Wednesday, August 18, 2010

The big move


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Sunday, July 11, 2010

For the Love of a Lassi

When you’re in India, a banana lassi is sort of like traveler’s insurance — you feel a lot better if you have it. The live bacteria can reduce the incidence of Delhi Belly, and when you get the inevitable tummy troubles, yogurt can help mitigate the symptoms and restore your normal intestinal flora.

During our trips through northeastern India in December 2007 and January 2010, Brad had one at breakfast almost every day. I usually ordered milk tea for myself, but Brad never had a lassi of which I didn’t steal at least a few sips.

Back at home, he makes one for each us nearly every afternoon, and the frothy beverage makes an even better sunset snack than a breakfast. His recipe is an adaptation from one in Julie Sahni’s Classic Indian Cooking; he heeds her exhortation that the quality of the yogurt is of prime importance.



Banana Lassi for Two

Ingredients:

2 ripe bananas
1 1/2 cups plain yogurt*
3 tablespoons cream (to match the richness of Indian yogurt)
4 tablespoons sugar
4 ice cubes

Technique:

Put the bananas, yogurt, cream, and sugar into a blender.  Blend on low speed until they are fully mixed.  Add ice cubes and mix until they are crushed and lassi is cold.

*If using thick Greek-style yogurt, use 1 cup yogurt and 1/2 cup milk.
 

Friday, July 9, 2010

The beauty of brick & tin

In addition to the titular building materials, brick & tin is full of wood and air and earth. Pews flank a few of the reclaimed-wood tables in the new downtown sandwich shop, and the rest are surrounded by spacious chairs. Sunlight floods more than half of the long dining room, streaming in through the massive storefront windows. Where the rays don’t reach, illumination comes from industrial-looking fixtures at the ends of dramatic ceiling fans. The “earth” I mentioned is what the sandwiches are served on — varicolored clay plates made and glazed by hand in Italy. Considering the chic decor and dinnerware, it’s the last place you’d expect to find bologna on the menu.

And yet the “bologna” is one of the nine panini on offer: Pretty pink mortadella is piled on toasted white bread, then slathered with ricotta and whole-grain mustard. The taste is so robust and rich, you forget it’s merely a sandwich in your hands.



In two visits this week, we’ve also tried three other panini: the Cuban (slow-roasted pork shoulder, smoky mountain country ham, pickled pepper relish, and Gruyere); the New Orleans (a variation on the Muffaletta, made with salami, capicola, mortadella, provolone, and olives) and the Coosa Valley (scrambled farm eggs, sliced avocado, and bacon). The sandwiches are served sliced in two, making the halves easy to trade, and each one comes with a choice of soup, salad, or a seasonal side. The latter, in summer, is either deviled eggs with shaved country ham or a field pea, sweet corn and cucumber salad. The only soup I’ve sampled so far was the roasted chicken, a light, bright broth embellished with firm summer vegetables and shredded crepes.

The crew is still getting its bearings. Service was slow, sides dishes were transposed, and on our first visit, the lack of signage made it tough to figure out whether we were supposed to seat ourselves or order at the bar. But such hiccups are easily forgiven in an eatery’s earliest days. Much like one member of the trio that runs the nearby Trattoria Centrale, brick & tin proprietor Mauricio Papapietro (shown at right) learned his way around a kitchen working for Birmingham superchef Frank Stitt. And by applying his extensive experience to something as simple as the sandwich, Papapietro may prove anew that what makes fine dining isn’t the price point so much as the food.

brick & tin is located at 214 20th St. North. Hours are Mon-Fri 10:30 a.m.-3 p.m. this week; next week the restaurant will begin staying open until 7 p.m. For more information, call (204) 297-8636 or visit www.brickandtin.com.


P.S. “Panini” is a plural noun. The singular is panino, which is Italian for “little bread roll.”

Wednesday, July 7, 2010

The Feast of the Fourth

The weekend was so busy we didn't get a chance to post about the Fourth of July feast that Brad for 11 people. It was the most local meal he's ever prepared, featuring 10 lbs. of Fudge Family Farms pork butt purchased at V. Richard's, plus homegrown okra, tomatoes and Silver Queen corn that we purchased at the Finley Avenue Farmers Market. Check out the menu.

Tacos de Carnitas with homemade salsa & Greek-style yogurt (in lieu of sour cream)
Roasted okra
Roasted corn with brown butter
Pan-roasted potatoes with rosemary
Chilton County peach ice cream





Roasted corn with brown butter


Ingredients:

6-8 ears of fresh corn
2-3 tablespoons of olive oil
2-3 ounces of butter (1/2 - 2/3 stick)
salt and pepper to taste


Technique:

Preheat your oven to 500 degrees.

Shuck the corn and remove the silks.

Cut off dry tips and stems (if necessary).

Cut each ear if half cross wise (so you have two short ears instead of one long ear).

Arrange the corn in a large casserole dish.

Drizzle with olive oil and roll each piece around so it's fully coated.

Sprinkle with salt and pepper.

Pat with butter (break the butter into small pieces and arrange it evenly over the corn.

Roast for 7-10 minutes.

Using a thick potholder, grab the pan and shake it back and forth so the corn rolls around, or remove the pan from the oven and roll the corn around with tongs.

Return to oven and roast 7-10 more minutes until the butter has browned.

Allow to cool and eat.

Yum.

Friday, July 2, 2010

Market Share: Yum Brownies


Even though I've gotten great peaches, melons, okra and corn this summer, my best farmers market purchase of the season so far was made at the Yum Brownies & Biscuits booth at the Pepper Place Market. I chose an almond cream, but I could have had cherry pistachio, ginger bite, peanut butter, mmmmint or salty caramel pecan. On Saturday, you could have any one of those flavors — or chocolate chocolate or fireball!

Tasha and Jeremy Fisher are the brains (and the bakers) behind the sweet squares. You can follow them on Twitter for a flavor schedule and other updates. If you miss them during Independence Day weekend, you've got six more chances:

July 10
Aug 7 & 21
Sept. 4 & 18
Oct. 9

As an aside, the OED's first definition of brownie is "a benevolent spirit or goblin, of shaggy appearance, supposed to haunt houses, esp. farmhouses, in Scotland and sometimes to perform useful household work while the family were asleep." The first U.S. usage of the word to mean a small square of rich (usually) chocolate cake appeared in 1897 in the Sears & Roebuck Catalog: The "Fancy Crackers, Biscuits, Etc." section offered brownies, in 1-lb. papers, for $0.14 each or $1.50 per dozen.

No More Mediocre Okra




Remember the look that Luke had on his face when Yoda, with his dying breath, said, "There . . . is . . . ANOTHER . . . SKYWALKER. . . ."?

That's sort of what it was like the first time I had Indian-style okra.

If you're like most Southerners, your idea of perfect okra involves a batter made from buttermilk, cornmeal and flour. I used to be the same way. That's how my grandmother made it, and that's how they made it in the school cafeteria, and that's more or less how I assume they make it at Green Acres (where a piping hot bag costs but a buck-forty and is my secret treat to myself more often than I'm willing to publicly admit). But my household had a revelation. A daring order we made one night at Taj India led us to it.

The Bhindi Masala at Taj is a standard Punjabi preparation: the green seed pods are sliced, then sautéed in ghee with onions and tomatoes. The bright acidity of the tomatoes prevents the okra's delightful mucilage from turning into disgusting slime when exposed to water. And the addition of coriander, cumin, cayenne and turmeric does nothing to blunt the sweet, strong flavor of the okra. The first time I ordered the dish was the first time I'd ever had okra that wasn't battered and fried. That was three years ago, and there's a big difference in what we do with okra now.

Inspired by Bhindi Masala, Brad started sautéing okra on the stove top with olive oil and garlic. Eventually, he improved the simple recipe by moving the whole operation into the oven. Since we have a tiny kitchen, roasting the okra frees an eye on the stove top for making magic potatoes or some other splendid dish.




BradBrad's roasted okra

Ingredients:

1 pound okra, washed and thoroughly dried
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil (more or less, as you like)
4 cloves of garlic, smashed
salt and pepper

Technique:

Preheat oven to 500 degrees.

(MAKE SURE THE OKRA IS DRY.)
Cut off stem ends and slice okra length-wise.
Place the okra and garlic in a casserole dish or baking pan.
Drizzle with olive oil, then stir around with your hand or a spoon to make sure the everything is well coated.
Salt and pepper to taste.

Roast for 10-15 minutes. (The more thickly you layer the okra in the pan, the more slowly it will cook.)


P.S. Botanically speaking, okra is a member of the family Malvaceae and a cousin to the hibiscus. And outside of the U.S, almost everybody calls it "ladies' fingers."

Thursday, July 1, 2010

Concentrated effort


My great-grandmother, Ray Q. Thornton, kept scrapbooks in the kitchen. Or at least that's where I think she kept them. I have only the dimmest memory of the years Meme lived with us, but I remember clearly that there was a bookshelf in the kitchen and that at least some of the real estate on it was taken up by old-fashioned photo albums without a single picture in them. Instead the pages were full of recipes cut out of newspapers and magazines. I'm sure there were several volumes like this, but I only know of one that survived. It's a battered, old-fashioned "loose leaf notebook and memory album," full of clips by a Birmingham Age-Herald food reporter whose name could pass for a casserole: Sue Scattergood. The recipes Meme deemed worth saving were mostly sweets and salads: baked Alaska, coconut bread pudding, blushing apple salad. She wrote out many of her own recipes by hand, but the ones she got from the newspaper were neatly trimmed, then glued down with some conviction — they're holding fast to the pages after more than 60 years.

I haven't been so diligent in keeping up with recipes that mean something to me. The closest I've come to keeping a kitchen scrapbook was stuffing the whole May 6, 2007, issue of the New York Times Style Magazine into Brad's Silver Spoon. It's tacky the way the magazine sticks up out of the book and the pages are badly battered except where the cookbook has protected them. But I've held onto it for an Oliver Schwaner-Albright essay called "Iced Storm," all about the decades-old New Orleans practice of making coffee concentrate. The piece concludes with a recipe adapted from the Blue Bottle Coffee Company.




New Orleans Cold Drip Coffee

Ingredients:

1 pound dark roast coffee and chicory, medium ground
10 cups cold water
Ice
Milk

Technique:

1. Put coffee in a nonreactive container, like a stainless-steel stockpot. Add 2 cups water, stirring gently to wet the grounds, then add remaining 8 cups water, agitating the grounds as little as possible. Cover and let steep at room temperature for 12 hours.

2. Strain coffee concentrate through a medium sieve, then again through a fine-mesh sieve.

3. To make iced coffee, fill a glass with ice, add 1/4 cup coffee concentrate and 3/4 to 1 cup milk, then stir. To make café au alit, warm 3/4 to 1 cup milk in a saucepan or microwave, then pour into a mug and add 1/4 cup coffee concentrate.

(Concentrate will keep in the refrigerator for up to two weeks.)



I like to keep the finished product in glass bottles — specifically Traders Point Creamery yogurt bottles because their narrow necks make it easy to pour and the colorful resealable caps look awesome. In New Orleans, they keep their concentrate in mayonnaise or mason jars, which is, I'm sure, how Meme would have done it.