smitten kitchen

Last year, when I made that dud of a clementine clafoutis a whole bunch of you brought Nigella Lawson’s Clementine Cake to my attention. But, by that point in the winter I was tired of clementines and filed it away to try the following year.

It was a long wait. When you know you want to make something but the item is out of season, it seems like its time will never arrive. Last week, I came upon an artichoke recipe that is clearly designed to blow my artichoke-loving mind but are artichokes (that you’d want to buy, not that one with a fuzzy pelt I saw last week) anywhere? Nope. And tomatoes… flavorful, non-mealy tomatoes. I can’t even think about how far off they are. It makes me weep.

Nevertheless, I suspect that each and every one of our households has adopted one or ten of these crates this winter. I think we’re on box four or five, which is kind of frightening when you realize there are just two of us. So I don’t think about it.

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A firm believer in the jinx-ing gods, I always pause before I say these kinds of things, but I have a pretty good life both out- and inside of the kitchen. Food is my friend. The only things holding me back from eating everything and anything in the whole world are, in descending order, my pickiness and my waistband. I don’t know what it means to have food make me consistently sick. (Well, except Spaghetti Carbonara. But that story for a different time, or on second thought, never.) I scour ingredient lists because I don’t trust them, but not because my life could depend on it. I can eat all of the bread, pasta and cake, glorious cake that I want. And it is these things I have been thinking about since I dug into Gluten-Free Girl this weekend, the new book by the food blogosphere’s own Shauna James Ahern, someone I had the fortune to meet, along with her Chef, Danny, and other friends last weekend.

I first learned about celiac disease from an old coworker who had it. “What do you mean you don’t eat no cookies?” I would joke in mock-Aunt Toula tone because it was just that absurd to me that he would be the only person in our whole department to not eat my baked goods with glee. It came back on my radar through my friend Joc’s coworkers, Kim and Kelly and their site, Celiac Chicks, but I still didn’t really get it. No flour, I’d think? More flourless chocolate cake, then! Big deal.

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It only took us over a year, but Alex and I finally had dinner at Tia Pol, a closet-sized gem of a tapas restaurant on 10th Avenue on Saturday night. We live so close, it’s embarrassing that we hadn’t eaten there yet, but the thing with the proximity is that every time we’ve popped our heads in, taken note of the mob of people crushed against the entryway and the “at least an hour and a half” wait, we’ve rationalized that we’ll go another time — later. Well, six months had passed since our last “later,” when on Saturday, so we decided arriving at the criminally early hour of 6 p.m. would outsmart the crowds. The laugh was still on us but the 45 minutes were well worth the wait, the tight space not claustrophobic but cozy on a freezing night as we snugged into a row of coats while drinking our first then second (mon dieu!) glass of their delicious sangria. At the bar, we couldn’t resist trying one of almost everything — marcona almonds, potatoes with aioli and hot paprika, ham-wrapped artichoke hearts with manchego cheese, deep-fried spicy chickpeas and thick, fork-tender white asparagus stalks again with that blessed aioli.

By last night, it had been a whole two days since our last dose of aioli and we needed a fix. Alex grabbed some white asparagus, red potatoes and salad greens on his way home and I began mincing garlic for the sauce. Oh, how easy dinner will be, I thought… And now you see where this is going. The first aioli started out splendidly, but at some point near the end, when you start drizzling the olive oil more confidently, it split and if there’s one thing that’s impossible to fix, it’s a broken mayonnaise. Frustrated as hell, I didn’t want to associate mayonnaise-making with failure and unhappiness, and forced myself to make another, this time in the food processor. I’ve seen Emeril make his in there often (say whatever you want about the man; he always makes his mayo from scratch), and hey, isn’t that what the little drip-spout is for? This batch not only didn’t break, it didn’t come together at all. Four egg yolks, two CUPS of good olive oil, twelve cloves of garlic and any remaining joy I’d had toward cooking that night went right in the trash. I was ready to write the evening off completely — never happened, nobody needs to know, let’s not dwell on these failures, okay? — but I still had those four egg whites and I got clingy, unable to part with another ingredient.

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We eat salad almost every single night with dinner, but if I told you about all of them, you’d be bored to tears. Ninety percent of the time it is some variation of arugula, radicchio, endive or butter lettuce with a basic vinaigrette. At least in the everyday salad department, I like it simple.

Most of the time. Other times, I am crafting a plan, and Monday night that plan included me avoiding our leftovers by being too full for them. Time for a confession! I’m terrible at eating leftovers. Day old meat has this, I don’t know, musk to it that turns my stomach. I can smell it before I taste it; I can barely choke down two bites. Just about the only foods that I find equally good, if not better in the days that follow are quiches, tarts, soups and legume-full things, like that chili. Unfortunately, on Monday it was just piles of that pappardelle ragu. Alex couldn’t wait to dive into it, but I made us a big, elaborate salad.

Now, I know there is nothing new about endive bulked with arugula, red onion, crumbled blue cheese, apples and toasted nuts but I will argue that this everyday salad warrants mention because I tried a spicy, candied pecan recipe I’ve long had bookmarked and loved it. Toasted spiced nuts are a fairly particular thing; around the holidays you see so many recipes, it’s nearly impossible to see the great ones from the greasy, heavy, oddly-flavored or soggy. In the end, of course, it’s just personal taste that leads you to one over the other and mine is very pleased with the texture and kick of this. Consider it, will you? And let me know if you’ve got a version you swear by.

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A couple months ago, I briefly mentioned making a wild mushroom soup from Gourmet magazine that was, you know, good, but also, eh. But shame on me, really, because last year we found the perfect, best-ever, fail-proof, tastiest recipe so why did I fall for the shiny new thing? Isn’t that the point of all this trial-and-error, anyway? I’m always trying to catalogue Recipes That Work, also called Recipes to Share you know, the ones that you try and you think “This is it. This is everything I have ever wanted from a [insert beloved grub here],” even if yes, I know, most people probably do not share my fanaticism about beloved grub. Lemon cake? Done. Banana bread? Found that too. Easy-peasy rustic loaf? Yup, and hooray for that. Chocolate cookies so good, it may bring tears to your eyes? That’s for tomorrow, because I am a tease, and also because I think about them again, I might eat five. Best-ever mushroom soup? I will never doubt you again.

What was missing from the bland mushroom soup was bulk. So many varied soup recipes come down to a similar process: a sauté of onions, leeks or garlic and herbs, a pile of vegetables simmered in stock until soft, then pureed and topped with cream, grated cheese or a splash of booze or if you’re super-lucky, all three. But if you want to make it taste like more than watery vegetables, you’re going to need some volume. Balthazar’s cream of mushroom soup has over two pounds of sliced mushrooms with a relatively small volume of broth coaxing it gently into soup form — there’s nothing more worthy of your spoon. You might, ahem, even determine that it tastes so good, that no, you will not share it and will instead eat it standing over the pot, hungry husbands be damned, even when they catch your selfishness on film. But then again maybe not, as you’re probably a nicer person than me. One can only hope.

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