October 2011

Business first: If you haven't yet tossed your name in the ring to win the gorgeous giveaway basket of Tate's Bake Shop cookies and brownies, today is your last chance. Just visit this post and leave a comment by 12pm. I will announce the winner tomorrow.Happy Halloween! Or All Hallow's Eve, if you will. Tomorrow is the Day of the Dead, the traditional holiday for celebrating friends and family who have died. It's a big deal in Mexico, with elaborate picnics transported right to the grave sites featuring favorite foods of the deceased. It's sort of like a tailgate party, but without the football. In honor of this occasion, I offer you a recipe for one of my most beloved dishes, typical of the Mexican cooking I ate growing up. I wonder who will bring it to my gravesite when I'm gone...
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I think I told you last year that Halloween was always a rather conflicted holiday for me as a child. It was my mother's birthday, and I felt very torn between wanting to stay and celebrate with her and itching to get out there with my pillowcase to haul in as many Sugarbabies and Milky Ways as possible. As you can see from the photo above, I did not hesitate to give in to my baser desires. (It appears my old friend and I both opted for the hobo route that year. She was probably looking for any excuse to dress up like a man, and I seem to have been working out some "cigar" issues of my own.)At that time, I had no qualms about scarfing down my ill-gotten gains, and my parents, usually sticklers for good nutrition, were strangely (but luckily) not among those who sorted through their child's stash leaving behind only those stupid little boxes of raisins we all resented. But now I cringe at the thought of the veritable rivers of high-fructose corn syrup, and am sad that homemade treats are frowned upon as Halloween giveaways. (The old razor-blade in the apple, remember?) Still, I'm going to offer you some options to that ubiquitous candy jar that seems to show up around this time of year and stay more or less replenished throughout the coming few months. Treats? For sure. But a few tricks to make them just a little healthier.
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Don't get your knickers in a twist, I'm not giving you a recipe to prepare strange and frightening innards. Not that I wouldn't! But no, this is considerably more tame. Although I hope it make take you out of your comfort zone as far as baked goods go. Why? Because it's made with a lot of buckwheat flour and that can have scary health-food store connotations. Trust me, you don't need to be wearing Birkenstocks to go for this delicious cake. It's actually inspired by an incredible muffin from Peels that I've enjoyed on several occasions. The pastry chef there, Shuna Fish Lydon, really rocks, as you can see by her blog, not to mention her addictive graham crackers, brown butter rice krispie cubes and other tweaked-homestyle treats. I've lauded her skills before.
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If any cookie can be said to have a cult, it would be Tate's. G was an early convert, after discovering them during his summers in the Hamptons. The original Tate's Bake Shop opened its celadon-green doors more than 20 years ago in Southampton. Founder Kathleen King eventually capitulated to the near-hysterical demand for her insanely crisp and addictive chocolate chip cookies (and other divine baked goods), and they can now be found at select, discriminating retail venues, as well as the brand's online store. Through a coincidence that I prefer to think of as destiny, I wound up practicing yoga with someone who works with Tate's and, learning of G's love of the cookies and sad intolerance of gluten, he very generously sent us a large box of their gluten-free products! Frankly, we did not have high hopes. Gluten-free versions of things so very rarely live up to the originals. But these? Just as good. No less than a miracle.
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I heard a rumor we are expecting snow showers next week—can you imagine?! An impending hard frost inspired G to bring in a huge batch of green tomatoes from the garden, the last ones clinging to the now-scraggly vines. Initially, I was a tad exasperated. But then I remembered to be grateful. Not to go all Pollyanna on you, but it's an interesting challenge to turn everything into a positive. The old lemons into lemonade philosophy. Not that a bumper crop of green tomatoes really has anything to do with that. And once they were turned into a tart-sweet, highly spiced chutney—thanks to inspiration from Winnie's Healthy Green Kitchen—I looked at those lovely jars stacked up and felt nothing if not happy. Like all the other animals at this time of year, I'm loading up the larder with stores for the winter.
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I opened the fridge and saw a jar of red chile puree, left over from our chile-fest the other weekend, and thought, instantly: enchiladas. Italians have their red sauce, their seminal tomato "gravy" that gets right to the heart of who they are as a people, a culture, and New Mexicans have their own version, a thick, smoky and deeply complex puree of toasted chiles that is their lifeblood. My mother poured hers from a can—routine at that time, but seems like sacrilege now. It was my grandmother who taught me to lightly toast the leathery, dried chiles in a hot skillet, then soak them before pureeing them in the blender. I've got my own methods now, but the whole process still connects me to the women who came before, the ones who made pink beans and sopaipillas and tamales with their own hands. This is the food of my people, and it tastes of courage, the earth and love.
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Torrential rains accompanied by great gusts of wind have brought many of the fall leaves cascading down in whirling colors. Now the birds are more visible, darting around, and you can see the squirrels—red and grey—perched on branches, nibbling pinecones like corn on the cob. The apples stand out like ornaments on the trees, tempting the deer, which are gorging themselves silly on the sweet fruit. We went back to Julia's ancient orchard to harvest a few more; I wish I knew what they are—2 green and 2 red, heirloom varieties for sure, each more delicious than the next. I decided to cook down their wonderful, winey essence into that most traditional of all preserves: apple butter. It's essentially just a highly concentrated form of apple sauce, produced by long, slow cooking of apples with cider or water to a point where the sugar in the apples caramelizes, turning the rich stew a deep brown. There's no actual butter involved in the product; the term refers only to the thick, soft consistency, and its use as a spread for breads.
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This year, I hope to bring you with me a little more often into the world of South Asian cooking. Having traveled in India, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Indonesia, I've been fortunate to experience many of these flavors in their countries of origin, but my real culinary knowledge of them I owe to Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, authors of two seminal—and well-thumbed—volumes: Hot Sour Salty Sweet and Mangoes & Curry Leaves. They track their recipes to the source, often cooking in humble homes alongside matriarchs of the region, and they really believe in simple authentic dishes. Mangoes & Curry Leaves features the cuisine of the Subcontinent—Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Maldives—so you can imagine the rich variety. I'm sharing a recipe for dhokla, a Gujarati specialty that's essentially a steamed bread. The recipe looks long, but it's really a very simple process, and the result is light and delicious (and gluten-free). So you don't become discouraged about trying these recipes, please find a source for South Asian ingredients. A market in Little India? An online resource? It's exciting to try something new, and a great way to vary both your diet and your repertoire.
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G's short film Aftershock was screened for an all-Chinese audience in Queens a couple of months back, and we took advantage of the occasion to have lunch and do a little shopping in the neighborhood. Before we moved upstate, we lived on the Bowery in Manhattan, on what was essentially the edge of Chinatown, but that does not prepare you for the immersive scene you find in Flushing. All of a sudden Chinese is the spoken language and your white face stands out, though no one gives you a second look. I hope I don't sound like too much of a rube when I say it feels like being in a foreign country. But this is a good thing! It was so exciting to be able to explore and discover just a few subway stops into this outer borough. We had read about Sky Foods, a newly opened 36,000-square-foot supermarket that stocks food from China, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, Korea, Japan, Indonesia, India and Singapore, so that was definitely on our list. And we decided to have lunch at Fu Run, a place specializing in Northeastern Chinese cuisine, most notably something called the "Muslim lamb chop."
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My first apartment in New York was on Avenue A and 3rd Street, at a time when the East Village was a rather seedy no-man's-land where you couldn't score much more than smack and a good bialy. There were no gourmet stores, no coffee bars, not even an ATM within blocks. But there was the original Two Boots pizza parlor and, for a short and very blissful time, a little joint called Southern Style where you could get some clean and tasty down-home cooking for cheap. To my knowledge, they never served fried green tomatoes but that alone is not enough to explain why I'd never eaten any before making them myself recently. Thanks to new restaurants like this, or this one, Southern food seems to be having quite the renaissance these days, so I'll probably end up sampling someone else's fried green tomatoes soon. But until that day, mine will have to set the standard.
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