eat and tell — Natural Aphrodisiac and Gourmet Foods, Wine, Romantic Travel

I do believe there’s someone out there for everybody. However, I don’t believe we are limited to only one chance at bliss. Good thing! Same goes for the world of food and drink. Yes, there are the classic pairings we all know so well – Champagne and oysters, beer and pizza, milk and cookies. But, when you look closely, you’ll find that the same flavor components that make those combinations work so well are universal to all our favorite foods and drinks… you just need to know a little more about how they work together.

Let’s take a closer look at each of the examples…

Champagne and oysters love each other because the acidity in the bubbly and the brininess of the oysters balance each other and if you’re lucky maybe even enhance other fruit and floral aromas hiding in the background.

Beer and pizza rely on beer’s tendency to be earthy, acidic and low in alcohol – and don’t forget those scrubbing bubbles! Earth flavors, like the ones found in beer, are flexible with many foods; more so than many of the jammy fruity flavors of many wines. This is especially good if you like lots of different toppings on your pizza. Acidity is a great foil for saltiness and the tang of tomato sauce; and the fact that most beers are relatively low in alcohol means you can get as spicy as you like! (Without fear of getting burned.) And those scrubbing bubbles? They work magic with the fatty meats and cheeses we love so much on a good pizza… palates are cleansed and ready for the next slice.

Even milk and cookies have a little flavor science behind their charm. Milk’s natural sweetness balances with the sweet cookies and refreshes the palate – again, making it ready for the next delicious bite.

In our endless search for pleasure, finding the perfect match (flavors or otherwise) means finding something that leaves you wanting more. When your palate is refreshed and excited you are compelled to take another bite, another sip, linger – bliss!

Here are some of the basic flavor principles that these and other perfect matches are based on:

Acidity gives flavor a backbone and makes your mouth water (and prepare for the next bite)

Salt is a flavor enhancer and can bring out fruity or subtle sweet flavors that you may not have noticed at first

Salt and acidity balance each other out and complement each other as well

Salt and sweet love each other (think salted caramels, chocolate covered pretzels, etc.)

Two sweet flavors will cancel each other out and accentuate any acidity. This can be refreshing when the flavors are in balance, when they aren’t in balance it’s like brushing your teeth then drinking orange juice (not sexy)

Sweetness soothes the burn of spicy foods (alcohol, on the other hand, makes the spiciness burn hotter)

Earthy flavors go with more… they are the beiges and neutrals of the food world – everything looks/tastes good with them

A few food and drink combinations that have brought me a little taste of bliss recently…

Lucien Albrecht Rosé sparking wine with crispy French fries dipped in bone marrow béarnaise sauce (L’Ecole, NYC)

Port-Stout “Boilermaker” – a cocktail of Old Rasputin stout and Taylor’s 20-year Tawny port with a chocolate soufflé tart (Hatfield’s, LA)

Pumpkin ale with Israeli couscous tossed with cubes of butternut squash sautéed in brown butter, Brussels sprout leaves, toasted pine nuts, and pomegranate “jewels” (my home, BK)

Leek and raisin curry topped with slice of duck breast, brioche croutons and cucumber-cilantro-lime salad with a chaser of banana flavored Maker’s Mark (a Cooking Issues creation at FCI, NYC) [picture and more info on my blog: http://wandereatandtell.com/2010/11/02/new-york-taste-what-i-did-last-night/]

2009 Dönnhoff Riesling (Nahe, Ger), an ever-so-slightly off-dry Riesling: tingly-crisp, Asian pear-like, with subtle layers of exotic fruit and mineral aromas. It went with pretty much everything we ate at lunch that day – escargot with Asian pear; cavatelli with sundried tomatoes and olives; perfectly cooked pork chop with cider jus and polenta; seared scallops with butternut squash puree, Brussels sprouts, and pomegranate; rabbit with chorizo and bacon; and a not-too-sweet pumpkin soufflé – yes, a huge lunch! (L’Ecole, NYC with Chrysta from Kiss My Bundt)

Whatever your taste, there is a perfect match for you. Think about what you like to eat – flavor combinations that you enjoy. Break them down to a few basic flavors and see if any of them fit with the concepts listed above. Then, go forth and explore the fun world of food and drink with confidence in what you know you like, and a sense of adventure for new taste opportunities. Do what makes you happy – that’s bliss.

Filed Under: cooking & recipes, eat and tell

falling in love again

June 1, 2010 By admin

with chef annette tomei

I’ve been cooking for my family and friends as well as professionally for at least three decades. For most of that time, cooking was something I did for the joy of the process and the pleasure it brought to others. Then, somewhere along the way, it became just another chore or task that I was expected to perform. Oddly, this coincided with my departure from the professional kitchen. I thought that, once I stopped cooking professionally, I would have more time and interest to dedicate to personal enjoyment, but my reality was quite the opposite.

Technically, I am still a chef – food is still part of my professional life; just not the preparation of it – not cooking. I manage chefs who cook, teach students who cook, write recipes and menus; I just don’t see the inside of a kitchen very often.

Many New Yorkers can blame not cooking at home on the size or functionality of their kitchens. Not me. I have a kitchen that might be considered luxurious by some NYC standards, and I have open access to the well-appointed kitchens of family and friends. Still, no cooking. Access to an abundance of good quality ingredients is not a problem either. I spend my days in close proximity to Little Italy, Chinatown, several farmers’ markets, and at least a two large Whole Foods markets. No excuses there. So, what’s the problem?

I’ve got no excuses. Just a chef’s version of a midlife crisis. The passion left my relationship with cooking. I was going through the motions. Still working, still reading Saveur and Gastronomica, still writing about food and cooking, but without the love I once felt, and it showed.

Then, in the past few weeks, something began to change. I wish I could say it was some particular food experience, a special person in my life, or a particularly moving event, but it wasn’t. Like falling in love, it just snuck up on me when I was least expecting it. That’s what makes it so exciting and so personal. One moment I was planning yet another evening in a restaurant (rough life, I know), the next I was planning a grocery list for a special dinner for one – myself. Nothing fancy. Just comfort food – my sister’s “summer pasta,” whole-wheat penne with tiny tomatoes, good olive oil, fresh basil, briny olives, and bocconcini (bite-size fresh mozzarella), served with a salad of fresh arugula dressed with lemon, olive oil and Sal de Ibiza con Chili. It was one of the best meals I’ve cooked myself in ages.

As with falling in love (again), once you get your first taste, you don’t want to stop. My work schedule and a NYC heat wave kept me from the kitchen for the next couple of weeks but plans for vacation kept my hopes up. Six days in Los Angeles and two days on the beach with nothing to do but cook, eat, drink, and write – perfect! To top it off, I’m even catering a dinner party the day after I return home. (Note: I’m writing from the last day of my visit to LA.)

My first day in LA was spent preparing for the evening’s release party for Amy Reiley and Juan-Carlos Cruz’s new book, The Love Diet. Nothing like jumping in with both feet. The menu Amy created highlighted dishes from the new cookbook and included items such as Sizzling Lemongrass Mussels, “Wake and Bake” (baked veggie omelet), Open-faced Grilled Cheese with Soybean Spread, and my favorite (and most challenging) – Blue Cheese-Walnut Brittle. It felt great to be in a kitchen again, especially cooking with friends. It was a true team effort with three of us slicing, dicing, whisking, and stirring. The food was delicious, simple, and beautiful – the event was a great success.

The next night we opted for a simple meal of grilled skirt steak marinated in red wine and grainy mustard with ginger, Greek-style fingerling potato salad, and baby carrots and icicle radishes dipped in soybean dip. We needed something relatively light before digging into the selection of Kiss My Bundt cakes leftover from the party!

My next major excursion into the kitchen was for Sunday brunch. Amy and I visited the Hollywood Farmers’ Market with no menu in mind, just the plan to prepare brunch for a small group gathering to enjoy a relaxing day and the remaining Perrier Jouet, more remains from the book release party. I hadn’t been to a California farmers’ market in years – what a treat! We purchased fresh duck eggs, porcini mushrooms (the morels were sold out), tender dandelion greens, raw garbanzo beans (a first for me), and the thinnest asparagus I’d ever seen – it was more like the wild asparagus I foraged in Italy than like any cultivated variety I’ve had here. We also purchased stone fruits called Apriums (cross between apricot and plum). Amy pointed them out – they look like smooth apricots. The woman at the stall gave me one to taste and I was hooked for life! The floral apricot aroma was intense. When I bit into it, the skin popped and released a flood of aromatic juices – much more complex than a plum, much juicier and tangy than most apricots. We brought home all our treasures; I hit the kitchen and Amy went to the garden for fresh chives, basil, and lemons to round out our larder. Here’s the menu:

Tangerine-Passion Fruit-Lemongrass Mimosas
Scrambled Duck Eggs with Fresh Chives
Cornbread Pudding drizzled with dark honey
Amy’s Watermelon Feta Salad
Sautéed Dandelion Greens with Porcinis, Fresh Garbanzos, and Chive Blossoms
Icicle Radishes, Baby Carrots, Endive Spears, Lotus Root, and “Wild” Asparagus served with Soybean Dip, Butter, and Pinot Noir Sea Salt

I feel very fortunate to fall back in love with cooking – something that has brought me so many years of pleasure and fulfillment. And I’m grateful for my friends who are willing to court my passions and provide beautiful kitchens, ingredients, and reasons to celebrate!

Filed Under: cooking & recipes, eat and tell Tagged With: farmers' market, The Love Diet

learning to love LA

April 11, 2010 By admin

with chef annette tomei

If you’ve read many of the Eat and Tell posts I’ve written over the years, you probably already know that I’ve always been an East Coast girl, even when I lived on the West Coast. To top it off, I’m a New Yorker, and as such, I’ve been a little prejudice against Los Angeles for a good long time. For years, friends have been trying to convince me of the wonders of life in sunny southern California. They’ve met with little success – and a bit of Brooklyn attitude to top it off!

Well, all that began to change after my most recent visit, a detour between a family ski vacation in Deer Valley, Utah and a return to winter in New York. I was only in LA for 36 hours-give or take, but managed to pack in several days’ worth of activities, as well as a few days’ worth of food and drink. Amy Reiley and I have both written about the details of those adventures on our blogs, click here and here for each of our stories of gastronomic debauchery.

It was a relatively short flight from sunny soft, warm breezes back to the cold and wet of NYC at the end of winter. For the first time, I wasn’t in a hurry to get back to my “reality.” Something about the bright orange tangerines on the tree outside the door as I was leaving, and memories of the exciting new foods and drinks I’d enjoyed the night before were lingering in my mind – making me question my decades-long mental block against the City of Angels.

Seemingly out of the blue, media and magazines were as caught up in the wonders of LA as I was becoming. On my flight home, I read an article in Gastronomica (Winter 2010, Issue 10, Volume 1) about the notable absence of women in the ranks of the world’s top chefs (Why Are There No Great Women Chefs?). The author, Charlotte Druckman, proposes that the two women chefs most likely to be considered for such “honor” found their success not in NYC or even San Francisco, but in Los Angeles. Druckman’s choices to rival the David Changs and Mario Batalis of the world are Suzanne Goin and Nancy Silverton (who actually partnered with Batali on a couple of LA hotspots, Mozza and Osteria Mozza). As a woman chef who has long battled with the same question, this article alone is enough to draw my attention and respect for a city I have frequently dismissed as one in which the restaurant spectacle far outweighed the seriousness of the cuisine. Seems I have a lot more to learn about LA restaurants – that puts at least a couple more trips on this year’s calendar. (Hope Amy’s ready for that!)

Then when I arrived home, I noticed that my other favorite food magazine, Saveur, also finds Los Angeles worthy of a closer look. The March 2010 issue is dedicated, in it’s entirety, to that city’s gastronomic treasures. Some of the information was expected – Wolfgang Puck’s pizzas, the influence of Hollywood, the fresh produce. Then there were the tidbits I either never knew or conveniently ignored (in true New York fashion) – the extensive influence of a thriving spectrum of immigrant populations, a fascinating culture whose history is as made-up as the best Hollywood movies. As restaurant critic, Patric Kuh, put it in his essay “Nights on the Town” (Saveur, #127, March 2010), “It’s okay not to have too much of a history in Los Angeles. In fact, being without one is something of a tradition…. Nothing was native here, so borrowed themes took on their own, distinctive character.” That doesn’t stop it from growing and developing a lasting influence on popular and dining culture.

I’ve always associated Southern California with an enviable abundance of fresh produce, available year-round to boot. Also, tasty delights like “real” tacos, especially fish tacos that are at their finest on the streets of LA; and now we can add to that the wonders of the Kogi truck – Korean tacos. Need I say more?

What about Persian cuisine? LA has long been an epicenter of Persian culture in the United States. Learning more about the culture and cuisine is high on my “to do” list for future visits. Add that to the long list of others such as Little Saigon, the neighboring Filipino enclave, and a bit more of the historic Hollywood that I still can’t get enough of! I’ll enjoy my multi-cultural tasting accompanied by some great California wines and maybe a classic Tiki drink or two. Then I’ll finish the meal with a nibble of the best bundt cake I’ve ever had from Kiss My Bundt, and maybe a donut from one of the many Cambodian donut shops scattered around the city.

Now, about those plane tickets…

Filed Under: cooking & recipes, eat and tell Tagged With: los angeles restaurants, restaurants

nibbles

July 11, 2009 By admin

with chef annette tomei

Nibbles. The word alone draws a sensual image – delicate, playful, innocent – but not very! Be it tender earlobes, the sweet spot on your lover’s neck or flavorful tasty morsels eaten with your fingers, nibbles can be fun and satisfying in their own right or a prelude to something more substantial. Either way, life would be far less enjoyable without nibbles.

Summer is a great time for nibbles (of all varieties). There’s too much fun to be had and it’s a bit too hot to prepare elaborate meals. We crave lighter bites with tantalizing flavors that we can eat al fresco in the park, on the beach, or wherever summer may take us. Small bites are easy to prepare, easy to pack, and fun to share with a loved one while sneaking nibbles of a more personal variety!

I always keep an assortment of nibble-y foods on hand, especially during the summer when cooking for one is more trouble than a treat. My refrigerator is stocked with cheeses, hummus, pickled veggies, olives and other savory finger foods. A crusty baguette, some sliced prosciutto, and some bubbles… picnic is served!

Some other favorite nibbles (of the food variety, that is):

Fresh, juicy peaches that drip down my chin
Sweet ripe berries fresh from the farmers’ market (with a little melted chocolate maybe?)
Jacque Torres’ “Wicked” ice cream (chocolate with chiles) or banana rum sorbet (what a kick!)
“Raincoast Crisps” (rosemary raisin pecan crackers) with perfectly ripe epoisses
Small, briny oysters served ice-cold (with some bubbly, perhaps?)
Picking the leaves off steamed artichokes, dipping them in lemony aioli or simple, decadent melted butter

Here’s a recipe for the easiest, most addictive pickled cherry tomatoes – you won’t be able to stop nibbling (What could be a more perfect nibble than a classic, summer aphrodisiac?)

Pickled Cherry Tomatoes

20 ounces rice wine vinegar
2 garlic cloves
4 tablespoons Sugar
2 jalapenos, split with seeds intact
1 (3-inch) piece of ginger, chopped
8 ounces water
20 cherry tomatoes, peeled

1. Bring the first six ingredients to a boil; reduce to a simmer for 5 minutes.
2. Pour over the cherry tomatoes to cover. Allow to pickle for at least 1 hour or overnight.
3. Tomatoes may be stored in this liquid for up to 1 week, covered and in a refrigerator.

Filed Under: cooking & recipes, eat and tell

life is a perfect cocktail

June 11, 2009 By admin

with chef annette tomei

My current favorite quote is one from Virginia Woolf. Basically, it says that there are moments in life that we experience so intensely that they stand alone like a delicate droplet of water. Eventually, and all too quickly, the drop falls and that precious moment becomes a part of the whole, blending with all other moments of life. I think that’s a beautiful sentiment but maybe a little sad, as if it’s saying that no moment is truly, distinctly special – only a part of a homogenous blend of moments. I much prefer to think of life as a perfect cocktail.

Any good mixologist knows that the secret to the complexity, depth, and balance of a good drink lies not only in the main ingredients – the quality of the liquor, the mixers, or even the ice used, but in the seasoning. The difference between a chilled shot of gin and a martini lies in the vermouth – no matter if it appears in the traditional proportion of three to one or if it’s just a brief mist of the glass before pouring in the chilled main course. By definition, a true cocktail is made using bitters – intensely flavored droplets of distilled aromatics that make the difference between an average mixed drink and a real and delicious cocktail. A perfect Manhattan would not be so perfect without the bitters!

As an analogy for life, the word bitters makes this idea seems a bit cliché – but, really, that’s not where I’m going with this… I’m thinking more along the lines of unique and truly intensely flavored (or felt) moments that change the quality of your life, hopefully for the better, the same way the addition of intense and unique flavors change a drink or a dish (also, hopefully for the better).

Moments like love at first sight, first kisses, a silky breeze on a moonlit night, the right song at the right time – all add up to the seasoning of life. Equally, the bitters, the vermouth, the Aperol, the Pernod, or my newest favorite – the fresh calamansi juice in a rum and Coke, can make a simple beverage something truly unique.

My favorite foods have bursts of unexpected spice, acidity, or other distinct but well-integrated flavors as well. I love to incorporate chiles in unexpected ways, like macerated in with strawberries for strawberry shortcake. I cook with an assortment of vinegars, citrus fruits, and other acidic flavor enhancers to make flavors dance in soups, stews and braises; and my cupboards are loaded with condiments from around the world that I love to experiment with for adding depth to simple foods. All of these items, though used sparingly, give the dish substance – character – same way I like to live my life!

Now that spring is officially in full swing and summer is just around the corner, there are many great opportunities to add a little spice to your life, your drink, and your dinner… Remember it’s the little bits of big flavor we season our lives with that make the average extraordinary. Experiment, allow a little surprise into your life… be your own mixologist!

Filed Under: cooking & recipes, eat and tell Tagged With: bitters, vermouth