Spectacular

Here’s Christmas cookbook email #2: Simple to Spectacular, by Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Mark Bittman, gifted by my mother on Kara’s advice from my wishlist. The concept is great- take 50 recipes and then make 5 increasingly sophisticated versions of each of them. Even the most intricate ones are a welcome change from all the complex restaurant cookbooks I have. So, for instance, you start with simple homemade chicken broth, but by the 5th iteration you have consommé. A fairly simple "Sea Bass Seviche" evolves into “Nearly Raw Lobster with Miso, Mustard, and Caviar.” 4 ingredients and simple techniques turn into over a dozen ingredients with advanced techniques.

For my first run, I went for the most advanced version for halibut. Their recipes in increasing sophistication are:

Halibut with white wine and shallots

Provençal halibut

Halibut with mustard-nut crust

Three-fennel halibut

and then we had…

Halibut Braised in Red Wine

This one was actually a little challenging. I screwed up a few basic parts a couple times and had to start over, but none of the things that really need love were messed up (I’m looking at you, expensive halibut). Kara said it was a very Xandiferous treatment of fish. Not delicate, but bold and full of umami. Heavily reduced red wine combined with reduced fish stock from scratch—very concentrated flavors—used to braise the halibut with pearl onions and mushrooms, topped with bacon, then broiled to crisp it up. Served with French bread to sop up the velvety sauce. I even busted out the kitchen torch to add some char and crust on the top of the dish that the broiler couldn’t quite complete.

Hard to photograph, but I think this shot looks edible, and it was damn tasty.

Still Cooking

I’ve been dark for a while as I have been working on Solver (coming soon). I’ve still been cooking plenty, but am just now getting back into exciting new stuff with new cookbooks from Christmas.

I have to take a moment to remember my great aunt Tish who was literally the first person added to this email list, and she also inspired much of my love for food. She gave me a dozen of her twice-baked potatoes for my10th birthday because it was one of my favorites of her dishes, and we traded recipes in later years. I am grateful for her passion for cooking, even when quirky. She knew her way around the kitchen in a way that only a woman who went from growing up in the Great Depression to cooking for an upper-middle class family in 1960s North Dallas could. God bless her.

That said, here’s what I’ve got for you: My cousin, and partner in cookbook crime, Will, picked out another book for me this year, Taste & Technique: Recipes to Elevate Your Home Cooking by Naomi Pomeroy (thanks to all the Berkowitzes). The recipes are pretty French (which I like) and there’s a focus on learning techniques to apply to impromptu home cooking. To start, I went straight to what seemed to be her signature dish, which she insists is great even if you screw it up, soufflé.

Spinach and Gruyère Souffle

I happened to NOT screw it up and it came out great, though I bitched and moaned that it should be called Whisk Till Your Arm Falls Off: The Dish. There’s not much more to say; if you know what a soufflé is and can imagine one made with spinach and Gruyère cheese… yeah, that. I served it with…

Smoky Tomato Velouté with Parmesan Sticks

My mother-in-law said she liked this tomato soup better than La Madeleine’s, which is very high praise. It’s fairly straight forward, but gets a hefty smoky kick from an onion smoked on the grill and some smoked paprika. The Parmesan sticks, or “tweedles” as Kara calls them, are a nice finishing touch.

Happy New Year to everyone!