No Recipe Bread

A dedicated pastry chef or artisal baker will tell you that unless you are an expert that you must follow a baking recipe with exact precision, or else you are doomed for failure. Baking is as much science and chemistry as it is artistry, and no one wants to serve a science experiment gone wrong. Many of us have pulled out a special occasion cake that failed to rise and vowed to never again disobey this cooking commandment.

If you are having the boss over for dinner, go ahead and stick to the recipe. But if you want to explore new territory, don't weigh yourself down with exactitudes.

More specifically, I'm talking about delicious bread here, people.

Bread. The staff of life. The human race was barely beyond caveman status and our ancestors were making it over an open fire. Or in a hot pit they dug underground. I can't believe that most of them had anything resembling a measuring cup. These people sustained themselves. Some of them thrived and produced legendary cultures (Greeks! Romans! Mesopotamians!) on their no-cookbook bread.

While I dutifully followed my French baguette recipe to the letter for years, I recently met a woman whose extensive dietary restrictions inspired her to come up with a bread recipe of her own invention. She has hired me to make this recipe for her from time to time, when she is unable to get to it on her own. I'll tell you right now, the batter is as ugly and unappealing as any bread dough can possibly be, but it bakes up gorgeously, and when she shares it with friends, they rave about it for days.

When I was little more than a child, living in one of my first rentals, working for a catering company, trying to be an uber-healthy health nut, I would "invent" some recipes for healthy baked goods. I'd tell my mother my invented recipe over the phone and she would snort...didn't sound like anything she had ever made, and for chrissakes, Karen...don't you need some leavening? That's going to be awfully dense.

Well, I had some lovely, hearty scones for a week. Tough luck if no one would try them. It just meant there was more for me.

I continue to cook for a growing population of folks with an extensive list of dietary restrictions. You can't just bake them a "normal" bread recipe. I have to cobble together many recipes or just create one. But I can bake for them. They do not have to give up bread.

What are the rules for no-recipe bread?
-You need a flour...a ground grain or dried legume. You can use gluten free flours for special diets.
-You need a fat...often not much. A little butter, oil, or egg.
-You need a flavor...salt, cinnamon, vanilla, anything really.
-You need a leavening...yeast, baking soda, baking powder, or even your egg will cause your grains to rise. Experiment. If your selected leavening is unsuccessful, the worst that can happen is you get to enjoy a flatbread
-You need some liquid...water, milk, pureed fruit or veggies (really! high water content!)

That's it. Mix it all up until it looks like thick cake batter. Put it in the oven and watch it 30 minutes or so at 350 to 425 is usually fine. (WE"RE EXPERIMENTING HERE!)

Go for it.

Five Easy Pieces

I love young Jack Nicholson. I love the piano. And last but not least, I love to cook dinner.

In regards to the first two assertions in the above paragraph, I highly suggest that you rent the flick, "Five Easy Pieces", in case you are not already familiar with it. As an inveterate Gen-X-er, I have a predilection for the bittersweet sensation one has when witnessing the underlying beauty of squandered talent, which is what that movie is all about.

As for the third assertion, I do love to cook dinner, but I took a week off. During the past week, my schedule was unusually hectic, especially during the hours when I am usually preparing a decent meal here at home.

But, I'd rather poach some old leather shoes than eat a terrible, chemical-laden, MSG-infused, flavorless frozen packaged dinner. I stock my freezer with homemade stuff for weeks like this, but I know that many other people are unable to do so. Still, I am confident that anyone can have an awesome, almost-homemade dinner on the table in 15 minutes with minimal effort. How? Well, here's five easy pieces for you. In all of these examples, you can add low-fat options or whole grain selections and make it really healthy. Try these five easy pieces on the next mind-bogglingly busy week and see if you are not more satisfied with these selections than you would be with a TV dinner:

-GRILLED SAUSAGE AND CORN ON THE COB: Pick up a package of sausages and buns: Italian, Chorizo, Chicken Sausage...it really doesn't matter. Fire up the grill...or the broiler if you don't own a grill. Dunk some corn in boiling water for 6-7 minutes. Char your sausages and make sure they are not scary-pink in the middle. Season. Add condiments. Done.
-CHICKEN CAESAR SALAD: Buy some chopped romaine. Buy a pre-grilled chicken breast from the prepared foods counter at a decent grocer. Buy lots of cherry tomatoes. Buy whole grain croutons. Buy Cardini's Caesar Dressing (no other bottled dressing will do) Assemble and eat.
-SMOKED SALMON WITH PASTA: Buy some chopped red onion. Buy a bottle of capers. Buy some smoked salmon or lox. Boil some noodles. Toss all with Greek yogurt and salt. Done.
-BLACK BEAN BURRITOS: Chop a green pepper and some cilantro. Open a can of black beans and some shredded cheddar. Wrap up in a flour burrito. Spritz with canned canola oil. Bake at 400 for 5 to 10 minutes until golden. Enjoy.
-MOCK HOT TURKEY CLUB PANINI: Buy a turkey sandwich at the deli. Buy some prepared coleslaw. Throw some slaw on the sandwich. Spritz with canned canola oil. Fire up the Foreman grill and toast.

You've had a reasonably good, reasonable wholesome dinner that took 15 minutes or less. (Junky frozen food in the microwave would have taken nearly as long) Now you have time to go relax and enjoy a good Jack Nicholson movie.

XO

Stuffed Cabbage and the Love of the Meatball

I may be on a Hungarian-style culinary bender or it may be the fact that the farmshare bounty that keeps arriving on my doorstep (courtesy of a truly generous mother-in-law) contains more cabbage per week than most people see all year, but I decided to make stuffed cabbage for dinner.

Stuffed Cabbage was probably my favorite food as a child. I hardly noticed that a vegetable was as much a star of the dish as the protein. It was so good, I probably wouldn't have cared.

I love to make it as an adult because of the meatball. (Well, stuffed cabbage is really not much more than a softened cabbage leaf that steams a meatball of sorts enclosed inside.) Anyone who has worked with me knows I love to make meatballs.

Meatballs, you see, were the bane of my existence during a moment of my restaurant career. I had to make meatballs 20, 30, even 50 pounds at a time for a high-volume Italian restaurant. Each meatball had to be rolled to perfection by hand. When your prep list is 3 pages long, seeing 30 pounds of meatballs on your worksheet can be a real downer if you don't have the right frame of mind, because it is so labor-intensive it is most definitely going to slow you down. When you are still working your prep list after dinner hour has started you are really sunk...but a big batch of meatballs can put you in that awful predicament.

But I learned to love the meatball...by eating a perfect one. I don't even know now who made it, but it was seasoned correctly, shaped perfectly, and cooked to just the right tenderness. It was, in fact, a revelation, however humble its origins. I thought to myself: "My God...this is worth all the measuring and forming and rolling and shaping." I made it my quest to give everyone the same meatball experience I had. And with a little focus and love, I could make those meatballs faster and better than I ever thought I could. I was getting out of work on time to boot!

I know this sounds a little ridiculous, but it's true. If there is anything I put my soul into when I cook, it's a meatball. I want anyone I am serving to feel what I felt with that perfect meatball.

Back to stuffed cabbage.

I had some bastardized version of my mother's or grandmother's recipe the first time I made stuffed cabbage and my results were so-so at best. I was crestfallen. How could I fall short on my favorite childhood entree?? I HAD to get this right.

So I started looking at the stuffed cabbage as a trumped up meatball. I put some additional ingredients in that I feel are essential to an outstanding meatball experience. I streamlined the stuffed cabbage cooking liquid to include things that are really compatible with the flavor of a good meatball. I wrapped those meatballs in the cabbage with the same love a mother swaddles a new babe. Honestly.

And now I am quite sure my stuffed cabbage would make my grandmother proud, though it's just a little different from her version.

So much of good cooking is nothing more than focus and love. And there's not much I love more than a good childhood memory and a good meatball.

Nick Drake and Tokany

The face of the sky is totally covered by a pale--almost platinum--curtain of clouds, Lake Erie is the color of gunmetal, and the coolness in the breeze verges on uncomfortable. THIS is autumn in Cleveland, Ohio.

I was driving home from work under all the Cleveland clouds, listening to a soft English voice sing along with a wistful chord progression on a solitary acoustic guitar. It was Nick Drake! He was one of those brilliant-before-his-time and sadly-plucked-from-our-midst-too-soon kind of songwriters. The disc jockey came on the air and said, "It's just a Nick Drake kind of day out there."

And so it is. It's also a "warm my brittle bones with comfort food" kind of day out there. When I made some Beef Bourguignon for a family yesterday, it got my gears turning towards hearty, meaty braises. Then my mind wandered to thoughts of my mother's veal paprikash, and Hungarian fare seems just right for this chilly early fall weather, so I pulled my grandmother's beat-to-death Hungarian cookbook from the shelf. I love this cookbook: The Cuisine of Hungary by George Lang. It contains absolutely no frills, no pictures, no luxe ingredients, but no bad advice, either. (The author cautions against the trend of trying to "Frenchify" recipes by indiscriminantly adding wine. "Frenchify"! I LOVE the total absence of pretense!) The author also claims that many of these recipes can be traced to sources reaching back to the 1600's or earlier.

One such ancient recipe must certainly by Tokany, which I think I will try tonight, if only for the appeal of the cooking method, which is referred to as "Mongolian waterless braising". (In other words, the meat stews in its own juices, but what a wonderfully exotic way to describe it). The essence of the recipe is beef shoulder, onion, and marjoram.

I'll give you the full report and a more complete recipe outline for Tokany later. But the general plan is to put Nick Drake's last album "Pink Moon" on in the background, find a scratchy sweater, tsk-tsk at the dogs vying for scraps, and enjoy the evening, in spite of the dark and gathering cold.

Phrasing and Food (I Want to be Good at Both)

I cannot tell you how many times I've been talking to music-minded acquaintances about something I always called "feel", then looked over at the clock and realized it was so late, well-beyond time to go home. I could just go on and on about that certain something that just sets some artists apart. The other day, while at a piano lesson, I learned that this ineffable quality in music that I always referred to as "feel", actually exists. The technical term for "feel" is phrasing..

Phrasing is, very simply put, how YOU do it. Sure, anyone who reads notes and has some facility with an instrument can play a piece of music. The question is, can they make it sound like something? The musicians you love the best must have an instinctive way of putting an accent here, holding a pause for an extra split-second there. They must know how the dynamics of volume might affect the mood of the piece. Musicians who phrase well (or at least to your tastes), can practically break your heart with a piece of music because they can reach some part of you that is so otherwise hard to get to. Conversely, musicians who do not phrase well can cause you to leave the auditorium after the first movement, because it's so boring it almost hurts.

This concept of phrasing is a revelation to me. It answers a lot of questions. At one of the restaurants where I once worked, we always wondered how different cooks could slavishly follow the exact same recipe (we were even required to measure everything in exact proportions using a calibrated food scale for consistency) and still achieve different results? For example, I could never get my cheesecakes as beautiful as Josie's, but no one, not even Josie, could come close to my lemon custard, even though we worked from the same recipes.

One of my customers is a medical professional (and a formidable cook herself when she has the time) who has noticed the same thing: give two different cooks the same exact recipe and get two vastly different dishes. Her quasi-medical theory for the difference in cooking results is that the bacteria that is permanently on our skin--the benign stuff that cannot be washed off-- somehow telegraphs some magic into the food. I am somewhat compelled by her interesting theory, and would be fascinated if someone actually did a scientific investigation of her hypothesis, but I suspect that what it really comes down to is phrasing.

The concept of phrasing tells me that maybe when YOU stir the risotto a few more times with the unique weight of your hand, you make it just a little creamier than someone else. Maybe when you add the salt at a certain moment, pinching it between YOUR two fingers which are sized like no one elses, you release a little more flavor into the sauce. Certainly, careful culinary school grads may have paid attention to the science behind the secrets, but others are capable of this magic by instinct alone. Your unique phrasing in the kitchen is what matters.

And I think about how I hear two notes on a dotted quarter note...and it's not really wrong for me to play the extra note I hear in my imagination. The overall piece remains the same, but one version is uniquely mine.

I cannot begin to describe how much the concept of phrasing knocks me out in both music and cooking. It tells me that everyone really IS an original and can make something transcendently beautiful when given the right skills and freedoms.