Two Butt Kitchen

Bagels1

Ask any person who has lived in New York City and since moved away what, if anything, he misses from New York and his answer will be one of two things:  "Pizza" or "Bagels".  I've already posted about pizza (and will again soon), but I want to turn my attention to the second item for a moment.

There are those who will tell you that there is something inherent about New York City that makes the bagels unique.  Usually the culprit is the water, but I suppose it could just as well be the air or some other uniquely New York item that gives the bagels there that special something.  Frankly, however, I'm more inclined to believe that it is neither the water nor any other particular magic ingredient from New York that gives the bagels there the special texture and taste, but rather a combination of two related things: First, the guys making really good bagels in New York City have it pretty good.  They're in a place where their trade is respected, they get to do something they love for an audience that loves them for it.  Why would they choose to go elsewhere?  Sure, they could go to Atlanta or Phoenix and make a bagel just as delicious as the one they make in New York, but why on earth would they?  All the talent decides to stay in New York, and therefore the bagels everywhere else are sub-par.  Secondly, due to the proliferation of "bagels" sold in grocery stores nationwide that are really just factory line Wonder Bread with a hole in the middle, I'm of the opinion that the majority of Americans who came face to face with a New York bagel might not even know what it was they were tasting.  They might think it was too chewy, that the crust was too hard, that it didn't come with cranberry apple slices on top, or whatever it is they eat on bagels (onion, sesame, poppy, salt... there are only 4 kinds of bagels, capiece?)...  that it just wasn't like the bagels they knew and loved from "back home."

Bagels3

The story behind the bagel is that it was invented in the 17th Century, following the breaking of the Turkish siege of Vienna by the Polish King John Sobieski.  The polish baker, who's name has been lost to time, took bread and formed it into a hollow circle to represented the stirrups on King Sobieski's cavalry.  It was spread around the world by Jewish immigrants, who by and large landed and settled in New York, creating their own industry of bagel bakeries in the five boroughs.

When I tell my friends that I make bagels for myself (and L, of course), most are frankly suspicious.  The predominant problem most people have is that bagels must be astronomically hard to make.  Most ask, "But, don't you have to boil them?"  As if none of them had ever made pasta before.  To get something out of the way off the top rope here, yes, you have to boil them.  A minute per side.  It's not excruciating, I promise.

The recipe I use comes from Peter Reinhart's Bread Baker's Apprentice, of course.  I sleep with the book under my pillow, I feel like everyone should know.

This time I did make the addition of trying some toppings which I have not done in the past.  I did six sesame bagels, which are by far my favorite type, three salt and three onion.  I dropped off a bunch with my friend who I believe might be the largest concentration of New York Jewish outside of the Brooklyn Chasidic community, and he pronounced them fabulous.  His wife from New Mexico also said they were good, but what does she know?

It's important to note that the recipe is a two day job (like most of the recipes in Reinhart's book) and so you should leave time to do the mixing of the dough the day before, then boil and bake the next morning.  The bagels also keep only for 3 or 4 days out on the counter.  What I should have done this time, but forgot to, was freeze a number of them, then defrost them through the week.  Frozen bagels are not as good as fresh ones, but are much better than stale ones, that's for sure.

I (L) met mole at Rosario's (possibly not the best, but always my favorite Mexican restaurant in San Antonio.).  Rosario's is where you took visiting family when you could get them away from the River Walk and into the more interesting areas of SA (in this case, the King William District).  I would rave about the sweet, tangy Enchiladas Suizas, complete with a white wine sauce and crema fresca, and inevitably the guest in question would order them and fall madly in love, promising candy and sunset walks to the plate if only it would give up one more bite. 

If you operate under the same restaurant rules as I, it's forbidden to order the same thing as another party of the table, so I'd only stare longingly and order what I perceived to be daring: the chicken mole, or enchiladas de mole ("Chocolate!" the staid guests would say in fascination, horror, and awe at my 19 year old bravura.  I think).

Their mole sauce had none of the one night stand delights of the suizas: this was a stormy, passionate, long term relationship where you realize what your previously detested is now endearing, and vice versa (sweet, spicy, salty).  We had another encounter at Boca Chica in St. Paul, MN, during my very long grad school winters - I was introduced by a friend, I was very homesick, one thing led to another....

Mole is many things, among them a small mammal, a unit of measurement, and a variety of Mexican sauces (poblano, black, yellow,  and red among them).  It was likely a happy accident of a recipe, given the number of ingredients, but the traditional legend is that nuns in a convent in Puebla de los Angeles concocted it (with heavenly intervention) to serve to a visiting archbishop.  One must assume those nuns occupy a very special place in the Hereafter.

Mole1

Similarly inspired, R and I started the nearly 3 hour journey to make our own mole, a combination of Emeril's and Tyler Florence's with a dash of Rick Bayless, depending on availability of ingredients.  I should note that their recipes rely heavily on a blender; I only own a small, unprepared, currently very pissed off food processor with one speed. 

There was much toasting and frying and grinding and leaking all over the counter (why must all ingredients be fried individually, one might wonder).  The mole I made combines tomatoes, garlic, onions (so far, so good) with sesame seeds, nuts (hmm) , raisins (what?), chiles, various spices and unsweetened chocolate (wait a minute) in a way that suggests an Italian ragu running off with a chocolate bar and suddenly taking up a crunchy, granola lifestyle, all the while having an affair with a serrano.   There were several ingredient mishaps and cases of neglect--we should really care about the number, size and type of chiles we used, but I chose the package in Spanish Safeway helpfully labelled "dried chiles"; left out the raisins, plaintains and subsituted peanuts/pecans for almonds; used tomato sauce instead of fresh tomatoes; discovered our only chocolate was not only not Mexican, but milk; quartered, sixthed, halved and guesstimated to cut down the serving size with abandon and somehow neglected to have "lard" in my cupboard--but the result was pretty fantastic. 

Mole2

(L here) The reasons to love fried chicken are infinite.  Crunchy skin, juicy meat, a topping of gravy, the inevitable mashed potatoes, the ambrosia-like nature of cold fried chicken as a midnight snack....I could go on.

Fried chicken exists in one form or another in cuisines all over the world - it keeps for a long time, travels well, and poultry was often more widely available than other livestock.  Usually my fried chicken is Southern in origin and fairly basic.  Key ingredients are buttermilk (for brining), flour, paprika, some salt and pepper...something like Alton Brown's.  I'll usually double batter in the flour, with an egg bath in between. 

fried chicken

From those ingredients, you can make a half ass fried chicken with crumbly or soggy skin and rubbery meat.  The key to excellence is patience, time, and a willingless to use a hell of a lot of cooking fat at an even temperature (vegetable oil , shortening...something with a higher smoking temperature, or else your fire alarm will go off.  Not that that ever happens in my house).  I've embarked on "oven frying" in the past, but my method involve a stick of butter in and around the chicken - hardly a healthier move. 

The last but most vital step is gravy.  Yesterday R made a brilliant comment: "I never realized until I met you that the bits of food stuck to the bottom of the pan are just tastiness waiting to be released into the world."  Like clapping your hands to keep Tinkerbell alive in Peter Pan, you have to scrape away at the chicken schmutz (not schmaltz), throw in some flour, salt and pepper, and, once they're in a nice paste, stir in flour, water, or chicken broth (depending on how you want your gravy).  I have yet to meet a food that didn't beg to be dipped in some kind of sauce or gravy.  R thinks this is a quaint French affectation on my part, but really it's just Southern genes.  Wait til I get into tabasco.

My book club recently met to discuss The Double Bind and had to put together food in the theme of "double" (twice baked potatoes, double fudge brownies...) to sustain ourselves during the highly intellectual discussion (right).  TDB makes constant allusions to The Great Gatsby, one of my read-once-a-year books, so I had to make "double" fried chicken to go along (one of my favorite TGG scenes: "Daisy and Tom were sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table with a plate of cold fried chicken between them and two bottles of ale.... They weren't happy, and neither of them had touched the chicken or ale-and yet they weren't unhappy either."  What they're eating and the setting, given their usual elegance and snobbishness, says a lot about the scene and their need to be in an absolute comfort zone.  I should mention that Daisy is from Louisville).

Double-frying is a method used in Korean Fried chicken--cooking the chicken through, removing it from the heat to cool for ten minutes, and then putting it back in hot oil to get an extra crispy crust.  My favorite part was using minced onions IN THE BATTER.  I've fried chicken IN a saute of onions before, but never thought of marrying the two in one amazing combo.  

Now if only I could come up with a way to make fried fried.

On Sundays during the football seasons of my childhood, the special treat was queso.  I would eat it for hours, somewhat careful to not drip cheese on the book I was reading in lieu of watching the game and constantly having to reheat after it inevitably hardened into an unnatural semi-solid state of goo.

One of my favorite dishes that my father made when I was still living at home was his pizza.  The toppings would vary, but the crust was always the same recipe, and was exquisite.  It was fairly thin, certainly not Chicago-style, but nor the very thin crust that you expect from New York pizza.  A while back my dad, at my request, sent me the recipe by reading it to me over the phone while I dictated the ingredients into a file on my computer.  Apparently this secret was too precious to be committed to email where just anyone could intercept it.

Pizza

L here - I've never really succeeded in making this dish, though it is theoretically quite simple.  The origin of the name comes from its first big fans, charcoal makers.  Italian laborers covered in coal dust apparently have a lighter touch than I.

The dish is essentially pasta with eggs, bacon (pancetta if you want to get fancy about it), parmesan, pepper, olive oil, and bit of cream if you're a true fat-loving American.  My recipe was based on Emeril's, with a few changes (mainly in that he probably made his with more flair and "Bams" or that mine simply has not been taken up as many notches).  Anything to which you add bacon can't be that bad, but it's the eggs that defeat me.  Who wants to eat pasta with scrambled eggs?  Which is exactly what happens when I toss my egg-parmesan-cream-nutmeg mixture into the just cooked pasta. 

The peas are another story.  The Albanian owned local Italian place in my home/cowtown didn't always use the most authentic recipes, but they did things to their bread that would make Moses ask for another round if their recipe had been manna.  Out of fondness for their pea-laden Pasta Carbonara, I add peas to mine, and tsp of nutmeg because it tastes good.  Also as further evidence to our friend A that peas do indeed belong in pasta. 

Pasta Carbonara

R was nice enough to say it was tasty and the sauce "light" (always good when cooking for an anti-cream sauce heathen), but I'll have to try again.  Our kitty, D, did adore the peas - or at least she would gum them mercilessly and spit then back onto the plate.  We always wanted a personal pea-smasher. 

Sources tell me that this dish was popularized in Italy after World War II, when some fresh food was scarce and American soldiers could supply locals with heaps of bacon and eggs.  Not ones for a hearty American breakfast, they tossed them with some noodles. This is just a nice way of again proving to me that everything comes back to my third true love, national security. 

R here...

Back in the depths of time before L and I had the thought of starting this blog, I made a challah bread for Rosh Hashanah which I happened to take a couple photos of, so my dad could see it.  The recipe (or, formula, I guess I should say) was from a bread baking book called The Bread Baker's Apprentice by Peter Reinhart, which is a book I must absolutely suggest for anyone that is remotely interested in maybe someday baking a loaf of bread.

Kraft Mac & Cheese

L & I make Mac & Cheese, from the box, most weekends.  I usually make it because I'm better at it than she is, generally.  The instructions on the side of the box (Kraft, natch) are ok, but I prefer to mess with them...  I like a less runny cheese, so I usually use only 3 tablespoons of butter, and only enough milk to get the dried cheese to rehydrate at the end, if it hasn't yet.  I usually also add garlic powder and salt, to taste.

-R