I see the same thing happening with food. If you look at menus, or say I look at my Thanksgiving menu, what I see are my favorite flavors emerging: fennel bulb – check!; maple syrup- check!; and anything sour – check plus!! (hey, I do eat whole, raw lemons).

But the question is why do you gravitate towards what you do – whether it’s words or foods? I recently went to a concert performed by a Julliard-trained musician – and when asked about why he liked a certain piece, he responded back with a question — why do you like your friends? There’s something that connects you — often times you can name it, certain characteristics that you both share or ones that you admire, but there’s also an element of mystery.

And you know how much I love mysteries.

When I first came into interview for a reporter job at Minnesota Public Radio, I knew I would like my editor because we both liked tea. He let me smell a steaming cup of a rather atrocious (sorry Euan!) brew. It was so smoky; it caught me off guard. I think he said he first got that particular tea as a gift, but instantly loved it and sought it out. Only much later did he uncover that this tea was actually the same brew his ancestors in Scotland drank. It was like flavor fondness had mysteriously passed through the generations.

With a few dear friends announcing their pregnancies, I’ve also thought about food cravings that pregnant women have. It must have something to do with what their bodies need, but perhaps the particular request that the flavor or nutrient comes in, is individual. On TV, these cravings are usually pickles and ice cream. For my mom, it was lime pickle – which we make in Goa (still waiting for that recipe, Auntie Imelde!). This has nothing to do with cucumbers, but rather, preserving cut-up limes in spices until they are soft and orange and sharp-tasting while retaining some citrus notes. Kind of like how that kumquat compote works, but in this case, the distant branch of the citrus family values sharpness over sweetness and patience (some lime pickles take months!) over same-day speed. Just thinking about lime pickle is making me crave it — it has such a profound zing!

And then there’s the “acquired taste” – like the one for bitter melon, that we grew up eating and that we grew in our yard. I have an Indonesian friend that says he craves bitter melon – a notion that had me almost drop my knives in the kitchen we work in. For my sister and I, eating bitter melon was a bitter pill to swallow, for sure. Even though my mom stuffed it with spicy shrimp, even though it looked gnarly (that was a pun), it still tasted so bitter!!! But, my friend has a great point; sometimes the unbearable flavor is also the most memorable. Strong emotions, either way, make an impact, right? I think he too, at first disliked it — but now misses it.

Some people suggest that the tartness of bitter melon adds “depth” to all kinds of dishes – hot, sweet, or sour. Maybe. I’ll see what my friend cooks up for me and report back.

Until then, what flavors do you crave?

I bought a whole duck at the farmer’s market – and used this as a guide. In homage to citrus (and my home state of Florida) I also stuffed a few oranges in the duck. Hello, Sunshine State.

On the cranberry sauce front, I went with a chow recipe that included orange zest as well as small diced fennel and toasted walnuts. It ended up being my favorite dish of the evening.

Here’s the whole menu:

Roast duck – in honey -orange-molasses glaze

Fennel walnut cranberry sauce

Radicchio, sliced apple, fennel, and celery salad (thought it would add a crispness that would pair nicely with the richness of duck. Got the idea from the duck & radicchio salad served at a favorite Minneapolis spot, the 112 Eatery. )

Mashed Potatoes and Parsnips (I also roasted a few potatoes and parsnips in the duck fat.)

Kabocha squash with maple syrup (kind of nod to those who like their sweet potatoes)

Melted leeks (a personal favorite from Ballymaloe – leeks cut into 1/3-inch rounds and cooked in a little butter, salt, pepper in a casserole dish with a tight lid. Surprisingly, the heart of this dish is a mild and true sweetness. )

Popovers (shout – out to Minnesota! They’re a crowd-pleaser… just something about height and hollowness, I guess.)

Sausage-stuffed mushrooms (See, I did have stuffing.)

Pumpkin pie (w/bit of cashew butter + normal butter crust)

Maple syrup pie (w/leaf lard crust)

Brandied pears & caramel ice cream

I was a bit disappointed with my store-bought caramel ice cream – probably because I was spoiled for over a year living near Bi-Rite Creamery in San Francisco. Will there ever be an ice cream as satisfying as their version of salted caramel? As I wrote that sentence, two ideas came to mind. One was that since leaving SF, the best ice cream I’ve tried has been Van Leeuwen’s sour cherry & currant — and, since I have leftover molasses from making my duck glaze, I wonder if I might try making a molasses-inspired ice cream….Hmmm….

Be honest, are you wondering about the leaf lard? I saw it for sale at the Brooklyn Larder, and felt I had to, just had to, give it a try. Leaf lard is a type of lard that comes from the fat around a pig’s kidneys. It is purportedly a baking treasure – and helps to create flaky pie crusts. I did a mix of leaf lard and butter for the crust. I don’t think I reached the pinnacle of pie crust perfect, but it was up there. The whole maple syrup pie was an experiment and another nod, this time to a friend at my Thanksgiving dinner who is Canadian. I cooked down Grade B maple syrup (which you/I can buy in bulk) and added a steady stream of cream, then added that to beaten eggs, and after pouring it into my crust, topped it with freshly ground nutmeg.

Sure, my menu was about feasting and flavor — and not getting too far from the dishes people expect when they have this particular meal. However, it was also about Thanksgiving — cherishing friends, places, and innovation. Hope you had a wonderful holiday!

When I was able to get my hands a grocery bag full of kumquats, of course I had to give it another go. You remove the seeds and then slice the kumquats – usually into about four or five thin rounds. You put them in a pot with water and sugar and cook them gently.

I had mine with homemade yogurt (yum!) – but it also goes well with goat cheese or even as a side that will brighten up a pork or ham dish. Don’t be misled by this yin yang-like photo. Just a spoonful of compote goes a long way. It’s packed with flavor — sweet, but with just the right amount of citrus-y kick.

A gem indeed.

In San Francisco I had a soft spot for La Cocina. Well, Hot Bread Kitchen is a similar concept – helping immigrant women become entrepreneurs using their cooking traditions. However, at Hot Bread Kitchen, the focus is on bread. The event, Women Bake Bread!, gathered together women bakers from around New York City. My first workshop was on sourdough with … Amy Scherber of Amy’s Bread! In fact, she generously gave all her workshopgoers some of her sourdough starter. Aaaaah! That’s right – I have some of Amy’s starter in my kitchen right now. I’m still feeding it water and flour.

Amy called starters “the baker’s magic.” She said, “Chefs have really cool sauces and essences that they put in their food; bakers have starters.” Starters are leaveners for bread, but they also impact taste. If your starter doesn’t have a good taste (is too vinegary, for instance), you won’t end up with a nice-tasting bread.

Amy gave us a starter glossary handout and said that at her bakery there are about nine different starters in tubs all around. She has a ton of a certain kind of starter, poolish ( a mix of flour, water, and a little yeast), that works well in a lot of breads. The poolish undergoes 18 hours of fermentation. The way she explains it is that with a starter, you can have 18 hours of fermentation (and the character that brings to your bread) without taking 18 hours to make the dough. Amy was a huge promoter of starters as a little extra effort that makes a big difference. She said starters extend the shelf life of bread, improve its browning quality, and add truly great flavor. In fact, Amy said every bread at her bakery is made with a starter and that when she makes breads she keeps the amount of yeast she uses at a minimum and instead gets much of the flavor of her bread from the starter.

At the workshop, Amy used King Arthur‘s Special bread flour. The bread flour has a higher protein content (12.7%-12.8% protein) than regular ol’ all-purpose flour. According to Amy, that percentage allows you to get a nice gluten structure when you knead it. She said if you used all-purpose flour (usually 11.7% protein), the bread would be fine, but wouldn’t have as much volume. And, says Amy, it would spread more and be lower in your oven, and not be as elastic. If you used a flour with a much higher protein content, like high gluten (over 13%), the dough would be chewier, something more akin to a bagel.

Amy let us munch on fresh-from-the-oven bread sticks that she made. She called it ” a casual snack” because they aren’t the perfectly proportioned twists she sells at the bakery. She sprinkled her dough with a seed mixture whose highest concentration was sesame seeds, followed by poppy seeds, a little dill seed and some salt. The result was a savory satisfying taste — crispy in certain spots and chewy in other spots – in other words, a totally delicious treat.

The day continued with other amazing baking instructors. We made our own baguettes and bagels and participants saw demos of fougasse, pizza, flat breads, chapattis, and tortillas. One highlight for me was when Amy gave us samples of walnut bread (one of my favorites!).

When I eat walnut bread, I look for that purple-y gray color. I love it in the inexplicable way I love those outdated tan M&Ms. Amy’s walnut bread wasn’t very purple-colored at all; she added toasted walnuts after the dough had rested about twenty minutes, when it had some structure. When I make mine, I actually want the purple color so I will add my walnuts in earlier and watch for the change. Until then, I have my eye set on trying one of Amy’s famed breads tomorrow — her signature semolina with golden raisins and fennel. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Here’s some of what we picked up (and ate)…

the common violet (blue, white, or hybrid) — you can eat the leaves and flowers, great in salad…

some wild greens, including chickweed, which tastes like raw corn,

and shepard’s purse (see the heart shapes… perhaps at some point resembling shepards’ purses?) Wikipedia tells me shepard’s purse is used Sichuan cooking, stir-fried as part of wonton filling.

Also, burdock (whose leaves we fed to some of the farms’ goats!), garlic mustard (tastes like it sounds), lamb’s quarters (like a more potent spinach), and this pineappleweed — which smells like pineapple and is used like chamomile for tea. According to Brill the tea can help relieve nervous tension, upset stomach, and insomnia due to stress.

My favorites were the wood sorrel (leaves that pack this delicious puckery citrus flavor, also known as shamrocks!) and the petals from this red bud tree…

They’re beautifully colored (imagine sprucing up a salad with fuschia!), but edible too. They taste like fresh peas. If you live in the northeast, you probably see them on your block. Just sayin’.

Gabrielle Hamilton is no softie. She is scrubbing the floor at Prune while 39 weeks pregnant. There’s a passage in the book about a line cook quitting and telling Hamilton in the middle of service. Hamilton, now very pregnant and very understaffed, says, “You fucking suck so much”. At the reading, when she got to this passage she prefaced it by reiterating how much she still hated the woman. (I think she was trying to soften the upcoming blow for us of her shouting, but it had the effect of underscoring her hard edge.) In the book, when she goes to an event about women in the food industry and the panel is asked, “Is it okay to cry?”, she thinks about how she has never, no matter what, ever cried.

Still, you don’t realize that toughness when you first open her new memoir. It is hard not to be mesmerized by the first chapter that deals with Hamilton’s childhood punctuated by elaborate feasts put on by her former professional ballet dancer mother and a father, an artist/visionary who creates whole sets like the ones for Ringling Bros., Barnum & Bailey Circus. (At one point, she’s with her dad at work and sinks her arms all the way to the elbows in a fifty-gallon barrel of silver glitter.) Hamilton captures her childhood voice so well and her love for her parents is so great. “Our house…,” she writes, ” was not really a house at all but a wild castle….”

And yet, that voice and that tenderness fades later on in the book. (Maybe for awhile displaced by the bad ass toughness?) The last section of the memoir, “Butter” that deals more with Hamilton’s marriage and her July stays with her husband’s family in Italy, is much harder to get through than the first. Maybe recent history is harder to write/make sense of/shape? than the more ancient chapters of one’s life…

I’ve heard a lot about this book and about how raw it is (she does kill a live chicken!) and I guess that’s true, but Hamilton is also indiscernible in some critical ways. As beautiful as the prose is, the most central questions about Hamilton’s life remain a total mystery. While she can talk about scraping by in catering kitchens and running summer camp kitchens, the major relationships with people (not food) in her life (a.k.a. one’s emotional heart) are difficult to understand. Why, for instance, did her connections to all her siblings (she’s one of five) except for her older sister disintegrate? Prune, after all, is not only the name of Hamilton’s restaurant but the nickname her French mother called her as a child. The affection there is powerful and unbreakable …

“Until this moment, more or less, I sat in her lap after dinner every single night. For a period I was too young for after-dinner chores –clearing, washing, drying — and possibly too favored, and so I eagerly crawled up and took my place in her lap, barefoot and drowsy. I leaned back into her soft body and listened to the gurgling as she chewed and swallowed. I breathed in her exhale: wine, vinaigrette, tangerines, cigarette smoke. While all of the others were excused from the table, I got to sit, alone with my mother and father as they finished. I watched her oily lips, her crooked teeth and felt the treble of her voice down my spine while she had adult conversation and gently rested her chin on the top of my head. She cracked walnuts from the Perigord and picked out the meats, extinguished her occasional cigarette in empty broken husks, shifted my weight in her lap; she squeezed the tangerine peel into the candle flame and we watched the oils ignite in yellow and blue sparks. I sat in that woman’s aproned lap every single night of my young life, so close to the sound and smells of her that I still know her body as if it were my own.” (23)

Such a gentleness and yet, later in the book, so little is mentioned of why the author and her mother did not communicate for 20 years! Similarly, Hamilton does little to illuminate why she married and stayed married to the Italian man that she at times doesn’t seem to have loved fully ever (keep in mind, she has only dated women up until this point). I found myself cringing at her comparison of her relationship to her husband to the homemade raviolis he first brought to her in an attempt to woo her. Apparently he carefully made the ravioli that are so beautiful and thin, but ultimately, they aren’t as perfect as they seem. She talks about how he forgot to blanche the pancetta so that the taste of the ravioli filling was too salty. Describing her relationship in this way is possibly a clever literary device, but is it a gracious move?

I say this partly because when you eat the food at Prune you feel the graciousness of the chefs in the back, of Prune’s creator. You get those nibbles on the table — in our case celery and olives. We even got to linger (three tea refills on my part, with milk and brown sugar cubes that came along with it), despite the small restaurant space.

Any questions or concerns I had while reading the book or seeing Hamilton at her reading, softened when I ate at Prune. The offerings were delicious, inventive, and fun. Deviled eggs were on the menu as was this hamburger on an English muffin with cheddar cheese.

I’m so glad Hamilton puts on the menu food that she has craved. Way before she opens Prune, she is young and traveling all over the world. She writes, “Because so much starving on that trip led to such an enormous amount of time fantasizing about food, each craving became fanatically particular. Hunger was not general, ever, for just something, anything to eat. My hunger grew so specific I could name ever corner and fold of it. Salty, warm, brothy, starchy, fatty, sweet, clean and crunchy, crisp and watery, and so on.” (129)

Lucky us to benefit from that kind of training (and a little like Achatz, no? Remember how he re-learned the specificity of taste when he was going through tongue cancer and only slowly got each taste back?)

Anyway, back to Prune. My skate wing was hands-down scrumptious. Nutty and lemon-caper buttery, yum.

And for dessert, lovely pâte à choux pastries, sprinkled with sugar and drizzled with orange blossom honey. At this moment, I wish I could better convey texture, like you could touch them through the screen. They are at the same time doughy and yet light, light, light.

If you go to Prune, you will see a very particular menu. It’s not trend-based; it’s the imaginings/memories-turned reality of a particular person with a particular lineage. And in the food at Prune? I think they’re both there — the tangerine peel into the candle flame and all that glitter…

Enjoy the day. Here is my favorite spot at Ballymaloe — the herb garden. Each section has a variety of herbs and greens growing in it.

Oh and if you are interested in celebrating by cooking something Irish, perhaps you could try brown soda bread. Here’s an easy recipe.

There’s a scene towards the beginning of the book where he is talking to then-CIA extern Richard Blaise (yes, Richard Blaise!!) about how working at The French Laundry is just a stepping stone for him. The book is full of letters Achatz writes along the way to people to convince them of different things (he wrote Thomas Keller 14 letters about why he wanted to work at The French Laundry!) that eventually paved the way to make his dream of owning and running the best restaurant in America possible. Clearly, this guy works so hard and loves his work so much.

When Achatz breaks away from The French Laundry and starts as chef de cuisine at Trio, he articulates what he is after: “I didn’t have notebooks filled with new techniques or recipes, nor did I have complete menus ready to implement. I had a vague notion that I wanted to explore new areas, and I had a very clear idea of how I wanted a meal to feel to the diner. That was the driving force, and everything else simply had to support that. ” (134)

Later, he explains the restaurant philosophy to his new staff, “I want to create an experience that is based on emotions. I want people to be excited, happy, curious, surprised, intrigued, and even bewildered during the meal.” (137)

Something about reading this rang true to me in a way it hasn’t when I have heard about Achatz’s philosophy before. I think because in my own room I have a little square of paper on the wall that says: “happiest, saddest, funniest, most beautiful”. It’s creative writing prompt that gets you thinking about moments in your life and to start to write from there. The result is sometimes that the happy, sad, most beautiful emotion you felt at a particular moment in your life is conveyed through the writing even if the plot is totally different.

I guess when I first heard of Alinea, it sounded like too much of merely an intellectual exercise (I mean Achatz did admit that his crew tries to intimidate diners!), but some else of what he does is about sharing. In particular, I like how he taps into his subconscious with some of the dishes — just how diners sometimes take awhile to figure out his dishes, sometimes he does, too. I think that’s how creativity really works. Take for example when Achatz is working out a seafood sponge concoction. It occurs to him that he should include the scent of spring flowers to enhance the dish.
Photo Credit: flickr/astaa

“Quickly, I settled on hyacinth as the flower that was needed. I had no idea why. I just knew that hyacinth flowers should surround the dish, and then we would have waiters pour hot water over them to release the scent as the diners ate….Nick got a teakettle of hot water for me and I poured it over the flowers — instant spring int he middle of winter…. as soon as I smelled the sweetness of the flowers I was transported back to my childhood. Until that moment I had no idea why I wanted to pair this fish with flowers. But once it was all together, I remembered a day when I was twelve years old, fishing for walleye with my dad in the late spring. We would tuck in along the shore and eat lunch among the wildflowers.” (233)

His ingredients are the stuff of memories, and you see how re-creating emotional memory might necessitate innovative techniques. (Incidentally, Martin Kastner, the guy who designs a lot of the serviceware at Alinea spent time reverse engineering old sixteenth -century padlocks in the Czech Republic. There were no keys for the locks, so he had to think like a sixteenth century lock maker. Talk about preparation for Alinea work — there is some metaphor here, I just know it.)

Achatz gains his business partner, Nick Kokonas, through food as well. Kokonas and his wife Dagmara were regulars at Trio and Kokonas books a reservation for Dagmara’s birthday. He sends Chef Achatz an e-mail a few days before the birthday with a line that can only be taken as a challenge, “Incidentally she is ethnically Latvian, speaks Japanese, and loves Thai food. Good luck!” Of course, Achatz takes on the task and by the end Dagmara is tearing up, tasting a bit of her childhood in a Latvian sorrel soup with smoked ham hocks and quail eggs. That’s the night Kokonas tells Achatz he would love to build a restaurant with him one day.

The tongue cancer appears towards the end of the book and now having understood better just how important taste was to Achatz and how deeply he poured his whole self into his work, you can feel how truly devastating the diagnosis must have been. When he’s doing chemo and his hair is falling out on the sides, his staff at Alinea show him their solidarity by shaving their heads into mohawks, too.

Sure there was a lot of ego in this guy. Much of what he wanted to do was driven by being different, setting himself apart from his esteemed mentors. But the drive was not without heart. It’s so clear that he loves cooking. (For some reason, to me, this counts for a lot.)

His business partner Nick Kokonas won me over not only because he’s the one who dragged Achatz to see the University of Chicago research team that eventually saved his life, but because he is constantly telling Achatz that people would love to eat his “real food”, too. Kokanas gets to sample it whenever he stops by the kitchen and Achatz and his crew create makeshift meals on the fly with “real” ingredients. (Real food may make an appearance at Next, their latest dining venture. Check out a preview of the restaurant here — it opens April 1, 2011.)

Needless to say… this book got me thinking. Imagine what the food would do!