chez pim

The best chocolate chips cookies ever?

 

Once in a while, along comes a recipe that changes the name of the game.  Jim Lahey's no-knead bread recipe published by Mark Bittman in the NY Times two years ago was one.  It got so many cooks - who hitherto dared not touch yeast bread - to fashion themselves a veritable French boulanger, baking loafs after loafs of crackly, crusty bread, and even turning more than a few of them into petty thieves.  Then, a few months ago, the Times struck again, this time with a chocolate chips cookies recipe that purported to be no less than perfection itself.

The key to that recipe?  A little patience, said the indomitable David Leite who penned the piece.  Let me just tell you that it was quite an understatement.  Unlike the good Mr.Leite, I don't live in a world where restraining oneself from devouring, entirely raw, the whole batch of chocolate chips cookie dough during the 36 hours called for in the recipe constitutes a little patience.  And not just any chocolate chips cookie dough, mind you, but one so rich, so deliciously salty-sweet, and so -ever, ever so- tempting.  In my world, chocolate chips cookie dough can speak.  And it's calling my name - the whole, half a box of scrabble's worth of alphabets in my name.

So, did I give in, you asked?  Of course I did.  Although not entirely, I should give myself credit.  I waited 24 hours before I baked my first small batch, and the rest managed to last the 36 hours required.  And, no, no, that little elf that kept sneaking into the fridge to steal mini bites of the cookie dough was not me.  Not me at all.  It must have been my cat Ella, in her human/elven suit.  True story.

no recipe apple tart

Can you bake without a recipe?  Most of you are probably shaking your head no...no, no, no, no.  You've all been scared off by that culinary truism that refers to cooking as an art and baking as a science.  I don't think it's true at all.  And I think most good home cooks who are afraid of baking are missing out a whole lot.  The same is true with bakers who religiously follow recipes.  If baking is rigidly following a recipe, you're missing out on the improvisation, the play that makes cooking so much fun.

Of course, it's true that you need to learn a few basic recipes.  Learn how to do a pie/tart crust, for example.  Any good food writer/blogger worth their salt can teach you one. Yes, I even have one in my book (which of course you must wait for.)  But once you have that, you can bake just about any fruit tart or fruit pies that your heart desires and you mind imagines.

Thai scallop ceviche - Yum Hoy Shell

I'm calling this dish Thai Scallop Ceviche.  The "Thai" descriptor here is for the ceviche, as in Thai-style ceviche.  And not for the scallops, as in, these scallops are not from Thailand.  They are from the Northeast, actually, Nantucket Bay Scallops, to be precise.  Yes, yes, I know full well ceviche is a Peruvian preparation, but we do a very similar thing in Thailand.  We call it Yum.  Or Yum Talay.  And true to the name, it is quite yummy too, and easy besides.

The idea here is the same as the regular ceviche, that is to say the seafood takes a nice, long bath in lemon or lime juice to "cook".  Let us not be confused though.  There's no cooking happening here.  The citric acid in lime or lemon juice just change the texture and look of the seafood so they appear opaque and slightly firm and generally look like they've been "cooked".  So I wouldn't suggest this dish if you're afraid of germs or parasites or all that peevish nonsense.  I read somewhere that if you're afraid of raw ceviche you could get away with cooking the seafood very breifly in boiling water just to "cook" them slightly before making your ceviche.  Frankly I'm more than a bit dubious about this advice.  To a germ or parasite, passing just a few seconds through boiling water is like having a day at a Japanese Onsen.  I don't know about you, but I don't want to deal with germs that have just had a restorative day at a germ spa. 

Boozy Bitter Chocolate Truffles, or, I DON'T WANT TO BE YOUR VALENTINE!

Nor do I want you mine.

I think it was that pink Rice Crispy Treats I was subjected to one sad Valentine that ruined it for me for ever.  Or perhaps it saved me.  Depending on your perspective.  In any case, if I saw another heart-shaped cookie or pink cake I might just scream and go sew black buttons over my eyes and then build traps for unsuspecting children or misguided lovers.  I just might.

But there is hope yet.  A distressed signal sent over Twitter to my crowd received in reply dozens of also-dissenting voices, reassuring me that even in my most misanthrope moment, I am, alas, not alone.  In the dark, lonely corners of Twitterverse we plotted to bring down valentines.  "Do the Chicken with 40 cloves of garlic", sang the Tweet-chorus.  "Cook everything that gives you gas", cried a petulant - or perhaps flatulent - voice.  Another pointed to a gnarly - if absolutely delicious - Dim Sum staple, braised chicken feet.  One even suggested a bottle of cheap booze and a hammer, I dared not ask why.  I supposed another that might do is that dish with a poetic name, Pissed-off Prawns, I ate earlier this week at Michael Chiarello's new Bottega up in Napa.

Then an aha moment arrived.  What fun is bitterness without booze?  There you have it.  I'll make chocolate truffles, dark and bitter chocolate truffles, and I'll make it boozy.  Rum perhaps.  No, Armagnac, better yet, Armagnac with some prunes soaked in it. 

And just in case you're wondering.  No, no, the cause of my bitterness is *not* because my otherwise-sweet valentine is at his restaurant cooking a very special meal for everyone else's valentines.  And, no, it hasn't been like that every year for the past four valentines we've had together.  And, really, no, I don't plan on wallowing in my bitterness tomorrow night with a bowlful of these boozy bonbons and all those monster movies marathon on Sci-fi.  I don't plan on doing that at all.

Dark Chocolate Hazelnut Bites

I've got a soft spot in my heart for first cookbooks.  It's not because my own first book  is coming out later this year, ok -not just because of that- but I love the earnest and unabashed enthusiasm that every writer put into their first project.  Cookbooks that come later in their career may perhaps be more polished, or even altogether far better, but they are often missing that je ne sais quoi that first books possess.

If you're a regular reader of Chez Pim, I'm sure you're a fan of my dear friend David Lebovitz's as well - you might even like him better, which is, of course, totally cool with me, just don't tell me!  And if you're a fan of his, you must also know that he's not only an über-blogger, but a prolific cookbook writer, with many successful books under his proverbial belt.  But the one that had my heart, and still does, is his first, Room for Dessert.  A number of recipes in that book have made their ways into my baking repertoire, and the book has coffee, butter, and molasses stains to prove that too.

The cookies I made last week is one of those recipes from this book.  He calls it Black and White Cookies, made with ground almond and bittersweet chocolate, rolled in powdered sugar.  These cookies are cute as buttons, and just about the same size too, absolutely the perfect size for just a bite or two of something bittersweet with your coffee.  I must also admit that I don't quite know how to leave a good recipe well enough alone, so I made mine with hazelnut instead of almond.  The effect was really quite lovely, sort of like Nutella cookies for grown-ups.

Crab feast and Thai seafood sauce

It took me a good long while before I got over my silly fear and tried dungeness crabs.  No, no I wasn't afraid of eating crabs.  I spent every summer of my childhood in Hua Hin on a diet composed almost entirely of crabs and prawns - in fact I'm rather surprised I haven't developed an exoskeleton by now. 

My fear was of pre-cooked crabs, actually.  In Thailand - ok, perhaps not the entire country but at least my family - we never ate dead crabs.  No, we don't eat crabs while they are alive - I only meant we don't eat crabs that had been dead before they were cooked.  If you go to wet markets in Thailand, you won't find a lot of dead crabs for sale.  You will, on the other hand, find crates of still alive (and sometimes crawling) crabs for shoppers to buy and take home to cook.  This is understandable, I suppose.  Dead crabs deteriorate quickly in the tropical heat, by the time you get them home their flesh have broken down into nothing but fishy, smelly mush - we say it's "gone back to sea" in Thai. 

This proved a bit of a predicament for my buddhist "kitchen mother" (that's how household cooks are referred to in Thai).  I still remember her sitting on the floor over a wooden chopping board with an ill-fated crab on top, her eyes closed, one hand in a half namaste while the other holding a sharp cleaver high over her head, her lips moving, quietly (and rapidly) reciting a pray begging the crab's forgiveness before quickly lowering the heavy cleaver to sever the crab in half.  Saturday Night Live can't make that skit up. 

Anyway, that's a rather long-winded way to explain why it took me a good many years to try one of the Bay Area's local specialties, the Dungeness crabs.  And now, when the season is high and the crabs sweet, they are one of my favorite things to eat, especially when dipped into spicy, garlickyThai seafood sauce.  Every time we have a crab feast, I make this sauce for myself and make sure there's drawn butter and even cocktail sauce for others.  But then everyone ends up stealing my sauce and I have to get back to the mortar and make more.  Luckily it's so easy, you hardly need a recipe.

Chocolate-caramel shortbread sandwiches

I've been in a bit of a mad search for the perfect sablé recipe.  I'm completely obsessed with the sandy French butter cookies from the north of France.  The best ones I've had came from a tiny bakery called Grain de Vanille in a little town named Cancale on the rugged Brittany coast.  That-little-bakery-that-could is small in size but not stature, as it is owned and operated by the Michelin-three-star chef Olivier Roellinger.  We haven't been back there in a couple of years, and I'm positively aching for some of those sablés (though chef Roellinger calls them Galettes de Cancale.) 

I'm not quite ready to share the sablé recipe yet, I've got a really good one now, but I'm not sure if it's the ultimate yet.  I'll share it when I get there.  Meanwhile, my mad search resulted in loads of perfectly delicious, buttery sablé cookies - albeit not quite the caliber of le Grain de Vanille yet - and I had to do something with them.  That's when this idea came to me.  Cookie sandwiches!  The obvious choice is chocolate ganache - who doesn't love chocolate ganache?  But I wanted to make something even more special.  Yes, and what about some gooey salted butter caramel - didn't the NY Times just claim that everyone now loves salty caramels?  (As for me, I've loved them for ages thank you very much!)

But filling cookie sandwiches with gooey, salty caramel turned out to be a bit of a design problem.  The caramel oozed out of the cookies before it had enough time to set.  So here's where the ganache came into play again.  I piped the ganache along the edges of the cookie, forming a levy so I could pour the caramel inside.  Topped with another butter piece of cookie, the sandwich is now ready to be devoured.  The caramel will still ooze out once bitten into, but by then I am beyond caring - and so will you, too. 

You can use just about any butter cookie or shortbread recipe you like.  If you need some place to start, Dorie Greenspan's "punitions", as interpreted by Deb of Smitten Kitchen, is a very good one. 

Pork Ragu

Sorry to have kept you waiting a while for this recipe.  I've just been a bit busy.  But better late than never, yes?  So, the ragu I made to go with my heretic pasta the other night was made with pork, because, as I said before, why offend only one religion when you can do three at once.  Ha.

The recipe came from Paul Bertoli's amazing book, Cooking by Hand.  This is not a book for the faint of heart, I should warn you.  The Ragù alla Bolognese recipe alone is over 1,500 words--but who am I to complain about long winded treatise on a traditional dish, you've seen my Pad Thai recipe, right?

The recipe calls for beef, ground chuck, skirt, or hanger steak to be precise, but I made it with ground pork butt instead, because my friend Beccy doesn't eat beef.  (Yeah, you can choose your friends but you sure can't choose what they eat!)

So, here's my slightly bastardized version of Paul Bertoli's Ragù alla Bolognese.  Hey, if you want the real thing you could always go buy the book.

Pasta with Pork Ragu; or how to piss off two gods with one bowl, Part I

After the holidays indulgences, I'm sure I'm not the only one craving something homey and comforting.  And after all the religious pomp and circumstances we were exposed to -voluntarily or not- during that time, I guess I'm also not the only one with a hankering for a little rebellion.  That's when an idea struck me.  I knew just what I wanted to eat, Strozzapreti pasta.

Strozzapreti pasta is a traditional pasta shape from the Romagna region of Italy.  The Italian name is literally priest-chokers in English.  Legend has it that this particular shape, sort of resembling a short, twisted bit of rope, signified a religious rebellion in the region long suffered under Papal rule (from the 13th all the way to 19th century).  Romagna housewives would cook this pasta for the local priests, in hope that they would choke to death as they scoffed it down greedily.  A heretic pasta for my very own post-holidays rebellion, how perfect!  To go with this pasta I made a ragu.  You don't have to be Italian to find ragu homey, yes?  This time my ragu would be made of pork, because why offend only one religion when you can easily do two (or three, actually)? 

The Thai paradox: or, how Thai fried bananas keep you thin

Everyone's always talking about the French Paradox.  You know, the one about how the French eat all that fatty stuff, cheese, pasttries, and drink loads of wine but stay healthier than most Americans.  Well, there's another paradox we should all be pondering.  We should call it the Thai paradox.  Oh, no, I'm not talking about the protesters occupying both of Bangkok's international airports, simultaneously apologizing to stranded passengers for causing them "troubles" and hunkering down for the long haul, the country and her precarious economy be damned.  That's not so much a paradox as children throwing a gigantic tantrum.  I'm also not talking about the one where the "democratically elected" ruling parties insisted on nominating the brother-in-law of the dude they had just thrown out of the country for corruption (and myriads of other unmentionable crimes, be they real or imagined) knowing full well that it would just exacerbate the tensions.  And so it did.  And so here we are.  A stand-off of epic proportion, the "final battle" as they are calling it.  How tremendously sad.

No, no, I don't want to think of any of that.  I'd rather think about Thailand at her much happier times, about her much more precious assets than those supposedly stolen by the ousted PM Thaksin.  Yes, I'm thinking about the food, that intricate, delicate, and at times deliciously puzzling cuisine that is Thai food, the main cultural asset for which, I fervently hope, the tourists will return after this mess is over so they could see, feel, and experience the real face of my Thailand.

Let's get back to the paradox in question, shall we?  You must be wondering what it could be.  Well, if you've been to Thailand, I'm sure you've seen all that deep-fried foods we eat.  It seems if we can toss just about anything in a little batter and fry that baby we're happy to eat it.  Dip it in a sweet sauce or a spicy one.  Eat it wrapped in a fresh leaf of lettuce or by its own lonesome self.  Politely eat it off a plate or conveniently and unceremoniously dump 'em in a little paper bag for the road.  Yes, just about every snack-y street food-y stuff you get in Bangkok is deep fried.  Yet, look around Bangkok, you'd be hard pressed to find an obese Thai person.  We are a nation of people with the metabolism of a hummingbird.  Don't hate us because we're beautiful, we say: hate us because we can polish off this whole bag of deep-fried bananas and still be thinner than one of your thighs.  Ok, ok, I'm just kidding.  Well, half kidding. 

And, now, apropos of - not so much nothing as - a very bad joke, here I give you the recipe for Thai fried bananas, Kluey Todd, as we say on the streets of Bangkok.