Big.

Today's a big day in our house ...

Therapy.

Gastronomy is the greatest form of therapy any misfit can be exposed to.

Thanks, Kurt.

Living.

Juan Mari Arzak has no bad days ... 

It’s after noon, but he has just gotten out of bed. “I’m not very hungry yet. There was a lot of traveling yesterday,” says Arzak, who at 72, with his wispy white hair and his gentle demeanor, might seem like any grandfatherly figure on vacation and out of place among the hipsters who are here to blow it out like they’re starring in their own MTV videos. But this grandfather can teach the youngsters a thing or two about living it up.

“Maybe just a little jamón,” he says when you’re seated for coffee. Straightaway, the chef at the hotel’s Traymore restaurant, which specializes in seafood, sends out a glistening plate of the finest Pata Negra, which appears nowhere on the menu. Then Arzak gets a hankering for gambas, instructing the waiter to make sure the kitchen doesn’t overcook them. The kitchen does one better, sending out a heap of fat, plain langostinos, just like he likes them. Arzak, whose famed restaurant in posh, seaside San Sebastián has held on to its three Michelin-star rating for a remarkable 26 years, dips a couple of the tails in fresh mayonnaise and sucks out a couple of heads before he realizes something else is missing. 

“Let’s drink vino tinto,” he says, and out comes the red wine.

Patience.

Francis Mallman's approach to no bad days ...

One of the most important ingredients of food is patience; with patience, you reach the most beautiful edges of the world.

Related.

Every day is different and I really believe that cooking is something that adapts to how you’re living your day. For me, the romance of cooking is very important. It doesn’t mean that you have to have a very complicated menu. Maybe you have a potato, an onion, and a piece of meat.  It’s more related to the weather, to who’s around you. Is it winter, is spring, are you under a tree, beside the stream, are you cooking in the snow? It’s related to the music you hear, the clothes you wear, what you take in your backpack, and so on. For me, that is a very, very important ingredient: the romance we have with life.

Chef Francis Mallmann

Rapture.

Goines, Garlic, 1977

Elizabeth David, from French Country Cooking ...

GARLIC
Anyone who may be alarmed by the quantities of garlic used in some of the recipes in this book, particularly in the Catalan and Provencal dishes, may be interested in the following story of the beautiful mannequin who found out how to indulge her insatiable appetite for garlic and at the same time keep her job. That girl was perfectly right. Eating garlic is a question of habit and digestion. There is also the indisputable fact that garlic changes its character according to the amount used. Half a clove crushed into the salad dressing has a more penetrating aroma than a J lb stewed with a chicken.

As a matter of fact, the best way of cooking that Poulet Bearnais of which Ford Madox Ford writes, is to place the peeled cloves of garlic (by all means use 2 lb if you can face peeling so much) underneath the chicken before putting it on to roast. The perfume coming from the kitchen while the roasting is going on is indescribably delicious. The chicken (or, for that matter, a leg of mutton) will be permeated with the flavour, but not unduly so; those who enjoy it may eat the garlic, inv pregnated with the juice from the roast, while those who do not can do without.

I came yesterday, also in Fitzroy Street, at a party, upon a young lady who was the type of young lady I did not think one ever could meet. She was one of those ravishing and, like the syrens of the Mediter/ ranean and Ulysses, fabulous beings who display new creations to the sound of harps, shawms and teacups. What made it all the more astounding was that she was introduced to me as being one of the best cooks in London - a real cordon bleu, and then some. She was, as you might expect, divinely tall and appeared to appear through such mists as surrounded Venus saving a warrior. But I found that she really could talk, if awfully, and at last she told me something that I did not know - about garlic. . . .

As do - as must - all good cooks, she used quantities of that bulb. It occurred to me at once that this was London and her work was social. Garlic is all very well on the bridge between Beaucaire and Tarascon or in the arena at Nimes amongst sixteen thousand civilized beings. . . . But in an atelier de couture in the neighbourhood of Hanover Square! . . . The lady answered mysteriously: No: there is no objection if only you take enough and train your organs to the assimilation. The perfume of allium officinale attends only on those timorous creatures who have not the courage as it were to wallow in that vegetable. I used to know a London literary lady who had that amount of civilization so that when she ate abroad she carried with her, in a hermetically sealed silver container, a single clove of the principal ingredient of a'ioli. With this she would rub her plate, her knife, her fork and the bread beside her place at the table. This, she claimed, satisfied her yearnings. But it did not enchant her friends or her neighbours at table.

My instructress said that that served her right. She herself, at the outset of her professional career, had had the cowardice o adopt exactly that stratagem that, amongst those in London who have seen the light, is not uncommon. But when she went to her studio the outcry amongst her comrades, attendants, employers, clients and the very conductor of the bus that took her to Oxford Circus had been something dreadful to hear. Not St Plothinus nor any martyr of Lyons had been so miscalled by those vulgarians.

So she had determined to resign her post and had gone home and cooked for herself a Poulet Beamais, the main garniture of which is a kilo - 2 lb - of garlic per chicken, you eating the stewed cloves as if they were haricots blancs. It had been a Friday before a Bank Holiday, so that the mannequins at that fashionable place would not be re quired for a whole week.

Gloomily, but with what rapture internally, she had for that space of time lived on hardly anything else but the usually eschewed bulb. Then she set out gloomily towards the place that she so beautified but that she must leave for ever. Whilst she had been buttoning her gloves she had kissed an old aunt whose protests had usually been as clamant as those of her studio/mates. The old lady had merely complimented her on her looks. At the studio there had been no outcry, and there too she had been congratulated on the improvement, if possible, of her skin, her hair, her carriage. . . .

She had solved the great problem; she had schooled her organs to assimilate, not to protest against, the sacred herb. . . .'

Provence by Ford Madox Ford (1938)

Pleasure.

Don’t be afraid of cooking, as your ingredients will know and misbehave. Enjoy your cooking and the food will behave; moreover it will pass your pleasure on to those who eat it.

Fergus Henderson, from The Complete Nose to Tail

Oldest.

PBS' presentation of The Innocent Obsessions of Russell Chatham ...

The people who are, to me, have always done the best work are the people who never forget what went before and who always in all their work take into full account the entire history of everything they know about the art that they're involved in.

And they rely on it very heavily for form and for stability, but they don't imitate it.

In that sense, those people in my mind become the real avant-garde, people who rely on the oldest information they have.

Plan.

Marco Pierre White has a plan for all of your weekend dinners.

Venison Tartare: You don't have to be a cook to do this ...

Soused Herring: There's no real skill to this job ...

Fish Pie: If it burns, don't blame me ...

Just.

The Francis Mallmann episode from YesChef ...

He's just a guy sitting on a rock, with a dog, and a fire.

The modern world has no notion except that of simplifying something by destroying nearly everything. 

G. K. Chesterton

Medium-Rare.

Medium-rare.

Life-Changing.

Julia Reed finds the poetry in a pork chop ...

I’d read—and loved—his poem “The Theory and Practice of Rivers,” in which he makes menudo, the Mexican tripe soup, for New Year’s revelers, and I knew something about his appetites. But I wasn’t expecting a life-changing meal. I figured we’d dine at the Dune Saloon, site of the pay phone that had served as our only means of communication.

But then I drove my rental sedan up the cabin’s rutted driveway, marked “Trespassers Will Be Shot,” and there he was, preparing the grill for pork chops, a bunch of hardwood sticks in one hand and his beloved English setter Tess by his side. Our dinner consisted of a single course, but it remains among the most memorable of my life.

Elementary.

ELEMENTARY PLATING TIPS

Before beginning the plating process, determine the focal point by visualizing how it will appear by drawing out a plate diagram. The focal point should be the highlight of the plate and where the eye is drawn first. Bright or contrasting colors, elevation, and food placement help to highlight items. Usually, our eyes scan a food plate much like a picture, from the lower left to the upper right. Photographers use this idea when setting up a photo, called the rule-of-thirds, which divides a picture into thirds both horizontally and vertically and uses the intersecting lines as focal points. The alignment of the subject should be somewhere at one of these focal points and usually off-center. This template can also be used when apportioning the quantity of food on the plate, which, as a general rule, means no more than 2/3 of the plate should be filled with food while the other 1/3 of the plate is negative or empty space.

Avoid the rim while creating a buffer zone of ½ inch/13 mm of space from the rim to the flat of the plate. Play with symmetry, geometry, and sequencing of the foods. Use color contrasts to add visual impact and interest to the plate. Odd numbers are more pleasing to the eye than even numbers, so three asparagus spears versus four are better. Remember to keep the components of the plate in proportion to each other to balance the presentation. Determine the focal points, lines, and flow as you apportion space to each element. Don’t crowd the plate; empty space will reinforce the focal point.   Plate the food simply without too much fuss or busyness. 

Thanks, Jess.

Return.

Much earlier in this century an Austrian journalist, Karl Kraus, pointed out that if you actually perceived the true reality behind the news you would run, screaming, into the streets. I have run screaming into the streets dozens of times but have always managed to return home in time for dinner -- and usually an hour early so that I can help in the preparation.

Jim Harrison, from The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand

Socarrat.

Saveur on the art of paella ...

There are a few old-fashioned paella-making basics that Valencian cooks don't mess with. All paellas start with a sofrito, or flavor base, of chopped vegetables cooked in oil—typically garlic and tomatoes, and sometimes onions and Spanish red peppers called ñoras. The longer the sofrito cooks, the darker and more intensely flavored the paella will be. Also indisputable is this: once you've stirred the rice with the cooked sofrito and the stock, you leave it alone, uncovered. When the rice is cooked through, after 20 minutes or so, some cooks blast the heat to create a flavorful crust, called socarrat on the bottom of the pan.

Jerk.

Saveur's guide to jerk ...

Few Caribbean dishes are as well-traveled, or as beloved, as Jamaican jerk, a humble meal of bone-in chicken or pork parts doused in a blend of spices and hot peppers, and cooked slowly over smoldering pimento wood branches. Peppered across the island, roadside jerk stands entice passersby with wafts of fragrant smoke rising from makeshift grills encased in sheets of tin siding. Supple, juicy, and crispy in spots where the meat has been charred by the fire, jerk is an integral part of Jamaica's economy too, with restaurants like the perpetually busy Scotchies or the relaxed Pepper's Jerk Center serving tourists and locals year-round. It's typically eaten with your hands alongside fried cornmeal "festivals" (dumplings), scorching-­hot Scotch bonnet pepper sauce, and cold beer.

We usually serve jerk with fried plantains and peas and rice.  The plantains are bias-sliced thinly, tossed in olive oil, salt, and pepper.  I do these in a cast iron skillet on the grill.

The rice and peas are a must ...

Ingredients

• 2 cans red kidney beans
• 1 can coconut milk
• 1 small white onion, chopped
• 1 head garlic, crushed
• 1 teaspoon fresh thyme
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 2 cups rice
• 1 Scotch Bonnet pepper, whole

Preparation

1. Saute onion, garlic, thyme in olive oil in a medium sauce pan.
2. Drain beans; pour into two-quart measuring cup; add coconut milk and enough water to make 4 cups of liquid.
3. Add liquid to sauce pan; boil.
4. Add rice; stir; reduce heat, add pepper, and cook covered until rice is cooked.
5. Remove pepper and serve.

I have been a fan of Walkerswood jerk seasoning for thirty years.  Recent study has made me a disciple of Grace based on its balanced, depth of flavor. 

Use bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs.-Ed.

Excellent.

Excellent cookbooks ...

Inevitable.

Vollon, Mound of Butter, 1885

The solution, once revealed, must seem to have been inevitable.

Raymond Chandler

Deep.

Francis Mallmann, the South American Shaman of Smoke ...

He had grown up around fire. In the Michelin-starred kitchens of France, he missed the fragrance of smoke and the bitter funk of a good char. “I was forty and I had been doing French food for twenty years,” he says. “I realized that I didn’t have a voice of my own, and I was losing interest. One day I realized that all those fires from my childhood were very deep inside of me.”

Pretty soon the fires seemed embedded in him—for real. He would board planes and passengers would ask to change seats, so pungent was his cologne of burning wood. 

Comeuppance.

Chach gets his comeuppance ...

Not bad for a troll.