Day 265

One afternoon recently I got a Slack message from one of my co-workers who lives in a different state in my time zone.

“I bought a pre-seasoned steak at the supermarket,” it said. “How should I cook it?”

I wrote back the following instructions.

1. Place a frying pan on the stove over medium-high heat. Drop in a couple of tablespoons of fat (butter, olive oil, etc).

2. When the fat starts to sizzle, put in the steak. For a medium steak, cook 5-6 minutes on one side, then flip and do the same on the other. 

3. Remove steak from pan and rest for about 5 minutes. Eat.

I received the following response: “That’s it?”

Yes, I confirmed, that’s it. I could have added a few extra steps: I skipped the “salt generously before cooking” step, because they said it was pre-seasoned, so that was taken care of. I didn’t send instructions on how to make a quick pan sauce, which is how I usually use the 5-minute rest. And I didn’t tell them to open all the windows, no matter how cold it is, because even with the fan on, I usually set off the smoke alarm when I cook steak. 

But although you can add on as many extras as you want, it really is that simple to make a good steak. I was reminded of this myself a few nights later, when I made a flank steak for the first time ever. I was nervous about messing it up and ending up with a piece of shoe leather, so I spent some time trawling my online collection for flank steak recipes. After looking at about a dozen, I came back to the basic method I’d outlined for my workmate. The only things I changed were to do my own pre-seasoning, liberally salting, peppering, and garlic powdering the steak several hours before cooking. And to remember to cut across the grain when serving - apparently cutting it any other way does make it tough.

It came out great, garnering praise from steak-fiend DP and steak-skeptic Miss B, who both declared it their cut of choice from now on. I'm calling that a win-win and putting it into the regular rotation.

Mass quantities

Despite the length of time since my last post, I can't face doing another round-up write-up. It feels like too much of a chore, and counterproductive to the practice of meticulous mindfulness. (Or mindful meticulousness; I still can't decide.) So for the time being, I've decided to take a different approach: I'm going to work through my photo backlog, one at a time. I'm hoping having a well of inspiration to dip into will motivate me to get back into a more regular habit of doing actual writing, as opposed to rapid-fire updates.

In any case, this one deserves its own post: it's my family recipe for lasagna, and as well as being iconic, it is fairly massive, as you will see. To give you a sense of how massive: I made this in August for a Sunday lunch we hosted for a group of DP's students and their families - 12 adults and 15 children, including us. Given the numbers, I decided to multiply the base recipe by 1.5. And we had leftovers.

Lasagna alla mia famiglia
As noted, even this base recipe makes mass quantities - it involves more than 15 lbs (~7 kilos) of ingredients. (When I say it like that, multiplying it seems kind of insane. But then, like Nigella, I am never knowingly undercatered.)

One of the good things about this recipe is that you don't have to do it all in one go; when I made this last time, I cooked the meats and the sauce the day before. This made assembly on the day much simpler. 

Sauce
a double batch of Disruptive Bolognese (or substitute your favorite Bolognese-type sauce; the key components you need are ~2 lbs/1 kg of hamburger/beef mince, and ~48 oz/1400 g tomato passata or equivalent. More is better than less.)

Lasagna
2 lbs/1 kg pork butt (confusingly, this American term actually refers to a cut from the upper shoulder of the front leg; also known as Boston butt)
2 lbs/1 kg sweet Italian sausage
4 lbs/2 kg good-quality ricotta cheese4-6 jumbo/extra-large eggs
3 cups/~10 oz/~300 g grated pecorino romano cheese, divided
2 lbs/1 kg lasagna noodles (ready-to-cook are fine)

Preparing the lasagna components
1. Make the sauce as you normally would.

2. Heat oven to 350F/180C.

3. Slice pork butt thickly (it takes much longer to cook if it is one piece), place in a shallow roasting pan, and put in the oven.

4. Line another shallow roasting pan with foil; place sausages in this pan, and put in oven as well.

5. Cook both meats for 40-50 minutes, or until just cooked, turning once. (Remember that they will cook further in the lasagna.)

6. In a large bowl, mix together ricotta, *2* cups of the pecorino, and as many eggs as you need. (The consistency of this once mixed should be creamy and somewhat grainy, more of a batter than a cheesy consistency. You may get to this point with only 4 eggs, or it may take all 6. Likewise, you may need a bit more than 2 cups grated cheese, but save some to sprinkle over the top of the finished lasagna.) Put aside.

7. After both meats have cooked and cooled, cut into bite-sized pieces. Put aside.

(Please note that all steps to this point can be completed up to a day ahead. Refrigerate the components separately until you are ready to assemble.)

Assembling and cooking the lasagna
(If you are using ready-to-cook noodles, skips steps 8 and 9 and proceed to step 10.)

8. Bring a large pan of water to the boil. Add 2 heaping Tbsp of salt, a few drops of olive oil, and the noodles.

9. Cook noodles for no more than 10 minutes after water returns to boil. Drain noodles and return to colander to cool for a few minutes, shaking to distribute so they're less likely to stick together.

10. If not already on, heat oven to 350F/180C.

11. Cover the bottom of a very large roasting pan with sauce to a depth of ~.5 in/1 cm.
(Please note that when I say "very large" - my mother used an oval 18 in x 12 in x 4 in/~46 cm x 31 cm x 10 cm turkey roasting pan to make this. I make it in 2 rectangular 14.5 in x 11 in x 2 in/36.8 cm x 27.9 x 5.08 cm roasting pans. Either way, you should be aiming to get three complete sauce-noodles-cheese-meat layers in a pan, plus a noodles-and-sauce cover, so divide your ingredients accordingly. I assemble both pans at the same time, essentially treating it like one giant lasagna, so I can divide the cheese and meat by 3 and the noodles by 4.)

12. Place a single layer of noodles in the bottom of the pan, making sure they cover it completely with no gaps. (Slightly overlapping the noodles at the edges is okay, as is breaking the noodles to  get a good fit.)

13. Cover the noodles with a thick layer of the cheese mixture.

14. Scatter a portion of the pork and sausage over the cheese.

15. Generously cover layer with sauce.

16. Repeat noodles-cheese-meat-sauce twice more. You should now have used up all the cheese and meat, and have some noodles left.

17. Cover the pan(s) with the remaining noodles. Spread top with sauce, and sprinkle with remaining grated cheese.

18. Cover pan with foil and bake in oven for 45-60 minutes, until hot and bubbling. During last 15 minutes, remove foil to allow top to crisp.

19. When fully cooked, shut off oven, re-cover lasagna, and allow to rest for at least 15 minutes before serving.

20. Serve topped with more sauce and grated cheese.


Serves about 20. Can be halved or multiplied.

Instant brining

NaBloPoMo, Day 6.

Speaking of incredibly useful throwaway tips from great food writers, here's one I picked up from the most prolific cookbook writing team in the US, Mark Scarborough and Bruce Weinstein (they also blog occasionally): pickle-juice brining.

This is just what it sounds like: when you finish a jar of pickles, save the brine and use it to brine your next pork or chicken dish. (Brining, in case you're not already aware, makes lean meat juicier and tastier.) Thus, you save a step (since you don't have to make your own brine), avoid waste (since you don't pour perfectly good ready-made brine down the drain), and get a better meal at the end of it. And no, your meat won't taste like pickles - I worried about this the first time I fed pickle-juice-brined meat to the pickle-hating DP, but all he noticed was how good it tasted. Try it and see!

August wrap-up

How can it be August 31 already? Tomorrow is the first day of spring in Australia! Not that winter has been much of a hardship; we've had quite a few grey days, and more rain than I remember in the previous two winters I've spent here, but also plenty of bright, sunny weather for Miss B to put some miles on her new birthday scooter. Some other items of note from August:

Here's a preview of a recipe that is under construction: sliced chorizo glazed with a mixture of red wine, wholegrain mustard, and maple syrup, baked in the oven, and served as an appetizer. I'm still fiddling with the measurements, proportions, and cooking times, but the first couple of trial batches were a hit. Then the chorizo I was using disappeared from Costco, and I've only just found a replacement. So more on that shortly, I hope.

Or I could just start making my own, I suppose, since I signed up to take a sausage-making class earlier this month at a local butcher shop - or, as the butcher called it, "Salami Academy." I learned all kinds of interesting facts and tips, had a chance to use the professional sausage-stuffing machine pictured here, and am now seriously tempted to plunge into the world of charcuterie - two years after everyone else, just as I predicted during my Year of Canning in 2011.

The second half of August has been another round of solo parenting, which means more cooking experiments that hopefully also double as treats for Miss B (and me!). This experiment is crumpets, which went down a storm. I used this recipe, and although they were delicious, they didn't turn out quite as I expected. I'm going to have a go at Delia's recipe next, so more on that later.

More fun with cross-cultural food terminology: the substance pictured here is known as fairy floss in Australia, candy floss in the UK, and cotton candy in the US. I'd love to know if it has yet another name in, say, Canada or New Zealand. (Full disclosure: I loathe it no matter what it's called and always have, but Miss B devours it at every opportunity.)

Did I mention that tomorrow is the first day of spring?

Origin stories

This might be the recipe that started it all. That’s how I remember it, anyway.

A couple of months after I got married, I took a day off work so I could help my mother make a batch of meatcakes – or really, watch her make them and write down everything she was doing, so that I could replicate it in my own kitchen. Even though I’d been watching her (or my grandmother) make them all my life, and eating the results, I wasn’t sure about meaurements, the precise order of assembly, and a number of other details. Since my mother made them out of her own head, the way her mother had done, and had taught her, there was no documented form of the recipe. And since I’ve never come across another version of meatcakes that are quite like my family’s meatcakes, I wanted to be absolutely sure I could replicate it.
 
Even the name is different. Most other people I know make meatballs. We make meatcakes – ours are not round, but oblong, and flat on the top and the bottom. The word my grandmother used for them always sounded to me like bubette; it was only after I started studying Italian in college, and came across the word polpette with a shock of recognition, that I made the connection between standard Italian terminology and my grandmother’s typical Calabrian twist on pronunciation.

I’m not sure my mother remembers how to make meatcakes anymore. And that makes me more grateful than ever that I took the time to write this down 17 years ago and have carried it with me on my travels since then. Every time I make these, wherever I am, I feel as though I’ve got my mother and grandmother back in the kitchen with me for a little while. 

Polpette alla mia famiglia 
The texture of these is much lighter than most meatballs I’ve come across – almost fluffy on the inside, while the frying in olive oil gives a thick, crisp, dark brown crust on the outside. I love this crust so much that I don’t submerge my meatcakes in tomato sauce when we have them for dinner with pasta; I reheat them in the oven and eat them by themselves after I’ve finished my pasta.

~1.5 lbs firm Italian bread

3.5 lbs hamburger (at least 15% fat in the mix)
salt

1 clove garlic

5-7 leaves fresh basil
11 eggs
1 lb pecorino romano cheese, grated

olive oil for frying

1. At least 48 hours before you want to make the meatcakes, cut the bread into large (about the size of your fist) chunks and leave out to get completely stale.

2. When you are ready to begin, submerge bread in a bowl of cold water to soak.

3. Break up hamburger in a large bowl; sprinkle the surface evenly with salt.

4. Mince garlic and scatter evenly over hamburger.

5. Shred basil and distribute evenly over hamburger.

6. Squeeze as much water out of bread as possible, one chunk at a time. Peel crust off, then break bread insides up over hamburger.

7. Pour oil ¼-inch deep in frying pan; heat on low.

8. Mix bread into meat with hands until mixture is a consistent pink color.

9. Mix in eggs, using a spoon.

10. Mix in cheese, about ¼ of the total at a time.

11. Shape mixture into oval patties, about 1½-inch thick, and as big as will fit into your cupped palm.

12. Place patties in oil.* Cook for 10-12 minutes total; turn patties over (towards the outside of pan) when they are browned evenly on the bottom (they should come away from the pan easily when ready to turn).

13. When fully cooked, remove meatcakes from pan and put on paper towels to drain. Repeat with remaining mixture until all patties have been cooked.

Yield: ~40 meatcakes

Total time: ~3 hours

* Turn oil up to medium heat after adding patties; turn to low or off to add, turn, or remove patties from pan. Oil will fizz increasingly as more meatcakes are cooked.

Christmas recap

One of the perks of living in the British Commonwealth is that the day after Christmas - Boxing Day - is a holiday in its own right, and the majority of people have it off from work. We went for a walk this afternoon, to get some fresh air and run a couple of errands to a couple of shops we knew would be open. We strolled along deserted streets and 90% of the businesses we passed were closed - some of them just for today, some until after New Year's, and one for the whole of summer vacation (it is scheduled to re-open February 5!). It was pretty much the only serious exertion in a day that included staying in pajamas until almost lunchtime, skyping with various North American relatives, and reminiscing about yesterday's Christmas lunch (while plotting what to do with a fairly enormous stash of leftovers).

There were six of us for lunch, and we ate outside! That's a Christmas first for me. Here's what we had:

Making gravy

Yes, this picture is a repeat - but look! Gravy! See?

Along with bringing an apple pie, a bottle of prosecco, and a festive attitude, my main contribution to Thanksgiving dinner was making gravy. I kept asking if there was anything I could do to help, and at the appropriate moment, the hostess asked how I felt about taking on that task.

I used to get really freaked out about making gravy, probably because I had to teach myself how to make it and try to figure out what a roux was supposed to look like when I’d never seen anyone else make one. I remember spending a lot of time stressing about the roux – was it too thin? Too chunky? Had  I measured (or weighed) the ingredients precisely to get the right proportions? Had I cooked it long enough? Too long? Was it actually thickening the gravy?

Then, as I was working my way through the endlessly fascinating and instructive Ratio, I came to the chapter on roux, in particular this sentence: “…it’s most convenient to measure [the ingredients for roux] by sight, melting your butter to cook off some of the water and adding flour in increments until you have the consistency of a paste.” And, even though I’m sure I had come across the same basic information multiple times already in other places, somehow this time I finally absorbed that roux is a means to an end: thickening soup, sauce, or gravy. All you have to do is create a paste of fat (preferably, but not necessarily, butter) and flour, and it will do that job. How thick or thin you make the paste is up to you; the consistency of the finished product will vary depending upon that, plus how much liquid you then add. If the gravy is too thick, you can add more liquid; if it's too thin, you can turn up the heat and let it reduce for a few minutes.

Grasping those basic pieces of information completely demystified the gravy-making process for me, and removed  my need to consult recipes from then on. Now I just make gravy, following the same basic process, and varying the ingredients based upon where I want the finished product to end up.

Basic gravy method

In addition to being infinitely adaptable, this method also has the benefit of being able to be made almost entirely ahead. Rather than frantically trying to concoct gravy from scratch at the last minute when the rest of dinner is ready, you can do the first four steps earlier in the prep process, then stir in the drippings, season, and serve. Much less nerve-wracking if you, like me, are made tense by last-minute cooking.

Step 1: melt fat in a medium-sized saucepan over low-medium heat. (I generally use 2-3 Tbsp/30-45 g butter here, but sometimes I use bacon fat or olive oil instead. You can also sauté minced onions, garlic, mirepoix etc. at this step if you want that kind of thing in your gravy.)

Step 2: whisk flour into melted fat until you have created a paste in the bottom of the pan, and continue cooking for a couple of minutes until the flour is no longer raw. Michael Ruhlman says that a roux is cooked “when it begins to smell like a lightly cooked piecrust.”

Step 3: deglaze the pan with a healthy slug of wine and continue whisking. This usually turns the roux into a thick and fluffy paste in my experience. (I use either white or red, depending on what I’m making and what’s open, and have not hesitated to use sparkling wine if nothing else was handy.)

Step 4: pour in 1-2 cups/240-480 ml of liquid slowly, still whisking. (Milk for a creamy gravy; stock for a more standard gravy. On Thanksgiving, all that was available was water, so I used that.) Bring this just to a boil, then let simmer. At this point the roux should do its work and the gravy should thicken up.

Step 5: add drippings from whatever hunk of meat you’re making the gravy to accompany. (Sometimes it’s nice to remove the fat, but not always feasible.) Bring gravy back up to a simmer, stirring frequently to ensure everything is mixed consistently.

Step 6: taste and check seasonings; add salt and pepper, plus other seasonings as you deem appropriate. (I wait to salt until after adding the pan drippings, as these usually come from meat that has been salted, possibly making additional salt unnecessary.)

Step 7: serve hot.

Braised pork loin

Speaking of disruptive innovation, here is something I would have automatically assumed was a bad idea - braising a pork loin? It has no fat! It's going to be the texture of shoe leather when it's done! But, since it originated from the authors of Dinner: A Love Story (the source of many a great recipe), I decided to throw caution to the wind and take a leap of faith. It was entirely justified.

I'm not going to provide a recipe as such, just a few pointers to success:

1. Sear the meat first.
2. Make sure it is partway immersed in liquid of some description (mine was a motley combination of blood orange juice, dijon mustard, maple syrup, ginger beer, and white wine - hence the "no recipe" caveat).
3. Cook it for at least two hours in a moderate oven. Longer is better.

It fell apart in shreds when I set out to carve it yesterday, and tasted amazingly good. It was even better tonight, when we had the leftovers in tacos. Lesson learned.

Cured meats

Did you know that when you ask for “bacon”, what you get will depend on where you are? In the US you get a long, thin rectangular piece of meat which comes from the belly of the pig and is about equal parts flesh and fat, optimally fried until perfectly crispy. Outside the US, this is known as “streaky bacon” or “streaky rashers”. In the UK and Australia, the bacon you commonly get comes from the back of the pig, is much less fatty, and is called, not surprisingly, “back bacon”. (This is known as “Canadian bacon” in the US, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me.)

Despite this being my fourth stint of living outside the US, I have to re-adjust every time to the fact that the bacon elsewhere is significantly different from what I'm used to and that, honestly, I don’t like it as much as I do the traditional US style. So much so that at least once I’ve done something that is usually unthinkable, and run out. As it turns out, this domestic faux pas has yielded some unexpected benefits, principally discovering that salty, cured meats are more interchangeable than I’d realized. A recent, very successful breakfast experiment emphatically demonstrates this; wanting some bacon to jazz up my fried egg on toast and finding none, I swapped in some fried spicy salami. The variation has now officially entered the RL breakfast rotation.

Fried egg & salami on toast
Of course, following the cured-meats-are-interchangeable principle means that you should feel free to swap in whatever you’ve got lying in the fridge.

1 slice whole wheat toast

2 slices spicy salami
1 egg
salt & pepper

Toast bread. In a small frying pan, fry salami until crisp on the edges, turning once. Remove salami from pan and crack in egg, frying to your liking. (I like sunny side up with a runny yolk.)

Put toasted bread on a plate, top with salami, then with egg. Sprinkle with salt & pepper and consume.

Fast food

It’s been a month since we arrived in Canberra. Re-entry has been kind of surreal, because in many ways we have been able to more or less pick up where we left off 2.5 years ago. DP is back working with many of the same people, Miss B is back at the same school with kids she remembers from her preschool year, and I’ve returned to my familiar routines of doing errands on foot and swinging through Supabarn several days a week ago so I don’t have to lug home too much heavy stuff at once. But of course we haven’t actually been here, and so we have various things to do to get ourselves re-settled. Top priority on this list is finding a long-term place to live. We’re in short-term furnished accommodation at the moment, until our stuff arrives from the US. Since we were told to expect transport of household goods to take 2-3 months, we’ve got some time to look around and see what’s available. Which has turned out to be a good thing.

House hunting in Canberra is an adventure. You find a house you are interested in renting, usually on a real estate website. The ad tells you to call or email to register interest, so you do. About 50% of the time you get no response to your expression of interest, so you learn quickly to keep checking the website to spot when the property is open for inspection. (Since you cannot apply to rent the property without proving you have done an in-person inspection, this is a critical part of the process. You cannot, however, request an inspection time that suits your schedule. Oh no. Don't be silly.) At some point, an inspection time will be posted, which generally runs for 15 minutes. If you are lucky, this will be scheduled for a Saturday. However, it is just as likely to be, say, from 1:35 to 1:50 on a Friday afternoon, as was the case with a house I looked at last week. This means, unless you have a flexible work schedule, as I do, that you are out of luck. Once you have inspected the house (often with 10-15 other people or groups who are also interested), you give your name to the estate agent who is monitoring the inspection as proof you were there, take an application form for each adult planning to reside in the house, and depart. If you want the house, it behooves you to complete your application and send it in as soon as possible, before all the other people who also want it get in ahead of you. Each application, including filling in, scanning, and rounding up supporting documentation, is a good hour’s worth of work, and each agency uses a different form.

We missed out on all this excitement the last time we lived in Canberra, because we sub-let an apartment from one of DP’s colleagues. I had no idea how lucky we were.