Fall is here, people. I, um, might have mentioned that before. Sorry for the redundant message, but I'm just so gosh-darned excited about it! Yesterday morning I visited the St. Stephen's Greenmarket to buy a healthy supply of apples for the week, with an eye to making a few different apple-y items over the next few days. (And, of course, I threw in a few apples for snacking purposes.)
This afternoon, I tackled the first of my projects: an apple crisp. Crisps, like cobblers and crumbles, are amongst the easiest of all desserts known to humankind. You basically slice up some fruit (or not, in the case of berries), mix it with a little sugar and spice, toss the lot into a buttered baking dish and then throw a sugar-and-butter-and-possibly-oats topping down over everything.
And, kaboom! You have absolute, utter, fruity perfection. And your house will smell pretty damn good, too. Feel free to mess about with the ingredients here, especially the types of apples and the seasonings, depending on what you prefer. Cloves would be great, as would allspice. A little Calvados in place of the cider would make things pleasantly boozy, which is always a good thing. And light brown sugar will give you a more-golden, less-brown topping, and a slightly lighter flavor. Whatever floats your boat (or bobs your apple! Too much?)
Apple Crisp
1 1/4 cups oats (old-fashioned, not instant) 3/4 cups dark brown sugar, divided 1/2 cup flour 3/4 tsp. kosher salt, divided 1 1/4 tsp. cinnamon, divided 1/4 tsp. freshly grated nutmeg 1/2 cup chilled butter, cut into 1/2-inch chunks 2 lbs. assorted apples (I used honeycrisp and gala), peeled and cut into 1/2-inch slices 1 tbs. lemon juice 1 tbs. apple cider
Pre-heat the oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. Butter a 2-3 quart glass or ceramic baking dish and set aside.
In a medium bowl, combine the oats, 1/2 cup of the sugar, flour, 1/2 tsp. of the salt, 1 tsp of the cinnamon and the nutmeg. Add the butter and blend the mixture with your fingertips until it forms soft, uniform clumps. Set aside.
In another bowl, combine the apples with the remaining sugar, salt and cinnamon. Add the lemon juice and cider and toss to combine, until the sugar has dissolved and the apples are evenly coated.
Pour the apples evenly into the baking dish. Sprinkle the topping evenly over the apples. Place the dish in the oven and bake for 35-45 minutes, until the top of the crisp is well-browned, and the juices are dark and bubbly.
Serves 4-6. Goes really, really well with vanilla ice cream.
Happy Saturday, folks! It's a stunning morning here in New York, and I'm getting ready to go get pretty at the salon this afternoon. I'm sure most East Coasters, at least, are out and about today (I'm hearing good things about the weather out west, too) - but, just in case you're not, here are some fun treasury items to psych you up! First, what seem to be the ultimate answer to (the pure, unadulterated nastiness that is) the Cadbury Creme Egg. Vosges has created a series of Easter eggs, the most intriguing of which (to me, at least) are the Wink of the Rabbit (caramel, pecans and dark milk chocolate) and the Bacon and Eggs (bacon caramel and dark chocolate). These will definitely be making an appearance in my Easter basket. Swoon.
Next, a recipe for Dijon chicken from Kerry Saretsky's French in a Flash series over on Serious Eats. This looks like a delicious, easy one-pot meal, and I predict that I will make it for lunch sometime soon. Mustard and wine and thyme - what could be better?
On Saturday night, my brother, sister-in-law and I tramped through the cold, biting snow to see Where The Wild Things Are. None of us enjoyed it all that much (I must not be a hipster...), and by the time I made it home, I was chilled to the bone and ready for a cocktail.
I wasn't in the mood for a martini, and I was running low on bourbon - but I had plenty of lemons and Laird's Applejack, an apple brandy made just over the river in New Jersey. I decided to make my new go-to autumn cocktail, an applejack sidecar. Sidecars have lemon juice, which makes apple pie taste good, so why not apple liquor?
As you know, thanks to Nick, I'm awfully fond of a bourbon sidecar. An applejack sidecar is a bit lighter in taste, but packs just as much punch at the finish. And since applejack is essentially apple brandy, I figure it's even less a bastardization of the original, which calls for brandy or Cognac.
It's key that you use fresh lemon juice (just as it's paramount to use fresh mixers in all drinks) to ensure the right amount of tart, citrusy bite. It would also be good to do half lemon juice, half fresh cider. Oooh, yeah, that would be awesome. You could sub (or even supplement) Grand Marnier in for the Cointreau...you could even do what Nick does with his sidecars and add a little Grand Marnier float to the top.
After all, you're already breaking with convention - have fun, wouldja?
Applejack Sidecar
This makes a smaller, quite civilized cocktail - feel free to double up. I often do.
1 sliver of lemon, reserved Granulated sugar 2 1/2 ounces Laird's Applejack 1 tbs. lemon juice 1 tbs. Cointreau or Triple Sec
Drag the lemon sliver, fleshy side down, around the rim of a cocktail glass. Once the rim is evenly damp with juice, put some sugar on a small plate and spin the glass around in it a couple of times to coat the rim with sugar. Place the glass in the fridge or freezer to chill while you make the cocktail.
Fill a cocktail shaker 1/3 full with cubed ice. Pour in the Applejack, lemon juice and Cointreau. Cover and shake gently until the shaker fogs with condensation.
Pour the cocktail into the prepared glass and enjoy.
Much to my brother's dismay, I'm constantly looking for the perfect apple pie. While his tastes run to a sweet, traditional pie, my own are sated by a tarter version. This year, a Gourmet recipe for a cranberry-apple crumble pie caught my fancy.
I tested the recipe out at my office potluck two weeks ago, and had a good bit of success. The pie uses Gala apples, as opposed to the more typical (and tarter) Granny Smiths. The Galas cook up beautifully, their slightly grainy texture turning to silky (but durable) velvet in the heat of the oven.
To counter the sweetness of the Galas, the recipe calls for brown sugar in place of white and adds a handful of cranberries to the mix. The cranberries (plus a bit of lemon juice) turn the pie filling a gorgeous pink color and add a different texture to the mix.
The real star, though, is the crumble topping. A basic mixture of flour, butter, brown sugar and cinnamon is made special by the addition of chopped pecans, which turn rich and dark during baking. I wasn't sure the topping would be contrast enough for the filling, but it was - very much so.
Next year I might do my experimenting with the pumpkin pie and let Jeremy have his traditional version of the apple...or not.
When you arrive at Alinea, the first clue that you're about to experience something totally out of the ordinary appears pretty quickly. The entry hall, which runs the depth of the small Lincoln Park townhouse, is a Wonka-like construction, becoming drastically narrower and shorter as it progresses, ushering you into Grant Achatz's world-famous culinary funhouse/wonderland.
The real fun, however, starts once you're up the stairs and settled into the spare, dark dining room. (Very dark, so I apologize for the grainy quality of the photos!) Alinea serves two tasting menus: a 13-course and a 24-course. Our reservation was for the 13-course meal, and we started off with a bang.
Our first course was Osetra caviar, served with all of the traditional accompaniments - sort of. The caviar and crème fraiche were their usual selves, but the red onions came in jelly form, while the buttered brioche appeared as a foam. The foam was incredible - I felt like the Wonka theme was continuing, and the foam was Violet's gum. Even though the foam was light as air and vanished in my mouth, it was so well-flavored that I felt like I'd eaten a piece of toast.
The next course was a big hit with everyone at the table. Pork belly confit served between two lightly warmed leaves of iceberg lettuce, accompanied by cucumber (Yum!) and a Thai basil seed vinaigrette. I thought this was awesome, but it wasn't my favorite dish of the night - that was still to come!
Next up was a symphony of mushroom goodness - one ingredient, matsutake mushrooms, prepared in several different ways. Creamy tiles, ice cream, a sort of crumbly pastry, and one fresh specimen, dead center. Mango sauce made an appearance, as did a delicious morsel of otoro. This was delicious, and a really great example of chef Grant Achatz's ability to make you think differently about an ingredient by playing with it in an assortment of ways.
According to our server, Chef Achatz likes to include one traditional dish in each menu, in order to remind us of where we've come from, and of the fact that though he may play with foams and gases and burning leaves (Just wait!), he's a classicist at heart. Achatz likes to challenge and delight you, but never fails to create something delicious. He doesn't sacrifice flavor at the altar of surprise.
The evening we dined, the traditional dish was Escoffier's trout monseigneur, a tour of the fish featuring roe, poached trout, and trout mousse. I could recognize the beauty of the techniques at work here, but am by and large not a fan of trout. Others at the table who are, though, reassured me that they loved the dish.
After the trout, we enjoyed my very favorite dish of the evening. A series of oak branches, their dry leaves still attached, arrived at the table. The leaves were smoldering, scattering tiny bits of ash around the dining room. Speared on the bottom of each branch was a fritter filled with roast pheasant, cider jelly and shallot confit. I picked up the branch, inhaled the unmistakable scent of burning leaves, and ate the fritter in one bite. All of my senses were flooded with the taste, smell and sight of autumn. The crunchy tempura batter didn't overwhelm the filling at all - the whole thing was a bundle of perfect flavor. I. Loved. This.
After the pheasant, I could have died happy - but there were still nine courses left to go! Our next dish was another single-bite course. Like the truffle at Tru, this ravioli, filled with black truffle, romaine lettuce and parmesan, exploded in the mouth. As I've said before: no matter how prepared you are (we received another "lips together, teeth apart" warning), food bursting in your mouth is never something you expect. It's awesome. I would love to serve something that explodes at my next dinner party. It makes you giggle. I like to giggle.
When we first sat down at the table, our servers had set a sprig of rosemary at each place. Our next course was a series of lamb loin medallions served on a sizzling strip of iron. The rosemary branches were placed in holes at the far end of the hot metal, and soon the air around our table was perfumed with rosemary. This scent was as much a part of the dish as the three different garnishes on the lamb. From front to back, they were pickled quince, pumpkin, and smoked eggplant. My favorite, somewhat predictably, was the quince, which I'd wisely saved for last.
Our last savory dish was a home run - like the mushroom bonanza, this duck presentation was a tour of preparations. We had foie gras, magret, and what I think was kidney. Along with a few, peppery brussels sprouts leaves, this was served with an orange broth and mace-scented foam. Mace! I never think to use mace (a spice made from the coating of nutmeg seeds), but I love it, and hereby resolve to use it as often as possible.
Peanut butter was chosen to usher us into the sweet courses. In this case, the peanut butter was dried to a powder and spiced with chiles. Placed on the tongue, it first crumbled, then reformed into that signature stick-to-the-roof-of-your-mouth texture. Too cool, and so delicious. Josh has decided that all peanut butter should be spicy.
I seem to be missing photos of the next two courses, both of which were small bites. The first featured another exploding sphere! A grape-like ball sat atop a small glass, and we were instructed to take all elements into our mouths at once. The ball burst instantly and, it turned out, was flavored with Concord grapes and filled with a watery juice that tasted lightly of Maytag blue cheese and walnuts.
The next course, a one-bite combination of ice-cold Thai banana, beer, mustard and pecans, was delicious, even for those at the table who don't typically love bananas.
The third sweet course was fun in a completely different way. Before the plates arrived at the table, servers placed a linen pillow in front of each of us. The pillows were filled with nutmeg-scented steam, which was released little by little as the weight of our plates, placed on top, gradually pushed downward to the table. On the plate was a delicious combination of coffee and huckleberries, topped by spun burnt sugar.
The chocolate course was a big one, featuring chocolate frozen with liquid nitrogen, applewood bacon (bacon and chocolate are an excellent combination of salty and sweet) and, surprisingly, a crabapple juice. The juice was contained in that little sphere in the middle of the plate. Like an egg yolk, all you had to do was prick it to spread its goodness throughout the dish.
The staff heard us talking about Louisa's birthday, and brought her a little treat to celebrate. This is Alinea's version of birthday cake. The chocolate cake came ensconced in a little ball of tempered chocolate and was revealed by a stream of hot pastry cream poured by our waiter.
Finally, it was time for one last science lab touch. This being Alinea, this test tube filled with hibiscus jelly, crème fraiche and bubble gum-flavored tapioca, and stopped with a disk of long pepper jelly, was not only cool as hell - it tasted great, like the best bubble gum ever. It was also tons of fun to eat. You had to suck on it like a straw to pull all the goodness out of the test tube and into your mouth.
If the rest of the meal hadn't yet turned us into excited little kids, this would have done the trick pretty damn nicely. As I left, this was all I could think of:
Alinea 1723 North Halsted (at Willow) Chicago, Illinois 312.867.0110
Hello from New York, my darlings! It's been a crazy couple of weeks, and with Thanksgiving fast approaching, it doesn't look like things will be calming down any time soon. I hope all of you are relaxing today before jumping into preparations for what I'm sure will be magnificent holiday feasts. (Or, if you are not American, just plain relaxing!)
The first item in this week's Treasury is some fashion-inspired brainstorming from Coco & Kelley. Her Thanksgiving table will take its cue from current trends in the fashion world, including the use of rich navies, refreshing grays and tulle, tulle, tulle! A nice break from the traditional orange and red, don't you think?
Next up, in preparation for the holiday baking season, Serious Eats brings us a look at the best (and worst) apples for baking. My personal favorite - Gala - comes out on top. I can personally confirm that an apple pie made with Gala apples (and by yours truly) was a massive hit at my office potluck this week. Trade in your Granny Smiths, but don't forget to compensate by using a bit less sugar in your filling.
I got up early on Saturday morning (one of the good things about a quiet Friday night) and hoofed it down to the Union Square Greenmarket around eight o'clock. Upon arrival, I was thrilled to see box upon box of new-harvest (as opposed to cold-storage) apples at the Terhune stand. Gala and Honeycrisp and Fuji - oh my!
I helped myself to a couple of the rosy-golden Gala apples and snapped a photo of the bounty. Nothing says fall like a big ol' pile of apples - except for a big ol' pile of leaves, something we don't see a lot of in Manhattan.
I spent Thanksgiving at my mom's new home in St. Augustine, Florida this year. She just moved in two months ago, and so she's in the box phase - you open one, you see what you see, and what you see is probably not what you need.
Case in point? The rolling pin was nowhere to be found, so I rolled out the pastry dough for my apple pie with a bottle of Pinot Noir, something I do not recommend to anyone but which certainly made for an interesting image (and a slightly lumpy crust). Of course, we didn't really care so much, since the pie in question turned out to be so darned ambrosial.
Typically, our family goes in for a very traditional apple pie: not too deep of dish, apples sliced fairly thin, filling flavored with cinnamon, sugar, nutmeg, and perhaps a bit of lemon juice. This time around, I decided to splash out and make Ina Garten's deep dish apple pie. She keeps her apple slices thick and hearty - they're more chunks, really - and uses a whopping four pounds of them. She adds orange and lemon juice and zest, and rounds out the spices with a bit of allspice.
I am not exaggerating when I tell you that this is the best apple pie I've ever tasted. It is complex, but not overwhelming, and not even a little boring. Plus, that final egg wash makes things awful pretty, no?
My mom was in town this weekend, which seemed like a good excuse to cook dinner for her, my brother, and my sister-in-law. It also seemed like a good excuse to ring in the fall with some dishes I've been wanting to try out. I settled on a menu of arugula salad, roast chicken, brussels sprouts with bacon and cider, roast potatoes, and an apple galette for dessert. To keep things interesting, I decided to serve the galette (really just a free-form apple tart) with cheese-spiked whipped cream.
I set off for the Greenmarket around 9:30 on Saturday morning. Now that the weather has turned a bit more brisk, the crowds are thinner, so it's actually feasible to make a full circuit of the market, check out everything on offer, and then start your shopping. The summertime crowds make me way too antsy for that kind of lingering.
On my walk around, I spied several in-season goodies, including gourds and other fall squashes, cauliflower in a rainbow of colors, brussels sprouts on the stalk, and dried flowers and herbs. I also saw huge bunches of eucalyptus, which stuck me as odd. My high school gave out sprigs of eucalyptus at our baccalaureate service (mine is still pressed between the pages of my yearbook), and so I've always associated it with springtime!
Still available, to my surprise, were bunches and bunches of concord grapes. Dark blue with slightly cloudy peels, the grapes are so different from their red and green cousins, with soft, jellied flesh and an ambrosial flavor. And unlike with the tart, crisp grapes, you only need a few to feel satisfied - sort of like the difference between M&M's and a tiny piece of dark, luxurious chocolate.
Knoll Crest didn't have any chickens this weekend, so I bought our five-pounder from the wild game vendor. There were more varieties of apple on offer than I've ever seen before in my life, and I had trouble choosing. Ultimately, I settled on Rome and Granny Smith for the galette, and a few winesaps for munching. I grabbed a couple of pounds of brussels sprouts and some fingerling potatoes, and headed for the Ronnybrook stand to buy some heavy cream and farmer's cheese.
A full half-day of cooking and one overheated kitchen later, we sat down to dinner. The salad, served with a honey and sherry vinegar dressing, was tangy, peppery and cheesy, thanks to some parmesan curls showered on top of each plate. The brussels sprouts with cider weren't quite as apple-y as I would have liked, but man, the bacon was good. My brother, Jeremy, picked the chicken clean, which I took as a good sign.
The best part, though, really was dessert. I based the galette on this recipe from Epicurious, sizing it down a bit to serve just the four of us. The whipped cream with cheese (flavored with a bit of turbinado sugar and vanilla, since the cheese was a bit funkier than expected) paired really well, setting off the sweetness and tang of the apples and the rich, buttery pastry. All in all, a good day's work.
In a stand mixer fitted with the whisk attachment (or using a hand-held electric mixer with the beaters attached), whip the cream and the cheese together until it holds soft peaks. Stir in the vanilla and the sugar. Serve immediately, or cover with plastic wrap and store in the fridge for up to 48 hours. Let sit at room temperature for about 10 minutes before serving.
Fall is here, people. I, um, might have mentioned that before. Sorry for the redundant message, but I'm just so gosh-darned excited about it! Yesterday morning I visited the St. Stephen's Greenmarket to buy a healthy supply of apples for the week, with an eye to making a few different apple-y items over the next few days. (And, of course, I threw in a few apples for snacking purposes.)
And, kaboom! You have absolute, utter, fruity perfection. And your house will smell pretty damn good, too. Feel free to mess about with the ingredients here, especially the types of apples and the seasonings, depending on what you prefer. Cloves would be great, as would allspice. A little Calvados in place of the cider would make things pleasantly boozy, which is always a good thing. And light brown sugar will give you a more-golden, less-brown topping, and a slightly lighter flavor. Whatever floats your boat (or bobs your apple! Too much?)
