Spotch!

This week marks the 10th anniversary of the first recipe I ever posted on the Web. I was playing with the new toy; I didn't post another recipe until starting this blog this year.

The Spotch was served (probably invented) at Pepper's Family Restaurant in Alice Springs, Australia. This place has been closed for over 15 years, so I may be the only person in the world who makes it now. It was their one vegetarian entree -- which is one more than most restaurants in Australia's Northern Territory (which is Australia's Texas) had in the late 80's.

Instead of putting the recipe here, I will give you the archaeological thrill of seeing the page exactly the way it appeared in 1995, modulo a few changes which are not my fault; the html is identical (but modern browsers now seem to make the background white instead of grey by default).

The Original Spotch Page

Somehow, some folks in the network security department at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center stumbled on this page back in '95 or '96 and thought the word "spotch" was just the funniest thing ever. It became a sort of buzzword for them, I was later told. One of the members of that department eventually named his consultancy after it. This lives on:

http://www.spotch.com/

Bon appetit and joyeux anniversaire!

beyond pathetique

I just got back from France and have virtually nothing to food blog about. I undertook the trip in a cloud of resentment, having traveled so much recently that what I really wanted was to stay at home and collect my wits and clean my house and cook for my friends. The resentment was so great that I decided to leave home Saturday, give my talk on Monday and return on Tuesday, and I made no plans for where to eat in Toulouse.

The last bit was not just resentment, it was also due to a well-founded trust that you tend to eat well in France just by walking into moderately likely-looking places. It hasn't failed before, but it failed rather consistently this time around. None of my meals were terrible, but none were inspiring. In my obligatory cassoulet the sausage was hot but the beans were not, and that sort of set the tone. Missing a connecting flight and getting stranded in Paris for a day pissed me off at first, but I played tourist until I settled into a more "c'est la vie" frame of mind.

Things I learned:

"French Pastry" is almost impossible to find in Toulouse

It is easier to find in Paris, but can be stale and uninspiring if you get it at random (and it is called "Viennoiserie" -- maybe what I should really do is visit Vienna).

Middle Eastern (or North African? Have we established whether I can say "Levantine" without it being a slur?) pastry is, on the other hand, fantastic, and seems to have all been made by the same factory whatever shop you buy it in.

Never let the chef ruin a perfectly good gazpacho by putting olive tapenade in the bottom of it, and never stir the thing that someone put in the bottom of your soup into it before tasting it first.

NoCal bread is still better.

Best things I ate:

The Levantine pastries

Slice of custard pie with prunes in it for breakfast with coffee

Things I brought back:

Can of confit du canard (for my own upcoming cassoulet or choucroute)

Bottle of an aperitif made of wine, armagnac, and sugar. The bottle was kind of old-fashioned and small-producery looking, but I'm sure it's all marketing. Armagnac, in case you were wondering, is made from grapes, like cognac, not from prunes. I once had this argument with a very confident Frenchman who maintained the opposite, but he was wrong. This trip I think I figured out why he thought that: they often bottle prunes in Armagnac.

____________________

On my way back from the airport, at 11pm, I stopped in Mountain View on Castro Street hoping to find an open restaurant and craving Chinese food. The place I found still open was amazing, and I had lamb and fish soup with preserved vegetables (marvelous), Szechuan spiced cold rice jelly (fiery and numbing), and something called "'A' vegetable" which I got by asking for "a vegetable". Apparently the vegetable looks like a letter "A" before you slice it up. It was green and crisp and garlicky and delicious.

There's no place like home.

The Fungal Savor of Old Europe

In Northern California in 2005 there's really nothing in the whole wide food world you can't get, and I love that. As much as I adored eating my way across the island of Singapore, I probably had nothing there that I couldn't have gotten (with much more effort) here.

The same goes for Europe, I think. But there are two items which I've been bringing back from Europe because they sell them there in large quantities of good quality at reasonable prices and they go for a zillion dollars a gram here: dried porcini mushrooms and truffle-flavored olive oil. I find the flavors of the two similar, and much richer than white, crimini, or portabello mushrooms. I have seen these things going here for about 100 times what they cost in Europe. At Andronico's the oil came in the sort of bottle you get liquor in on an airline for almost $20. In Italy it's in a liter bottle, just like regular olive oil, for just a couple of euros more.

What ever happened to arbitrage?

BUT: I finally found a reasonable local supply of the oil after searching a dozen grocery stores, and it was in Santa Cruz, believe it or not, not Berkeley: Mantova Grand Aroma "Truffle Delight", available at New Leaf markets. Trouble is, they seem to have two factories, or something: some bottles have a darker, greener oil which tastes nice and truffly, while others have a light golden oil which just tastes a little stale. The one portrayed in the photo is the bad kind! Now all I have to carry are the dried mushrooms, which are easier (and safer!) to schlep.

SALAD OF MACHE WITH TRUFFLE OIL AND SALT

Mache ("lambs lettuce")
Drizzle of truffle-flavored olive oil
Salt

Toss.

As someone supposedly once said to Alice Waters, "That's not cooking, that's shopping." I guess a little vinegar and freshly-ground pepper -- which I normally put on anything vaguely like a salad -- couldn't hurt, but try it without first. Then you can enjoy it with a nice wine without worrying about the vinegar (eating it out of big wooden bowls and thanking God for it, of course).

WARM POTATO SALAD WITH FRISEE AND BACON

I had a frisee and bacon salad in some restaurant which I loved; and I've always loved warm potato salad; and it turns out they're great mixed together and spiked with our Ingredient of the Day.

Small boiling potatoes
Frisee lettuce
Bacon
Scallions
Parsley
Truffle-flavored olive oil
White or white-wine vinegar
Salt, freshly ground black pepper

Fry bacon until very crisp, and crumble. Cut potatoes into halves or quarters (depending on size), keeping skin, and boil until tender but not falling apart*. Dice parsley and scallions (use both white and green parts, and cut very thin). Mix oil, vinegar, salt and pepper in a bowl. Toss potatoes, bacon, scallion and parsley with 1/2 the dressing and the frisee with the other half. Serve the potato mixture on a bed of the frisee (if you mix it all together, like I did, the potato starch rather unattractively coats the greens).

*The Mantova site above says their oil is "a superlative enhancement for mush potatoes", but if you make mush potatoes, throw them out and start over.

once in a while

I cook so seldom that I'd better make it interesting every time or this blog is going to degenerate into a series of restaurant reviews.

I'm at IRK's. Goodwin the neurotic orange cat is in a sunbeam at my feet. Last night I said "let me cook"; to get a sense of the dread this must inspire, take a look at David Jaggard's hilarious description of the production of Skip's Famous Spaghetti.

The menu:

TILIPIA AND ZUCCHINI WITH PIQUANT SAUCE

2 lb tilipia filets
6 zucchini
Salt, pepper, oil spray

Sauce:
4 roma tomatoes
6 cloves garlic
1 cup white wine
2 tablespoons capers
1 handful chopped fresh marjoram
(or substitute fresh oregano -- I only got
marjoram because I couldn't find o., but
it was good)
Salt, pepper

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Slice zucchini lengthwise and arrange on one baking tray using oil spray on both sides; arrange fish on the other likewise. Salt and pepper both. Dice tomatoes and mince garlic, set to simmer with wine and capers and salt and pepper. Give zucchini a 10-minute head start over the fish in the oven; I think both were done once the fish had been in 10 or 15 minutes (better check it frequently). Throw the marjoram into the sauce to heat just before serving. Arrange a fish filet and several zucchini strips on a plate and spoon sauce over both. I never noticed, but Rich says tilipia has the "bottom-feeder" taste of catfish. I don't mind it, but use any mild fish you like. Farmed tilipia is sustainable and environmentally friendly. And cheap.



PASTA WITH POTATO AND FONTINA

Something like this used to be served in several Italian restaurants in the Bay Area that seemed to share an executive chef and most of their menu, even though they all had different names. Use real, intensely flavored Italian Fontina cheese (Fontina Val d'Aosta). I'm not usually a quality nut, so you can believe me when I say something like that.

1 lb orecchiette or small shell pasta
3 medium russett potatoes
2/3 lb (approx) Fontina Val d'Aosta
1 large yellow onion
4 tbsp truffle-flavored olive oil,
if you have it (a rant on this is coming up soon)
Salt and pepper

Peel the potatoes, dice to a size between about 1/4 and 1/2", and boil until just about edible but still firm. Boil the pasta until al dente (but also ready to eat). Grate the cheese. Mince the onion quite fine and sautee in 1 tbsp of the oil. Toss all the ingredients together (including 2 tbsp of the oil), oil a large baking dish with a rounded bottom, if you have one, using the last of the oil, and bake in this dish (covered) for about 45 minutes. What's supposed to happen is that much of the Fontina melts down to the bottom of the pan and forms a nice brown crust down there. That's more likely to happen if you use more cheese than I called for here. My version isn't as oily and cheesy as the restaurants' version. A ceramic-lined Le Creuset casserole dish worked really well. I started prepping for the other dish after I put this in the oven, and the timing worked pretty well.

Dessert:

HOT CHOCOLATE WITH MEYER LEMON

1/2 cup powdered chocolate or cocoa (unsweetened) and 1/2 cup sugar
OR 1 cup sweetened powdered chocolate or cocoa
2 cups boiling water
1/4 cup meyer lemon juice
OR 1/8 cup lemon juice plus 1/8 cup valencia orange juice

Whisk ingredients together and serve (serves 4). When I was a kid I used to squeeze a lemon over chocolate ice cream. The rivulets of juice freeze.

the black pearl

The Black Pearl, from Mama's Fish House:

how to roast a chicken

This is the real thing -- step by step, how to roast a chicken deliciously, humorously, and above all: safely. From my mother -- and fun to read even if you have absolutely no intention of roasting a chicken. So read it.

from the great big web

Recipies for laughing, not for eating, from David Jaggard's Quorum of One:
http://mapage.noos.fr/qoo/Quorum59.htm

Brightly colored lures

Modulo the passionfruit mochi, Maui was not expected to be a food destination. Particularly not the trip to Hana. But our guidebooks told us about a fairly fancy place near the start of the Hana Highway called Mama's Fish House, so we decided to stop for lunch. What I didn't expect was how breathtaking the decor would be (or the prices). It was treading a 3-way line between Chez Panisse hypertasteful neo-deco, tropical tacky, and truly wacky and creative. The sidewalk going up to it is done in concrete in the Escher lizard tiling. Then you walk through a living arcade of vines. The interior had all kinds of canework and beautiful polished wood and batik tablecloths in royal and aqua blue, the exact colors of the Pacific out the open window. Sparrows flew through the restaurant, and one sat on the chair opposite the single diner at the table next to us.

The menu took ingredient specificity to an all time high. If Alice can tell you where the beets were grown, why can't Mama tell you who caught the fish? Yes, each fish entree described who caught the fish -- in one case, they gave the name of the ship instead of the fisherman: "Caught from the 'Sea Prince' trolling brightly colored lures." The coffees (although we didn't have any) also bore the names of the (local) farmers, and would have been brewed at our table.

Those who know me may believe it or not, but it was my mother, not I, who got the fish entree smothered in sauteed fruit salad (apples and bananas-sorry-Rich). We both had a delicious ginger consomee with a little mahi fishcake in the middle of it to start, and my father had a seafood gazpacho (which is very close to a cocktail, and even came in a martini glass). For the main dish, my father and I had "opah" (a very tasty fish, I don't know if I've had it before) with (only slightly) caramelized onions, diced tomatoes, and a chili/soy glaze. It came with a very light napa-cabbage coleslaw and a cute side of jasmine rice in a banana-leaf cone (although there wasn't any sauce for it to soak up). For dessert, my mother had a mango cheesecake and my father and I had the "black pearl" (picture coming soon), a round chocolate mousse in an "oyster shell" of cookie shells. It had a little lilikoi (passionfruit) cream in the middle that, like my mochi, was too faint in flavor. There was a drizzle of nicely sharp, concentrated passionfruit coulis around the edge though. The dessert was only really striking when you managed to get some of the mousse and coulis in the same bite. Which proves

  The worst lilikoi-nviction, while the best
  Are full of passionfruit intensity.
  [Wrong blog?]

My mother bought one of the tablecloths to take home. It was about the price of an entree.

We picked up a couple of fresh lilikoi (yummy) at a roadside stand run on the honor system, just like The Grocer's Daughter described. It also had bags of macadamias in their shells from Jim Nabors' nearby farm (every wonder what happened to him?) We also bought a bag of those but rapidly returned them to the stand when ants came out of the bag and launched an assault on my mother.

The chichi dango (coconut mochi) are cooling. Some of you may even get to try them.