how to cut your vegetables!

Here's where I must bow low and doff my hat to the editors of Cook's, because they make it hard for even people like me to screw up.

Right away they pooh-poohed the standard American practice of throwing a bunch of chopped vegetables into the food processor and pureeing it all together. They preferred chunky-style soup in which the flavor of each vegetable held its own in a bracing tomato broth. Hear hear!

So, following the illustrations, I cut everything by hand as best I could. No violent hacking this time, although there was a little sawing action. It's really time to take my knives to be sharpened.

I roughly followed the recipe in the New Best Recipes (pages 72-74), figuring I wouldn't need so much gazpacho for my modest dinner party, and suspecting that Tony, after an initial sip, wouldn't be eating much no matter how good it turned out. He's just not a cold vegetable kinda guy.

Here's what I used:

2 medium beefsteak tomatoes, cored and cut into 1/4 inch dice

1 medium red bell pepper, cored, seeded and cut into 1/4 dice

1 small to medium cucumber, seeded and cut into 1/4 dice. I left the skin on for color.

1/2 small sweet onion, minced

2 medium garlic cloves, minced (could have used just one in keeping with the halving of the rest of the recipe, but I love garlic)

1 teaspoon salt

1/4 cup sherry vinegar (I used a dark, sherry vinegar that I actually bought in Jerez, Spain.)

ground black pepper

3 cups tomato juice (Cook's swears by Welch's brand, but I couldn't find it. Campbell's seemed to turn out fine)

1 teaspoon hot pepper sauce (I didn't use this at all, but you might like your gazpacho with more kick)

8 ice cubes

Combine the tomatoes, bell peppers, cucumbers, onion, garlic, salt, vinegar and black pepper to taste in a large, non-reactive bowl and let stand for about five minutes until the vegetables begin to release their juices (!). Stir in the tomato juice, hot pepper sauce (if using) and ice cubes. Cover tightly with tinfoil or plastic wrap and refrigerate to blend the flavors..at LEAST 4 hours and for up to two days.

I could not have been happier when I tried my gazpacho the next morning. Delicious! Tangy and fresh tasting! I served it up in my charming eggshell-colored Heath bowls, to unanimous delight. Even Tony drank half a bowl.

Earlier I had considered trying to make a traditional garnish - something involving frying up bread crumbs and garlic in olive oil that Julia had showed me once, long ago. There's a name for it I can't recall...starts with an M...

No matter. It wasn't needed. The intensity of the gazpacho was enough. I suspect the sherry vinegar was the ingredient that put it over the top, but what do I know of such alchemy?  Next time I'm making it, I'll invite you over.

Sangria Patito

I've never been to the Grand Canyon.

I've never been to Las Vegas.

I've never been downhill skiing.

I've never made a sangria.

Until last night. With friends coming over, I went overboard and decided that since I was making the paella again, AND gazpacho, the only possible beverage option was a nice sangria.

So armed with just a rudimentary idea of what was involved, I turned to the great god Google and asked for guidance.

I was offered many fine options. One in particular, stood out, because it cited "Friends in Spain."

"Conchi's Sangria," from all.recipes.com, called for red wine, sugar, lots of different kinds of fruit and then a carbonated beverage. I didn't know about that last part.

Nor did I feel that a dinner party of four would be up to 48 servings of sangria, even if Ramalee and I were both drinking full bore, as we're apt to do at dinner parties. So I decided to cut the recipe in half. More or less.

And I decided to use a different kind of wine, because what did I know from sangria?  I found a nice white zinfandel that was in fact infused with a lovely pinkish-hue. Some recipes called for rose instead of red wine. This looked rose enough to me. Aren't rose and zinfandel the same thing? I am ignorant of such matters.

Before I tell you how to make Sangria Patito, however, I have to jump ahead and say that despite my ignorance, despite my fooling around with the recipe and my history of dramatic failure in these attempts, this sangria shocked everyone.

Think: Wine cooler with mangoes, peaches, apples, bananas and cinnamon, and infused with rose water. Sweet yet refreshing, with an exotic, warm afterglow.

We enjoyed it greatly. And as we sat outside, drinking our sangria and eating my paella (which turned out even better this second time!!) and ignoring our children, my daughter put a little rubber ducky into the punch bowl and made the sign you see below.

Hence the name, Sangria Patito. All that flavor, packed into a little duck.

Here's how you make it. With apologies to Conchi.

three 750 ml bottles of Barefoot White Zinfandel (Trader Joes, of course!)

1/2 cup sugar

Two peaches, peeled and sliced, chopped, whatever.

One banana, peeled and sliced.

One small apple, peeled and sliced

One leftover mango. Use what you can, sliced and peeled.

One cinnamon stick, slightly cracked with a heavy object, to release its aroma. Or something. (the original recipe says "crushed," but when I "crushed" it with my pestle, I had a lot of splintered cinnamon, which I  felt would be problematic to drinkers.)

One liter of Fresca. That's right. Fresca. They still carry this. Find it. Use it.

Put everything together EXCEPT the Fresca in a big bowl or pitcher. Cover and refrigerate overnight or for at least six hours.

When you're ready to serve, stir in the Fresca.

Apparently you don't have to add ice cubes, like I did.

One glass of this and you won't care that it doesn't really look like sangria. Salud!

Stay tuned for the tale of Julie's Kick-Ass Gazpacho.

The herb lady and me

It's summer. The mind turns to fruity things, yummy and refreshing. I wish I could make such things myself. But usually, I make do with a Popsicle.

The herb lady gave me this recipe the other day at the Farmer's Market. I like to linger around her stall because it smells so good and electrifies me with potential. Fresh mint! Bay leaves! Thyme! Rosemary! All the usual suspects, but many I've never seen or heard of before. Like lemon verbena. It was the most intoxicating aroma on her table; long twigs with small green leaves and little white flowers, tied together in bundles. It begged to be picked up and fondled.

When I'm at the herb table, all is well with the world. But I fear I am a mere hanger-on. I want herbs in my life. But I don't know how to use them to their full advantage. Since each bundle on the herb lady's table is only $1, I often buy several bundles, and take them home, feeling righteous, and ready to flavor soups and season meats and infuse butters and do all manner of Martha Stewart-type feats I really have no business even considering. But no matter. I have the best intentions. And my herbs will make my car smell like Italy and my kitchen like France. They then proceed to wilt on the counter or slowly freeze to death in my refrigerator, because not only do I not know how to use them, I don't know how to keep them, either.

I said as much to the herb lady. She handed me a slip of paper that said,

Peel and quarter four or five white or yellow peaches in a medium bowl. Add 20 lemon verbena leaves and 15 mint leaves (chopped). Add one tablespoon of sugar, and mix lightly. Cover and let chill. Use on ice cream or simply on its own.

Well that sounded easy!  So I bought seven white peaches from the lady at the next stall, bought a bundle of mint to go with my lemon verbena, and took the lot home, along with good local honey (sage!) and four chicken tamales from the best tamale makers in the known world, Gourmet Tamale Co. (for use as backup in case my paella didn't turn out.)

I took it all home. I got out my lovely coral Bauer bowl and skinned and quartered those peaches, feeding the remaining two to the nits to make them happy and keep them quiet. I picked the correct number of leaves off the herbs, but wondered if I needed to chop them both, since the recipe said chopped only after mint. And if so, how small were we talking about? I decided it didn't matter too much, and chopped everything up with kitchen scissors. I added the sugar. I mixed lightly, covered with tinfoil (wondering, should I cover with plastic wrap instead? Do such things make a difference on flavor?), and let the whole concoction chill overnight.

I imagined this would turn out to be some delightful, subtly-flavored summer treat. I imagined how it would look gracefully dolloped over a scoop of French vanilla ice cream. I imagined my kids clamoring for more. This was the sort of simple but clever thing Christina Bess would throw together off the top of her head. And if she'd made it, it would have surpassed all my expectations.

Except that I made it. And when I brought the bowl out and uncovered it, my peaches were cold, slimy, and going brown at the edges.

That didn't stop me from sampling, however. The peaches were tasty, of course. But the sugar didn't do anything to make them better than they already were. And the chopped leaves...well, you had to pick them out of your mouth, like seeds.

Another deceptively simple recipe. Clearly there was something missing. Some step, some bit of information that everyone knows and finds obvious except for me. What could it be?

The kids would not eat this. I didn't even mention it to them. There were still Popsicles in the fridge, after all.

Ole! How to cook Paella on your first try

I donned the tatty blue apron. I tied back my hair. I washed my hands. I left the wine in the refrigerator and hit the flamenco playlist on the kitchen iPod.

I printed out this recipe for California Paella.

I read it through three times. I made notations in black pen.

Then I prepped my ingredients.

I had made special note of sizes and proportions. I bought precisely 1 1/2 lb of organic chicken thigh meat, and I cut it into exact 1 1/2-inch chunks (I measured it with a ruler pulled out of my kids' art box). I had a whole branch of rosemary from the farmer's market, and sweet paprika, and the correct kind of saffron. I made sure to buy enough organic chicken broth. I used the timer to roast the pepper, and I cut it into medium dice as carefully as I could, using my newly-sharpened chef knife.

Mr. Squid left a comment that paella wasn't all that hard to make, but that foul-ups were "spectacular." Great for blog fodder, sure, but bad for self-esteem. And I wasn't even going near any seafood. 

Also at stake: I've been botching everything lately. The other night I made chicken and Masala sauce over rice...a regular weeknight dish featuring frozen chicken and sauce in a jar from Trader Joe's, slopped over rice, which I usually make with aplomb. But I forgot to brown the chicken first. And I used too much onion. And then there was the Jasmine rice, which is of a different consistency than my usual Basmati and turned out too gummy, and anyway, it was largely inedible. A waste of time and money. I was furious with myself. And more than a little discouraged.

And now I was trying a paella? For the first time? It was going to be a face-plant.

But even as I pondered my ruinous results, a little whisper inside of me down deep goaded me forward. Pay attention this time, it growled. Have everything ready. Stay focused and think, you stupid cow. And maybe you might actually be able to pull this off.

The result? I did it. I made a California-style paella with organic chicken, artichoke hearts, Blue Lake green beans, roasted red pepper, a lovely sofrito and arborio rice. The picture here doesn't do it justice (why is it fuzzy? Clearly I was shaking with excitement when I took it.)

It was flavorful. Hearty. The chicken was tender and juicy. The rice was perfect. Tony, who arrived later that evening, stared in awe at the thing. Then he took one bite and closed his eyes. "This is the best thing you've ever made. Punto."

Two key details helped me in my mission. The kids were playing at the neighbor's house and so weren't underfoot. And I purposely did not pour a glass of wine. There was no room for fuzzy thinking tonight. The iPod, meanwhile, seemed to sense the task at hand, and played only the best flamenco cuts on my playlist. Very puro, driving bulerias and tangos, intercut at perfect moments with soulful soleas or siguriyas. It set the perfect mood, and kept me focused.

When the kids did come in, midway through the process, and started agitating for dinner, I did not offer to make them anything. I pointed to a cupboard.

"Your favorite cereals are in there," I told them. "Go eat it in front of the TV and stay out of my kitchen."

They acted like it was Christmas, and left me alone for the rest of the night. What's a Bad Mommy moment in the face of the paella challenge?  Besides, they got bonus points for asking what smelled so good.

I followed the recipe to the letter, with only a few strongly thought-through detours. I did not have fava beans, nor do I like them. I was going to substitute edamame beans (the recipe said I could sub frozen peas or Lima beans, for example), but at the last minute thought better of it, since their flavor is distinctive enough to possible detract. Also, I used marinated artichoke hearts from Trader Joe's. It's a product from Spain, after all, and after a light rinse and pat dry, I felt the marinade would suit the rest of the ingredients.

I also used my garlic press for the first time, and grated tomatoes. I even made a sofrito!

Lessons learned: A lot of duh here: Think through these things first. Have everything on hand. Prep. Don't allow distractions. Leave the alcoholic beverages until after the dish has successfully turned out.

As I write this, flush with unexpected success, another little voice inside of me is whispering: This would make a great party dish, yes?

Party?

Mi paella primera

"I really like your sunglasses."

The checkout clerk and I were talking shades. "Those look great. I usually just buy mine at the gas station."

"I used to, too, but the boyfriend won't have it," I said, slipping the expensive fancy-ass designer shades back behind my ears.

"I see," laughed the clerk. "That's who you're making the paella for."

"It's who I'm attempting to make the paella for," I said.

"Oh come on, it'll be fine."

"On no, it probably won't." I smiled sadly. Should I tell her about my blog? Naw.

"I'm sure he'll love it."

"Well," I said, "I suppose I'll get points for trying."

"You'll become the paella master!" she said, bagging up the last of the ingredients, on which I spent $60. For that much money, I could get a hell of a paella, prepared by a professional, with an appetizer AND wine. And this very night, too.  If I were a woman with more sense.

But I'm not that kind of woman.

Check this space tomorrow...