When Good Bakers Go Bad

Check out this blog, Cakewrecks, that my friend Eleanor found. To quote Arnold Schwarzenegger from Raw Deal, one of the best bad movies ever made, you should not drink and bake.

Scroll down to the clowns. Somehow I don't think this was the effect the baker intended.

Punchy Puttanesca

Anchovies rock. I love them as does my daughter. My wife, not so much, unless they are in a good caesar salad.

I especially like the tanginess and punch anchovies give a good puttanesca. With my wife away for a few days at a writing conference, I decided to try to make a puttanesca at home. I consulted a couple of recipes and forged ahead.

To my surprise, especially given what restaurants charge for a puttanesca, it was easy and quick, about 30 to 35 minutes start to finish. The result was outstanding: powerful, over-the-top taste and remarkably filling. My daughter, usually a bottomless pit in spite of her small size, rejected desert she was so full.

Here's the recipe:

Saute a cup of finely chopped onions (not minced) and one minced garlic clove (more depending on your taste) in a quarter cup of olive oil on a medium low heat until translucent, but not brown. How long it takes depends no the heat of your stove. My electric range needed about seven minutes.

Add a quarter cup dry white wine and bring to a boil. Add finely chopped anchovies (I used six, again, depends on your taste) and cook until they disintegrate and dissolve. Add four cups canned hand-crushed Italian tomatoes, two tablespoons rinsed capers, a cup of chopped olives (you can use oil cured, but I used regular black olives out of a can and they were fine) and a shake of red pepper flakes (optional, gives it a little bite). Adjust seasoning (I found it needed pepper and just a little salt), then bring to a boil, lower heat and simmer 10 minutes. Add six to 10 torn basil leaves, depending on size of leaves and taste (I like a lot of basil) and a shake of ground oregano.

Serve with spaghetti and viola! A quick, tasty meal that knocks your socks off.

Home Fries

I love French fries. Who doesn't? I'm especially partial to the fries at Le Petit Cafe, an unpretentious French bistro that I consider one of the best restaurants in the New Haven area. They are golden, crisp and not at all greasy, with a wonderful fried potato flavor.

I've eschewed making French fries at home, fearing the fuss and mess. I have also, rightly or wrongly, perceived making them to be dangerous because of a story I did years ago about a couple who burnt down the house while making French fries. Admittedly, they both appeared to be elderly alcoholics, but walking through the charred remains of their home with that horrible burnt-house smell in my nostrils as the husband described flames shooting from the oil put the fear of God in me.

That said, I have increasingly taken to heart Julia Child's sage advice: Don't be afraid. So a few weeks ago when I was trying to settle on what to make with mussels, I decided to give French fries a try. Nothing goes with mussels like fries. My wife, daughter and I have wonderful memories of digging into a heaping pot of mussels cooked in garlic and wine during our trips to Quebec. Accompanying those mussels was always a pile of perfectly cooked fries.

I pulled out my trusty "How to Cook Everything" by New York Times food writer Mark Bittman and found French fries. I will not recount the recipe as I've decided to be more respectful of copyrights, but it was relatively quick and easy, and yielded some of the best French fires I've ever tasted. The key appears to be frying them twice. Get the book. It's the best cookbook I've ever used.

I've made fries twice since and each time they've come out perfectly. French fries: They' re not just for restaurants any more.

Gourmet as Roarshack

Reactions to Gourmet's demise are so varied, it's almost become a kind of Roarshack test. An odd oped in the New York Times somehow transforms the magazine's closure into a indictment of "amateurs" without formal training, whatever their discipline. Especially strange was the writer's drafting of Julia Child, a largely self-taught cook who quickly recognized the limits of her formal training at the Cordon Bleu, to buttress his point. It's hard not to conclude this is yet another mainstream writer looking to take a crowbar to bloggers who have broken their monoply.

One of the best pieces so far is this one in Salon (an online publication no less!) that rightly refutes the meme that Gourmet was stodgy and stuck up. Yes, they did some quirky things, but it was more like the charming eccentric aunt who has money but doesn't care about it than the stuck up matron who buys pate just to impress the girls at the club.

Personally, I still don't understand how a magazine with 1 million subscribers goes under. It speaks to fundamental changes in the economics of publishing. For whatever reasons, not enough advertisers felt it worth their while to buy ads. Or Conde Nast wasn't satisfied with modest profits. It was go big or go home and they decided to go home.

Update: My friend Eleanor has an especially good post on her blog about Gourmet's death. I would add that she is the farthest thing from stuck up or pretentious.

Good Bye Gourmet

I'm devastated. I love this magazine. A few weeks ago, I made a panko chicken recipe from the magazine that was out of this world.

What amazes and puzzles me is that Gourmet had nearly 1 million subscribers. How can a magazine that 1 million people are willing to pay for go out of business?

It's all advertising, the stories say. The publication was heavily dependent on upscale advertisers who have been shellacked by the recession. I suppose there's some justice in makers of ridiculously overpriced, 12-ring gas ranges for McMansions hurting, but I never considered their pain would take down one of my favorite publications.

I've received Gourmet for years ever since my sister-in-law gave me a subscription for my birthday. Ever since, it's been my birthday or Christmas present. I've loved the recipes, many of which are favorites of my family. The emphasis on the quirky and out of the way coupled with the eschewing for the most part of overly complicated food and hard-to-get ingredients was, for me at least, a perfect balance.

I will miss Gourmet immensely.

Oh well, nothing is eternal except Roosevelt, as they said in The Palm Beach Story.

5 Snacks Relaunch

It's been five months since I last blogged (I sound like I'm in the confessional or at an AA meeting) during which I completed my New Haven mafia project.

It's time for a relaunch. To paraphrase the Six Million Dollar Man, we can rebuild it . . . better. . . stronger . . . more interesting.

Where this is going and how long it will last, I have no idea. What I am sure is that my interest and passion in cooking, food and food-related subject matter have only grown during the time I took off from this blog.

As Jackie Gleason used to say: And away we go.

Tasty Tilapia Piccata

I love fish, but I hate the price. It just keeps going up, an ominous sign that overfishing and environmental degradation have reached the dinner table. Just check out the price of wild salmon. A few years ago, it was a pricey $10 or $12 a pound. Now you're lucky if it's under $20 a pound.

Tilapia, meanwhile, stays steady as rock: a consistent $7.99 a pound, day in day out. That's because it's farmed. From what I've read, it's also environmentally friendly to eat. You aren't contributing to the destruction of a species or the earth by tucking into a tilapia fillet, or so I read.

Unfortunately, it's a fish largely sans flavor. And it dries out quickly if you cook it even a minute too long.

I have found one great recipe for tilapia (soak it in milk, bread it, dot it with butter and blast it in a 500 degree oven for 10 to 15 minutes. Serve with lemon) and long searched for a second one. This evening, I decided to experiment. Why not pan fry the fillets in butter and olive oil and make a piccata sauce?

I love piccata sauces, a combination of olive oil, butter and chicken stock. Chicken cutlets piccata is one of my standards.

I salted and peppered the fish, dredged it in flour and seared the fillets in one tablespoon butter and one tablespoon olive oil. Unfortunately, I used too small a pan and struggled to keep them in one piece, After about 10 or 12 minutes a medium high heat, they were done.

I took the fish out of the pan and dumped in about a quarter to half cup of chicken broth, cooking for a couple of minutes while scrapping up all the goodness. Once the liquid thickened, I added a tablespoon of lemon juice and half a tablespoon of butter and dumped the sauce over the waiting fish.

The result was outstanding. The fish was flaky and moist, the dusting of flour having locked in the moisture. The sauce gave the fillets a buttery -- but not too buttery -- lemony flavor. It was like eating little pillows of flavor, melt-in-your-mouth good. It was so good, my daughter coaxed me into giving her part of my portion (can't leave a growing kid hungry, I say).

An excellent recipe, simple, quick and tasty.