Three meals

A commenter asked about our normal meal time frame: How long do we cook? How long do we eat? Are we always carefully "slow"?

To the last question, yes: we make almost everything from scratch, using fresh local ingredients as much as possible. (Some exceptions: when there are not tomatoes, we eat canned tomatoes, but we can those ourselves. "Asian" ingredients, like soy sauce and coconut milk, we do not try to source locally. Milk is local, but most of our cheese is imported. And so on.) To the second question, our meals are just about exactly an hour of eating. In particular, we usually put on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me to listen to while we eat, and we finish the salad (we always end with a salad) just as they're finishing the show.

But as to how long cooking takes? Here are three recent case studies.


Thursday's dinner was very fast to cook — start-to-finish twenty minutes. Fill a large pot half-way with water, bring to a boil, and add some salt. Meanwhile, scrub two pounds of mussels and set aside. Wash and chop a medium head of of broccoli, and begin steaming in a colander set in the top of the pot. In a large fry pan, melt butter and olive oil and sauté a few cloves of garlic, chopped. When the broccoli has turned bright green, transfer it to the sauté pan, pour a pound of dried rigatoni into the boiling water, and set the timer to ten minutes. Begin sautéing the broccoli, adding salt and more oils as needed. After three minutes, move the cleaned mussels to the colander and steam six minutes. When the timer has one minute left, transfer the mussels to a bowl, and set on the table — also finish setting the table and open a bottle of wine. Rinse the colander, drain the pasta when the timer goes off, and mix with the broccoli in a large serving bowl. Serve with a brick of pecorino romano and a peeler for shaving over the pasta.








For comparison, consider Wednesday's dinner of ratatouille and carrot cake. B made the carrot cake in the afternoon; the ratatouille is from Chez Panisse Vegetables, and is described as "serves 8" (the two of us ate half of that recipe as an entre, and had the other half cold for lunch the next day). Mise en place is essential for a long meal like this. The ratatouille is easy, but it's a lot of chopping: make into half-inch cubes equal amounts of eggplant (one larger), onion, tomato, peppers, and summer squash; begin with the eggplant and salt it liberally, so that it can drain in the colander while you prepare the other veggies. Also mince ten cloves garlic and prepare a bouquet garni (the recipe said just basil; we used a mix of garden herbs). Then dry the eggplant, and sauté until golden in the bottom of a large pot, remove and set aside. Sauté the onions until transclucent, add the garlic and peppers, a few minutes later the squash and bouquet garni, and a few minutes later the tomatoes. Bring to a boil, cook ten minutes, add the eggplant, cook another twenty, let cool a little, and serve. Plan about an hour if you're doing all the chopping yourself, and more time to make the dessert, etc. (Ratatouille is delicious, but not entirely satisfying as the only course.)







The final meal this week was about forty minutes of cook time. With a peeler, make very thin slices of potato (two medium taters is probably enough), and lay out overlapping on a piece of wax paper. Salt and rub with a little oil, then place on the potatoes a large fillet of rock fish. Liberally add salt, pepper, and herbs (we used thyme, fennel tops, and rosemary), and then wrap the fish in the potato skin, using the wax paper to help roll the fish. Wrap in parchment (or wax paper, but it doesn't work as well), and bake in a preheated oven 20 minutes. Meanwhile, slice thin two small yellow onions, sauté with salt and olive oil until translucent, add a few cloves minced garlic, and then the stems and then the greens of a bunch of silver chard.

Ravioli with butternut squash and hazelnuts

I was utterly exhausted on Monday, so my boyfriend nicely did all the dinner prep and all the dishes. The ravioli filling included butternut squash (peel, remove seeds, and bake with a little salt and oil about 45 minutes, then mash), Oregon hazelnuts (chop fine), Locatelli pecorino Romano (grate fine), and ricotta. The sauce was mostly butter, with garlic, white wine, thyme, and frozen peas. My boyfriend is amazing.

Medical note: As my boyfriend found out first hand, so to speak, the skin of butternut and acorn squash can cause contact dermatitis. (His was very mild, and went away with some washing — and we've each peeled squash before without problems.)

Poached halibut, wheat berry, and chard with walnuts

Collect fennel tops until you have a full freezer bag. Cover fennel with water and bring to a boil. Let cook a while to extract the juices. Then add one pound halibut (scrape off any last scales) and poach ten or so minutes. Remove halibut from the broth, take off the skin, and cut in two.

Combine one cup wheat berry with 2.5 cup water and some salt. Add two sprigs rosemary as a bouquet garni. Bring to a boil and reduce to a simmer, and cook covered about an hour, until the water has cooked off (check occasionally that the grains aren't burning). Mix in a Tbsp butter.

Ladle a few spoonfuls of boiling fennel-water over a small bowl of currants to plump. Shell walnuts. Heat a dry wok and toast the walnuts a few minutes; remove to a bowl. Cool the wok with a splash of white wine (we had some leftover from the previous night), and then add olive oil. Sauté three cloves garlic, cut into small pieces (Catalan Farm has amazing garlic right now, very fresh), and move to the bowl with the walnuts, reserving the oil for more cooking. Then add the currants, drained, and sauté a minute or two. Remove the currants and sauté stems of a bunch of rainbow chard. Then add the leaves of the chard and some white wine and some fennel juice to steam. When the chard has wilted, drain the excess liquid and mix in the currants, walnuts, and garlic, and a little salt.

First night back: oysters on the half shell, tomato gratin

Extra-small oysters from Hog Island; vegan tomato gratin from Chez Panisse Vegetables.

Pita bread with falafel, raita, and fresh tomatoes

It's so nice to be back in Berkeley. The weather has been warm, the mathematics has been stimulating, and the food has been delicious. Tonight's meal was particularly good; I'll post the last few meals soon.

This was not the first time we've made falafel and pita, but we're getting it down to an art. Tonight we forwent the hummus and babaganoush we sometimes make, in favor of a luxurious raita: it was hot this afternoon, and we wanted a cool yogurt. There are many variations — for example, combine nonfat yogurt (Nancy's), diced Armenian cucumber (wonderfully fresh from today's CSA), minced peppermint (from Full Belly, probably a weed growing on the farm), cumin, salt, and olive oil.

For the falafel balls, open a can of garbanzo beans (we didn't decide to make this meal until the last minute, else we would have soaked and boiled them; the surprisingly good Westbrae organic cans were on sale), and mix in plenty of tahini, some cumin, and a bit more salt than is strictly necessary. Also add a fair amount of flour, lest the beans fall apart while frying. The standing mixer with the paddle makes short shrift of the mixing and helps mash the beans — you do not need to get the beans completely smooth. Heat olive oil in the cast iron fry pan, and create small paddies (about 2 Tbsp each) of the bean mixture; fry on each side until golden brown, and transfer to a bowl lined with paper towel.

Maybe the most important part of the meal is the pita bread. We had been thinking of having soup and a whole-wheat baguette, so B had made a dough earlier, which fortunately was perfect for pita: very moist to the point of being a bit sticky, and not overly worked. When the dough has risen, transfer to a well-floured work surface, and cut off small pieces. Coat with a little flour if necessary, and lightly work into a round ball by hand. Then with a floured rolling pin roll the dough ball into a thin circle, about the size and thickness of a diner pancake. Coat well with flour, and set aside. Repeat; if you use enough flour, you can stack the dough pancakes into a short stack.

The trick with pita is to avoid overly glutenizing the flour until you roll it out: the rolling pin creates high glutenization but only horizontally. With the baking stone set inside, heat the oven as hot as it will go, and place the raw pitas on the stone. After a minute or three they will puff way up as the water in the middle expands and rips apart the weak vertical gluten strands. Remove the pita from the oven when it just barely starts to turn golden brown.

We paired the dinner with a Rosé from Red Bicyclette (we began by finishing a bottle of their Pinot Noir), and finished the meal with a lemon-dressing salad. Most important to the meal, though, were the sliced tomatoes we had with the falafel. The tomatoes had come in today's CSA (we also bought a twenty-pound box for canning) and were extremely fresh.

Last night in Denmark

You can tell I did not learn to cook in a Thai kitchen. My dinner last night was some strange "Thai-Italian Fusion". Or, do they have coconuts in Italy? If so, I had an "Italian Coconut Curry".

I began by heating extra-virgin olive oil on medium-low, and sautéing garlic and a full bunch of green onions. When the garlic became pungent, I added lots of sliced white mushrooms, and cooked them until they started to droop and turn brown. Then I added ground ginger, red wine, red curry paste, a little soy sauce, and a can of coconut milk. When I had brought the liquids to a boil and dissolved the coconut fat, I added two ripe tomatoes, diced, and just as I was finishing a large bunch of basil, washed and stems removed.

I had the curry over rice — it was good, but needed a little salt. Then I realized that I had a plate of grated cheese in the fridge that I would have to throw away today. As it turns out, grated cheese goes excellently on Italian curry. The wine pairing could have been better: I was finishing off an old bottle of Australian Syrah that hadn't been particularly great when I first opened it, either. But not awful, and now my cupboards are bare.

Salad with poached eggs and pickled herring

If there are any Danes who read this blog, they are probably laughing at what I do to the proud Herring. After all, it is supposed to be served on Danish ryebread, with dill and raw onion, or perhaps pickled with curry or "oriental" spices. But I'm not Danish. I specialize in California fusion cuisine, and the supermarkets here seem rather thinly stocked.

Begin by mincing shallots and allowing to macerate with salt, lemon juice, and olive oil. Perhaps open the jar of herring to check how acidic it is — mine was pickled in a very sweet vinegar with whole peppercorn and minced white onion, and I appreciated having the lemon juice at hand. A sherry vinegar probably would also be wonderful.

Wash and rip lettuce, and toss with the shallot dressing, and add one tomato, sliced. Then add the herring with a little of its pickling spices. Bring water to a boil with some lemon, and poach three eggs. While the eggs are cooking, pour yourself a glass of white wine — the salad will be sweet, so an Australian chardonnay is probably perfect, or a light rosé (my three-day-old cheap Spanish table wine is slightly too acrid for the salad) — and chop up a fresh baguette. Add the eggs to the salad just when the whites have set and the yolks are still runny. Sprinkle some salt over the eggs and tomatoes.

Enjoy! You'll want the bread at the end for sopping up the excess dressing.

Pasta with herring and chanterelle

The herring, it turns out, was canned in a sweet sauce with hints of clove and dill.

I first melted butter and olive oil, and then added garlic and chanterelles. The mushrooms, it turns out, could have used a good cleaning — I have been spoiled by the spic-and-span white button mushrooms from the same supermarket, wrapped in the same plastic. I added a splash of white wine and steamed everything covered for a few minutes, while searching for a can opener. Then I added the herring, chopped into pieces, and some salt, and waited for the farfale to finish boiling.

I drained the farfale, mixed it into the sauce to coat in the butter-and-olive oil, and served with grated cheese. The dish, it turns out, was excellent.

Finishing Up

I still have four days here in Denmark, and another day and a half of traveling, but I've been emotionally done for some time. Still, I've been entertaining myself. I've just about finished my Quantum Mechanics paper (left to do: put together the bibliography, fix a factor of two, perhaps change all the signs?, and do a final read-over). I've explored the campus park, as well as some of the forested areas north and south of the city. I know my way downtown.

And I've gone to just about every museum in Aarhus: ARoS (pretty neato Modern Art museum, although the basement and roof-top exhibits were closed when I went); Moesgaard Museum (very cool Paleoanthropology and Archeology museum, including a beautifully-preserved bog man); Den Gamle By (quite entertaining open-air museum chronicling the history of Danish city life from roughly the 16th through 19th centuries, including wonderfully-preserved old houses that have been moved there — the food is expensive, though); and two on-campus museums, Steno (okay history of science and medicine, and it would have been free if I had said I was in Physics rather than Math) and the Naturhistorisk Museum (not worth it). Rather than post pictures here, I've put together an album of about 150 photos from the trip here (update: Moesgaard Museum pictures now posted).

Meals since I last wrote:

• Leftovers.
• Steamed mussels, with a sauce of cream, wine, garlic, and white pepper; baguette; small salad with lemon and olive oil. The bread was from the supermarket, and very good and fresh (I'm impressed); I went through the whole loaf sopping up all the extra sauce I had. The white pepper was OK — I wanted whole brown mustard seed — but gave the sauce a bit of an "alfredo" smell. The sauce did not have enough salt.
• Farfale with feta, garlic, tomatoes, and olive oil. An old standby: my mom first came up with it while we were camping on the Banks Peninsula on the New Zealand South Island, and it has been a family favorite since.
• (tonight) Enchiladas with black-eyed peas, avocado, and cheddar cheese. You make do with what you have.
• (tomorrow) Stir-fry with mushrooms, baby corn, snap peas, green onions, and whatever other veggies I thought to grab; rice. Not particularly seasonal, but it's what's at the supermarket.
• (the day after) Pasta, canned herring, and probably other stuff.

Two curries

I'm back in Aarhus, of course, which means cooking for myself, and that seems to mean curry.

For example, sauté leeks in olive oil and a little salt, and add some powdered ginger. Add one head broccoli, cut into small pieces, and cook a little; then add one can coconut milk, a splash of soy sauce, a small spoonful of red curry paste, some chopped lemongrass, and a small bag of frozen shrimp, and bring to a boil. Mix in the juice of one lime, and serve over rice.

Alternately, sauté leeks in a mix of butter and olive oil and a little salt, and add a lot of curry powder and a little ginger. Then add 6 oz dried lentils and 10 oz water, or so, bring to a boil, and reduce to a simmer. Add one head (chopped) of whatever brassica you have lying around — I bought what I thought was kale, and perhaps is, but is somewhere between an American kale and a cabbage (they are the same species, after all) — and some more salt and spice. Let the mixture simmer covered for twenty minutes, until most of the liquid has cooked off or been absorbed, and then serve over rice.