Celebrate, big or small

The kitchen is closed for the holidays. We’ll be back next week with a new recipe, something new on the boombox and more. In the meantime, a quick word about big and little celebrations of the season.

The house in the picture above is an example of big. It’s in our Logan Square neighborhood in Chicago. The people living here have done this for years now, and every year it gets more involved. It now includes sound and a small working ferris wheel. People come from all over to see it; in fact, I was only able to photograph it sans a steady stream of cars because I went late at night when it was about zero degrees out, with winds gusting to 50 miles an hour.

We call the place Harry Potter’s House. When it’s not festooned with more lights than a small town, you can see the two huge bronze dragons flanking the front door and the giant fountain out front covered with little birds and perhaps more dragons. Obviously the residents favor flamboyance and celebrating in a big way.

At the opposite end of the celebration spectrum is the small, beautiful poem below by American poet e.e. cummings. I remember first hearing it when I was a child. One of the many teachers who touch our lives more than we know at the time read it to our second or third grade class. Poems were of course supposed to rhyme, so I thought she was reading us a story.

I rediscovered it in college when I stumbled on cummings’ amazing poetry, thanks to another teacher. Only this person wasn’t really a teacher—he ran a small bookstore near school. He sold my girlfriend and me only a handful of books over our many visits, but he spent countless hours sitting and reading poetry to us.

I’m embarrassed to say I don’t remember either of these wonderful teachers’ names. But I will always remember the wonderful gifts they gave me. One of them was this poem.

little tree
little silent Christmas tree
you are so little
you are more like a flower
who found you in the green forest
and were you very sorry to come away?
see i will comfort you
because you smell so sweetly
i will kiss your cool bark
and hug you safe and tight
just as your mother would,
only don’t be afraid
look the spangles
that sleep all the year in a dark box
dreaming of being taken out and allowed to shine,
the balls the chains red and gold the fluffy threads,
put up your little arms
and i’ll give them all to you to hold
every finger shall have its ring
and there won’t be a single place dark or unhappy
then when you’re quite dressed
you’ll stand in the window for everyone to see
and how they’ll stare!
oh but you’ll be very proud
and my little sister and i will take hands
and looking up at our beautiful tree
we’ll dance and sing
“Noel Noel”

—e.e. cummings

Whatever holiday you celebrate and whether you celebrate it big or small, I hope it’s filled with wonderful moments and memorable gifts. I’ll see you next week. Or as we used to say in grade school and think ourselves the kings and queens of wit, “See you next year!”

The bayou meets Brazil: Cajun shrimp and rice

Brazilian rice teams up with spicy Cajun shrimp for a satisfying dinner on a cold night. Recipes below.

Wintry weather can put me into a stew-soup-chili-hearty-heavy-food rut. And while I do love all these foods [and jones for them in warm weather], when I saw a lively sautéed shrimp first course in the January issue of Food & Wine, it sounded like just the break I needed—something I could morph into a satisfying main course. Light, but big-flavored with a lively kick of lemon. And when I turned up the heat a bit with cayenne pepper, it got even more interesting.

Because it was intended as a first course, the recipe didn’t say what to serve with it. My first thought was pasta. After all, with the garlic, lemon juice and parsley, this Cajun-inspired dish that was meant to transport you to the Louisiana bayou was coming dangerously close to Italian for me. But then I remembered the wonderful Brazilian rice that was part of the Brazilian rice and beans Patricia over at Technicolor Kitchen had posted here at Blue Kitchen a while back. That sounded perfect.

And it is. The rice is a nice, deceptively simple balance for the spicy shrimp. With the sautéed onion, it brings much more to the party than rice alone, and its snowy whiteness is the perfect visual foil for the colorful shrimp dish.

Best of all, this whole meal comes together fairly quickly and easily. Add a salad and you’ve got a dinner that blends cultures beautifully and delivers more flavor and appeal than something this simple should be able to get away with. Continue reading “The bayou meets Brazil: Cajun shrimp and rice”

Mascarpone: Italian for easy, elegant desserts

Delicate, creamy mascarpone cheese is the starting point for countless impressive, easy-to-make desserts. Recipes below.

The holiday season is upon us, which means parties galore. Which means it’s also the season of the little black dress. Women know little black dresses as the simple little tricks in their closets that—with a few accessories—make them look elegant, festive and very, very lovely. Men know them as the things that make us lose our train of thought at parties, because they’re just that good. Marion has one that works like a charm, every time.

Well, when it comes to dinner parties, this is the little black dress of desserts. Simple, sophisticated, infinitely accessorizable. At its heart is mascarpone, a buttery rich double-cream or triple-cream dessert cheese from Italy. Made from cow’s milk and typically containing 60% to 75% milk fat, it is most often known as that intoxicatingly silky cream found in tiramisù.

A quick search on epicurious.com turns up more than 120 recipes for this versatile cheese. Still, they’re the first to admit that “this delicately flavored cheese needs little embellishment other than being topped with fruit.”

The recipe below is almost that simple. A half dozen ingredients thrown into a bowl and beaten with an electric mixer into mascarpone cream. And then a little fruit, nuts, chocolate or what have you to accessorize it. That’s it—no double boilers, no baking, no fuss. So easy for something that tastes so over-the-top decadent and dresses up so beautifully in the right setting. We used smallish vintage martini glasses. Teacups, mismatched or otherwise, could work just as well—especially with a couple of small, plainish, lemony cookies on each saucer. Obviously, the key here is scale. These desserts are served in small portions—serving dishes should be scaled appropriately.

An unexpected bonus for something so delicate tasting is how surprisingly sturdy mascarpone cream is. I mixed up a batch and then started experimenting with the fruit I was adding for one version. Then I fussed over one photo set-up until I decided it wouldn’t work and created a completely different one at the opposite end of the apartment. After the first shot, I decided it would be good to show two variations, and Marion helped me put together the second dessert. The whole time, the mascarpone cream was sitting out on the kitchen counter, no wilting, no running, no collapsing. And the first prepared dessert looked just as good in the last shot as it did in the first. In fact, we even had the remaining cream the next night with more fresh berries, and spending the night in the fridge [covered, of course] hadn’t affected it in the slightest. To me, this says you can whip up the mascarpone cream before company shows up and dress it up when you’re ready to serve dessert. If the kitchen’s particularly hot, you may want to keep it in the fridge.

This recipe is based on one found in Tastes of Italia, the same issue of the magazine that led to last week’s Rosemary Sage Chops. If I get a couple/few recipes out of an entire cookbook, I feel that I’ve gotten my money’s worth. Well, so far I’ve gotten two from one issue of a magazine—and I don’t think I’m done yet.

Continue reading “Mascarpone: Italian for easy, elegant desserts”

Tomato-free Italian: Rosemary sage chops

Fresh herbs and garlic give these pan-roasted chops a satisfying depth. Recipe below.

Italian chefs and home cooks are rightly renowned for their way with tomatoes. Others may well use the tomato—the French even dubbed it the pomme d’amour, or love apple, for its supposed aphrodisiacal powers—but the Italians own it.

Unfortunately, as a result, we sometimes forget that there’s a whole world of Italian cooking beyond insalate caprese and bolognese sauce. At least I do. So I was happy to stumble upon Tastes of Italia magazine recently. A number of recipes caught my eye in this issue. I’m sure my takes on more than a few of them will turn up here sooner or later. I’ll start with this one that had me thinking outside the tomato.

This recipe for juicy, quickly prepared chops calls on three other stalwarts of the Italian kitchen—garlic, sage and rosemary. I’ve already pronounced rosemary my favorite of the herb world, and as far as I’m concerned, just about any savory dish can be improved with the addition of garlic. Sage falls more into the category of good intentions for me, though. I always feel I should explore its pungent flavor more, but never quite get around to it. So when I saw this recipe that married it with garlic, rosemary and pork, I had to try it.

The chops are pan roasted, cooked in a covered skillet with the herbs, garlic and some olive oil. Covering the pan holds in moisture, keeping the chops from becoming too dry or tough. This is especially important with today’s pork production methods that create leaner meat; the reduction in fat may be good for our waistlines, but it also makes the meat more prone to drying out. Sometimes when I’m searing chops, I’ll add a little vermouth to the pan when I turn them and cover it to finish the cooking. This also introduces some moisture to the meat, along with a very subtle flavor note, thanks to vermouth’s fairly neutral taste. I may try that the next time I fix these chops as well. Continue reading “Tomato-free Italian: Rosemary sage chops”