Not Mrs. Fran's London Broil

 I'll get to the steak shortly -- this is an easy recipe with a very nice result. The title above is the one given by author Kwame Onwauchi. We had flagged the article when we read his Notes from a Young Black Chef. Since that was almost a year ago, I had to skim over the pages just before the article to be reminded of the reason for this unusual title.

It brings to mind Not Your Mother's Green Beans from the mini Moosewood, which is a Hayes-Boh favorite whose title announces a departure from the overcooked blandness typically associated with a particular dish. Onwauchi is indeed offering a recipe that contrasts with the leathery steak served by his family friend Mrs. Fran, but he does so as a reminder to himself that as important as it may be to cook well (and he is OBSESSED with this throughout his life), gratitude for those who cook with great heart is even more important, even if their skills are limited. Read his "Dominoes" for the complete, humbling story.

Herewith, the flavorful approach from the Creole side of his culinary biography. It preparation should start 24 hours before the meal. If the steak is frozen, it should be thawed prior to the first step below.

Whisk together (and do not fret overmuch about exact measures):

• 3T olive oil
• 3T balsamic vinegar
• 3 garlic cloves
• 1 jalepeño, quartered (or several, chopped coarsely)
• juice of 1 lime
• 1/4 cup cilantro stems (with leaves)
• 1 t salt
• 1/2 t ground black pepper

Put this in a ziplock bag with a 2-pound top round steak and put it in the fridge overnight. I had an excellent 1.5-pound free-range steak from Crescent Ridge, one of our local favorite sources. I often find some other way to marinate when a bag is called for, but I followed the directions this time and was pleased. It was easy to turn the bag over a couple times during the (almost) 24-hour process.

Onwauchi does not say exactly when to make the salsa -- he vaguely uses the word "meanwhile" -- but to me it made a lot of sense to make it right after the marinade, so that it could meld overnight and also chill. The salsa is most unusual, but also very simple. Mix the following in a bowl, and 90 percent of this meal is done:

• One pound of cherries, pitted and coarsely chopped; I was lucky to find fresh cherries at the beginning of their season; frozen would have been my other option. This is a bit time-consuming.
• 1/4 onion, finely chopped
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• 2 T cilantro leaves, chopped (I used more)
• 1/4 jalapeño (I used a whole one)
• juice of 1 lime (yes, that's 2 limes total)
• salt (just a bit)

One the marinade has soaked and the salsa melded, the steak should be removed from the marinade and placed on a platter for 30-60 minutes, to reach room temperature. Onwauchi suggests patting it dry, but that seems silly. I just left if on a platter and picked it up with tongs (click-click!) when I was ready to cook. Rather than searing it on a hot skillet (he suggests 7 minutes per side, with a 130F internal temperature), I put it on our Big Green Egg, in which I had been baking potatoes at about 450F for over an hour. (We are all-out potato bakers!) 

My special blogger power is knowing when the final dish is not going
to be photogenic and also when the ingredients will be. These nice
colors all melded together in a tasty but not pretty way.

I did this for 7minutes per side, taking no temperatures. In retrospect, 6 minutes would have been even better, but these results were very good -- medium at the ends and medium-rare in the middle. I tented foil over the steak for 10 minutes and sliced it very thin (on bias, as he writes). I returned this to a clean platter and served with the salsa.

We shared this with friends we knew would appreciate the vibrant flavors and the local sourcing (we buy our best chickens from these same friends). The sweet/spicy, cool/warm contrasts of this meal were amazing. We will definitely repeat -- and we might be doing so with this salsa on their chicken. 

Bonus: this recipe involves a fair bit of chopping on the day before, but almost no work at all on the day it is served. That makes it a very nice thing to serve when friends are coming over.

Apple Cake

 

Last spring the Bridgewaters' One Book One Community Read was Thanks A Thousand by A.J. Jacobs. This memoir recounts the author's attempts to thank everyone who brought him his daily cup of coffee beginning with the barista at his local coffee shop and ending with a trip to South America to thank the farmers. Ultimately he thanks about a thousand people, while realizing he didn't even get to everyone. 

As a children's selection along the same theme we found Dawn Casey's Apple Cake which features a young child thanking all the people, plants, and animals who provide the ingredients to make Apple Cake. A recipe is included in the book, so in honor of the start of fall I made it. I made my own almond flour by grinding almond slivers in the blender. The cake is dense and not too sweet although it has 3 cups of honey.

Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us

After reading this article about the science of making food addictive in the New York Times, I knew I would need to read Michael Moss' whole book about the subject. The author describes how the three titular ingredients are combined, along with a bunch of nasty preservatives, in a variety of ways into convenience and snack foods in order to make consumers want more. Food researchers have discovered how these ingredients activate the pleasure centers of our brains, and study how much of each of these ingredients we can stand - the bliss point. And, as it turns out, there is no bliss point for fat! There is no limit to how much fat food manufacturers will add to prepared foods, because consumers will just keep feeling better and better about eating them. In fact, I was very surprised to read that  some prepared food producers were actually advocating government regulation on added fat in order to level the playing field. Right now Kraft, Nestle, Pepsico, et al appear to be in some sort of arms race to get the biggest snack food share, by having the foods that will make their consumers the happiest through fat. It was not surprising to learn that the rise in consumption of convenience food is correlated with the busyness of the lives of baby boomers, who will often skip breakfast in order to get to work for an early meeting, or just have a quick bite at their desk, then rushing home to take their children to sports practice or other extra curricular activities. The more people skip meals, the more they will snack.

There were a lot of things that made me cringe while reading this. Especially the description of how Lunchables were invented, and then marketed directly to kids. While I will admit to always keeping chicken nuggets and boxed macaroni & cheese on hand when my daughter was little, I take some pride in the fact that I never fed my daughter one of those yucky things. She even asked once when she might be able to have one, after all, her friends at school brought them all the time. "Never" was my simple answer.

This book will definitely make readers reconsider they way they think about food, even for those who have already done so!

The Colonel's Apple-Stuffed Pork Chops, adapted for Sandy

About a year ago I wrote a post entitled "Oddly, I'm looking forward to reading this..." about a (then) forthcoming "food autobiography" of Colonel Sanders (of KFC fame). Last week I remembered the post, and did a bit of internet searching to find out if the book had been published yet. It had. Online. And for free. The catch is, you have to "Like" KFC on Facebook to get it.  I am pretty selective about what I like on Facebook, especially anything corporate, especially corporations I don't actually like. I was given the option, though, of making my "like" not visible to others, and so I downloaded the book (184 pages, including about 50 pages of recipes). I have not yet read the autobiography part, but I did browse through the recipes and noticed Apple-Stuffed Pork Chops, and we had recently ordered pork loin chops from Crescent Ridge Farm, which delivers our milk each week. We could not even remember the last time we had pork chops it is such a rare meal in our house, so we knew we had to make it good. We also have had a lot of apples lately, delivered in our CSA farm box this month, so this recipe was a good match of our local farm deliveries. We also knew that Hurricane Sandy might have caused our power to out at any time, and the recipe calls for cooking the chops for an hour in the oven. We decided to use our covered indispensable cast-iron skillet and cook on the gas stovetop instead, which was good, because our power did go out in the middle of cooking. These did not take long to prepare, and James and I working together had them ready for cooking in about 20 minutes. I chopped the apples and onions and cooked them in butter to soften. James mixed bread crumbs and fresh parsley (he braved the storm and got it from our garden!) and cut pockets into the chops. We then combined the bread and parsley mix with the apple and onion mix and added a bit of apple sauce (the recipe called for apple juice, but we didn't have any, and were not about to go out in the storm for that.) and stuffed the chops with it. The chops were then coated with flour and placed in the hot skillet and browned on each side. Then we turned down the heat, added more apple pieces and let them cook, covered, for about an hour.  Perfect. These were tender, and tasted like autumn. Eaten by candlelight, while the winds whipped and the rains came down, and paired with a South African Merlot/Cabernet Sauvignon "Le Bonheur" this meal was cozy and romantic.

Oddly, I'm looking forward to reading this...

Earlier this month, a KFC employee found Colonel Sanders original "food autobiography" in the company's archives. According to this press release, the document tells of Sanders' passion for "home style cooking" and hard work. One can only imagine what he would say about the KFC Famous Bowl. Here is something I would never consider cooking at home. Blech.

The Best Cookbooks of 2011

The International Association of Culinary Professionals selected its choices for the best cookbooks of 2011. In over 20 categories winners and finalists were selected from over 500 entries.

Food Books!

For a feast of food books see the Farmbrarian blog. Reviews of all kinds of books about food, farming, and sustainablity - including fiction, non-fiction and children's books. This website is a collaboration between a nutritionist and a librarian. Well done.

A Farm Store Welcome

As Pam mentioned at the opening of this blog, it is about eating and preparing food, but it is also about good food writing. One of Pam's finds is a 2009 publication, Field Days: A Year of Farming, Eating, and Drinking Wine in California, by Jonah Raskin. Pam has been reading it to me over the past couple of weeks, and I have appreciated its connections to the film Food Fight, which was brought to our campus by Chris Taylor and Thetis Sammons last year.

As Pam read today, I was particularly interested in the following passage for two reasons. First, the description of the bustling store, its helpful employees, and its connection to the farm reminded me of a couple of rewarding visits to Wilson Farm in Lexington, Massachusetts during the past year. Second, it is a sweet example of intergenerational learning about food in general and about the importance of seasons in particular. Herewith, from pages 70-71:

On the occasion of my first visit, I saw cars arrive and shoppers going into the Red Barn Store with backpacks and bags of canvas and paper. I followed the shoppers and, like them, looked at the produce, and I drifted into conversation with a woman standing next to me. She defined herself as a "locavore." "A what?" I asked, not having previously heard the word. "A locavore is a person who shops locally," she said. "That's precisely what I'm doing now." And I watched as she selected teh vegetables she planned to cook for supper.

The Red Barn Store is a veritable paradise for locavores. For nine months of the year, from April to Christmas, when it closes for winter and a much-needed break for the staff, Gael del Mar, Patrick's girlfriend, runs the store with help from two young women, Estefania and Courtney. In many ways the Red Barn Store drives the farm. The shoppers I saw arriving were insatiable for the organic fruits and vegetables on hand and couldn't seem to get enough of the items they wanted. When would the tomatoes arrive? a young woman wanted to know. Why wasn't the corn in the store? another asked. It would all be here when it came into season, Gael explained, but for now they would have to wait. Why not shop, cook, and eat what was available, she suggested to the importunate buyers, expressing much the same approach as Henry David Thoreau, who urged his contemporaries to "live in each season as it passes" and "open all your pores and bathe in all the tides of Nature, in all her streams and oceans, at all seasons."

This was clearly a new concept to the young woman who had asked for corn and was obviously accustomed to buying whatever she wanted at almost any time of the year. "Why don't you have strawberries?" she asked. "I saw them in Safeway." Gael replied, "We don't grow strawberries here." With that, the young woman took Gael's suggestion to buy what was in the store and in season, and she filled her basket with beets, fava beans, celery, kohlrabi, radishes, Savoy cabbage, and several bouquets of flowers. The older woman, who had introduced me to the word "locavore" and was now paying with a check at the counter, turned to the younger woman and said with a smile, "Welcome to the world of locavores."