Top Chef at Home

The man of the house and I are going to the Bahamas over New Year's and we could both stand to pay more attention to getting ourselves in fighting form. This means that this morning at the greenmarket, I spent less time fantasizing about buttery tarts, pies, and pastries I could make with fall fruit, and more time realistically planning healthy meals that wouldn't taste, well, like salad.

The cool organic salad people tricked me out with a mixed assortment of everything they had and then directed me to the purslane (hmm, where have I heard about purslane recently?); I paused very briefly to give their baby cherry tomatoes on the vine a grab, followed soon after by the sungolds I get from Walter every week.

After grabbing some apples and raspberries, I had a hankering for fish. Even though Wednesday is not a great day for me to be buying fish as immediately after work I have my french lesson (allowing said fish to become a little more room temperature than strictly desired), I decided to risk it because we haven't had scallops in a while.

But wait, surely purslane and scallops remind me of something. Oooh, that's right, it was a dish made on the finale of Top Chef. I think they used grapes - lucky for me then, I bought about 200 pounds on a rare Saturday trip to the market this past weekend! I think I remember something about fennel and, voila, here is some beautiful baby fennel staring right up at me - god, I love this market. I think there would have to have been an herb included somewhere, but I can't be expected to remember what it was. How about lemon thyme? Lemon thyme seems like it would work well with scallops fennel, purslane and grapes. Let's grab it.

Upon arriving at work I hope that I can find the recipe online and lovely Bravo obliges. Shoot, it was tarragon not lemon thyme, and I do not have a lemon at home for fresh lemon juice, improvisation will have to commence.

Fast forward 12 hours and I realize that I only have yuzu rice vinegar, but the yuzu in the vinegar will obviate the need for the fresh lemon juice. So I start cleaning and picking and stirring and sizzling and suddenly:



dinner is served.

And dinner tastes good. Really good. Even at 10:30 at night.

Seared Scallop with Purslane (adapted from Top Chef season finale and Dale)

1/2 cup green grapes, halved
1/2 cup olive oil
1 tbsp. lemon thyme
3 tbsp yuzu rice wine vinegar
Salt and pepper to taste
9 fresh scallops scallops
5 bulbs mini fennel, shaved thin
1/2 cup purslane, cleaned and picked

Garnish:
some corn I found in my freezer

Marinate grapes in olive oil, lemon thyme, and vinegar; season with salt and pepper. Sear scallops until hard and brown crusted (really this took quite a while, about 8 or 9 minutes, but the scallops were quite big and I have a horro of undercooking them). Toss fennel and purslane with grapes. Place scallops on salad and garnish with sweet corn.

Friday From The Tagosphere

To start with, I just read this and it made me laugh out loud: "I come by this particular tendency honestly, as that's just the way we always did it in my house while I was growing. It's akin to the how my mom's family used to eat cheesecake when she was growing up. Her mom would plunk a frozen cake down on the kitchen table and everyone would sit around it with forks, picking at the defrosting edges." By way of Slashfood.

Caramelized Red Onion and Goat Cheese Tarts - Not much to complain about here. I have passed by the red onions in favor of the cipolinis for several straight weeks, but next week might be the week I change my tune.
Ricotta Tart with Honey Glazed Figs - I have been rather disappointed with all the figs I've eaten this year: those from the guy on the corner, the horribly expensive ones I had sent to me from California and, yes, even those I have eaten in restaurants, but I seem to remember loving figs, so I keep taking down recipes that use them.

Raspberry Crumb Cake - The weather just doesn't seem to be cooling off which means that there are still buckets of raspberries being displayed on market tables. I've been just popping them down my gullet at my desk for sport, but perhaps more could be done with them.

Dark Chocolate Custard - I must must must coordinate my work so that macaron day and ice cream day are either the same or very close together so that I don't run the risk of more egg wastage. However, instead of ice cream day, perhaps there should also be custard day. The man of the house does enjoy custard especially now that we own a blowtorch.

Quince Tartlets - So, I'm looking at you chef from Payard who was fairly brusque and forwny with me on Wednesday at the market when I expressed delight in your menu choice of wild boar and quince, when I say that just because I don't have the kind of relationships with the US Customs and small wild boar purveyors in Canada does not mean I will be unable to enjoy the brief exciting quince season. I am a lady so I will content myself with extending a VTFF to you as well - sheesh I was just trying to be personable.

Depression in Aisle 8

Yesterday I did something I haven't done in quite some time: I went to my local supermarket.

I live in a bad neighborhood. In order to preserve my unbroken record of living in New York, I have opted to live in a less than ideal locale, calmly coping with the drug dealers, the occasional shooting, the lackluster food delivery options, and the absence of many of the amenities the rest of my home borough rightly takes for granted. It was Sunday, we had been spending a lazy long weekend, punctuated by some frivolous eating out and dressing up (as documented earlier), and I just wanted something to eat. Right. Now.

That's what the local supermarket is for.

So, with a vague notion of something quick to heat and eat, I entered. I've lived in this apartment for four years and have made my way to the supermarket loads of times to stock up on garbage bags, sugar, parchment paper, light bulbs, etc., but I can't remember the last time I went in here for food. I do most of my shopping at the Whole Foods near my office and the Union Square Greenmarket. I am the girl on the subway laden with bags. By the way, please give me your seat when you see me - this stuff is heavy.

As I walked up and down the aisles, though, I felt myself grow more and more dissatisfied and vaguely ill. The man of the house had requested a hard sausage, and the options available to me were Oscar Meyer - meat of uncertain provenance (or uncertainly meat) stuffed to the gills with freshenators, colorizers, and starchatives (he is far less demanding than I (and often dismissive of my food fascism) and accepted the Hormel pre-sliced pepperoni like a champ, though I was pleased to see the majority of the package in the trash this morning.

The produce aisle looked like something out of a documentary on starving children in war zones - the fruits and vegetables donated by rich countries left to spoil on a tarmac somewhere while 14-year olds with uzis prevent people from taking it. There was no fresh bread to speak of, unless you count the spanish style rolls which are without taste or nutrients. There was no cheese save packaged cheese (forgive me I bought Polly-O String cheese as I know he likes it) - and I'll have more to say on that later. The frozen foods were plentiful, but not a single product worth looking twice at. Frivolously I read some packages noting that there were far more ingredients than strictly necessary or preferable, and that, more often than not, simple things were labeled as flavored i.e. chicken parmesan made with chicken flavor, macaroni and cheese with real cheese flavor. What is real cheese flavor?

I saw the Top Chef-hawked Bertoli frozen skillet meals and almost took one with me, but the idea of cooking it made me ill - there were just too many mystery inclusions. I did discover organic milk, but many of the cartons (of both organic and conventional) were either past or nearly past their expiration.

I ended up buying a frozen pizza and I did, in fact eat it. There was nothing wrong with its taste (bland vaguely tomato), but it didn't really taste like anything going down. It was so clearly designed to make me full without nourishing me. I took home a bag of Pepperidge Farm bagels which had a more natural feel to them than the Thomas's ones (which are a consistency no bread product should be - a very very disturbing squishiness), but couldn't really commit to eating one so I threw them in the freezer.

Had I wanted chips and soda, I would have had limitless choices. There were three separate chip displays including the new, and incredibly grotesque sounding, crab flavored Lays. There was an entire half aisle (in a four aisle supermarket) devoted to soda (though, in fairness, they did have some Izze).

I get a lot of grief at home for my shopping habits. The man of the house doesn't understand why we need to pay twelve dollars a pound for flank steak from the market and why I won't just buy an apple in the store in June. Since he does none of the shopping and is clearly pleased with what he eats in our home, these little disagreements crop up only on the rare occasions we go shopping together (when ample fun is made of me for convenience purchases like organic bouillon). And, to be perfectly honest, until yesterday, part of me felt as though my shopping habits had a fair amount to do with conscious choices and politics (though anyone who has eaten supermarket meat recently will back me up when I say that taste plays a major role in how I shop). Now, having seen that the poorest people are supplied with food that is bereft of nutrients and stuffed to the gills with white flour, white sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and methylethylwhatevrylmimicyrlfalserylcolorylickyryl - food that lets you know you've eaten but does nothing but stuff you with simple carbohydrates and, presumably, cancer, I realize that health is now trumping politics in my mind as I shop for our household. I don't ever want to go to that supermarket again for something that isn't a household cleanser or paper good. It made me not a little sick.

Now back to that cheese:

A 15oz. package of Polly-O Extra Long String Cheese set me back $5.99. Read that again to make sure you got it, please. Even at Whole Foods, which can be a little pricey, a pound of fresh mozzarella is, I believe, $5.99. It certainly was $4.99 at Fairway, and the bocconcini I bought at Citarella a couple of weeks ago was $7.99, and that's a prepared food. When I hear people lament that buying and eating good food is too expensive, I'm going to remember the mozzarella.

Market Wednesday

The folks at the office think I might be a little crazy. Every Wednesday morning, I show up groaning beneath the weight of my bag (and sometimes some other bags) because I have just spent the past hour shuffling around the Union Square Greenmarket. This is a weekly date I have with my mother (ok sometimes it's twice weekly) and both of us have severe difficulty in keeping to any sort of plan.

Case in point, this morning I had two items I had to buy: potatoes and blackberries. Now, while it is true that I bought both of those things, it would be an appalling understatement to claim that this was all I bought. Enter

1 box tiny red cherry tomatoes
1 box sungold tomatoes
2 boxes tristar strawberries
1 raisin walnut bread
1 dozen large brown eggs
2 pounds elephant plums
1.5 pounds white nectarines

My fridge is a fruit fly's wet dream. I am still eating fruit from last week, but I simply can't resist - it's all just too beautiful and all just too fleeting. Behold a small sampling of the market's bounty.