It’s been quite a year. More travel than I ever imagined, growing and cooking delicious food, taking (and teaching!) my first paella class, starting a new group of like-minded foodies…As December 31 comes to an end, here are a few of my favorite moments from the past year.
The only acceptable cold slushy white stuff I want to see on a beach in Aruba in March.Garden chive flower vinegar.My favorite meal this year–Sarma in Boston in April with some of my favorite people.Barcelona paella class in May.
Slow-smoked ribs to kick off summer.London calling.London’s Tower Bridge in July.Teaching a sold-out class in August.Sharing what I learned about paella in Barcelona with my class in Chicago.Glut of garden tomatoes.
Paris by night in August.First meeting of Cooking the Books in November. Can’t wait for the next one in January!
And no reflection on the year would be complete without mentioning the passing of my grandpa. I think about him often and wonder who I’ll send my paczki to this year…
Cheers to an incredible year past and a promising new year to come!
“Living well is the best revenge.” That saying kept running through my head Saturday night as I sat in my living room talking with new friends, drinking wine, eating a homemade feast from Dorie Greenspan’sAround My French Table. While this wasn’t the original intent when I planned this dinner weeks ago, at least to the seven of us sitting there, it was the best possible response to Friday’s horrific news from Paris.
The coincidences surrounding this dinner made it feel like fate. It started with two articles: the first from Serious Eats about cookbook clubs (a combination potluck and book club with everyone bringing a dish from a chosen cookbook), the second a New York Times claim about the “death of the party,” blaming its demise on everything from the Internet (…huh?) and helicopter parenting to the real estate market and craft beer.
I’ve been looking for more excuses to play hostess and am always looking for a reason to try new recipes (especially from my ever-expanding cookbook collection that gets neglected in favor of whatever’s popped up on the Internet lately) . So I left a comment on the cookbook club article saying I’d love to start one in Chicago and for anyone interested to email me.
Inviting strangers into my home with a vague hope that we’d all have some common interest in food–not something my normally introverted self would take on. But I didn’t want to leave it to chance that someone else would start a group and hope they’d invite me. Between the half-dozen people who emailed me and several other food-loving friends, I gathered about 15 people who were equally excited about the idea.
I chose Around My French Table as the inaugural selection for the “Cooking the Books” club since it had a huge variety of recipes and Dorie Greenspan’s recipes are almost always fool-proof (and, of course, I’ve become a bit of a Francophile over the past year). I found out one of the people who emailed me from Serious Eats was from France and that the date I picked, November 14, coincided with the first French Restaurant Week in Chicago. Fate, I thought.
Then I heard the news on Friday and my heart broke.
Suddenly this dinner was so much more important than just meeting new friends and eating delicious homemade food–or maybe it was so important for exactly those reasons. The attack in Paris targeted those simply enjoying life with friends and loved ones–a dinner out, a concert, a soccer match. If there’s one thing I can do in response, I thought, it’s this: I can bring a handful of people together to share a meal.
So I braised short ribs, set out candles, found good party music, chilled bottles of wine–not to avoid what had happened, but to control the one thing I could when everything on the news seemed determined to show how little control we have.
The dinner itself was everything I hoped for. Every dish was outstanding (I think that speaks both to everyone’s cooking skills and the recipes) but more importantly a group of near complete strangers with such varied backgrounds turned almost immediately into a dinner of dear friends, laughing, eating, and drinking like we’ve known each other for years. Of course the conversation revolved around food–what tweaks we made to the recipes, what inspired us to make a particular dish, what else we want to try. There’s something to be said for a group of people that can collectively nerd out over the kind of butter used in a dish.
Credit to Sarah for this picture! Her plate looked much tidier than mine.
Sarah, our resident Frenchwoman, made a comment at the end of the evening that meant everything to me, though: after spending the better part of the past 24 hours on the phone with her family and friends, she was glad to have this dinner to look forward to. This was what she would be doing with her friends on a Saturday night in Paris.
I still can’t watch the news. It’s all too much–the posturing, blame, and misplaced anger, the sights and sounds and overwhelming pain–and too similar to so many, too many, other stories lately. But I can find and share food and comfort with friends. It might be a small thing, but when the world seems hellbent on making us afraid of enjoying life (and of welcoming strangers into our lives), it’s the least I can do.
Heavy thoughts aside, this dinner was incredibly fun and I can’t wait to do it again (Smitten Kitchen cookbook is on the docket for January!). Here’s what we made and a few thoughts on each dish:
You know who are good people? Ones who love pizza and other bread-y things so much they build their own wood-burning pizza oven in their backyard. Conveniently, I am lucky enough to know these people and they love me enough to share. They also love me enough that when I say “Hey! I want to come visit. Can we make pizza, please?”, they say “Of course, and can we take you out to all our favorite restaurants, too?”
That’s how I ended up spending 3 days eating my way through Boston with my best friend and her boyfriend. (Let’s ignore the absurdity of the fact that I lived on the East coast for nearly 20 years and this was my first time in Boston. Suffice to say it was a visit long overdue. Also, I will never, ever complain about Chicago traffic ever again.)
Sarma
I did not have a single bad meal during those three days, but the trip was bookended by two meals that I’m still dreaming about six months after the fact. Dinner at Sarma was the first.
Sarma is the best restaurant I’ve been to this year, hands down. I could write an entire post just about this meal. Of the eight (nine? ten? I honestly lost count) dishes and two cocktails I tried, there was not a single one that I thought “Well, this is just ok.” Usually a meal with this many dishes will have some low point, some moment when I’m ready to move on to the next thing. Not here. For every plate that we had, I couldn’t decide which I wanted more: the last bite in front of me or whatever was coming next.
Sarma does Mediterranean/Middle Eastern small plates, which sounds…not unusual. But, while they have falafel and feta and hummus and kibbeh and kofte, their versions are nothing like I’ve had anywhere else. First of all, it’s obvious they prioritize fresh produce. Not hard when they get most of it from the farm run by the husband of one of the chefs. Meat and seafood are equally good (the huge hunk of gorgeous tuna we saw the chef preparing in their open kitchen was all the convincing we needed to order whatever dish it involved–pretty good sales tactic).
The spices–essential in Middle Eastern cuisine–were spot on. It’s incredibly easy with strong spices like sumac and harissa to let them over-power the rest of the ingredients, especially vegetables, but here the spices enhanced every bite instead of taking over.
I won’t list everything we ate, but there are a few things I’m still talking about. The basturma (cured beef) and cheese rolls were just the right amount of salty and crunchy, perfectly complemented by pickled strawberries (immediately added to my “Things to pickle” list for next summer). Perfectly cooked baby artichokes with spicy olives I could have eaten a bowl of on their own. Little raviolis with mint & pistachio pesto, fresh peas, and crunchy fried halloumi cheese. The chicken wings that were, simply, good beyond description.
And because my friend would disown me if I didn’t mention it, there was also dessert. Specifically, halva caramel that comes in a wee little Mason jar (is there any doubt I love this place on that fact alone?). In theory it’s one of the toppings you can get for their delicious little ricotta donuts or frozen yogurt, but the consensus at the table was all we needed was a spoon.
Homemade Pizza and Cinnamon Buns
The last dinner of my visit, on a perfect spring night, was what all great meals should be: delicious food made better by amazing surroundings and even better friends.
I’m just going to let the pictures speak for themselves:
And the next time I have extra pizza dough, I’m turning it into cinnamon buns.
Read on for all the cheese in Boston, art museums, and more…
You guys. I’m struggling to find the words. Tuesday’s class was the most tangible and immediate validation of my purpose for this blog, for nearly everything I do involving food: to give people the confidence to try something new in the kitchen, to show that cooking doesn’t have to be this big, intimidating, scary thing.
At the beginning of the class I asked who had eaten paella–nearly everyone raised their hand. Who’s made paella? One, maybe two hands went up. But by the end, every one of the 24 people in the class (plus the amazing volunteers who cooked the “teacher’s” paella) could say yes, they’ve made (amazingly delicious!) paella. And they could all do it again, too!
Watching each group proudly unveil the beautiful meals they created at the end of class, the impressed comments from their classmates–I wanted to give them all a hug and say “Look! You made that!” Everyone sitting together to share conversation and food (and wine, there were some amazing sangrias at the table) had me mentally shouting “YES. This is what’s it’s about.” (I mostly restrained myself on the shouting and hugging; I only had one sangria–a much-appreciated glass beautifully prepared and with a pretty little lemon twist by one of the groups.)
There were so many moments like that during the class, but this might have topped them all–one of the students came up to me at the end and told me she was really excited to try this at home. Then she said, “Honestly, I’ve had a paella pan sitting in the back of my closet for years and I’ve never used it. Now I have a reason!” Again I had to restrain myself from becoming a crazy hugging person, but I did tell her, “Yes!! You can totally do this!!”
And the comments on the feedback forms–I want to frame them, and not for my own ego. The best comments said that this intimidating dish was actually easy, that they tried or learned something new. Two of my favorite moments from the class were showing everyone a whole cuttlefish and walking around to let people smell smoked paprika, and it’s so rewarding to know that the class got something out of those moments too.
And I learned something in preparing for this class! I’ve never cooked cuttlefish before this week, but I love the stuff now (it’s like calamari, but thicker so less chance it will overcook). I added some to a salad last night and it was amazing.
For me, personally, there was a moment too. As anxious as I was in the days leading up to the class, as soon as I got to the kitchen and started setting up–it’s cliché, but I felt my nerves melt away. I know my way around a kitchen and a cutting board, I know how to cook.
Beyond the actual cooking portion of it, the years of practice I’ve had running web presentations at my day job were also surprisingly helpful. The speaking came easy because I knew the story I wanted to tell. I knew how to handle questions and figure out if it bore repeating to the whole group; I could troubleshoot my slightly burned garlic or pans that were heating unevenly without panicking. There are definitely things that will improve with practice (like actually remembering I have a pan on the stove before the garlic burns), but for a first time, it couldn’t have possibly gone any better.
I also cannot say enough good things about the volunteers who did so much of the prep for the class (roasting the red peppers to steaming the seafood to cutting the cuttlefish and all the meat), who pretty much cooked “my” paella when I was busy teaching, and washed all the dishes. They (and Lindsay and Becky from PGP, who also get credit for most of the pictures) made the class happen without me feeling frantic. If you have a kitchen skill you want to share, Peterson Garden Project is the place to do it.
I’m already brainstorming more class ideas (and I want to do this one again too!) and can’t wait to share more with all of you.
Why does bruschetta get all the toast-topped-with-tomatoes-and-olive-oil love? Nothing against half of my heritage, but the Spanish version, pan con tomate, deserves some attention too.
Tomatoes seem to be taking their sweet old time to get in gear this year, but with one lone tomato hanging out on my counter and having eaten my fill of tomato and lettuce sandwiches (for now anyways, I’m still planning a grand BLT with everything either grown or made by me. Yes, including the bacon and the mayonnaise), pan con tomate seemed like a perfect option. It helps that I’m obviously on a Spanish food kick lately.
Everyone’s pretty familiar with bruschetta at this point–toasted bread (where bruschetta gets its name) rubbed with garlic and usually topped with diced tomatoes, sometimes basil, and drizzled with olive oil. That’s the idea anyways. The concept has become so diffused that it seems like anything on a piece of bread shows up as bruschetta on a menu or in a Google search. Pan con tomate, on the other hand, at least requires tomatoes to be part of the equation.
Instead of dealing with my complete inability to ever keep the pieces of tomato from falling onto my clothes or the floor when I eat bruschetta (or requiring me to use a knife and fork, which is equally awkward), pan con tomate has you rub a tomato in all its juicy splendor right into the crusty bread. That is, of course, after a clove of raw garlic has been rubbed all over the toast that would, in any other application, tear up the inside of your mouth but instead grabs onto tiny bits of garlic. Rubbing the tomato into the bread is the messy part in this version, but it’s kind of fun. And at least more of the tomato has a fighting chance of getting to my mouth.
Think this sounds like a recipe for soggy bread? Well…you’re not wrong, but if you toast it enough (or use day-old or slightly stale bread, which this is ideal for), the tomato juices soften the top and edges enough so that you aren’t risking a mouthful of tiny cuts with each bite. The inside of the bread retains some welcome texture and chew and, unlike bruschetta, which is more often just a vehicle for its toppings, pan con tomate actually melds the bread, garlic, and tomato into one delicious bite.
Top it with a generous drizzle of olive oil, a sprinkle of flaky salt, add a gin and tonic (I saw more of these than of glasses of sangria in Barcelona), throw in a sunset view, and you’ve got about all I need on a summer night (with apologies to anyone who talked to me after dinner. Only in hindsight did it occur to me that I essentially ate several raw cloves of garlic.). Ok, maybe a salad or some slices of good Spanish cheese, ham, a spicy dried, cured meat…I’m sorry, where were we? Right, tomato bread.
Remember that Barcelona trip I took back in April? There were honestly so many amazing things about it that I’ve struggled to put them all into words, but considering I’m teaching a class about part of the trip in two weeks, I figured now was a good time to share at least one story!
For the first vacation I’ve taken completely on my own, I left most of my time open for wandering, but I wanted a few things planned to give me a little direction. That’s how I spent three hours learning to cook paella from an amazing teacher in her home with a dozen other eager (and hungry) fellow students from all over the world. It was by far one of the best parts of the trip and one I would do again in a heartbeat. (Update: Want to know how the class turned out or looking for a good paella recipe? Check it out!)Continue reading →
The past six months have felt a bit like a real-life “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” minus the red hat and the international intrigue. Which is to say, last week I spent four incredible days in (and just outside of) Barcelona.
It was a trip of firsts–first time in Spain, first time baking bread in a wood-burning oven, first time taking a cooking class in someone’s home, first time using AirBnB, first time using the tiny bit of Spanish I remembered from high school (which, as I learned, was only marginally helpful as all the signs are in, and many people speak, Catalan). Most significantly for me, though, it was the first trip I’ve done completely by myself, with no agenda or priorities other than my own. It was a transformative experience, one I’m still processing, but that I could not be more grateful to have had.
I’m still organizing my thoughts (and nearly 2,000 photos), but more, so much more–all the amazing people I met, the beautiful sights, the food (oh, the food!)–to come soon. Bon dia!
Sorry for the silence lately, the weather has gotten me a bit down and, with it, any kitchen inspiration other than egg sandwiches, take out, and freezer leftovers. But this weekend starts Daylight Savings and an extra glorious hour of light when I get home, the temperatures are slowly creeping above freezing, and I got to spend last weekend enjoying this view. I can’t complain.
An impromptu, whirlwind trip down south recently was a much-appreciated reminder of what temperatures above freezing feel like. It was also my first opportunity to get a taste of New Orleans–its history, its music, and especially (and obviously) its food.
A long overdue continuation…When last we left our intrepid travelers, we were enjoying oysters on an upturned wine barrel, crepes with hard cider, and bread…oh, the bread.
In today’s episode, two of the most quintessentially Parisian moments of the trip.
Nothing looks quite like a rain-slicked cobblestone street in Paris. An impromptu stop escape a downpour on our last evening, my friend Pam and I tucked into a corner table of a random cafe for an aperitif (Aperol spritz for me) and to watch the city hustle home.
Halfway through my drink, an older gentleman at the next table started speaking to me in French. I think he was telling me to button up my coat or wrap my scarf tighter against the wind and rain that kept sneaking in under the awning. Once he figured out the only way I could communicate was with a smile, he laughed and managed “I really must learn English sometime.”
Replying with “Your English is much better than my French” only earned me a confused look. Second try: “Your English–” and a thumbs up and a smile. “My French–” I shook my head “no” and made a rather disgusted face and he cracked up. He wished me bonsoir with a smile before he left. It was one of my favorite moments of the trip.
Then it was a mad dash through the rain to get ready for…
Chez Denise
My last meal in Paris. I can only hope I’m a good enough writer to share how perfect this experience was–not just the meal, mind you, the experience. It was everything. A little hole in the wall restaurant in the heart of Paris; you’d walk right by it if you didn’t know it was there. A zinc bar, dark wood, red-checkered tablecloths. The 90-year-old owner and her red leather-bound book thicker than a phonebook filled with decades of hand-written reservations. Continue reading →
My Homespun Home 