h o m e * e c o n o m i c s

chicken en papillote with tomato, olives, and thyme

Two weeks ago tomorrow I moved into the apartment I had been trying to get renovated for more than a year. For a while I thought I should start a blog documenting that process, but I'm glad I didn't--it would have been gloomier than a fourteen-year-old's journal. One of the hardest things about waiting all that time was that most of my STUFF was in storage, and I love my stuff. It's good, I suppose, that I learned to live without the reassuring presence of my books, but boy, am I glad to have them back now.

I'm especially glad to have my cookbooks back (though I kept some essentials with me, and couldn't resist acquiring a few more). For the first dinner, I wanted to try out both the cooktop and the oven, so I chose recipes from two books I had particularly missed: a potato leek gratin from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, and a provencale chicken breast from Simple to Spectacular.

As so often happens, everything had to be tweaked--this time because the cooktop was not yet functional  (is still not functional, I might add). Curiously, Jean-Georges does his foil packets of chicken in a skillet on the cooktop; so I had to adjust and try it in the oven, which resulted in someone's suffering sweetly through a piece of half-raw chicken. I tried the recipe again this week, though (at a home where the cooktop works), and it was fan-tastic. I would have found Simple to Spectacular too intimidating (Jean-Georges? Spectacular? Caviar on the jacket?) to pick up, but happily a friend recommended it as a learn-to-cook text. The simple recipes (the ones I've tried, at least) really are fast, easy, and yummy, and the only reason I haven't tried the others is that they often call for ingredients that make me nervous.

chicken in a foil packet

Put two 18" square pieces of foil on top of each other. Smear about a tablespoon of olive oil in the middle. Layer on top of olive oil:
    2 thick slices of tomato
    2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts, about 6 oz. each
    salt and pepper
    1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese
    1 tsp. fresh thyme leaves
    10 pitted black olives (I sliced them up)
    2 branches of thyme
Seal the packet up good and tight by folding, but leave some room around the chicken. (There weren't really clear instructions for this, and I'm pretty sure I didn't do it right, since the packets didn't puff up. But the chicken was cooked and good). Put a skillet on high heat; after a minute, add a mere film of olive oil. Put packet in skillet, seam side up. After two minutes, it should puff up; then you cook it for 5 more minutes. Let sit for one minute off heat, and be sure to spoon juices out of packet when you plate.

As I said, my packet did not puff up, so I cooked it longer, and I could have cooked it longer still. Next time I will try folding the packet differently (and next time, I hope I get to do it in my own kitchen!).

the new house

always more to learn

Sara Dickerman just wrote a terrific piece for Slate in which she put five cookbooks—The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, The Joy of Cooking, The New Best Recipe, How to Cook Everything , and Marcella Says—to the test by having her culinarily challenged husband cook from them. As a staunch supporter of Mark Bittman, I was curious to see how the other cookbooks would measure up (and, weirdly enough, worried that his would not fare well enough); as someone whose cooking style varies significantly from her significant other’s, I liked the hints about how Sara Dickerman's kitchen works.

My devotion to Mark Bittman is especially puzzling since most of his dishes turn out to be bland, at least to my taste. I suppose his simplicity and straightforwardness are appealing, and he entered my consciousness at the peak of my veneration of the New York Times (fall of 2000, if you care, said veneration having suffered much in the intervening years). I recently decided that my lifelong aversion to The Joy of Cooking could be chalked up to its having become associated in my malleable young mind with The Joy of Sex, something I wanted no part of. Now that I’ve spent some time with The Joy of Cooking, my boyfriend’s go-to text, I actually like it quite a lot. I fear, however, that buying another information-packed book is out of the question, since I already find myself sitting in front of five cookbooks every time I want to do something basic I’ve never done before. The Fanny Farmer Cookbook always intrigued me, and it doesn’t anymore; I all but ignored Marcella Says when it came out, and now I’m eager to pick it up. As for The New Best Recipe—my admiration of the Cook’s Illustrated crew is unparalleled (though I agree with Dickerman about the insistent, deathly boringness of their prose), and that brings me to my sweetheart.

You see, my ideal cooking experience involves a precise recipe, perfect ingredients, and loads of time to devote to proper execution. It has taken me years to become comfortable enough to fiddle, even with things I’ve made over and over, and so the first time I make something, I want to follow good instructions (especially because I hate feeling that I’ve wasted time and money shopping for ingredients only to render them less than lovely). Andrew, on the other hand, is a confident improviser. Sometimes he wanders off and forgets something is on the stove, but for the most part he produces terrific food with only the barest attention and no anxiety at all. We have different, um, strengths: mine are conducive to spending meditative hours at the counter, while his lend themselves to getting dinner ready with a minimum of fuss. It's probably no coincidence that the books I lean on are about how to cook everything and the best recipe, while Andrew's reference presents itself as a work of joy. Sigh. I haven’t mastered my overcritical tendencies yet, but even I must admit that with my book learnin’ and his confidence, we have had more successes than failures.

m minus ? (where m stands for move-in)

Now that the initial rush of believing the apartment to be done has worn off, I am reverting to form and seeing what remains to be done more readily than what has been done already. Imagine my dismay, for instance, on one of the first miserably humid days of summer when I went to measure my window for an air conditioner and found that it had been painted shut, as in a chintzy rental.   That can be fixed, and other imperfections can be lived with (and even construed as charming, I keep telling myself), but  I don't know how the place will ever get clean. Today Andrew and I made a good stab at the bedroom--sweeping over and over--but dust has accumulated in the deep old grain of the wood. Then we swabbed the floor with gentle wood furniture polish, in hopes of getting up some of the dust and leaving the wood more supple. Above is the dinner we made to reward ourselves: salmon, wild spinach, and pan roasted potatoes. And here is Andrew at work on the floor--see how dusty the unmopped portion is.

bathroom

bathroom, originally uploaded by Robin Heather.

I can't believe I spent so much time planning what turns out to be a perfectly ordinary bathroom! Oh, well. It looks nice and plain, and in the world of bathroom fixtures it is difficult to find nice, plain things.

Move-in: T minus one week? Still waiting to hear back from the super.

scenes from a beautiful weekend

Here is a confession: I find the farmer's market kind of intimidating. We've been told that we're supposed to be eating perfect food perfectly in season, and buying it has become a sacrament, a chance for the soul-starved city dweller to commune with the natural order and to form meaningful relationships with the  people who truly understand it. But, being my shy self, I have yet to count among my friends someone whose acquaintance I made by asking him "what's that strange knobby thing, and how do I cook it?" Intimidated or not, I love to wander through the piles of vegetables and flowers, looking at the people and getting a little glowy if the sun is out. This weekend the sun was out, and thank goodness I had help for the dreaded lugging home of

a bunch of chamomile, a bunch of wild spinach (fuzzy and substantial, with pointed edges), a bag of regular spinach, a bag of apples (that turned out not to be great), some fingerling potatoes, a bag of mini yellow potatoes, a bunch of spring garlic, and a CHICKEN (I have bought eggs at the Greenmarket, but never chicken!)

I was especially excited about the spring garlic but then could not find anything to do with it--the books with suggestions must all be in storage (their liberation is near at hand, thank goodness). It had a great shock of leaves that left a fragrant trail as we walked from Union Square to the 1.

For dinner Saturday we had spinach salad with strawberries (from Gristede's, since there were none left at the market) and balsamic vinaigrette, roast chicken that had been stuffed with the spring garlic, and the fingerlings that sat beneath the chicken in the roasting pan.

Sunday I went crazy with leftovers, and we had buttermilk pancakes with sugared strawberries (which ended up tasting like strawberry shortcake...highly recommend, perhaps with some whipped cream!), chicken salad with homemade mayonnaise (so gratifying! I didn't even have a whisk, but it came together with a fork), beans and kale, and, because there was a sad plea for something chocolate, brownie tart from Barefoot in Paris. Having gone to the store expressly for brownie tart ingredients, I found upon my return that I had bought salted instead of unsalted butter. And I had the wrong sized pan, and I did not make the creme anglaise to go with (substituting whipped cream). Anyway--it was not my favorite chocolate dessert, but I would like to give it another go with better chocolate, the right butter, the right pan, and maybe without the instant coffee crystals, which taste I'm not at all sure I like.

Tonight I was absurdly pleased with my wealth of leftovers and enjoyed a gorgeous salad of spinach, chicken, bacon, roast potatoes, green beans, and mayonnaise. My favorite thing about making mayonnaise is feeling obliged to find things to eat it on!

chinese orange-flavored chicken

Deep frying at home is in my mind forever associated with lingering odors and spitting oil setting things on fire: a messy, dangerous proposition. I was therefore understandably reluctant to try the orange-flavored chicken from the May/June Cook's Illustrated. When my yearning for the new issue sent me back to the old one (first stop: chunky oatmeal cookies, not so exciting), I enlisted the Y to handle the boiling oil. Look how brave he is: short sleeves! The blue sunglasses are for protection, or maybe just to look awesome.

This turned out to be yet another Cook's Illustrated recipe whose complicatedness, thankfully, is more than matched by its deliciousness. I suppose it wasn't that complicated (chop stuff, make marinade, bread and fry chicken, reduce sauce), but it was time consuming. Having never deep fried anything myself, I was enthralled by the texture and taste we achieved--at home!: the chicken was dipped in egg white and then cornstarch, which left a perfectly crispy shell. We didn't even have an oil thermometer to make sure the oil was the Cook's mandated temperature, but it worked out perfectly. The Y and I resolved to attempt a sesame chicken variation once we had saved up enough energy to do it all again.

I was extraordinarily amused by the time and effort it took for us to produce a meal (however delicious) that looked exactly like...

...what everybody else in New York ordered for dinner that night and had delivered to his door in twenty minutes flat. The only delivery Chinese I've ever had that was even close to this good was the old sesame chicken from Y.Y. Doodle's, on a good night. Our sauce may look the same, but it was so aromatic and, um, saucy.

poached pears with chocolate sauce

In this Jacques Pepin dessert, pears are poached in sugar water, which is then reduced and mixed with chocolate to sauce the pears. Unfortunately I used the bittersweet chocolate I had on hand instead of unsweetened, so the sauce was a little too sweet. But it is good to remember how nice poached or roasted fruit is for dessert. I would have been just as happy (happier) with cream or nothing instead of even the chocolate sauce.

tuna with tapenade

THIS IS the tuna with tapenade that was Sunday night dinner about a month ago (!). A funny thing about this camera...the colors aren't true at all, but at least in this case, that seems to have improved matters rather than made them worse.

I can't remember whether this was from Fast Food My Way or Encore With Claudine, but it is the best Jacques Pepin recipe I have tried yet. You simply mince olives (Nicoise and oil-cured) and press them onto one side of the fish before cooking it on top of the stove. (We should have added anchovies to the tapenade, too, but I did not want to buy them). You finish the fish in the oven, but this left it rather dry--if I use such a thin piece again (just under an inch), I might skip the oven. I would not skip the bed of arugula, though. I'm usually not sold on that kind of thing, but in this case, the cool, peppery bed made the meaty tuna and olives all the tastier.

By the way, you will perhaps be amused to know that part of my original intent here was to show my grocery bill for each dish. This would help me comparison shop, and I think it's interesting. So far I have a big pile of receipts but have not broken anything out. I can tell you off the top of my head that fish is almost always so expensive as to be a very special dinner. Last week wild ("wild"?) salmon cost only $10/lb at Whole Foods, and I had to buy it; though on second thought, that's pretty expensive for Tuesday night dinner. In the new house maybe I'll start managing my receipts. Onward!