Once again, using the techniques from Harold McGee and Jesse Schenker, and three octopus legs from New Deal Fish Market in Cambridge, I was able to enjoy two terrific meals with my favorite mollusk. Best of all, it required minimal labor to make it happen.
Here’s the formula:
McGee
In this instance cook in dry pot for 3.5 hours.
Schenker
Buy the octopus on Wednesday. Wash, blanch the tentacles, cook in an empty pot for 3.5 hours at 200° F
Wednesday evening, mix the marinade, drain and cool the octopus legs, place legs in marinade in fridge
Thursday, remove half the legs from the marinade, cut in 3/4-inch pieces, add olive oil, Pimenton, salt, and enjoy Pulpo alla Gallega for lunch
Friday, remove the rest of the legs from bowl, grill until charred on both sides. serve with cannellini beans, chopped Italian parsley, olive oil, and lemon juice.
This is a story about the classic Cantonese dish, Egg Foo Yong. As you often find with my posts, you will get recipes, photos, personal reminiscences, a history lesson, and a chance to try your own hand at re-creating a meal.
My wife is an accomplished cook in many areas. One of her favorites is Chinese food. Ever since we took a series of cooking lessons 40 years ago at the home of her friend, Eugenia, she has been comfortable with a variety of dishes. When we moved toward vegan/vegetarian options, this was especially helpful.
Last week she decided to make fried rice, with a bunch of cooked brown rice leftover from another meal. That decision led her to shop at an Asian food market nearby, where she bought a large bag of mung bean sprouts, cleaner and fresher than anything we would find at other supermarkets. The total price was $1.47. The fried rice was made with other leftovers and the bean sprouts, and it was delicious, as always. However, she still had more than half the bag of sprouts, and she was anxious to use those while they were nice and fresh, so she determined that it was time to figure out how to make Egg Foo Yong as the vehicle to consume them.
To find a good recipe, her first thought was to go to the bookshelf and to examine the Joyce Chen Cookbook, written in 1961. For those of you not familiar with this famous chef, you will find her personal story fascinating. She is best described by this: Celebrity chef Ming Tsai later said of Chen, “She is the Chinese Julia Child […] Joyce Chen helped elevate what Chinese food was about. She didn’t dumb it down. She opened people’s eyes to what good Chinese could taste like.”
Since we lived in and around Cambridge from 1963, we often went to her restaurants and talked with her in person. One of the last times we saw her was in 1970, when we had a mini-banquet with family to celebrate the completion of my doctoral degree. That dinner was in her restaurant along Memorial Drive in Cambridge, and it remains a powerful memory.
Here are the two recipes which were merged for our dinner last week. The first is from Joyce Chen and the second one, from Kay Chun, via the New York Times Cooking section online.
After a good deal of prep work and skill with a hot wok, here are the results of superb Egg Foo Yong.
Just to be sure we had enough for dinner, she also made Noodles with Oyster Sauce, Garlic, Ginger and Scallions. It’s truly amazing what one can do with $1.47 worth of fresh bean sprouts!
Last week I visited the coastal areas north of Boston. I had a ticket for a concert by Kathy Mattea, an American country music and bluegrass singer. She’s been one of my favorite artists for close to 30 years. While I had enjoyed her music for many years on recordings, I had not seen her in concert until four years ago, when she played at the beautiful Shalin Liu Performance Center in Rockport, MA. She was so good that night, I was eager to see her again. Best of all, she closed the show this year with a song I love, 455 Rocket.
Her show was amazing. She was accompanied by Fred Carpenter, who played fabulous guitar, mandolin, and fiddle at various times, and also by an excellent bass player, whose name I didn’t catch.
The drive to Rockport from my home is about 75-90 minutes, depending on traffic. The concert started at 8 PM, so I decided to take the afternoon to explore food highlights along the way, thus avoiding the worst traffic periods as well. Two of the best places I know are in Gloucester, MA, which is just 15 minutes away from Rockport, so I stopped there to pick up fresh pasta at Pastaio Via Corta. I planned it so I could have an early dinner at about 5 PM at Tonno — an outstanding Italian restaurant featuring the local seafood — and it is located only a few blocks up the street from the pasta shop.
The meal was superb. I had tuna tartare (the best I ever tasted) and then a lobster flatbread with two cheeses. A glass of Etna bianco provided the wine.
Tuna Tartare
Lobster Flatbread
One final stop…I had some time to kill before the concert, so I stopped in the bar at the restaurant, Feather and Wedge, a few blocks from the Performance Center. Keeping in mind that I had a long drive home late that night, I ordered 1/2 glass of an Italian sweet vermouth. It tasted good and kept me warm before the theater that chilly night.
Vermouth
While we’re on the subject of vermouth, I want to share a discovery that came about recently in an unusual way. This has little to do with the North Shore, but it doesn’t deserve a separate post, so here it is. I recently went back to the restaurant Atlantico and had dinner with my friend, Chris. We both enjoyed the meal, and at the end, I tried a Spanish vermouth exactly to my taste. It reminded me of the vermouth I had in Falset, Spain, in 2019, when I was traveling the wine country there with my son. Then I looked at the Atlantico menu and reviewed the list of the vermouth choices.
The one I liked was rojo (red) Yzaguirre, from Tarragona! That’s where we stayed overnight before going on to Porto in 2019. And Falset was where we stayed the night before we were in Tarragona. All the pieces matched well. NOW the challenge was finding that vermouth in a retail shop. Mirabile dictu! My South Boston wine store, Social Wines, has it in stock. I went there immediately and am now happy to be able to drink it before or after a meal at home. Best of all, the bottle cost $22 vs. $14 by the glass in the restaurant. Once in a awhile, everything just works out well.
One week recently I found myself eating a number of bright, spicy, cheerful salad dishes.
Beets with Pickled Cauliflower, Chopped Onion, Feta Cheese and Pickled Jalapeños
Radicchio with Cucumber, Fresh Shell Beans, Clementines, Olives and Feta Cheese
An Indian Vegan recipe: Kachumber – Cucumber, Red Onion, Tomatoes, Jalapeños, Chile Peppers, Lime juice, and Kala Namak (black salt)
Then we had a good friend visiting us from Italy, up in the mountains. For a change of pace I made a spinach pasta dough, then cut it into Tonnarelli to serve a a first course to the meal. A few days later I used the remaining spinach-infused dough to make cannelloni, stuffed with whipped almond milk ricotta and feta cheese, topped with a little tomato sauce.
Finally, here’s a wide-angle view of our kitchen — spacious and well-equipped. You can see why we enjoy cooking there.
Bakers like to tinker. Even when I get a highly satisfying recipe for my breads, I am often tempted to tweak the components to see if it could be any better. Such was the case a week ago, when I modified my favorite light bread (80/20 with Rye and Spelt), incorporating 50 grams of Type 85 flour and reducing the white bread flour by a similar amount. The recipe made one batard and one boule. It seemed to work well.
It’s been a warm October in New England, with more great produce from our local farmers. My wife and I have each enjoyed cooking during this time of plenty.
Zucchini and Mushroom Frittata and a Shrimp Dish on the side
Picking the Rest of the Basil on our Plant, then Chopping Garlic for Pesto
Finished pesto in a freezer bag
My wife’s best meal this month was a risotto with pancetta and green peas.
Flounder Wrapped in Prosciutto
I’ve been enjoying fish a lot recently. Flounder fillets wrapped in prosciutto and served with sweet potatoes, broccolini, caponata, and cabbage was a colorful dish and well-matched with a French Chablis.
I do sometimes invent recipes, but I read, borrow, and adapt a great many others. Tonight’s dinner is owed almost entirely to three very good cooks. The meal was made of two relatively simple dishes:
Scallops with Curried Onions and Lime
Fregole Sarde with Zucchini and Parmesan
Geographically, this meal starts in Portland, Maine, where our very good friend, Pat, introduced us to the cookbook, MEZCLA, by Ixta Belfrage. Pat had made a dinner for us featuring several recipes from this book, so I bought a copy as soon as I got home. I copied several recipes that looked good to me and put them in my online recipe file. Tonight I made the Scallops dish as a first course, although I must admit that I forgot the lime. Chalk it up to old age.
Scallops photo from the bookmy version tonightCloseup of mine
Here is a short bio about Ixta. You can see that her cooking brings the influences of Brazil, Italy, and Mexico, which is probably why I find the recipes so intriguing.
The main course comes directly from a cookbook author and blogger, Clotilde Dusoulier. I had discovered her blog, charmingly named Chocolate and Zucchini, very early in my food blogging days. Lively inventions from her Paris kitchen have been collected into my recipe files, and tonight, her Sardinian dish, Fregola Sarde with Zucchini and Parmesan got the call.
It tasted even better than it looks. I restrained myself and had only three helpings. A glass of Lugana was a nice match for both dishes.
As the summer winds down, we are enjoying a surfeit of great vegetables from local farms. One unexpected source was a former student who has been growing terrific veggies in a large plot in Belmont, not far from his home in Cambridge. He has been very generous with his gifts of fresh produce, including green beans, Japanese eggplant, cucumbers and cherry tomatoes.
Cucumber Tomato Feta Saladon Grilled Sourdough
Farro with Beans and Vegetables
Cannellini and Cranberry Bean Salad
Fusilli with Swiss Chard
The purpose of my recent trip to Gloucester was explore the wonders of Pastaio Via Corta and to meet the proprietor, Danielle Glantz. It was a very long ride, but well worth the trip! I bought three kinds of fresh pasta (this fusilli was one of them), one box of dried pasta, and a bunch of other goodies.
Butternut Squash with Tomatoes and Peas
This is now one of our regular risotti.
For our last trick, How to Cut a Bunch of Cherry Tomatoes Easily…
You may have noticed if you’ve followed this blog for a while that seafood has taken a prominent place in the foods I eat and write about. This post provides some short stories of recent adventures in my continuing search for the best seafood.
JT Farnum’s – Fried Clams
In July I read an article online from Boston.com about the best fried clam restaurants in Massachusetts. The top three were The Clam Box of Ipswich, Woodman’s of Essex, and JT Farnum’s. Since I was headed to Gloucester after that, Ipswich was out of the way. I had been to the famous Woodman’s several times before, so I decided to try JT Farnum’s, also in Essex. It was a good choice. I stopped for lunch and enjoyed a delicious plate of fried clams. The scenery behind the restaurant was a real bonus.
Two other restaurants provided excellent meals this month. Select Oyster Bar in Back Bay, Boston, was a good Monday evening/early-dinner/avoid-the-traffic spot to eat. After my usual selection of several oysters on the half shell and the Romanesco cauliflower salad with hazelnuts and aioli, I ordered the Blue crab salad with celery root remoulade. It was delicious and very rich, so I took most of it home and had it for lunch the next day. Superb.
Another Monday night and another restaurant; this time it was an old favorite — Il Capriccio, in Waltham. The occasion was reconnecting with an old friend and colleague over an extended, leisurely dinner. My seafood choice was the Octopus appetizer, and it was excellent, very tender.
Octopus also provided another form of finding my seafood. This example was in the form of a pre-cooked, frozen package of Spanish octopus. Usually, I cook my own, as you may know from previous posts, but this was from Sven Fish, a local supplier of good fresh fish, so I gave it a try. I made a few dishes on different days at home. It was convenient and not too expensive, but I felt it needed to be cooked longer to be tender enough for my taste. The Portuguese wine made with Castelão grapes redeemed the meal anyway.
I’ve been making sourdough breads for 13 years. They are a source of great gratification. I just reached a new milestone last week. After examining the Excel spreadsheets which hold my bread logs, I chose two recipes that I had ranked the best, and I duplicated them. They were even better than the original versions, so I want to establish them now as my “go-to” breads, the standards of what to bake unless I want to experiment.
The first one is made predominantly with white bread flour. I call it 80/20, because the 20% of non-white flours are a combination of whole wheat, rye, and spelt. It’s my favorite “white” bread. The 20% makes it more flavorful and interesting than any other white bread I know.
Here is the formula:
The second bread is my new standard whole-grain bread, one I feel achieves the right balance of rich flavors and textures that these healthy flours can produce. The key to this bread is Type 85 flour, made by Central Milling, a producer of outstanding flours from Utah for more than 150 years. Their description of it:
“This organic type 85 flour is a blend of hard red winter and hard red spring wheat that has been malted with organic malted barley. Designed for artisan bread baking, this flour replicates older milling techniques. The higher ash content increases the nutritional value of the flour without compromising its baking performance. Organic Type 85 Malted is not quite white flour and not quite whole grain.”
I learned about this flour when I discovered Maurizio Leo, an amazing baker who recently published a major book, The Perfect Loaf. You can learn a lot from his website of the same name. I now have three incredible tutors for making breads: Chad Robertson of Tartine Bakery, Ken Forkish of Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast fame, and Maurizio. I’ll have to live to 120 to take full advantage of all these insights, but we’ll take it one year at a time.
You might find it interesting to compare a slice of each bread, side-by-side. You’ll see the darker grain on the rich Type 85 loaf vs. the light color of the 80/20 bread. Both of these taste great when toasted, grilled, or sautéed in olive oil. They both go with a variety of cheeses, nut butters, hummus, white bean purée, slices of prosciutto, and bruschetta with all sorts of toppings.
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