Just for the Halibut... I mean, butterfish :)

During the first week, if not on the first day, of school I let all my students know what my favorite color is: yellow. I LOVE yellow. It is so bright and cheery and you can't look at it without it putting a smile on your face. So, as I looked through my "Platter of Figs" book, trying to decide which recipe to try, my eyes were drawn to "The Yellow Hunger". The picture of the grilled halibut with the yellow tomatoes was the most beautiful and eye catching picture I had ever seen in a cookbook. I knew right away that that was the dish I wanted to prepare.

There was one simple problem... The dish is called "Grilled Halibut with Indian Spices and Yellow Tomatoes". What's the problem you may ask? Well, I live on an island in the middle of the pacific so we don't really have any "seasonal" items and most of our groceries are imported. And so today I discovered while at the store that both halibut and yellow tomatoes are two things that are NOT imported to Hawai'i.

I was not dismayed nor disheartened however. I decided to make yellow zucchini in place of the yellow tomatoes (which Safeway has imported from Mexico :) which is also part of the "yellow hunger" menu. However, instead of doing the recipe in the book I decided to make just grilled zucchini with olive oil and a little salt and pepper. As for the halibut, I had contemplated doing chicken instead, I mean, you can never go wrong with chicken. But I couldn't overcome the guilt of NOT cooking fish when I live in a fishing community. So I departed from Safeway and their totally overpriced and slim pickin's on fish and made my way to SackandSave where things tend to be more local and therefore of a better quality. There I found exactly what I needed: butterfish! So my Grilled Halibut and Yellow Tomatoes was now going to be become Grilled Butterfish and Yellow Zucchini.

The first part of the recipe calls for making your own spice. I had to toast the seeds and then grind them up. It was totally awesome and I was super proud of myself ! I have to admit though, I didn't grind it by hand... my roommate has a magic bullet :) I also made the yogurt sauce to go with it, which was super easy, and turned out superb!

I then had to decide how to cook my fish. I have a grill at my house, but I am not super confident in using it. I was debating between baking it in the oven, broiling it, or cooking it in a pan. My roommate suggested that I use her Japanese portable grill (yet another great contribution by my totally awesome roommate). It worked beautifully! The food was all cooked perfectly and even had those dandy little grill marks on them!

Cooking just for yourself is never fun, so in addition to my roommate I had three other friends over to enjoy the meal with me. And they all loved it :) Also, one of the garnishes for the dish is mint leaves, which inspired me to make mojitos too. So, I think it is fair to say, we had a really great time!

Review: A Platter of Figs

On a scale of 1-5, how would you rate this book?
Kim + David: a 3
Stephanie: 3+
Crystal: 4, but only because it is the first!
Tempa: Layout / style: 5 - I love the look of this cookbook and that it's divided into menus / seasons. Approachability: 4 - Most of the recipes are simple but a few include an ingredient that may be difficult to find if you don't live near an expansive European farmers market.

Would you recommend to a friend or buy as a gift?
Kim + David: yes. it would make a beautiful gift for the right person, even the woman at the store commented on what a nice cover it had.
Stephanie: This would make a beautiful gift for someone who enjoys entertaining.
Crystal: Ha ha, I would totally recommend this book for Stephanie but she already has it! The book seems a little intimidating at first but the recipes actually aren't that hard.
Tempa: I would definitely recommend this book to someone who is passionate about cooking and isn't afraid to try new things.

Was there a recipe that you will be adding to your repertoire?
Kim + David: the polenta
Stephanie: I loved the Tomato Bread with Anchovies (pg. 175)!!
Crystal: I will totally make my own spices again! I never knew it could be so easy!
Tempa: Yes, the Roasted Pepper Salad (so easy, you could make it any night of the week!)

Any new tips or techniques that you learned?
Kim & David: nah
Stephanie: Not in the few recipes I tried.
Crystal: Once again, making my own spices.
Tempa: Yep, I mada Panna Cotta for the first time. It wasn't a smashing success...I'm willing to try it again sometime.Working with duck was a first for me also. I loved the technique of tying the two breasts together to make a little roast. I may try this with skin-on chicken breasts at some point.

Did you find a recipe you will never make again?
Kim + David: we're just not meat eaters at this point in life, so we'll skip those.
Stephanie: nope!
Crystal: I only had time in the month to make one meal, so I would have to say no.
Tempa: Nope! I may not make that duck recipe again but not because I didn't like how it turned out - I just have a hard time preparing any one recipe twice. There's just too many recipes out there to try!

Favorite thing about this book?
Kim + David: the simplicity of the recipes and the voice of the author.
Stephanie: I really enjoyed the beautiful pictures and the stories around the food David cooks: who he cooks for, where the inspiration came from, etc.
Crystal: The pictures were beautiful and I love how he writes about food! He describes cooking in such a unique way that I love!
Tempa: Again, I love that it's broken out into seasons and menus. I also love the little stories at the beginning of each menu.

Thoughts? Comments? Concerns?
Stephanie: I wish I could have made more of the recipes, so I plan on spending a bit more time with this book. The only drawback I found is that each menu costs quite a pretty penny to make, so I am more inclined to cook these dishes for a special gathering of friends then just any night of the week.
Tempa: I purchased this cookbook to add to my collection and will definitely be cooking out of it again and again - most likely for special occassions, Sunday suppers, or if we have guests staying with us.

Thanks for a delicious October everyone! See you in November :)

Stephanie

On the Menu: Leftovers

After our Catalonian fish soup meal, I utilized a few of the residual ingredients to create this satisfying rainy day lunch. Eggs over toast is one of my favorite dishes to eat, so I spiced up the usual with a little sautéed Spanish chorizo topped with leftover Red Pepper Sauce. Served alongside a simple arugula salad dressed in a pear gorgonzola vinaigrette, and voilà!

Stephanie

A Beautiful Bowl of Soup

I wish every meal I make could be like the meals I make on Sundays.

Sundays are all about food. I wake up - leisurely, sans alarm clock - and immediately begin thinking about what we'll eat that day. I settle in at the dining room table with a cup of hot coffee and spread out my latest cooking magazines and favorite cookbooks of the moment. I flip through pages, scan recipes and build my meal plan for the coming week. My husband and I eat breakfast together - a luxury that our busy weekday mornings doesn't afford us - and I make a shopping list. On an ideal Sunday afternoon, we head out for a bite to eat around lunch time at our favorite cafe, Grand Central Bakery, and then it's off to the grocery store to stock up for the week. As soon as I finish unpacking the groceries at home, I get to start dinner. Sunday dinners are usually the ones that involve a bit more time and effort. I love to fill an afternoon - and sometimes even part of the morning - with preparations for dinner that night. A meal that is planned and prepared well in advance always feels more special.

Regrettably, I was unable to begin preparations for my next meal from our friend, David Tanis' cookbook in my usual Sunday style. That's because I planned this meal for a weekday night.

My parents were coming into town. They would arrive at our house on a Thursday in the early evening and I wanted to plan a meal that would greet them as they walked in the door and would be comforting to sit down at the table to after a 2-day road trip from California. What better than a bowl of soup? When I saw the picture of Tanis' Zuppa di Fagioli with Rosemary Oil (p183) I knew it would be perfect. Just thinking about that steaming bowl on the table warmed me up inside. :)

Early in the week we made a special trip to our nearby meat market, Gartner's, to pick up the smoked ham hock for this recipe. I'll admit that I'd never worked with ham hock before and wasn't even sure what it would look like when the butcher presented it to us. Turns out it's just a nice, meaty hunk of pork from the hind leg. The only other item I needed for this recipe was the dried white beans (I used cannellinis) which I purchased from the bulk section of New Seasons, another of our favorite markets.

The recipe recommends that it be made the day before you plan to serve it which is exactly what I did. The night before my parents were due to arrive, after a long day at work, I came home and set about making this soup. After sauteeing diced onions, garlic and bay leaf, I nestled in the ham hock and tumbled the dried cannellinis around it, then covered the whole thing with water and let it simmer. The simple seasonings (ground fennel, red pepper flake and salt) are added in after an hour. Then it's simmered for an hour more. And that's it.

The next night, about an hour before my parents arrived, I pulled it out of the fridge and put it back on the stove to reheat. I put together a plate of salami, prosciutto and capocollo with olives, sliced the bread for the garlic toasts that would be served alongside the soup, and snapped a fragrant handful of fresh sprigs from our rosemary bush for the rosemary oil drizzle.

By the time my parents walked in the door, road-weary and hungry, the soup had filled the house with the most amazing fragrance.

How can a dish be rustic and elegant all at the same time? This soup achieves that balance.

And, so what? I didn't get to make a whole day of making this meal. (If I had, I most certainly would have made the almond biscotti - also part of menu fifteen.) What this simple recipe did allow me to do was to make a special meal - in a relatively short amount of time - to share with loved ones which, after all, is the most important part!

buon appetito

Tempa

Tanis Elsewhere

Read more about Tanis, life in Paris, his book Platter of Figs, and what others have to say about his recipes:

Saveur
Saveur - Recipe
The Wednesday Chef
New York Times
Martha Stewart Show

Enjoy!

Stephanie

Menu Fourteen: In Catalonia

“Many people think they don’t like anchovies…” is the opening line from this menu. I used to be one of those people. It was only after a rather amazing tapas experience with our dear friends k+d that changed that; in fact the very reason I chose this menu was due to the beautifully glistening anchovy fillets; I didn’t care what came after on the following pages, I just knew that I wanted to eat those salty little gems. Little did in know that the true surprise of this meal would reveal itself as a post-dinner philosophical discussion.

I set the whole day aside, devoted to the planning and preparation of this menu. I created a shopping list over a cup of coffee, then headed to the Ferry Building Farmers Market to collect my bounty. Since I scored everything minus the seafood items (however, I did find the anchovies at the market), I headed to Whole Foods to find the remaining ingredients. I opted for two different types of mussels: common blue and the green lipped. I was disappointed to find that I would have to return later in the day to purchase halibut bones for the fish stock, so I cheated and went with prepared fish stock (at least it was made by the young, knowledgeable man helping me behind the counter… that counts, right?!).

The recipes were a breeze. I prepared a few items in advance (cleaned the mussels, marinated the monkfish, made the red pepper sauce) so when it came time to make dinner (which really couldn’t come quick enough and I attempted to distract myself until dinner reading Anna Karenina) everything came together in 35 minutes, easily. The table was set, the soup was steamy, the antipasti tempting, the wine chilled. We ate, enjoying every bite of the flavorful, yet mild, comforting Spanish inspired fish soup. It was my very last mussel that happened to fall with ease out of its shell into my bowl. I took a moment to admire this meaty little nugget and, as I often do, started to “examine” (all right, I was playing with my food) this gift from the sea. I noticed a funny little lump and pulled it out…O…M…G. A semi-digested crab bursting with roe. I spent the next 10 seconds trying to keep my appetite from completely disappearing.

A few deep breaths and a clear thought later, I began to question this automatic reaction of repulsion. Why am I so freaked out by this? I am obviously getting my fill eating this mussel… and what does the mussel eat? I had a face-to-face confrontation with my food, the things I eat, the things my food eats, and the places all eats come from. It’s easy to isolate oneself from the food chain when we purchase perfectly-packaged food… we forget that there was an existence for this item, be it animal, vegetable, or dairy, prior to arriving in the supermarket, farmers market, and yes, Whole Foods. Is this simply an American issue and should I place the blame on our privileged, western culture for not having to partake in the “gruesome” aspects of our food? When walking through the markets in Italy, I was initially horrified by the hanging chickens, fully intact (sans feathers) with heads and feet, or head meat literally cut from the back of a decapitated pig head. Yet, this was an assurance to the buyer that this was fresh meat (from the actual farmer, no less). All this to say that it took a small encounter with this little crab to recognize the limits and boundaries in which we place our food. Although I had previously considered myself an open-minded eater, there are evidently hidden traces of my former life as a blind consumer.

Ultimately the meal was a 3 out of 5. I thought it was good, easy, and would for sure make it again (especially for someone who really enjoys mussels… not Brian), but will probably add a bit more spice and cube the fish prior to marinating to allow the flavors to better penetrate. I halved the ingredient amounts since I was only cooking for 2, but still have enough for four hefty portions. Thinking that the soup wouldn’t last so well as leftovers, I bagged up two meals and shared them with some new friends on the streets, where they were very appreciated on a chilly San Francisco evening.

made w/ love,

Stephanie

another early autumn

Let me start by saying that it was not easy to make a selection from this beautiful cookbook. Everything looks amazing. So, I narrowed it down by making a selection based on the following criteria:

1. Must be an entire menu.

2. Must come from the Fall portion of the cookbook.

3. Must include a technique or ingredient that I've never worked with before.

*Bonus: Ideally include figs!

Well, I found a menu that matched all of my criteria: menu sixteen, another early autumn (pgs. 190-199). This menu includes a few techniques and ingredients I've never worked with. Panna Cotta. Duck. Livers.

Yes, I'll admit that I was a little nervous about the duck and more than a little nervous about the livers...

but looking forward to expanding my culinary know-how!

Next up: making my grocery list. Many of the items we already had on hand but needed to pick up some of the key ingredients...duck, juniper berries, livers, pancetta, fresh baguette, half-and-half, Creme Fraiche, and powdered gelatin.

We went to no less than three different grocery stores to pick up everything we needed. Found the duck breasts at our favorite gourmet foods market, Pastaworks, the livers, pancetta, Creme Fraiche and gelatin came from another local specialty foods market, Zupan's, and the rest from Whole Foods.

I planned this to be our dinner for Sunday night so I started by preparing the duck on Saturday since it called to refrigerate the duck breast roast for "several hours, or overnight" prior to cooking. I have to say that I really liked this technique of tying two duck breasts together to make a little "roast". It was super easy to prepare the spice rub (I subbed ground allspice for the allspice berries in the rub), apply it to the duck and tie it all together in a compact little bundle. After prepping the duck breast, it was on to the Duck Liver. Okay, fine, I didn't find duck livers but the recipe does indicate that you can also use chicken livers so that's what I did. Trimming the livers was...to put it mildly...my least favorite part of preparing this meal. In their raw state they felt like pieces of jello. Needless to say, I tried to finish that task as quickly as possible. The remainder of the prep for the liver spread was quite simple and once everything was mixed together I popped it in the fridge for the night.

Sunday: I made the Panna Cotta early on Sunday morning since it had to chill in the fridge for at least 6 hours. This recipe calls for Creme Fraiche with a recipe to make your own (p. 41). I did take a peek at the recipe and even attempted to gather the ingredients during our trip to the grocery store but could not find non-ultrapasturized heavy whipping cream... Since I didn't know if that was critical to the texture and consistency of the finished product, I scratched that idea and just picked up a container. The headnote at the top of the Panna Cotta recipe says that it's "surprisingly easy to prepare" and I would have to agree.

The baked figs and roasted pepper salad were perfectly simple and, also, extremely easy to prepare.

My final report on the meal:

Liver Toasts: We served these as our first course on crostini. I was not a fan of the metallic, iron-y taste of the liver. We both decided that rubbing the crostini with fresh garlic helped us to enjoy the spread a little bit more!

Roasted Pepper Salad: Simple. Delicate. Lovely.

Double Duck Breast with Baked Figs: The recipe called for 6 duck breasts (to make 3 mini roasts) but since I'm just cooking for Jim and I, I used two, which still left us with lots of leftovers. This turned out really nice. The duck cooked perfectly moist and we both felt that the spice rub was a great compliment to the duck. And the figs. The figs were fantastic. The roasting process intensified their flavor and still left them soft - almost jammy.

Panna Cotta: I was a bit disappointed with how the panna cotta turned out. I had hoped that they would easily turn out from the ramekins into perfectly shaped little molds. But, they didn't really hold their shape at all. Instead, they turned into little puddles. (Maybe I should have prepared them the night before to give them more time in the fridge...) The flavor was good though so it was not a total loss! They were like a silky, milky pudding. The vanilla bean gave it a mild sweetness that paired well with the fresh strawberries I served with them. And, no, I did not take a picture...it just didn't seem worthy of a photo!

I had a fantastic time preparing this entire meal and I can't wait to pick out another recipe!

buon appetito!

Tempa

Fresh Tomato Salsa, pg. 141

Sunday was a very mellow day around these parts. Grey skies and rain made it a day mostly set around the house, so food was made and sports were watched on TV. We dipped chips in David Tanis' simple salsa recipe. One addition we made to his recipe, however, was some lime juice. We wanted more depth in the flavor and this really hit the spot.

Eat well,

Kimberly and David

Creamy Polenta pg. 169

Ok, so we have to admit, we ate the polenta before we had a chance to take a picture of the finished product. Therefore, we gathered the ingredients and simply shot those. David Tanis paired this recipe with steamed Fennel with Red Pepper Oil and Roasted Quail with Radicchio. We do not eat meat, so we came up with our own topping: sauteed onions and red pepper in olive oil. We loved this meal and will be making it again soon. It's perfect right now as the Colorado weather seems to be getting a bit cooler.

Eat well,

Kimberly and David

October

A Platter of Figs by David TanisOur inaugural launch of The Book Cook Club will set sail on the pages of David Tanis' beautifully presented book, A Platter of Figs. With each season comes a collection of menus, and for each menu a treasure of recipes. An irresistible cover of 2 perfectly ripe figs draws the curious in, to which is revealed an elegant compilation of unbelievably simplistic recipes (dare I call Sliced Tomatoes with Sea Salt a recipe?). This is the food that Tanis serves to his friends and family; dishes that highlight ingredients and thoughtful preparation. It appears that the attraction of such basic presentation is to strip away pretentiousness, and penetrate the true pleasure of cooking and eating with people you care about.

Happy Cooking,

Stephanie