QUICK FIRE CHALLENGE

Last night was a banner night in the kitchen thanks to my sister's stroke of genius. After a few gin and tonics our friend J revealed that he hadn't eaten dinner. The sis and I had of course eaten (hobo dinner: sausage with sautéed peppers and onions), but rather than pull out some leftovers for Hungry Man, we fused Iron Chef and Top Chef to turn our kitchen into Kitchen Stadium for a Quick Fire Challenge. The task: use whatever ingredients we had on hand to make a series of small plates for our taster. Luckily, being obsessed with food, we had some good ingredients: basil oil, homemade ice cream, homemade ancho chili jam, herbs, fresh berries. What began on a whim morphed into a 6-course meal, and we had a great time doing it.

The Menu:
Dilled Goat Cheese and Ancho Chili Jam on Toast with Tamari Pumpkin Seeds
Chicken Nugget with Melted Cheese, Barbeque Sauce, and Fresh Parsley
Manchego Cheese with Blueberry Gastrique and Dill on a Rosemary Cracker
Green Eggs and Ham: Basil oil Sautéed Egg with Turkey Bacon
Tarragon Turkey Lettuce Wrap with Red Pepper Aioli and Sour Cream
Vanilla Bean Ice Cream with Hot Fudge Sauce and Fresh Raspberries

Guess who made what!
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Bi-coastal no more!

Hilary and I are no longer separated by a continent. Now we share a kitchen, but that is no reason not to continue the adventure.

My latest food obsession is breakfast-related: sautéed leeks with eggs. This morning I sliced up a whole leek (bulb and some of the green part), locally grown of course, and threw it in a pan with some olive oil. The fragrance of cooking leeks, onion-y but greener, is intoxicating. Once the leeks softened and began to brown, I made two little nests in the middle and cracked 2 eggs into them. Then I turned the heat down to medium and threw a lid on the pan, leaving the eggs to poach in the leeks themselves.

I was inspired by a recipe in "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle," writer Barbara Kingsolver's record of a year of eating only locally produced food on her farm in Appalachia. I like the simplicity of only using one pan, a practicality that underlines the elegance of the dish. Don't overcook the eggs! While the whites cook into the leeks around them and hold everything together, there is something satisfying about breaking the yolks with your fork, making a delicious and simple sauce.

Yum.
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minty cool freshness

Mint! A sprig of mint is summer to a T. The crisp freshness of the herb lends itself so perfectly to a meal on a warm night. Last night mint reigned supreme in my kitchen.

The last time my sister visited we began Mojitos and Tapas Night, something that she may not even know I have continued to do. On that particular evening we drank ourselves silly on rum, and blurrily swerved our way around the dinner table, dancing to Hall and Oates. While I hate to mar the glamor of that night in any way, getting pirate-drunk isn't exactly the most sustainable way for sis and I to party, as our pounding headaches the next day testified. I found the mojito needed a little re-invention, and Kettle vodka (a personal favorite of ours) has done just the trick!

The vodka mojito has all the mintiness and special-occasion-ness of the original, without all the blurry-sugary-trouble of the rum. This drink is especially fun to make for people at parties, and I fully enjoyed my post in the kitchen behind the pile of mint. We mashed mint with super-fine sugar, added fresh squeezed lime and club soda in a big pitcher and mixed individual drinks. We added a sprig of mint and a green straw in each cup, and I have to say they looked really incredible in my brightly colored metal 60s cups.

Loathe to drink on an empty stomach, I had not neglected the tapas. I made one dish my sister and I had tried on our first appetizer adventure: the garlic-sizzled shrimp out of Jill Duplex's Good Cooking (hot red chili, garlic, paprika olive oil and sherry), serving the beautiful prawns in the cast iron pan I cooked them in. I also tried something new from the same book: matchstick zucchini slices, quick fried with toasted almonds and tossed with mint, kosher salt and fresh ground pepper. they were profoundly delicious; smoky from the almonds and fresh with mint, the dish, although deceptively simple, had a complex finish.

To end the night I made a Chocolate Pinwheel cake, one of my favorites. I love the cake's light yet rich texture due to the ribbon of bittersweet chocolate coursing throughout. It never looks too fussy: rather than frost the entire thing, you merely sandwich a rich, mousse-y chocolate between the four layers. The recipe calls for brandy in the frosting, but I skipped that and served it on a tall jade cake plate garnished with mint leaves... Of course!

For the love of mint!
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CHOCOLATE BUNNIES!!!

I have a bad habit of reading signs on the street out loud at extremely high volume. When I was visiting la soeur in Santa Cruz, amid the panoply of Easter advertising I got it in my head to scream "CHOCOLATE BUNNIES" at the top of my voice. Many were annoyed.

A few days after I got back to dreary ole Cambridge, what should I find at my door? That very same chocolate bunny that had inspired all the shouting. My sister is a genius, and not without a sense of humor. Do you know it's the most delicious thing I've had in a while? Dark chocolate with--get this--ginger, wasabi, and dark sesame seeds. The ginger is the most prominent flavor of the three, but I have to say it's an amazing trifecta. The sesame seeds give it a little crunch, and the wasabi is very subtle and counters the sweetness nicely. I think the bunny is from Japan. Do they have Easter bunnies in Japan? I sense a Wikipedia search...

Easter is over but I'm still nibbling away. So far he's lost both his ears. I'm eyeing the tail for tonight.
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joyce, jet-setting, and cooking in the cruz

The first two lines of the Bloom section in Ulysses may well be the best two lines about food ever written:

"Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencod's roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine."

Joyce is right to build Bloom by his (unique) appetites: what and how we eat reveal something essential about who we are. I mistrust people who have indifferent relationships to food, to whom flavors and textures and even dining experiences blend together in a vague beige expanse of memory.

I remember meals in intricate detail. There was the plate of potato gnocchi, plump morsels of rich softness yielding gently to the teeth, that I shared with my sister and her boyfriend in Santa Cruz. Its velvety dark mushroom sauce tasted of the earth, returning the potato to its origins while elevating it to something sublime. That evening, my sister ordered a flight of wine for the fun of it, and asked the waitress not to bring the food too quickly. I realized she had become an astute diner, one who pays attention to her tastes and eats with exuberance (or perhaps she always has been and I only just became conscious of it. This latter is almost certainly the case). We began with a green salad, ordered by la soeur, that was just what a salad should be: a small plate of perfect baby butter lettuce tossed with parsley, marjoram, dill, and chervil. The leaves of lettuce rose in stacked curls of green, coated with just enough, but not too much, clean, sharply vinegared dressing. We ate that alongside tiny, jewel-toned beets infused with orange, and slices of bread in a fruity and richly scented olive oil. Next came a cool salad of lentils topped with warm barbecued octopus, the dark (sea)horse of the menu. Curled blackly
atop its bed of lentils, it seemed intimidating until the first tentative bite. Then the sweet, smoky char of the squid blended with the gentle, quiet flavor of the lentils. I'd like to say we fought over the last bite, but I'm pretty sure I hoarded all for myself.

The true star of the meal, though, was the gnocchi; the memory of that taste brings the others with it in true Proustian fashion. It also recalls my whole week in Santa Cruz, wandering the stalls of the farmer's market as I filled bags with peppery arugula, trim little Japanese cucumbers, and nutty sunflower sprouts. I would make a salad for dinner that night to balance a menu my sister and I had devised. Impressing me yet again with the specificity of her tastes, she wanted to make a tapas-style meal with several small dishes and lots of intense flavors. We had already made an Ancho chile jam for a southwest spin on bruschetta: it lulled you first with notes of sweetness, then as you swallowed walloped you with heat. The dried chiles gave it a deep brown-red color and a taste that I can only describe as old, like the smell of a warm dry cellar in Mexico. We would spread the jam on toasts, then top them with a fine salsa of avocado, fresh corn, and lime. There would be other dishes as well: Thai pork balls wrapped in lettuce with mint and cool rice noodles, sizzling shrimp with homemade aioli, eggplant bruschetta with mellow roasted garlic, homemade (and lethally strong, as it turned out) mojitos. The salad, simple and slightly austere, would offer a cool respite.

At the heart of these memories of food and flavors is my sister. She is the force around which my thoughts turn, my relationship with her the pulse that brought life to these meals. We worked together in the kitchen, moving easily despite the small space, transforming raw ingredients, fusing them together into a meal. I talked about the unique alchemy of cooking, how it seems both mysterious and magical to cart shopping bags into the kitchen and emerge with a delicious meal. She laughed at me and said she could tell I was in school. And certainly it is a luxury to think about food like this, to elevate the simple act of nourishment beyond biological necessity, to call it art.

So I continued chopping eggplant, mincing garlic, squeezing juice from yellow lemon halves, sautéing shallots. My sister, alchemist, coaxed oil into egg yolks, whipping the two together into satiny peaks of mayonnaise. Dinner was coming along fine.
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From Boston to California: two sisters, two kitchens, and the beginning of a culinary adventure

I have just thrown down the proverbial gauntlet to my sister: she's been my partner in crime in too many adventures to count, and I want her to join me on this one. The project? A cross-country food blog detailing a year in the culinary life of two sisters. We both cook like crazy, and although our approach is different, we delight in a meal well-prepared, in eating out, in watching the Food Network like it's our job. So why not talk about it more, write about it more, use this food blog as a way to keep in touch and get inspired. If I know us, it may spark a competitive streak. If I know us, something great could come of it all. We'll see.

A toi, ma soeur.
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