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Spring, Edible Edition

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Despite the grey skies and the steady drizzle, I would not be stopped from eating spring even if I couldn’t exactly enjoy it yet. Once those bundles of just-picked Maryland asparagus and (not exactly local but close enough) North Carolina strawberries were spotted, all inclement weather was forgotten and the market scores were hauled home for a feast to celebrate the season.

Though I had been unable to really strategize as I dodged rain drops and chatted with my favorite vendors, once home with a bag of fresh veggies and eggs, a Portobello and Asparagus Quiche seemed the way to go. The bright bunch of asparagus was blanched and the tops nipped off before slicing up the rest. The spring onions and the portobello mushrooms were sauteed in a bit of oil and butter, tossed with thyme, mixed with salt and pepper, and left to cool on the back burner. And I went back to my standby savory pastry crust because I love how it puffs up around the edges of the plate.

After a freeze and a 15 minute pre-bake of the crust at 450F, I beat 5 eggs with a scant cup of whole milk and a half cup of roughly grated Parmesan (the only cheese in the house, though the combo proved to be quite tasty). Mixed in the cooled veggies and poured it all into the shell. Topped it off with the asparagus tips and popped it back into the oven, temp lowered to 325F. Mine took about 50 minutes to puff up and brown ever so slightly. It was delicious, and the sun even peeked out. Maybe it wanted a bite.

Though the strawberries could have been left well enough alone, I did have a stash of almond flour in the freezer and was making a pastry crust already, so whirling up a topping and popping it into the oven seemed like a perfectly reasonable way to finish this late afternoon lunch on a sweet note.

Post Prohibition

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The Baltimore kitchen is excited about mixology once again (not that it takes a great deal of cheerleading, mind you), and the internet has been kicking up all kinds of delicious sounding cocktails worth a try. (Check out Post Prohibition for more.) Plus, now that the temperature has risen to a degree suitable for evening porch-sitting, it seems like an especially good time to shelve my neat bourbon habit and break out the shakers.

The Franklin Mortgage and Investment Co. in Philly is a lovely establishment in which to enjoy a drink, and this post outlining the basics for their Ghost Hardware caught my eye in particular. Extra credit: it contained Aperol, a liqueur I had been reading about but had yet to sample, alongside one of my favorite gins.

In addition to the above, plus cucumber slices, lemon juice, salt, and bitters, the recipe calls for a 1/2 oz of demerara syrup (2:1 simple syrup made using demerara sugar). For me, this pushed things a bit too far into the sweet and syrupy; dialing that back a bit would result in a drink more to my taste, I suspect. However, though I am no fan of bitter Campari, I’ve discovered that the orange-y tang of Aperol and I get along just fine.

Anatomy of a Snack

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For the first time in a long while, I woke up this morning with no one expecting any kind of work out of me whatsoever. As a change of pace, I found a new book to read, announced to the cat that I was taking a vacation, poured some coffee, and plopped down on the couch.

All that relaxing eventually made me hungry, however, so I headed to the grocery for some fun, over-processed treat to fuel this day of slothfulness (as part of my vacation, I was keeping off the internet and out of the kitchen). Cruising down the aisles failed to produce anything tempting–plus, I realized halfway through my shopping adventure that it would be hard to eat and enjoy something made of things I could not pronounce while simultaneously reading a book about farming. I re-strategized, grabbed a couple potatoes, a jalapeño pepper, and a bunch of cilantro, and headed home to fry up the awesomest of hot afternoon snacks: Potato and Peanut Pawa.

This is a dish I rediscovered in World Food Cafe: Global Vegetarian Cooking (a too-short collection of amazing vegetarian recipes from exotic locales), but I first ate it in Nepal almost a decade ago. The woman I was living with would drop everything to whip up a batch for any late-afternoon guests who wandered in needing something substantial to nosh on. As far as timing went, this usually occurred while she was also in the middle of making dinner, and the fact that she would just reshuffle and squeeze in another pan on the two-burner stove amazed me. It also irked me somewhat, since these hungry stomachs interrupting things never seemed to belong to her friends but rather a group of dudes who came to have leisurely chats with her husband. I liked the snack a great deal, however, so I kept my opinions to myself and tried to help out.

The most interesting ingredient in this dish to me is the pawa, also called beaten or flattened rice. It doesn’t taste like much of anything on its own, but once fried up with the potatoes and peanuts, it sucks up the salt and oil flavors and becomes quite a tasty aspect to the mix while keeping the potatoes from clumping together.

Step-by-step photos and my variation on the recipe can be found here.

Blood, Bones & Butter: Lifestyles of the Overworked and Hungry

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Indeed, the adventure! The bad-assedness!

But you know that feeling you get when people ask who would play you in the movie version of your life? There was a tone to the entire book that made me suspicious, as if I was reading the dramatization of Hamilton’s lived history. I mean, it was an awesome read because of it, but it also felt like it had to be a bit of a lie. Or at least it was throwing up sign posts that it was committing sins of omission. I know in the end she notes a few details that were altered for narrative reasons, and obviously when you sit down to write a memoir, you pick and choose among the most interesting bits of your experience, but the two major emotional upheavals that seem to occur–whatever it was that turned her against her mother so bitterly (surely there is more to unpack there than gets mentioned) and the split with her long-time girlfriend who saw her through the opening of the restaurant–goes without much comment. It is what it is.

That said, what little she does say sticks with you, so maybe the gritty details are best left just out of the frame. There’s a passage in which she is about to marry Michele, the Italian man she’s been having an affair with, and the girlfriend is now gone, but she gives her the last word in a way, all the while braiding it in with the food without getting ridiculous about it:

The negroni is a short and perfect aperitivo made of equal parts bitter Campari, sweet vermouth, and floral gin over a couple of ice cubes with a small slice of fresh orange dropped in it to release its oils. That perfectly Italian presence, which sparks your appetite and brightens your mood, holds in balance the sweet and the bitter, which I can’t help but think of metaphorically, as the relationship with the non-threatening Italian continued even after the girlfriend, whom I had come to think of as the great love of my life, finally left, giving me and our many shared years the double bird, that very same double bird I had taught her to use as a parking and driving tactic when she first arrived in New York. She and I have never spoken since.

Blood, Bones & Butter: Opening a Restaurant

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The Three Points Kitchen crew launches its first book club this week with a bit of friendly conversation surrounding Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef
, a memoir by Prune‘s chef Gabrielle Hamilton.

To kick things off in style, we took a stab at getting a table at her restaurant (during the no-reservations brunch crush!) so that we might try out her much-praised offerings for ourselves. We had already dug around in her life through the book, so now it was time to pull up a chair and dig around in her kitchen.

We were prepared to endure a long wait outside the establishment, standing among Prune’s notoriously adoring fans. We were prepared to be rushed through our meal by an overworked staff hard hit by an ever-lengthening wait list. What we got, however, was nothing of the kind. We received a prompt, if somewhat over-cozy seating, great food, and killer Bloody Marys. Because we would certainly not be so gauche, we did not whip out our cameras and take pictures of our meals before digging in. Honestly, though, I so much enjoyed the spicy stewed chickpeas and tomatoes–served in a deep bowl with poached eggs and two thin strips of toasted-to-charred bread–that I hardly need a snapshot to remind me how much I want to eat it again.

When we arrived just 15 minutes before the hostess unlocked the front door, the line was already about twenty deep. Not too bad for an exceptionally sunny, not-a-cloud Sunday morning in New York, but my anxiety increased as the numbers grew. I watched them watch me eat through the huge front windows.

After reading Hamilton’s book, with her vivid descriptions of the heat and speed demands placed on those in the kitchen, it also felt like we were committing a kind of aggression against the employees. And yet Prune is a restaurant in New York City that is open for brunch. What were we supposed to do–stay home and give it its space? Still, in Blood, Bones, and Butter Hamilton  conveys the pressure everyone is cooking under in the fast rush of a multi-claused sentence:

The whole crew feels it–that tension before a fight. The customers lined up outside before we have even turned on the lights and had our family meal, the total knowledge of what is coming–the relentless, nonstop five-hour beating–and we practically huddle up, poised for the bell, we are scared even, saying in psyched but tense tones, “Here we go!” as Julie unlocks the door and they flood in, scraping the chairs, and that milk foamer on the espresso machine rages its monster roar, and we stand motionless in the kitchen, looking out onto the floor, waiting for the panic of tickets, tickets, tickets.

Just a few lines later she gets at the real psychological battle that lies just beneath this real-world onslaught:

No matter how well set up you are, how early you came in, how tight and awesome your mis en place is, there will be days, forces, events that just conspire to fuck you and the struggle to stay up–to not sink down into the blackest, meanest hole–to stay psychologically up and committed to the fight, is the hardest, by far, part of the day.

Between reading Hamilton’s memoir and finally also consuming Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, the primal lesson underlying each level of shock and terror they relate took me right back to my musical training. In the studio I studied in, the line went that if you could imagine pursuing any other career–accountant, hair stylist, doctor–then you should do that and leave your concert violinist dreams in the closet. But if you truly couldn’t do anything else with your life but play, well, then, here’s what you could be taught and god help you handle the rest. For every dinner party that has ended with the line, “Your cooking is fabulous. You should so open a restaurant!” and images of a place just as charming as Prune floating in my mind, I’m going to cling to that same lesson, picked up and processed in an earlier life.

Rebecca adds: One of the lessons learned from Kitchen Confidential is that brunch is a throwaway meal, no matter how popular. Eggs are nice, but they’re still eggs. Blood, Bones & Butter didn’t give me much added confidence, with Hamilton describing the brunch service in boxing terms, as she battles blood sugar drops with doses of orange juice, iced Ovaltine and a quart of icy Coke, taken at once, like a trainer squirting Gatorade over a fighter’s head in the corner:

During the eighth round, close to three o’clock, I get dizzy stupid. I don’t even know what I’m cooking. By which I mean, I know what each individual item in front of me is, but I don’t know what I’m cooking in the larger picture. Is this the eggs Benedict that picks up with the salmon omelette? Or is this the benny that picks up with the oatmeal and lamb sausage?. . . Five minutes in the life of a cooked egg, unlike a nicely resting piece of meat, is the difference between excellent and bullshit.

Nice to discover, then, that her Prune crew has the fight won. While I could argue that Molly’s poached eggs were cooked a bit hard, and that my sour cream and caraway omelette wasn’t done to the tender perfection Hamilton describes in an omelette demo given by legendary French chef André Soltner, the filling combination was a revelation. And the skewer of pickled baby turnip, capers, radish and Brussels sprout in my Bloody Mary (with lemon vodka) made me feel like I’d gotten a satisfactory serving of veggies.

Three Cubed: B&O Fresh Fruit Shortcake

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The Book: Dining on the B&O: Recipes and Sidelights from a Bygone Age

(2009, though the collection gathers recipes from instructions published decades earlier)

And now for a bite of dessert.

Kate conceptualized this Three Cubed cooking project as a way to expand our horizons and blow our minds, and so far it seems to be working! By forcing our spatulas a bit and getting us to try a few of the recipes we usually just skip over, we’re bound to be making things we have already decided won’t work out well or don’t meet our usual tastes, so there is a kind of odd dissonance at play in the kitchen during these experiments.

I had already been having an arms-length affair with my copy of Dining on the B&O. As I read through the special notes on everything from the salad dressings to the service style, I enjoyed imagining the staff in their efforts to pull decent dining out of a small, rocking and rolling kitchen (long before the microwaved chemistry we call travel dining today)–perhaps for Cary Grant, with his Gibson and his beautiful blonde, dining a la train car.

That all said, I never felt motivated to actually cook anything from it.

So this is exactly where the Three Points Baltimore branch decided to kick this project off. The B&O cookbook isn’t long, so I had to back up to page 127, where I was sad to see not only a dessert (we are not a dessert-eating household–birthday cakes and chocolate cookies are often, criminally, left to go stale on our countertops) but also one that required shortcakes. Images of spending hours producing dozens of cakes that no one would ever eat stomped on my enthusiasm somewhat, but I was committed to giving it a go.

Crisco was purchased (lard, it is suggested, produces a better flavor and I was sorely tempted to go all out in the name of nostalgia, but just couldn’t do it in the end). Once the measuring was actually in process, however, I realized that I was only going to end up with four petite biscuits and that portion of the production would take only about 10 minutes to assemble and 15 minutes to bake off. Plus, consisting of just a bit of fat, milk, flour, salt, and baking powder, the biscuits would end up a rather all-purpose addition to my general culinary skills, such as they are. I ate one plain as soon as they were out of the oven and had to resist a strong urge to eat all the rest, flaky and warm and temptingly sans sweet fruit.

Having no peaches or strawberries at hand, but a whole container of freshly cubed champagne mangoes in the fridge, I confess that I cheated on the fruit portion of this assignment. I whipped up some cream, assembled according the careful “chef’s notes” instruction as far as portion size was concerned (“tab” diners vs. a la carte changed the amount/price), snapped a few pics and called the resulting tower tasty. The only thing sweeter would have been to look out the window and see the station lights of some unknown city promising fresh adventure up ahead.