Swedish Meatballs are a beautiful thing on a late winter night.  A classic, somehow more embraced by middle America than Sweden since the 1950’s, and the miraculously transcend time and trend.  You can take the easy way out and pop down to Ikea, come home a few hundred dollars poorer with a trunk full of candles, hangers and knickknacks, along with a bag of frozen meatballs authentico(ish).  Most of the time, I like the hard way though.  I feel it builds character, the way I constantly root something down to its essence in order to reconstruct it my way.  It’s nice to know what the compositional choices are so you can make your own still life, since you know a roomful of artists are each going to sketch it a different way.  It’s the same with Swedish meatballs.  The first thing you must choose is the meat. 

Read more

All three men in my life love meat.  The cat loves it for innate canine reasons that I can’t fault.  My husband loves it so much an ex once broke up with him because she thought his diet was excessively carnivorous.  My 18 month-old toddling bundle Bentley Danger gnaws on steak above chocolate, leading me to believe it somehow runs in the family.  It’s slightly appalling to me given the fact that I only started eating meat several years ago and I still view it as more of an accoutrement than a centerpiece, but I guess boys will be boys. 

Read more

Chiles en nogada is a dish that strikes fear in the hearts of many a chef.  It’s a multi-day affair replete with dozens of steps deceptive in their seeming simplicity.  You might think peeling chilies is a relatively straightforward affair, but if you consider that you first must roast them, then sweat them, then peel them and finally concoct a piloncillo mixture in which to soak them for 24 hours suddenly straightforward is not the word you’re looking for.  There is a reason chiles en nogada is typically served only once a year on the day of Mexican independence- it truly is a labor of love.  Of course there is also the fact that there is really only a very short window of time during which all the myriad ingredients for the dish are in season- a crazy culinary serendipity when you think about it. 

The walnuts that comprise the majority of the nogada sauce, for instance, must absolutely be fresh in shell and recently harvested, according to most experts on the dish.  The reason for this is that you need to be able to peel them as the peeling imparts a bitter taste on the sauce, and you won’t have a chance in hell if you’re using older walnuts.  I have heard many a United States-based Nogada chef lament the difficulty of peeling the walnuts, no matter how fresh, and I’ve recently heard tell that it’s because we have a different, harder species of walnut less prone to peeling.  I unwittingly came across something of a solution to the bitter peel problem with nogada.  Try as I might, even with a mixture of half pecans (softer skin) and half walnuts, to peel the little suckers, I just couldn’t remove the majority of the peel before blending it with the milk and cream to compose the sauce.  I decided to pass it through a fine-mesh strainer to achieve a smoother texture and lo and behold, the vast majority of the peel would not pass through the strainer, leaving me with a creamy sauce pure as the driven snow.  Now all this complicated food talk makes me hungry. Take a gander at the quail egg, bacon, mini-apple appetizer I needed to serve to stave off my guests’ longings for the nogada:

Read more

Ok ok, I know I have a wee obsession with duck eggs.  I am seeking proper care to cure my addiction, but in the meantime I want to share yet another showcase meal featuring the lovely oval gems.  I present to you sous vide duck eggs on a bed of wilted greens flanked by butter egg biscuits and drizzled in Meyer lemon hollandaise.  Sexy factor is high on this one since you’ve got all sorts of beautiful consistencies playing off each other for a smooth mouthful. 

Read more

You have probably heard that saying “once you go black you never go back?” Well I recently went on a mission to discover if that was also true in the fowl family.  One of my favorite places in Seattle, Uwajimaya, sells black Silkie chickens.  I’ve been eyeballing their lush, purple- black skin for a few months now but I wanted to make something of them that would truly showcase their ebony splendor.  Silkie chickens are one of the oldest breeds of chicken, and the most well-documented and earliest mentions come from China.  They are prized today for their downy white plumage said to be as soft as silk- hence their name, Silkie.  From a culinary perspective they are most frequently seen in Chinese dishes such as soups and stews, but not very usual in Western culture.  I don’t mean to generalize, but I feel this is because they lack the over-bloated unnatural abundance of flesh most Westerners now expect on the genetically modified animal commonly known as a chicken. 

Read more

chocolate chili with homemade polenta crisps

Consider yourself warned: my inner foodie snoot may rear her ugly head in this post; I’ll try and keep her at bay but she’s a fierce bitch when she wants to be unleashed so just ignore her puzza sotto il naso banter. 

I don’t typically participate in hyper-American activities such as super bowl parties.  What’s so super about it besides the billion-dollar commercials advertising products you’ll rarely find in my kitchen, anyway? I know, I know, there are countless hundreds of you who will argue with me ‘til you’re blue in the face about the merits of the game diminutively referred to by the rest of the planet as “American football.”  I prefer proper football myself, and have been justly rewarded by the fact that Seattle now proudly boasts a football franchise known as the Seattle Sounders Football Club.  The games are not quite up to the snuff of Juventus games back in the motherland, but give us trailblazing pioneers a few years and we’ll elevate the Americas to global standards. 

piloncillo cane sugar boiling down for chili

That being said, as most of you know this super bowl is historic for good reason. The New Orleans Saints have not been to the super bowl, and this is a success story most of our country wants to get behind, football or no football.  It’s as if the Saints embody the phoenix rising from the ashes of Katrina and for the first time since the disaster the city is rallying with the fervor of its original spirit.  It’s an infectious spirit, since the rest of the country seems to have caught it as well.  I couldn’t just blatantly ignore it and attend super bowl deep discount shopping events all day, so I decided to buck up, rsvp to a super bowl party and make something worthy of the occasion: chocolate chili over polenta crisps.  Not sure what that means? In layman’s terms, frito pie.  If you’re still not sure what that is you’re probably a Northerner or from outside the boundaries of our fair country, so let me break it down.  You put some fritos in a bowl, smother them in chili and top the whole shebang with a generous lot of shredded cheese. 

Read more