Man With a Pan (5 page)

Slowly but surely, the whole family has emerged as able cooks. Last year, I flew home from some work I was doing the day after my birthday. I walked in to find that the two kids had cooked my favorite childhood dinner. That was their present.

Turns out cooking a meal is pretty good practice for just about any complex project. Planning ahead, anticipating mistakes, figuring out the little tricks that will have vast effects down the road, and getting to a result that can be described as beautiful is the basis of every decent meal but also the recipe for a good science-fair project, end-of-the-year term paper, or school play. Thomas Jefferson once said, “I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.” He could just as easily have been discussing a beautifully savory stew. Food, it turns out, is a gateway drug to aesthetics.

The meals we cook around here end up becoming some part of the discussion at dinner, but not in some supercilious or precious way. There are no foodies here, but there are people who like to cook and eat, so thoughts about how to make something better are appreciated.

It’s in the kitchen that you realize how collaborative all food is. Even when you’re alone, you’re communing with some other cook via the recipe itself, deconstructing some other person’s haiku written perhaps centuries ago. Some dishes—like an African American rice recipe prepared by a curious white boy—can only be cooked by adding a lot of honest history.

I have always enjoyed real barbecue. Slow-cooking a whole pig on a low-temp fire for twenty-four hours is magical not only because the meat tastes so good but because for a whole day, people can’t help but stop by and pitch in with the best of intentions and often amazing advice. After I read Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s
Near a Thousand Tables,
though, I learned that Nestor slow-cooks some beef barbecue in the
Odyssey.
That’s the other conversation that’s always happening with older dishes and ancient methods—one with the very roots of our being.

Mostly, though, the food in our kitchen happens in the present tense, in the here and now. Even when someone makes a mediocre dish—Lisa recently tried some fish thing in a tomato sauce and it ended up being merely OK—the criticisms aren’t so hard to hear. They come from a different place than most disapproval, a place where we all know it could have been us there at the stove. Sometimes the alchemy just doesn’t happen and you’re stuck with a lump of lead. But each critique also comes with the sense that food is a common experience that needs group participation. So criticism comes couched in more helpful terms, empathetic terms, because in the kitchen it’s easier to express dissent in the helpful language of cooking. Somehow in the kitchen, “This sucks” more often comes out as “Could have used more oregano in the sauce. What do you think?” So far, translating that more gracious conversational gambit to the other rooms of the house hasn’t always worked out. But if that style of interaction makes the leap, it will be leaping from the kitchen.

The kitchen teaches us that the only way to make something better is to tweak it, talk about it, find some new trick, edit and rewrite, and call upon one’s own ever-expanding experience. So often we’ve found that what’s needed to boost something from merely OK to truly beautiful is just some small touch that really changes the dynamic participation of all the other elements of the dish and elevates the entire sense of the meal. It might be some little thing born of experience long ago, something that happens in the moment of cooking and easily gets lost when translated into the stenography of a recipe. Like crispy celery leaves.

“When did our relationship move from the bedroom to the kitchen?”

Recipe File

Really Good Chicken

For years, chicken was a sometime thing for me. Maybe the meat was fully cooked. Maybe the skin was tasty. Maybe the meat was moist. Here’s what you get after half a lifetime of trial and error.

1. Get a kosher chicken or brine a nonkosher chicken. (A lot of folks now mock brining—ignore them. It’s a basic thing, like marinating lamb chops in red wine to get rid of the gamy odor.) Preheat the oven to 500°F. Meanwhile, pat the chicken dry. Then push ½ teaspoon of butter (or garlic butter or rosemary butter) under the skin over each breast. Then mash it around with a spoon.

2. Take a lemon or a lime. Stab a bunch of holes in it with a knife, all around.

3. Stick some rosemary in the holes if you can. If not, stuff the chicken cavity with a generous mix of rosemary, tarragon, and marjoram. And anything else you might like: garlic paste, chopped-up onions. (The idea is that once the high temperature hits the goods in the cavity, the lemon juice will evaporate, taking the flavors around it directly into the flesh of the bird; so whatever you stuff around the lemon or lime will become a slight flavoring in the meat.) Sew the cavity shut with butcher’s string; otherwise the flavors fly out into the oven.

4. Place the chicken on a roasting pan, breast side down, and put in the 500°F oven for 20 minutes.

5. Turn it over, breast side up, and return to 500°F oven for 10 minutes.

6. Lower the temperature to 350°F for 30 minutes (10 minutes longer if the bird is huge) or until that little white thing pops up (an instant-read thermometer inserted in the thigh should read 165°F).

7. Let cool for 10 minutes before attempting to slice.

On the Shelf

Near a Thousand Tables,
Felipe Fernández-Armesto. A wild man who’s a blast to read.

American Fried; Alice, Let’s Eat;
and
Third Helpings,
Calvin Trillin. No one can write about what we eat and somehow answer why we do better than Trillin.

The Joy of Cooking,
Irma Rombauer. My first cookbook, and I still use it. Her occasional remarks scattered among her endless recipes are genius. (“A pig resembles a saint in that he is more honored after death than during life.”)

IN THE TRENCHES

Glen Payne lives in Hermosa Beach, California. A forty-one-year-old high-yield debt trader, he’s out of the house by 4:00 a.m. each day to prepare for the opening of the markets in New York City. He’s back at home by 4:30 in the afternoon to cook for his wife and two daughters, ages five and one.

If you segment the two hemispheres of the brain, you might say one is creative and the other is analytic; I don’t know if that’s necessarily true, but just suppose it is. The work I do is extremely analytic. It’s an intense environment where you’re constantly negotiating and dealing with large sums of money. But in the kitchen I get to put together whatever my creativity can dream up.

I grew up on a fifteen-thousand-acre cattle ranch in New Mexico, and I inherited a love of eating and cooking from my mother and grandmother, who were constantly preparing food and planning for the appetites of the men (mostly me and my brothers) who worked on the ranch. From eating the unique cuisine of New Mexican chefs (definitely not your run-of-the-mill Mexican food, and worth the trip to New Mexico if you haven’t visited), I also developed a craving for all things spicy, which doesn’t work particularly well for either my wife or my kids, though I still try to incorporate spiciness into my day-to-day cooking.

My oldest daughter is one of the more finicky eaters I’ve ever found. After she was born, I eagerly awaited the day that she would start eating baby food, and I jumped right into making my own baby food. She rejected all of it. And that was just an early sign of what kind of eater she would be. Now that she’s older, she helps me cook, and I find that when she does, she tends to experiment more and tends to eat more. So if I can, I involve her in the meals.

Before kids, my wife worked, and we had schedules where I would shop for the meal as I came home. I’d stop at the local butcher or the local fish market, and I’d put an entire kind of multicourse meal together before my wife got home. Now that we’re parents, it’s more about rushing home to have food ready for the kids, and possibly even for us, if we’re going to eat together by 5:30 or 6:00 and do some other things around the house. One thing that’s changed with kids is that I do tend to do more cooking ahead of time. I definitely prepare something one day and then freeze it or maybe eat it over the course of a couple of days if I don’t freeze it.

If you’re just starting to cook, the best advice I have is to be patient, recognize that you’ll make mistakes, and know that not every dish will turn out the way you want it to. In fact, many of mine don’t turn out the way I want them to. So I keep experimenting. Most importantly, get involved with cooking if you want an alternative to the everyday meals that you’re going to see, whether they’re in restaurants or from the food counter at a grocery store or from a takeout. Do it because you want to get in touch with what you’re eating. Know what the ingredients are. Know what you’re putting into your body. Know why you’re doing it. Control the portions. Control the different things that go into it so that you yourself are creating the taste. At a very important level that I think we tend to forget in this society, you’re controlling your health through your food.

There’s something else about cooking that my wife and I have talked about between ourselves and with other friends who are of a similar age. The women were raised by moms who were coming out of the fifties and left the home—many for the first time in generations—to start working. These moms didn’t pass along to their daughters, who are my wife’s age, knowledge about cooking. So my wife and many of her friends never learned how to cook, and frankly they don’t have a passion for it.

I’m hoping that by involving my daughters in cooking, they’ll have a passion for preparation, they’ll have a passion for food in general, a passion for pairing foods with other foods, or foods with wines. And I just think food is so much about enjoyment of life. And hopefully, they pick that up. Maybe, if nothing else, they pick up an element of creativity from it.

Recipe File

Miso Cod

This recipe is adapted from one by Nobu Matsuhisa.

2 pounds black cod fillets (salmon can work as a substitute, but regular cod cannot)
1 cup sake
½ cup mirin
1½ cups miso paste (white)
2 tablespoons sugar

Wash and dry the cod fillets and cut into ½-pound portions.

In a small saucepan, bring the sake to a quick boil, then add the mirin and the miso paste until dissolved.

Add the sugar, stirring until dissolved.

Remove from the heat and allow to cool to room temperature (the refrigerator works well to speed up the cooling).

In a plastic bag, add the miso mixture to the cod, and allow to marinate for 2 hours minimum, up to 24 hours. If marinating longer than 2 hours, then put it in the refrigerator.

Preheat the oven to 425°F.

Remove the fish from the miso mixture and arrange the fish, skin side down, in a baking pan or dish, then place in the preheated oven for 12 to 15 min, until the top surface of the fish is a caramel brown and the fish begins to visibly flake (do not turn over or flip the fish while cooking).

Serve with coconut rice, garnished with sesame seeds.

New Mexico Chili and Beans

This recipe is adapted from the recipes of my mother and grandmother.

2 white onions, diced
5 cloves garlic, minced
2 cups pinto beans (sorted and soaked for at least 2 hours, or overnight, which is better)
1 russet potato, peeled and quartered
2 pounds ground turkey (or ground pork or beef)
2 tablespoons red New Mexico chili, ground or powder (see note)
1 16-oz can stewed tomatoes
½ cup flour

Sauté the onion and two cloves of the chopped garlic in a sauce pot, preferably cast iron, sufficiently large to hold the beans and their liquid.

After the onions become translucent (about 10 minutes), add the beans and the potatoes (which, I’ve been told, help to reduce intestinal gas) and 4 cups of water, or enough to cover the beans.

Bring to a rapid boil and then reduce to a simmer until beans are soft, about 2 hours.

Meanwhile, in another stove-top pot—also ideally cast iron—sauté the remaining onion and garlic until the onion turns translucent.

Add the ground turkey and continue to cook until it browns thoroughly.

Mix in the chili powder to coat the meat mixture thoroughly.

Add the tomatoes and 4 cups of water, bring to a boil, and then reduce to a simmer.

Once the chili mixture has simmered for about 1 hour, place the flour in a small sauté pan and heat it gradually, stirring constantly, until it browns (do not overcook).

Once the flour is a caramel-brown color, remove it from the heat and add it to the chili mixture 1 tablespoon at a time, until mixture is thickened.

To serve, place the beans in a bowl and then cover with the chili.

Note: New Mexico red chili powder can be found at Whole Foods in the spice area or at Web sites such as www.hatch-chile.com and www.nmchili.com. As an alternative, you can grind dried chili pods into a powder.