Monday August 3, 2009

Dinner is surfed

DON'T CALL ME CHEF

Online resources that click with cooks.

ON the eve of my 30th birthday, stuck in a dead-end secretarial job, living in a hideous apartment in Long Island City, Queens, and dreading what seemed like a life of terminal mediocrity, I came up with a panicked notion – to cook through all 524 recipes of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, in a year, and blog about it.”

These are Julie Powell’s own words in an interview on how she came to chronicle her year-long odyssey of cooking in 2004 which turned her into an Internet celebrity. The blog was later reworked into the book, Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen.

This Friday, the movie Julie and Julia, based on Powell’s book and Child’s autobiography My Life in France, opens in the United States. It stars Meryl Streep and Amy Adams.

Talk about a great idea.

Online journals are no longer a novelty (this is the ninth year of The Bloggies, the longest-running blog awards) and you’ll find plenty related to food (cakewrecks.blogspot.com won The Bloggie this year for Best Food Weblog). Here are the blogs/websites that get the thumbs-up from us.

First-rate fry-up

THE food-related essays on nytimes.com and guardian.co.uk are exceptional. They’re well-written, informative and certainly more compelling than those usually draggy, self-interested and often pedestrian accounts of cooking pursuits from many food bloggers who fancy themselves the next Julie Powell.

It’s no coincidence that both publications often discuss the same issues at around the same time. After all, they’re the ones that keep up with global food trends.

It was serendipity, however, to find a contribution from Powell to The New York Times, that sang the praises of Nigel Slater, long-time food columnist for The Observer, the sister paper of the British Guardian.

Slater’s version of sausages and mash potato elevates this simplest of pub grub but with none of the cheffy snobbery.

All it takes are good butcher’s sausages and cooking them slowly in the oven for full flavour.

Since some of his original seasonings are not easily available here, I have used alternatives. I doubt he would mind. As is his belief – and a good adage for the rest of us to live by – “Right food, right place, right time... this is the best recipe of all.” – Marty

BANGERS AND MASH WITH ONION GRAVY
Serves up to 4 people

Butter
Good sausages, 2 or 3 plump ones per person
Onions, a medium one per person, peeled and sliced
Seasonings: Drained capers, dried thyme and bay leaf
1-2 tbsp flour
½ cup dry red wine or water
1 cup stock (enough to feed 4)
Dijon mustard
Floury potatoes, 2 or 3 medium ones per person

Over moderate heat, melt enough butter in a heavy roasting pan or oven-proof frying pan to cover the bottom. Fry sausages till lightly coloured; remove from the pan. In the sausage dripping, fry onions until soft and golden, about 20 minutes. Set oven to 180°C.

Add 1 bay leaf, a few capers and a pinch (or more) of thyme. Turn up the heat and sprinkle in some flour.

Cook for a minute, then pour in wine or water and enough stock; bring to the boil.

Season with salt, black pepper and 1 tbsp (or more) of mustard. Return sausages to pan and cook in the oven for 30-40 mins until gravy is thick, glossy and bubbling.

Peel potatoes and boil them in salted water until tender. Drain and mash with a little butter. Serve with the sausages and gravy.

Secret weapon, Popeye style

AS A young kid, I grew up believing I’d be strong to the “finich” if I ate my spinach, just like Popeye. As a result, I despised spinach. When you’re seven, you don’t want to do what’s good for you because, where’s the fun in that?

Now, three decades later, I can’t seem to get enough of spinach. Fresh, frozen or canned spinach is my ingredient du jour... and, call me maniacal but I’ve had spinach almost every other day for the past two weeks.

Bored of quiches and frittatas and weary even of my all-time favourite palak paneer, I looked to some of my favourite blogs for help. I wasn’t ready to move on, you see.

Enter David Lebovitz. The American pastry chef and cookbook author is a genius with chocolate and one short visit to davidlebovitz.com is enough for even the most strong-willed dieter to defect.

Usually, that would be me. Given my current obsession though, I decided to try a Lebovitz Spinach Cake which is actually an adaptation of David Tanis’ recipe. It’s easy, it’s healthy, it’s cheesy and it’s delicious. – Veggie Chick

SPINACH CAKE
Serves 4

2 medium leeks
2 tbsp (30g) butter
Salt and freshly-ground pepper
750g fresh spinach, well-washed and stemmed
Big pinch of chilli or cayenne pepper
Whole nutmeg
2 cups full-cream milk (substitute 1 cup milk with cream for a firmer cake)
6 large eggs
Parmesan cheese

Remove the green part of the leeks, wash all the grit out of them and cut into small pieces. Melt the butter in a deep pan and sauté leeks with a little salt and pepper, stirring occasionally, until they’re translucent. While they’re cooking, cut the spinach and add them to the cooked leeks (in batches), putting on a lid until the spinach has cooked down.

Add more salt and pepper, a scraping of nutmeg and the chilli powder during the final batch.

When the spinach is slightly wilted, transfer into a large bowl (along with any juices) and let cool. Preheat the oven to 200°C. Liberally butter a 23-25cm baking dish.

Purée the spinach mixture with the milk and eggs until almost smooth. (At this point, if you want, add some cooked bacon or chopped prosciutto). Add more salt and pepper here.

Pour batter into the baking dish and grate a layer of Parmesan over the top; bake for 45 minutes or until a knife poked into the centre comes out clean. Cool to room temperature and serve.

What goes around, comes around!

I ABSOLUTELY hate chain letters. More so when they come online and there’s so much work involved – copy letter to new e-mail, add your name, do this and that and mail to 20 people in five minutes or else blah blah. Sheesh kebab! There’s so much to trash from my inbox every day, I don’t need the added stress of having bad luck befall me if I choose to ignore these nasty chain-mails.

But thanks to my sister Becky, who’s an avid forwarder of mail, our home had the recent joy of discovering an Online Recipe Exchange... which soon led to the baking (and devouring) of the most wonderful Moist Apple Cake.

According to Becky, a recipe chain is easy enough for you to start with a few friends, and guaranteed to give you results. The best part is that even if the chain is broken you would surely have received a few recipes in hand.

A generic e-mail needs to be sent out to start the ball rolling – something along the lines of:

You have been invited to be a part of a recipe exchange. Please send a simple recipe you’d like to share to the name listed in the No. 1 position below (and only to that person even if you don’t know them). After you’ve sent your recipe to the person in Position #1, copy this letter into a new e-mail, move my name to the No. 1 position and put your name in the No. 2 position. Only mine and your name should show when you send your e-mail. Send this to 20 friends. If everyone participates, you should receive 36 recipes.

The turnaround is fast because only two names are on the list: the sender’s and the sender’s friend. And you only have to participate once.

So, why waste your time looking through a billion sites for a recipe that may or may not turn out? Leave it to someone else to tell you what works.

Send out the e-mail and build your chain. Meanwhile, I’m getting back to that apple cake ... it tastes divine à la mode and drizzled with caramel sauce. – Sweet Tooth

MOIST APPLE CAKE
Serves 10-12

150g cake flour
100g castor sugar
1 tsp fine salt
1 tbsp baking soda
50g chopped walnuts
170ml vegetable oil
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1 tsp vanilla essence
400g grated apples (Granny Smith or any red apple)

Line a 20cm square tin with grease-proof paper. Preheat oven to 180°C.

Mix flour, sugar, salt, baking soda and walnuts in a mixing bowl. Stir in the oil and mix until well combined. Next, add the eggs and vanilla essence and stir until well incorporated.

Lastly, mix in the apples and pour batter into the prepared tin. Bake for 45 mins or until skewer inserted into the middle of the cake comes out clean.

Cool before slicing to serve. Store in the refrigerator.

Recipe club

I DON’T know how to bake a cake, so it is strange that I’d be drawn to Tuesdays With Dorie (tuesdayswithdorie.wordpress.com). This group of bloggers take turns to select a recipe from Dorie Greenspan’s Baking: From My Home to Yours. They then do their baking, and post the pictures up in their own blogs every Tuesday. If you do this consistently, you get a turn at choosing a recipe for everyone to try out.

TWD started with one person, and now has 200 members. It’s fun to see the photos and comments posted, and also feel the camaraderie from sharing a love for baking. If you are into baking, it’s also a short cut to getting linked to the best baking blogs around. These people bake the most beautiful cakes; I can only ogle at the pictures.

So, I was happy to finally see a recipe I can try out on TWD. This is easy, as in a if-I-can-do-it-anyone-can way. – Blessed Glutz

PARISIAN APPLE TARTLET
Makes 1 tartlet

2cm thick, 10cm diameter circle of cold puff pastry
½ firm, sweet apple, such as Golden Delicious or Fuji, peeled and cored
Light brown sugar
1 tsp cold butter, cut into 3 pieces

Centre a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 200°C. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a silicone mat and put the pastry circle on the sheet.

Cut the apple half into four chunks and centre the chunks on the pastry circle. Sprinkle the apple with 1-2 tsp brown sugar – depending on how much sweetness you want – and dot with the bits of butter.

Bake the tartlet for about 25 minutes, until the pastry is deeply browned and puffed up around the apple and the apple can be easily pierced with the tip of a knife.

Transfer the baking sheet to a rack and let the tartlet cool. It’s great just a little warm and equally good at room temperature.

Marty thinks good pictures alone don’t make a good blog.

Veggie Chick thinks food blogs are so, so seductive.

Sweet Tooth can be persuaded with cake to do anything.

Blessed Glutz spends hours looking at pictures of food.

■ Don’t Call Me Chef appears on the first Monday of every month. We can’t offer advice but we welcome feedback and suggestions on possible themes. E-mail: startwo@thestar.com.my