A Writer Afoot » food

Progress and a flat of basil

Barbara Samuel — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 21:18:12 +0000

Have been scarce finishing the new book, attending to the wedding of my younger son, and generally running from one urgent thing to the next. But I thought you’d like to know that the garden beds are going in this week! So excited. A couple of photos.

The winds finally took out the twenty-five year old fences in our neighborhood so we had to have those replaced. (The houses look much closer than they actually are, but you can see why we want to plant for more privacy.) This photo was taken this morning, by the way. A surprise snow storm struck overnight.

This is this afternoon, from the upstairs window, looking down on the mapped-out garden beds. You can see how desperately the sandy soil needs amending. Just out of the photo on the left is one of the best things about the yard, which is a tall, healthy, beautiful Ponderosa pine that will get its own box, so we can keep the desiccating needles out of the rest of the garden. That’s a whiskey barrel toward the back, about four feet from the fence, for size estimations:

This is a tomato plant, robust and nearing readiness for transplanting:

And here is a pretty flat of basil. I will have to give some away.

As I type this, there is snow coming down again, but spring can’t hide from us much longer.

Ramona’s Sunshine Fruit and Honey Bread

Barbara Samuel — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 01:16:15 +0000

(A recipe from How to Bake a Perfect Life. )

These are actual texts from my sister a few days ago:

Feb 5, 2011 7:13 pm
Making sunshine fruit and honey bread

Feb 6, 2011 12:36 pm
OMG OMG OMG. That bread is soooooo good I could prolly eat the whole thing!!!

Feb. 7, 2011 12:26 pm
I can’t stop eating this bread ! I feel like the guy in the window in Chocolat. LOL

———

I can’t promise you will like it as much as she does, but it’s one of my favorites, too. It would be an excellent offering at a book club.

RAMONA’S BOOK OF BREADS
Sunshine Fruit and Honey Bread

Sometimes a recipe is born from a moment, and this is the recipe that I came up with after my first night with Jonah. Filled with light and juice and tenderness, it is one of my favorite things. Try it with a cup of sweet chai.

2 cups all purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
½ tsp kosher salt
½ cup butter, softened
½ cup raw sugar
½ cup dark honey
½ tsp vanilla extract
½ tsp orange extract
2 tsp grated orange zest
2 eggs
1 cup raspberries, whole
1/3 cup slivered, toasted almonds

Juice of one orange, mixed with enough powdered sugar to make a thin glaze

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Grease a 9 x5 inch loaf pan

Whisk together dry ingredients. Cream butter, honey, and extracts and zest. Add eggs one at a time. Mix in the dry ingredients just until moist, then gently, gently fold in the raspberries and toasted almonds.

Bake for 55-60 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean.

Cool for 20 minutes, then tip bread out to a wire rack and cool thoroughly, then drizzle the top lightly with glaze.

Feasting and friendship in New Mexico

Barbara Samuel — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 17:23:41 +0000

It is a lusciously gloomy morning here in Colorado, and despite the long list of tasks that are calling me (the tamales, the wrapping of gifts, walking the dog), I find myself drawn here, to write. The subject almost doesn’t matter—the desire is simply to be here and put some words on the page, capture something.

Last week, my friend Heather and I went to Chimayo. It’s a tiny strip of settlement along a two lane highway leading into the mountains from Espanola. You may remember the mention of these places from The Lost Recipe for Happiness, and I will say that it was oddly disorienting to see again all the places that inspired the book—the elaborate descansos, some now lovingly decorated for Christmas, the arroyo that saved Elena from bleeding to death; the wide open field behind the Santuario where I imagined her companions bidding her farewell. It was like visiting another part of my life, a me I once was.

Heather and I were there to make vision boards, which is simply a poster-sized collection of words and images to represent goals and desires for the coming year. We wanted someplace quiet—and got it. The Rancho de Chimayo hacienda is an old inn, with the rooms built around an internal courtyard in traditional hacienda style. A friendly white cat with black patches on her ears and paws visited us. We had no television. No radio. And horror of horrors: my iPhone did not work. No texts. No phone calls. No compulsive checking of emails every ten minutes. It was wildly uncomfortable at first, and then we both grew into the quiet.

The first night, the only restaurants in town were already closed and the B&B had nothing, so we traveled back down the road to a convenience store where two tall blonds stood out like bright yellow lights among the small dark men. Sometimes I’ve felt slightly afraid in Espanola, but not that night. The clerk was friendly, and one of his customers joked with us about our purchases—bottles of water and a can of prepared tuna salad and guacamole chips. I had tucked away some good cheese and bottles of beer and Izze sodas for the trip, so we had those, too, and it was a decent supper. We cut out photos and started arranging our vision boards in the utter silence, and went to bed early.

In the morning, we both we ready to leap for more civilization. Breakfasts both mornings were very good, carried to our room on trays, with tiny oatmeal muffins and juice and pretty fruit the first day, a giant blueberry muffin and good yogurt the next.

That first morning visited the Santuario, which is one of only a handful of pilgrimage sites in North America. (You can read the story here.) It was only a few hundred yards up the road, and there we mulled spiritual things. I found small gifts for my Catholic son and friends who would appreciate the holy dirt. I shot photos and then spent a long quiet time in the chapel. I found Heather, who is the queen of animal charmers (and believe me, that takes some doing in my world) making friends with a dog and a horse.

And then, like the city women we are, we bolted for Santa Fe. Heather had never been and I was delighted to show her around, thinking we could eat at my favorite diner, The Plaza. First, we wandered around the La Fonda hotel, which is a very old, sprawling hotel with a beautiful restaurant in the middle. Heather asked if we were eating here, and I realized I’d never tried it—I always eat elsewhere in Santa Fe. “Another time,” I told her, and we headed for The Plaza.

To my dismay, it was closed under renovations. Not only was I disappointed that we couldn’t eat there, but even more that the restaurant I loved would not exactly be there the next time I visit. No more the kitschy little booths, the old diner style in red and turquoise, the spirit of Route 66 lingering in the old tiles on the floor. While I recognize things cannot always stay the same, I’m hoping that they’ll preserve the spirit of the old restaurant.

So we ended up at the La Fonda restaurant after all. We sat by the fountain and I shot photos of the handpainted window panes thatgive the room its unique beauty. Light floods into the room. The menu had some northern New Mexico dishes, but my eye was captured by a spinach tart, puff pastry over sweet potato puree and topped with spinach and goat cheese. It is an elegantly balanced dish, and I’m sure a person who likes beets would have found even that note charming. I left with the resolve to recreate the dish, and to have traditional northern New Mexico food at dinner.

We wandered the shops in the mild afternoon. I noticed again that Santa Fe is genuinely graying—far more people in their sixties than their twenties or thirties. I also remembered that love Santa Fe style architecture and decoration, the color and splashy details, the coexistence of buildings to earth and sky. I should live in a Santa Fe style house someday.

Back in Chimayo, we had an indifferent meal at the local restaurant. Nothing was terrible, but nothing was particularly interesting, either. Back in our room, we rigged up music through my iPad (and discovered we do not have the same tastes in music at all—since she likes mainly modern country and that might be the only form of music I don’t really know very well). In the morning we made a second visit to the Santuario. I talked with the old priest, a tiny very old man with a Catalan accent, who told me he was “95 years old, soon to be 100!” I bought Chimayo red chile, and a rosary made of turquoise and silver.

Our last meal was on our way home through Santa Fe to catch I-25, at Café Pasqual, and it was the best of the trip. A chile relleno that might be the best I’ve ever eaten, delicate and not overwhelmingly cheesey, and a black bean and roasted corn tamale, that inspired me to give this version a try. I don’t even like black beans, and have an aversion to corn in things, and it was marvelous. We took a picture to remember the day, and drove home in a blustery day, across the vast, empty landscape with its harsh mesas and faraway mountains, talking and talking and talking and talking, which is what one does on a road trip.

It was quite fine. We agreed we will find another place for this trek next year, and make our vision boards again together.

Postscript: my vision board was not quite finished, and I wasn’t quite sure what I was waiting for. It sat on a table in my family room for several days. During the eclipse on the solstice, I awakened at exactly 1:48 and went outside to discover the shadowed amber moon at full eclipse. I went inside, finished my vision board, and came back outside to see the bright white edge of blazing moon emerging from the shadows. Magical!

Do you love Santa Fe, too, or some other place you like to go eat? Do any of you set goals by using a vision board?

Potato Leek Soup

Barbara Samuel — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 22:02:36 +0000

It’s been awhile since we’ve had a recipe here. I made this over the weekend, in two steps. The first night, it was basic Potato Leek Soup, and frankly, a little bland. The next night, I tried to make it a little more interesting, and it was delicious. I’ll save you the boring part and get right to the better version.

Olive oil
2 large leeks, rinsed thoroughly and sliced
3 garlic cloves, chopped
2 shallots, diced
4-5 cups chicken broth
5 fist sized red potatoes, peeled and roughly cubed
20 peppercorns
2 bay leaves
1 tsp dried thyme
1 tsp dry mustard or 1 T Dijon mustard
1 tsp salt (or more)
1-2 cups milk (I like non-fat, but cream is traditional)

To top:

6 slices of crisp bacon, crumbled
3-4 green onions, washed and sliced thinly

Cover the bottom of a heavy, large pot with olive oil, heat to medium hot. Add leeks, garlic, and shallots, stir until tender. Add broth and potatoes and spices, and let simmer until potatoes are tender. Carefully pour mixture into a blender and puree until smooth, pour back into the pan and test for seasoning. (It will often need salt at this point, perhaps another bit of mustard.) Add milk or cream until the soup is the consistency you like, and let heat, but do not boil. Put a pat of butter in each bowl and add soup, then top with bacon and green onions.

Fresh local food…from my backyard

Barbara Samuel — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 03:01:54 +0000

Today, I harvested two handfuls of red potatoes from a black potato sack. I’ve never grown potatoes before, afraid of them for no reason I can really pinpoint, maybe just because they grow deep in the mysterious earth and you have to dig them up. How would I ever know when I should harvest them? What if I spent all that time growing them and they were rotten when I dug them?

But when we visited CR’s mother in the UK, she had potatoes growing in a soft-sided bag. The local garden club was having a contest and she was serenely certain to win over her neighbor Barbara (who tries not so show her aggravation with this serene certitude). Something about that little sack kindled my interest, and Gina gave me brand new bag of my own, along with a little flyer of instructions, to take back with me. It was late to start anything by the time I returned, late June, but I found some seed potatoes and followed instructions. They began to grow.

And grow. Every week, I gave CR the news to give to Gina: the plants were sturdy and strong, vigorous as we all know potatoes can be. I started too late to get much of anything, but a million strawberries and raspberries, but today it was time to harvest the potatoes. I marched to the back of the yard where the sturdy vine was growing, and stuck my hands in the dirt. Nothing. And then only a potato the size of a quarter.

Disappointment tugged my chest. I picked up the bag and upended it. And there, in the bottom of the bag were the potatoes. Tiny ones and medium size, and the size I would choose at the store. It made me laugh to see them all, so plain and vigorous and unmarred, their thin skins a color of pinkish red that I might have thought was dye if I spied it in the grocery store.

Fresh, local, organic. As fresh as you can get, from the ground to my table in less that twelve hours. We ate them with butter and salt, and they were as sweet and tender and perfect as any potato I’ve ever eaten. Next year, I’ll be planting more. Gina says they really should go in at Easter.

Mmm… garden.

Do you like to garden? What are your favorite food crops?

The Lost Art of Family Dinners

Barbara Samuel — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 04:59:49 +0000

Dinner in Suburbia by Make Less Noise

When I was a child, we ate dinner together nearly every night. I did not necessarily love the whole ritual, especially when my mother made hamburger pie, covered with mashed potatoes, or when I was in trouble for one thing or another (which was a lot), but I can see from this angle that it was a good thing.

Our kitchen was large and we ate there, gathered around the white melamine table with its painted edging of lacy gold leaves. We had assigned seats, mainly because my sister Merry is left-handed, but also because there was sometimes a scuffle over who landed the seat next to my dad. My parents pinned the ends, and I sat between my mother and my sister Cathy (who still jockeys to sit next to my father at all functions). My father would ask, “What was the highlight of YOUR day?” and we’d have to answer.

Supper was rarely anything fancy. Tacos and spaghetti and sometimes a Sunday roast beef, most every meal made from ground beef, which was affordable and stretched over six people. We did eat Hamburger Helper, which honestly didn’t seem that terrible to me, and jello with fruit, green beans from a can (I absolutely despised frozen vegetables) and applesauce from a jar, and sliced wheat bread with margarine to fill up whatever didn’t get full from the main meal. (Four growing teenagers can eat a lot!) When my father worked for awhile at a 7-Up bottling plant, he sometimes brought home six packs of Nehi, but we mostly drank Kool-Aid. (Hey, it was the ’70′s. Nobody had discovered cuisine, at least not in the suburbs.)

We talked, made conversation. Sometimes my father would ask us all to tell the highlight of our day, and we’d moan about it, but it was fun. We talked about everything, and if anyone had a problem, they stayed at the table after dinner to sort it out.

So naturally, when my own children came along, I also created a tradition of dinner at the table. American standbys had shifted a bit by then. Chicken and soups and Mexican food were my standbys, things that wouldn’t burn if I became distracted by my work. We drank milk and iced tea. Again, simple food on a simple rotation, the same 30 meals in endless rotation. In our house, we sat in the dining room with blue walls (light blue for a long time, then a bright, bold deep blue I loved madly), around a heavy wooden table someone gave us early in our marriage. The dogs were banished to the line on the other side of the door, and waited politely to finish. We talked about school, and I asked them sometimes to share the highlight of their day. Somebody would tell a joke. Someone would lodge a complaint.

But it was good.

There has been much made about some (flawed) studies of children and family dinners, and I’m not going to bother with statistics here. I’m an observer, not a social scientist; a curious writer, not a statistician. We don’t need statistics. Our gut knows that this is an important ritual. Time Magazine said it best in this article from 2006:

“There is something about a shared meal–not some holiday blowout, not once in a while but regularly, reliably–that anchors a family even on nights when the food is fast and the talk cheap and everyone has someplace else they’d rather be. And on those evenings when the mood is right and the family lingers, caught up in an idea or an argument explored in a shared safe place where no one is stupid or shy or ashamed, you get a glimpse of the power of this habit and why social scientists say such communion acts as a kind of vaccine, protecting kids from all manner of harm. Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1200760,00.html#ixzz0gEQfFb8l”

Yet, over and over we read that the family dinner is in decline. There are likely hundreds of reasons. Parents who work long hours to keep the mortgage paid, the decline in cooking skills, fast food, irregular schedules. I suspect, however, that we’ve simply fallen out of practice a bit.

In THE LOST RECIPE FOR HAPPINESS and THE SECRET OF EVERYTHING, family dinners end up playing a small but crucial part of the narrative. And I’m forced to admit that I believe in it, family dinner, believe that it has the power to cure all kinds of ills and problems. Not everything. Heaven knows family dinners didn’t keep me out of trouble as a rebellious (and obnoxious) teen. They did, however, give me a place to retreat, fall apart, even make reparation by showing up and behaving myself. “Pass the potatoes, please,” and “Does anyone want this last tortilla?” can go a long way to healing rifts.

Family dinners don’t have to look like they do on television. Maybe both mom and dad can’t be at the table. Maybe the family is mom and one child, or dad and his visiting children, or stepfamilies assembled in all their glorious and inglorious incarnations. Maybe it’s even grandpa bring home some chicken and biscuits from the local Kentucky Fried.

The important part is the regular-ish timing of it. It’s the setting of the table and the sitting down to a meal on plates, whether it came out of a bucket or an oven or is peanut butter sandwiches and a glass of milk. It’s the dumb requirements of conversation (What was the highlight of your day? What was one thing that happened today?) and the attempts to be present for each other, even if—as in the Time paragraph—everybody would rather be holed up in their rooms in front of the television.

So, those would be my rules for magical family dinners.

Same time every night
(If evenings don’t work, make family time at breakfast.)
Seven days a week.
Every family member is required to sit at the table unless they have to work (and parents should not use this as an excuse very often. Aim for a time that’s realistic.)
Everybody has to participate even if they think it’s silly.

Bonus points:
Prepare meals from scratch together
Offer a blessing from your tradition over the food before you begin
Aim for one really great meal every week, maybe Saturday evening, and follow with family games or movies.

Triple points for teenagers showing up. I shamelessly used bribery with mine, but you may be more squeamish.

Eat. Talk. Prosper.
—————–
Do you find it difficult to arrange family dinners? What gets in your way? What tricks have you found to help? Did your family eat together?

Pancake kisses, bacon hugs

Barbara Samuel — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 15:38:14 +0000

THE SECRET OF EVERYTHING is out today! To celebrate, a love song to breakfast.

PANCAKE KISSES, BACON HUGS

Why breakfast is the secret of everything

I suppose I should confess upfront that I am a morning person. I wake up cheery, chatty and at the very first fingers of sunlight creeping over the horizon. I know you find this annoying. I know you wish I’d stop humming under my breath as I crack eggs and start the coffee, but I can’t help it. I was born a singing lark. This does, however, offer benefits to all you blinking owls and sleepy headed in-betweens.

Once upon a time, I had a job working the breakfast shift at an upscale diner. It meant getting up at 4:30 am to creep around the dark of my teeny-tiny house so I wouldn’t wake my roommate. I dressed in my uniform with its plunging neckline (an unfortunate feature of many waitress uniforms of the early 80’s), and braided my Rapunzel hair. In the cold dark, I drove to work in my clunker, feeling—yes, I admit it–smug that I was awake before the rest of the world. Here and there, a light clicked on in a kitchen, but mostly, the world slept on. Porch lights glittered against the velvet blackness of mountains on the horizon, the air was fresh. All was newly reinvented, and it was mine.

At work, I dove into the bustle of getting the place ready for the doors to open. It smelled faintly of cleaning supplies from the night crew, of baking biscuits and potatoes grilling. Every morning, I fell in love all over again with the empty stage of tidy, waiting tables, with the clatter of cooks prepping, and the heat of flatware straight out of the dishwasher. We waitresses made pot after pot after pot of coffee, filled cream pitchers; wiped down syrup dispensers and set out glasses of ice to fill quickly with water. We drank coffee by the gallon ourselves, and snitched bacon when we could get away with it. It made me feel important to create a world of efficiency and nourishment for the hungry humans about to stumble in and beg for coffee.

This passion for breakfast arrived in a roundabout way, I must admit. My mother, who is a very good cook under many circumstances, was born an owl, and she finds early morning painful, especially when her lark child rose well before sunrise and was known to dust siblings with flour or lipstick or explore—well, never mind. It was early, that’s all.

Because she loved us, my mother did manage to get up and fix us breakfast. She believed in a hot breakfast, but cooking anything much would have been dangerous considering her eyes were barely open. So she made hot cereal. Endlessly. Malto-Meal and Ralston, Cream of Wheat and a colorless, gluey oatmeal I loathed with the considerable passion of a toddler foodie. Thankfully, she left us to our own devices once we made it to late grade school and we never had to choke down porridge again.

Not the best circumstances to fall in love with breakfast, I know. The happy accident is that my mother briefly took a job at a manufacturing plant when I was about seven. The other three children went to my grandmother’s house for the day while I stayed home with my father and walked to school on my own.

Once in awhile, my father got dressed and took me to a little café downtown, where there were individual jukeboxes along the counter and at the tables, and we ate pancakes and eggs and tea. We sat at the counter on round stools. I flipped through the jukebox offerings as if I knew what they were while he flirted with the waitresses and they flirted back, and there was usually music playing, and cigarette smoke hanging in the air with heady notes of bacon and coffee and frying onions. I loved the food—little balls of cold butter on top of my French toast, glass pitchers of syrup, tiny tubs of jelly—but mostly I loved the time with my dad, having him all to myself. Afterward, my dad would drop me off at school and I’d head up the stone steps feeling warm and special, a girl who had extraordinary experiences.

I fell in love with breakfast then and there. All good breakfasts, but especially a good café breakfast. And from that love was born a book.

At the heart of my new book, The Secret of Everything, is a restaurant called 100 Breakfasts, where a lark of a woman cooks to heal the hearts and souls of the people in her town.

It is to 100 Breakfasts that the protagonist, Tessa Harlow, comes to explore the questions that have been haunting her. She is heart sore and weary, recovering from a freak accident and trying to find answers to questions that have only just now bobbed to the surface. When she sits down at the long counter at the 100 Breakfasts Café, she unwittingly sets in motion a tangled array of connections and reveals secrets that have been hidden for a long, long time.

It is also at 100 Breakfasts that Tessa gets to know widower Vince Grasso, who is trying to heal his own family, including the troubled Natalie, a 9 year old who takes food very seriously, and is working her way through the entire list of 100 breakfasts on the menu.

The Secret of Everything was born out of my passion for breakfast, for the power it has to heal and renew, to nourish and ground. It’s a book that was born out of those days when I was a child hating oatmeal and loving the French toast at the local café; when I fought with my sisters and the mornings when my father took me out to breakfast, just the two of us, because this is, at the heart of it, a story about fathers and daughters and how that connection can make or break a woman’s spirit. Tessa’s father is nothing like my own, of course, but a father who is devoted to his child gives her permission to be as mighty as she can be.

Ironically, Tessa’s favorite breakfast is oatmeal, because in my adulthood, I learned to love great oatmeal. It is my own breakfast of choice most days. Whole grain oats served with butter and my own spiced apples that are cooked to a deep, dark flavor. Because I am that lark, so smugly and cheerfully alert at the first glimmers of dawn, it falls to me to get up and make the tea and start the coffee so it fills the air with its fragrance. I set the water boiling and set the table with cloth napkins and the good sugar bowl and the milk pitcher. I set the stage for my sleepy headed partner, sometimes a child, to come blinking to the table and fill his belly and drink his coffee.

In this small act, I am offering the most solid secret I know: breakfast is the secret of everything.

Breakfast is love.

What is your favorite breakfast?

1 day till THE SECRET OF EVERYTHING arrives in stores

Barbara Samuel — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 18:19:05 +0000

Not long now!

I get so excited when it gets so close. I’ve known Tessa and Sam (oh, you will love her father!) and Vince and Natalie (darling, troubled Natalie) for more than two years. Very happy for you to be able to finally meet them.

Here’s my favorite review of the week, from the B&N.com website:

“December 21, 2009: The Secret of Everything is a beautiful story about love and family, good food and gorgeous landscape, faithful dogs and a mysterious town. Tessa is a hiking tour guide who is recovering from a traumatic, near drowning experience. As she recovers strange memories from her mysterious childhood begin to surface. She sets out for Los Ladrones, the small town in New Mexico where she was born, in an attempt to uncover the truth.

“What a gorgeous book! The strength here is in the real, down to earth characters. I just fell in love with them and then became so wrapped up in their stories I couldn’t put the book down. The detailed descriptions of New Mexican landscape, its ferocious storms, and the enticing food are icing on the cake. The plot is unique enough to be interesting and only requires a little suspension of belief. Barbara O’Neal writes the kind of captivating novels that keep me up late at night turning pages. I will anxiously await her next one!”

Slow cooked, spicy, chunky apple butter

Barbara Samuel — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 22:37:52 +0000

Technically, I suppose, apple butter is smooth. I originally made this recipe last winter and pureed it afterward. Since, however, my main use for this particular condiment is in my morning oatmeal, I have found I much prefer it to be left chunky. Recipe is adapted from one I found at The Art of Homemaking.

SLOW COOKED CHUNKY, SPICY APPLE BUTTER

Apples enough to fill a crock pot–about 10-12 good sized apples.
2 T cinnamon
5-6 whole cloves
1 tsp ginger
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 vanilla bean, scraped and broken into pieces
6-8 oz hard apple cider

Wash, core, and peel the apples. Slice them into good size slices and fill the crock pot. Add the spices, salt and cider, and cook on low for 18-24 hours. Smell it like every good thing all night long, and stir sometimes to keep the spices moving. When they’re very dark and soft, use a potato masher or two butter knives to break the apples into small chunks. Ladle into jars and freeze, or if you eat it as fast as we do, just pile the jars in the back of the fridge. Also very good on French toast or buckwheat pancakes.

Do you have an easy winter recipe to share with us?

The Deconstruction of Fish & Chips

Barbara Samuel — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 23:34:30 +0000

At CR’s urging, I decided to give the deconstruction of fish & chips a try. (For background on the Top Chef deconstruction challenge, read about it here.)

My challenge was to create a dish that would deconstruct fish & chips and end up tasting like the original. Since the only ingredients in the traditional offering are white fish (usually cod or haddock, depending on your locale), and potatoes, both fried and heavily salted, then served very hot, it wasn’t easy. But it was intriguing.

THE PLAN

Really good fish and chips are served very hot, very greasy, and very salty. There’s a good crisp breading on the fish, and the chips (fries) are thick and tender, not like McDonalds, but like your mother’s best home fries. I decided to bake the fish, and use potatoes to create the crispy texture of the fried version of both fish and chips (fries). I had the luxury of two days to think about it, and arbitrarily made a rule that I had to use the fish in the house, which was halibut. The challenge in my mind was to get the simple, satisfying flavor of that very, very simple food and not add much of anything to the ingredients to try to make it upscale. I decide to bake the fish, mash potatoes, and try two different crispy potato pancakes.

By happy accident, I was in the English Home Goods store (where we buy stupidly expensive imported PG Tips for $26 for 250 bags, but trust me, if you get used to English tea, American is very pale in comparison). While I was there, I happened to spy a small bottle of malt vinegar. Eureka! Everyone knows you can’t eat fish and chips without malt vinegar!

THE PROCESS
(Note: always remember that I am at 7000 ft altitude, so shorten your cooking times if you decided to try anything I post!)

I started with Yukon Gold potatoes for the mash. The fish was simple, 7 oz frozen halibut steaks. The chefs on Top Chef had two hours, but that seemed excessive, so I started 90 minutes out. Peeled and boiled the potatoes, leaving them a tiny bit undercooked so they could rest in the hot water while I readied the fish and made the two pancakes. The fish was very simple prep: olive oil in the pan with plenty of kosher salt, in the oven at 350 for 20 minutes.

To get ready for the pancakes, I grated two medium size potatoes and a very small onion. (Onions are not standard here, but I just couldn’t do potato pancakes without it!) For the first set of potato pancakes, I mashed about 1-1/2 cups of cooked potatoes with 2 tablespoons butter, enough milk to make a good paste, then blended it until the potatoes were smooth. Added 1/2 a beaten egg (save the other half), a tiny bit of grated onion, roughly 2 tablespoons of flour, and for some body, about a quarter of the grated potatoes, and salt and pepper. Because I wanted a very thin, crispy cake, I added milk until the batter was fairly thin.

Since time would be short, I also made the second batch of potato pancakes, which were a hashbrown with a little egg to hold them together. Mixed the grated potatoes, grated onions, salt, pepper and the other half of the egg together.

I used an electric grill and poured a generous amount of canola oil on it (this was the greasy element), then added a couple of tablespoons of butter and heated it until it was medium hot. On one side, I poured the mashed potato pancakes, on the other, the hashbrowns, and let them cook.

Meanwhile, I poured the water off the remaining boiled potatoes, put them back on the burner on low, added 4 tablespooons butter, milk (my mistake is always adding too much milk, so I do it in small amounts) and mashed the potatoes, keeping an eye on the potato pancakes at the same time, and turning them about 3 minutes in. They were nicely brown and by this time, I was getting very hungry, so I was beginning to look forward to eating this experiment, however it turned out!

CR was in charge of setting the table, and now, the timing was critical. I took the fish out of the oven, and on the plate I had already sprinkled with malt vinegar, the fish was settled in the middle, it with the two different pancakes in a circle around it, and a nice mound of mashed potatoes to one side. It was rather bland looking, all that white, so I put the lemon rounds on top of the fish, even if they are not traditional (“You’re American,” said CR. “We make allowance for you.”)

The layering was, pancake, fish, mash, all in a single bit, with a dip in the little pool of vinegar. We both tried it, blinked, and looked at each other in happy pleasure. He tried one kind of pancake, I tried the other, and—it worked!

Honestly, it was wonderful, and a faithful deconstruction/recreation. For the sake of the experiment, I thought the hashbrowns gave the layers the right greasy crispness, but CR preferred the pancake. Both of them were delicious and very greasy and the kosher salt sprinkled on top added just the right layer of brine.

But I must admit that the malt vinegar was the crowning touch, pulling the flavors together just the way it does when you go to the chip shop.

WHAT I WOULD DO DIFFERENTLY NOW

–I would cut the fish into smaller pieces and grill it rather than bake it, just to give it some color.
–I would layer the pancakes, fish, and mashed potatoes like a tiny lasagna

I will definitely be making those little potato cakes again. It was fun to make this dish just to find something we liked so much.