Farmer's market again

I like to make a point of going to the New Morning Farm farmer's market Saturday mornings and simply buying what looks good to me. It's fun then to find the right recipe for the ingredients.

Last Saturday they had "cheddar cauliflower," small little heads that truly were the color of cheddar cheese. I roasted it with butter and lemon per a technique in a Canal House cookbook I bought recently, and, together with a sautéed yellow squash we had around, put it over penne with a little grated pecorino. Pretty good.

I also got some fava beans. These were pretty late stage beans but I used a recipe from Sara Jenkins' Olives and Oranges for a salad with "spring" fava beans because she specified you could use more mature beans and blanche them to remove the tough skin. It's a bit labor intensive to first shell the beans, blanche and shock them, then pop them out of their skins, but playing with food is for me part of the joy of cooking. The beans get mixed with greens, herbs (mint, basil, parsley), and tiny cubes of pecorino and dressed just with olive oil and salt.

I paired it with a pork loin spit-roasted (felt like using the spit on my Weber grill) that was marinated in roast garlic and spike with springs of rosemary. The recipe from the Jamisons' Big Book of Outdoor Cooking called for fennel and onion to be roasted in the grill underneath the spit and then tossed with orzo. So it was a great little meal, with lots of leftover pork for later in the week. No chianti with these fava beans, but a nice Montalcino.

Pure Food and Wine

This lovely vegan restaurant at Union Square in New York bills its food as raw, though some of it is gently cooked, below the 118 degrees when enzymes break down. It bursts with fresh vegetable flavors, enhanced by silky oils and seasonings.

Unfortunately the restaurant doesn't update its menu so I can're recreate what I had, though I know I had a creamy polenta with a braised green and the salt caramel tart for dessert, both very good. The wine was a crisp, southern French with a nice mineral taste and matched the vegetable dishes well.

Fresh pasta

So I created enough time and space to experiment with making fresh pasta. It's always something lurking in the back of my mind. My mother often made egg noodles when were growing up and we'd have noodles draped over furniture on towels to dry all over the house when she got in a noodle-making mood. I had attended a session on pasta making in Princeton and bought the machine but never really used it.

I used the recipe and technique from Domenica Marchetti's The Glorious Pasta of Italy. Very simple -- 2 to 2-1/4 c. flour, 1/2 tsp salt, pinch of nutmeg in a mound, create a well and crack 3 eggs into and add 1 to 2 Tbl olive oil. Break the yolks with a fork, whisk eggs and olive oil together and gradually fork in some flour from the inside of the well to make a batter-like consistency. Then push the flour into the batter and start kneading. She suggest flattening with heel of hand, quarter turn, flattening some more, etc.

My first attempt failed because, as she suggested for hand kneading, I used the maximum amount of flour from the get-go. It was too much and dough came up very stiff and even after resting for half an hour was too stiff and dry to put through the pasta machine. So I started over, using just the 2 c. of flour. We got the "00" imported flour from Vace as recommended by the recipe. This time it worked much better. The dough was smooth and supple, and after resting 1/2 hr. I could cut it into quarters, roll out the quarter into an oval and feed it into the machine (Atlas from Italy) at the #1 setting. Following her technique, I folded it over in thirds and repeated this process 3 or 4 times. Then I started narrowing the setting -- #2,#3,#4,#5 -- feeding it through twice each time. She said to cut noodles at either #5 or #6. I didn't want to press my luck and have the dough start to break on me so I stopped at #5. It turns out this is too thick for fettucini, so next time I will go to #6.

The dough stretched out nicely and the cutting attachment worked perfectly to yield long, even fettucini, which I wrapped around my hand into a nest and dusted with cornmeal while I stretched out the other 3 chunks of dough. The noodles were very long and next time I will probably cut them in half as well as making them thinner.

We had been to the farmer's market in the morning and I got yellow zucchini and a couple of types of mushrooms just because they looked so nice. We found a couple of pasta recipes in Sara Jenkins' Olives and Oranges, one using zucchini and mint and the other using mushrooms and mint and decided to combine them with our fresh pasta. The mint gave me pause, but I used 4 Tbl in the end and the dish did not taste "minty" but the mint gave it a zingy freshness that was very nice. The zucchini got grated and then sauteed with chopped shallot.

For the mushrooms, she had an interesting technique I hadn't seen before. She called for putting just a single layer of trimmed and cut mushrooms into the heated oil and butter, adding some salt and pepper, and cooking them for 2 or 3 min., then pushing them to the side of the pan and adding a another single layer. Of course, the mushrooms reduce and the cooked ones continue to cook and brown, but this worked well for the 3 or 4 layers I had. Then you add some butter and chopped garlic at the end and cook until the butter foams. In both cases, you add the chopped mint at the end. So I tossed the cooked pasta -- it took nearly 5 min. because they were thick -- with the two dressings and some parmesan and it was really good. The mushrooms predominated because we had more of them than zucchini, but the mix worked fine. Jenkins' zucchini recipe has squash blossoms and a couple of other optional ingredients as well as a lot more zucchini, so it would probably be worthwhile to try it on its own someday.

Not sure how often I'll go to the trouble of making fresh pasta, but I will find a place to keep the machine that's easier to get at. We had it way back in a lower cabinet that I had to empty and almost crawl into in order to retrieve the equipment. Also, I have to move some stuff to open up counter space for this operation. When we renovate the kitchen we'll plan for a space that's always available for dough-making.

Tackle Box

Fresh fish, great ambiance, reasonable prices -- what more could you want? A little more food, maybe. The latest eatery from Jonathan and Bethany Umbel has opened in Cleveland Park and we had a nice lunch there Saturday. No lines, though the kitchen was a little slow in getting our fresh-made tacos and sandwich out.

The prices are reasonable, though they don't give anything away. Two tacos costs $8, and that's what you get -- two tacos. No rice, beans, salad or garnish of any sort. Just two tacos, each half full of a tiny, grilled fillet of tilapia and some slaw. Tasty, but not filling. Andrea's fried haddock sandwich came with fries, but came on two slices of totally untreated bread -- not a roll, not toasted, not buttered. So it's a little primitive.

The ambiance -- with well-used boat tackles hanging from the walls and a general feeling of Maine lobster shack -- is really nice, with a great bar and a friendly bartender. Drink prices also very good -- my 16 oz. Landshark draft cost only $5.

We did not try the lobster roll for $19, though it would be interesting to compare it with the lobster truck's $15 roll and Persimmon's $17 roll. The fish taco ranks behind Persimmon's and behind Surfside's, at least in volume, though sometimes the Surfside fish is not as fresh as it should be, or not freshly cooked.

The meal combos look like a good deal, and the shellfish pot, starting at $35 per person and going up depending on what fish you add, does not look like a good deal but looks interesting. We'll go back, though Cleveland Park is not always easy to deal with.

Web recipes

Among the many wonders of the Web are the wonderful recipes that pop up from various corners. There are Epicurious and Recipes.com and various blogs but you just never know where a good recipe is going to come from -- a wine site, a cooking store email, wherever.

I printed out a recipe for Braised saffron chicken with pasta the other day, and I honestly have no idea where it came from. (Update: It's not where I found it, but it turns out the recipe comes from Epicurious.) It was really good and a simple dish for a weekday. You brown 2-1/2 lbs. of chicken thighs ("with skin and bones") in 2 Tbl olive oil, set them aside and sautée 2 c. chopped white onion with 6 peeled and crushed garlic cloves. Then you add 2 c. (!) white wine with 1 tsp crushed saffron and boil it down to half. Then you add 2 c. chicken broth and the thighs, bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer for 1 hr., turning halfway through. You remove the thighs, let cool, then remove skin and bones and separate meat into bite-size pieces. You skim the fat off the braising juices, and 1 c. heavy cream and 2 Tbl lemon juice and reduce that, then add chicken pieces to heat through. You cook 1 lb of paccheri or rigatoni, drain, put back in pot, pour chicken mixture over, toss, and add 2/3 c. of chopped basil and serve. We also sprinkled parmesan on individually.

Update: Two Web recipes in a row. Last night it was Spanish pork burgers that I found on Recipes.com by googling. Very simple. Sautée 3 c. sliced onions (they say Spanish onions, but nobody seems to really know what that means), then chop up half to mix with the ground pork and save the other half to put on the bun. Mix 1 lb. of pork with the chopped onions, 2 tsp of pimenton (doesn't say, but I presumed sweet), 4 cloves chopped garlic, salt and pepper. Don't overmix, then divide into patties (three or four, we like them big). To accompany, mix some lemon zest, lemon juice and a pinch of saffron with mayonnaise. Grill 10-12 min. Delicious, a real keeper!

Local gems

Despite my negative comments about some new Connecticut Avenue arrivals, I have a number of local favorites that reliably serve up high-quality food, are affordable, and not too hard to get into.

Recently I've been back to Surfside, Pete's New Haven Apizza, and Black's Market Bistro and they all fall into this category.

Surfside is just a bit far to be considered neighborhood. But it takes 7 minutes to get to Blue44 and it is certainly well worth the extra 8 minutes' drive to go to Surfside and get a really good, very affordable meal. We went back recently and realized we don't go the extra mile often enough. Also, as we ate our favorite Cuba and Maui tacos (pork and fish, respectively), we realized we don't experiment enough and need to try their burritos and quesadillas, which also look great. So we resolved to go more often and try different things. My target is the Bar Harbor quesadilla.

Pete's serves large, family-sized pizzas, which takes some getting used to. But a quick and easy lunch is their pizza by the slice. Again, very high quality for a very reasonable price, and, like Surfside, a very efficient system for ordering and serving.

Black's Market is one of the four Jeff Black establishments in the area. He is one of the happier success stories coming out of the seedbed of Kinkead's. I've been to two other restaurants of his lately as well -- Addie's and Black Salt -- and enjoyed them as well. Black's Market in Garrett Park has proven to be very handy on Sunday bike rides north on the Rock Creek Park Trail, following Beech Road to Garrett Park Ave. then up through the little park and across the railroad tracks to Black's very nice brunch. I've gotten the skirt steak with scramble eggs the past couple of times because that goes well with beer, but the pancakes and other sweet items look very good, too.

There are other casual dining options that are very good and it's good to remind myself we don't have to settle for mediocre restaurants just because they're a few minutes closer.

Update: Let me add Buck's Fishing & Camping to the list of local gems. We went back last night and it was refreshing after the misfires at some of the new places in the neighborhood to have a quality meal and service. I actually tried their big steak for the first time, splitting it with a friend, at it was truly delicious (still way too skimpy with the fries, though). The wedge was terrific as always and desserts -- chocolate cake with Lewes cream and a strawberry/rhubarb cobbler -- were superb.

Belga Café

You can plan and read and scheme but sometimes serendipity serves you best. We went to a cocktail party at a friend's place near Eastern Market and since we secured a parking place decided to explore 8th Street SE, which was hoppin' on a Friday night.

As we walked along looking at the numerous restaurants and their sidewalk areas we saw an empty two-top at Belga Café and got ourselves seated there. It vaguely rang bells and clearly sported a fairly authentic Belgian menu. It turns out that Chef Bart Vandaele claims to be the original Belgian restaurant in the District, leading the way in one of DC's biggest trends.

We split the four-cheese croquettes, which were hot and creamy and richly cheesy, with a frisée-bacon salad and balsamic gelée. I had the Flemish beef stew with red cabbage and the rich, brown braised beef truly melted in your mouth with a deep beef flavor. The red cabbage tasted of cabbage but was blander than some other versions I've had. It was served with frites -- which were very good and served nice and hot.

Service was good though I made the mistake of letting the server pick my beers without checking the price and while the blond Lucifer was good to start with and pricey at $9, the stout, though it paired well with the beef stew, was too expensive at $12.

We like Brasserie Beck and Marcel's, so we're definitely susceptible to Belgian cuisine. The Belga Café menu looks great, with a good mix of authentic traditional dishes and updated or Eurofusion creations. Not sure how pleasant it would be inside, but the patio on a breezy spring evening was ideal. The whole 8th Street SE scene was a revelation. It is really far from our house but definitely worth a trip back.

Blue 44

I don't want to be too negative but my first visit to the new restaurant on Connecticut was not promising. The new family restaurant that moved in after two mediocre Mexican restaurants failed in this location, certainly brightened up the place with some nice cosmetic changes. But it's still a small place with lots of tables crowded together. And, while a family restaurant presumably is great for families, the noise and running around of unruly kids is not always pleasant for the rest of us.

In the end, though, a restaurant is judged by its food, and I found the food in this first foray decidedly mediocre. I ordered a "Pittsburgh style" cheesesteak sandwich which was not very good. I don't really know whether Pittsburghers make a bad sandwich or whether this was just a poor version of it, but I suspect the latter. The meat was not freshly cooked but warmed up and the addition of fries to the sandwich as well as on the side may be authentic but it means there's less meat on the sandwich. The fries may have been "hand-cut" as advertised, but I got odds and ends of small fries that also did not seem to be particularly fresh.

Andrea ordered a Caesar salad which she said did not do any of the things that can make a Caesar salad good -- tasty dressing, crisp croutons, etc. I found the Romaine lettuce surprisingly pale and not very fresh tasting. She had to order an extra portion of dressing, but it is a common failing of entree salads not to have enough dressing.

The place was packed because the rich Chevy Chase market is under-served by neighborhood restaurants. It may survive on that basis alone. I will go back and give the place the burger test. If it fails that test, I don't rule out going there for convenience but I doubt it will be very often.

While no one can expect a neighborhood restaurant in DC to match a trendy West Hollywood eatery, we couldn't help noticing that we paid the same for a really great meal at BLD in LA as for this ho-hum offering at Blue 44.

Update: I realized looking back I never blogged about Jake's, the other new neighborhood restaurant on Connecticut. I've been there twice, sat at the bar, ordered a hamburger each time. Nothing special, but OK. I think it will be like Clyde's or Chadwick's -- a place where it's safe to go for a beer and burger but not much else.

Update 2: While I'm at it, I may as well include the comment I made about Terasol on the Chevy Chase listserv. I'm probably too hard on these neighborhood restaurants, but I think the problem here is the same as it was in Princeton -- you have a wealthy, captive audience so you don't have to be that good to stay in business. There were not any really good restaurants in Princeton, either.

On March 15, I wrote:

I'm glad that other people who have had an unsatisfactory experience at Terasol are also weighing in. Our first dinner there could at best be described as mediocre, but friends who like it persuaded us to give it a second chance, and the second time the food was even worse. There will be no third time for us.

It's good to have neighborhood restaurants, but they will survive and flourish only if they provide good food at a reasonable price-quality relationship. Sometimes, as when the Mexican restaurant closed recently, some people seem to suggest that we should support these local establishments because they are local. That's not the way it works for any other local store, which earns its support by providing quality goods or services. Restaurants are no exception to that rule.

Los Angeles

Our long weekend in Los Angeles was not all about food -- the graduation at Occidental and ancillary ceremonies were classy and spectacular in the Southern California settings and the Getty grounds and gardens were breathtaking in their spring beauty. We saw some old friends, made some new ones and had a convivial time with family. But LA is a real culinary destination. It has that critical mass of money and people to support a lively and creative restaurant scene so we had a great time sampling the offerings.

La Bastide has a charming interior courtyard with a vertical garden that is intimate and refreshing. I had a marvelous turbot, the best I've had since France, preceded by a spring truffle salad. We had a great bottle of Montrachet that managed to be stringent and fruity at the same time. For dessert, we went down the street to Sweet Lady Jane for some wonderful moist cakes served in gigantic portions. I had German chocolate, which was actually several layers of different chocolates and delicious.

We went to trendy BLD for lunch, and I had the signature spicy Cuban pork sandwich, which was generous and tasty. The cocktails, including one with a cocoa nib-infused tequila, were stimulating. Another day, we had a late breakfast at Blu Jam Cafe, which had a good two dozen breakfast dishes on the menu that are served all day. I had the Eggwich, a tremendously filling egg, cheese and avocado sandwich on a toasted ciabatta. Both of these were just fun places to be, with clean, funky decors, bright, innovative menus, and a nice buzz. LA can fill a breakfast place at 10 a.m. on a weekday because a lot of people don't work 9 to 5.

We went to a pizzeria and a sushi place where I had to learn these simple concepts could be taken to new heights. Pizzeria Mozza has so many lovely appetizers that even after we had ordered several for our table of six there were others to try another time. One standout was the farro and bean appetizer, which seemed to burst with flavor; the duck rillette, the fried squash blossoms and the crispy goat cheese were also fabulous. I couldn't pass up the chance to get the pizza with stinging nettles -- kind of a cross between spinach and greens in flavor -- with pepper salami and a salty cacio di Roma cheese. The pizza crust was light and puffy and the whole package excelled anything I'd had before.

Nobu offered some really special hot dishes, notably the signature rock shrimp tempura and a seared salmon with spicy cilantro sauce that were simply out of this world. While the sushi and other cold dishes were very good, I would focus on the hot dishes on a second visit. It's also the first time I've drunk sake out of a bamboo box, with an equal portion spilled into the saucer for good luck. That and a special single malt whiskey cocktail made the drinks the match of the food.

The Getty has a beautiful light and airy restaurant where I had a surprisingly delicate crisp pork belly on polenta for a starter and then a delicious farro risotto with spring peas, mushrooms and parmesan cheese that was delicate and hearty at the same time. Two for two on the farro dishes, so I've found a new favorite grain.

It was marvelous fun having this cornucopia of choices to play with. The dinner restaurants, particularly Nobu, were pricey, but the lunch places and even Pizzeria Mozza were reasonably affordable. I'm sure we'll go back to explore some more.

Yellow Indian Woman bean salad

I was looking for a recipe to use up the half-pound of Yellow Indian Woman beans from Rancho Gordo when I came upon this Moroccan-inspired salad in Heirloom Beans. It seemed the perfect follow-up to our chicken tagine earlier in the week because it used up the other half of the preserved lemon as well as using some of the newly opened jar of harissa paste.

It turned out to be delicious. And it was a stroke of genius, I say in all modesty, to pair the salad with grilled merguez from Broad Branch Market.

Steve Sando's beans once again proved their worth. I soaked these overnight then cooked them with a mirepoix. In order to use the bean pot, I sautéed the mirepoix in olive oil in a skillet and added it to the cold beans and soaking water to heat up gradually in the clay pot. It took a good hour or so to come to a boil and then simmered for another good hour. I added a tsp salt in the last quarter-hour of cooking then drained the beans. Per Sando's instructions, I heated up the 2 c. beans in the microwave at the time of assembly.

The other essential ingredient in this salad was 1 c. bulgur wheat. You simply add 2 c. boiling water and let it sit for an hour. The grain absorbs all the water, but remains moist and you fluff it up with a fork. It looks a lot like couscous but has a different, wheatier flavor.

Other ingredients were 2 Tbl chopped preserved lemon, 1/3 c. chopped scallions, and 1 c. chopped parsley. The dressing was 1/4 c. lemon juice, 3 minced garlic cloves, 2 tsp harissa, 1/3 c. olive oil and salt and pepper. You put the salad ingredients in a bowl, pour over the whisked dressing and toss to make a healthy, well-balanced salad.

The merguez was great, though it created huge flames on the grill as the fat escaped. I also put on a couple of the thicker sweet Italian sausages from Broad Branch but the merguez really matched the salad best. We drank a Gruner Veltliner with it, though I think a red would have been a better match.

Tagine

Tagine was the last on my list of special clay pots to buy and I finally got one at La Cuisine in Alexandria. It was made in Tunisia and is a pretty pistachio green.

I was not in a hurry because I wasn't sure how well I would like these stews that mix sweet and savory. But after trying it the first time, I think I'm going to like them fine.

After all the lamb over Passover and Easter, I didn't want to try the traditional lamb tagines, but took a recipe for chicken tagine with harissa, artichokes and green grapes from Ghillie Bașan's Tagines & Couscous, a new cookbook I bought on the basis of its high rating on Amazon.

The result was really delicious -- warming, exotic, tangy and very pretty with the ocher-yellow color it got from the turmeric. And very simple for a weekday.

I had cured the tagine right after I bought it, soaking it 24 hours then smearing the inside with olive oil and baking it at low temperature for 3 hours. Although this is a working utensil, it is also very decorative sitting on top of the hutch.

Whole Foods was very cooperative in providing the special ingredients needed for this recipe -- a nice jar of harissa paste and both artichoke hearts and preserved lemons in the olive bar.

I cut 4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts into wide strips and tossed them in a marinade of 1 Tbl olive oil, juice of 1 lemon, 1 tsp turmeric and 2 crushed garlic cloves. I covered it and put it in the fridge for 1 to 2 hours.

For the tagine, I sautéed 2 onions cut in half lengthwise and then sliced with the grain and half a preserved lemon, thinly sliced, with 1-2 tsp of sugar, in 2 Tbl of olive oil until the vegetables were lightly caramelized. Then I added the chicken strips along with 1-2 tsp of harissa and 2 tsp of tomato paste. Then I poured in 1-1/4 c. chicken broth, brought to a boil (slowly in the clay bottom sitting on a heat diffuser), put on the conical top and reduced the heat to let it simmer 15 min. Then I added 13 oz. of artichoke hearts cut in half and let it simmer another 5 min. At the end, I stirred in 16 seedless green grapes cut in half and part of the coarsely chopped leaves from a bunch of cilantro. I sprinkled the rest of the chopped cilantro over the top for serving. Bașan suggested an accompaniment of warmed flat bread, which Whole Foods also thoughtfully provided. We accompanied with a dry Côte de Provence rosé that we had picked up on our rosé shopping spree last weekend at Weygandt's and Addie Bassin's.

Both the new clay pot and the new cookbook passed their inaugural test with flying colors! We'll be doing more tagines.

Easter dinner

Very simple, very nice. My brother was visiting and he likes to celebrate Easter (so do I, really). I got a butterflied leg of lamb from Whole Foods (actually two, since they seemed to be half legs) and used the "Basque" marinade from the Jamisons' Big Book of Outdoor Cooking. This was just 1/2 c. olive oil, 1/4 c. sherry vinegar, 1/4 c. minced fresh tarragon, 6 cloves garlic minced, 1 Tbl coarse salt. Mix and pour in Ziploc bag with 4-1/2 to 5 lbs lamb, pounded to uniform thickness, 1-1/2 to 2 in. for overnight marinade.

Pull out and drain the lamb an hour before grilling. Jamison talks about 2-heat grilling but I just fired up the Big Green Egg for direct heat and grilled for about 20 min. turning 3 or 4 times, and let it rest 10 min before slicing. Really good -- A. even said it might be the best lamb I've done.

We accompanied with a Fingerling potato salad that we had tasted the previous weekend at La Cuisine in Alexandria during a tasting of French olive oils. This one demonstrated the virtues of Picholine oil. It has 1-1/2 lbs potatoes, boiled till tender, 4 hardboiled eggs, mustard, garlic, 1/4 c. white wine vinegar, 1/2 c. Picholine oil (so fruity and peppery), blanched green beans, salt and pepper. You add a little water to the vinaigrette (and we left out the 2 anchovy fillets). This is a real keeper, and I think the oil does make a big difference.

Cote du Rhone was the wine, brown sugar shortcakes with a strawberry-rhubarb compote and whipped cream the dessert. Happy Easter indeed.

Pork shoulder braised in hard cider

When Steve Sando, founder of Rancho Gordo and author of Heirloom Beans, a cookbook that has given us many great meals, mentioned that Cooking in the Moment by Andrea Reusing was his favorite cookbook of the moment, that was reason enough to order it. Specifically, the comments mentioned this recipe, which made a second good reason.

And it was delicious. As simple as Marcella Hazan's classic pork loin braised in milk, this yields an equally tasty and very hearty dish. The recipe calls for a 5-6 lb. pork shoulder, but Whole Foods doesn't cut them that big, so I settled for their biggest, a 3.5 lb piece of meat. You insert a dozen slivers of garlic in the meat, salt and pepper, sear in 2 Tbl of vegetable oil, and remove to sautee a sliced carrot, quartered onion and apple cut into chunks in 1 Tbl of the oil (though I used new oil). Add 2 c. of hard cider and 1 c. of regular cider and a head of garlic cut in half, bring to a simmer, put pork back in, cover with parchment and lid and put in preheated 300-degree oven for 3 hours.

The dry hard cider adds an edge to the sweet cider and both flavor the pork with the other aromatics while the braise keeps it moist. Since my piece of meat was smaller, I probably didn't need the full 3 hours, but it doesn't really matter.

We accompanied it with a delightful little recipe from Deborah Madison's Local Flavors. You slice half a small Savoy cabbage, the white of a large leek, and a quartered fennel bulb, wash them (don't dry them) and put the vegetables in a sauteuse with 1 Tbl butter and salt and cover to let them steam, not brown, for 10 min. In the meantime you reduce juice of one lemon to 1 Tbl and then, away from the heat, swirl in 3 Tbl butter. You chop 3 Tbl of parsley or chervil (I used parsley) together with the zest from the lemon and add half of that to the butter and half to the vegetables. Then you toss the vegetables in the butter. Madison refers to it as a "big green mess" but it was delicious, preserving the freshness of these flavorful vegetables and getting some real zing from the butter and lemon.

Cookbooks

Cross-posted from my book blog, Cogito Ergo Sum

It is a fair question when you already have literally hundreds of cookbooks why you should ever buy a new one. It's safe to say that I could do a Julie and Julia and cook one recipe a day from my existing cookbooks and not run out until it was time to go to the old folks' home.

But, like everything else, taste in cookbooks change. Julia Child deserves all the credit she gets for revolutionizing Americans approach to food and cooking, but not too many people will be cooking the recipes from Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The only three I still use regularly are cassoulet, ratatouille and boeuf carbonnades.

I have numerous cookbooks I've picked up along the way that simply are not very good cookbooks. I have English-language books on Swiss cuisine I bought in Switzerland -- totally useless even when I wanted to do Zuercher geschetzeltes recently. I have another with South African cuisine that I've never used. I have a big book on Spanish cuisine, in Spanish, that I use every once in a great while simply to decipher the recipe for paella with the aid of a dictionary. I have the Larousse gastronomique in French, but it may as well be in Greek for all the use I get out of it. I still have a few cookbooks in German, but they're not very practical to use here. Chef's cookbooks are by and large useless, I find -- too complicated, too many hard to find ingredients, not practical, etc. -- and I think sometimes their purpose is to convince you that you have to go to a restaurant to get a really great meal.

The modern classics -- Julia Child, Marcella Hazzan, James Beard -- still sit on my shelf, along with Elizabeth David and others in that first wave of cookbook authors. There's no reason to think that just because these books are devoid of lovely color photos that the dishes produced from these recipes will be any less delicious. New cookbooks nowadays have a color photo virtually every other page. And that of course is an art it itself, and can sometimes bear little resemblance to what you will come up with following the recipe, given all the tricks and shortcuts the photographers use.

But times change, and just as translator Richard Howard says every generation should have a new translation of the classics, many of the standard dishes can use a freshening up and "translation" for the current generation. For one thing, Julia and Marcella had to find substitutes when ingredients readily available in France or Italy were not so easy to find in the U.S. Some dishes they would not even include for that reason. Now, many of these ingredients are much easier to come by and mail order is much more sophisticated.

A cookbook written today can cater to the new focus on fresh, local products, put more emphasis on vegetables like kale and broccoli, give advice on sustainable sourcing -- addressing concerns that hobby cooks a generation ago didn't have.

But cookbooks themselves are under threat from online recipe sites like Epicurious. These books with their gorgeous photos -- and it is the photos now that distinguish them from the online recipes -- are not searchable. In pursuit of the seasonal, it's nice now to go to the farmer's market and pick what is in abundance and looks good, and hunt up a recipe for it when you get home. But who wants to plow through a half dozen indexes to find a good treatment for rapini. Just put it in the search box at Epicurious and you have dozens of recipes to choose from.

So managing cookbooks becomes a logistical challenge. We keep about 60 in the kitchen in our pseudo-hutch -- several of the standards, many favorites, and others that get swapped out seasonally -- braising books in the winter, grilling books in the summer. But the only way I can actually get to the recipes in these books is to pick one or two at random and leaf through them, noting recipes that are appealing and seasonal, and then arbitrarily selecting some to put on a shopping list and actually cook. In this way, we find many wonderful dishes that you could easily repeat, though we hardly ever do. Some we cook for guests, others just for ourselves (concluding almost invariably that this would be great for guests).

Not surprisingly, I find myself gravitating most often to Mediterranean dishes -- French, Italian, Spanish, or regional cookbooks that include Turkey, Lebanon, Morocco and so on. Paula Wolfert is a current big favorite, but Sara Jenkins' Olives and Oranges is also one I turn to a lot. I have several Indian cookbooks, but it's not that easy to assemble the ingredients if you just want to cook Indian every once in a while. We have a number of Mexican cookbooks and perhaps we can do more with them this summer.

But it's a wonderful problem to have. As I've said before, we live in something of a foodie paradise right now, with a true cornucopia of choices. Who knows what tomorrow brings. While my attitude is not exactly "Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die," I am inclined to order a new cookbook from Andrea Reusing when Steve Sando recommends it, and save the $20 to buy it by skipping that pizza and beer and staying home with leftovers instead. (It cost $20 from Amazon, but retails for $35, and I have to say cookbooks are something I will generally buy from Amazon. I don't understand why Politics & Prose, for instance, hasn't caught on and made it an incentive for their membership to offer a permanent discount on cookbooks.)

Pot-roasted chicken with gnocchi

This is a kind of Italian version of chicken and dumplings. It is the first recipe I've tried from my new Canal House Cooking #5, and it appealed to me because it's a simple recipe for a weekday meal, given that I skipped the gnocchi-making and just bought fresh gnocchi at Whole Foods. It turned out well enough but I'm not convinced about this cookbook series.

You are supposed to rub 2 Tbl spoons of softened butter onto the chicken. My butter was soft and my chicken was dry, but it just clumped along the skin and did not spread at all. Oddly, then, I thought, you also rub 2 Tbl of olive oil onto the chicken once you've put it in a enamel cast-iron pot. You salt and pepper it, pour in 2 c. water and 3 sprigs of fresh sage. Then you cover and put the pot into a preheated 375-degree oven.

So far, so good. But then it says to roast a 3-4 lb. chicken (mine was 3.5 lbs.) only 30 min. before taking off the lid, basting the chicken, adding 4 carrots, peeled and sliced into rounds, and returning to oven uncovered -- for only 15 min.!

I was skeptical about the time and I was right. The chicken was still snow white after 15 min. (supposed to be crispy, golden), so I turned up the heat and after another half hour (total 1 hr 15 min -- about what I would have expected), it was golden enough to be presentable and the juices ran clear. It was still plenty moist (I basted it some more in between). You remove the chicken and let it sit 10 min. before carving.

You cook the fresh potato gnocchi in batches in simmering, salted water, removing with a slotted spoon after they float on the surface for 10 sec. and put on a heated plate. When the gnocci are done, you toss with melted butter and parmesan. Then you serve gnocchi in a wide bowl, with slices of chicken on top, spooning over some broth and carrots. The chicken has a great flavor, the broth is rich and rounded from the sage and carrots, and the gnocchi are a lot like dumplings.

It worked fine for a weekday meal. I see a problem for serving it to guests, though, because getting it to the table with everything hot is a challenge. I'm also concerned that the timing was so far off. Added to that, the cookbook has a quirky selection of recipes and I don't see too many that I'm interested in doing. Bottom line: May not get another Canal House cookbook. I got this one because one of the authors in a book I'm reviewing recommended the series. Pretty photos seem to be the main attraction.

I may try to follow their recipe for gnocchi some weekend, though. It doesn't look that hard, just a little time-consuming for a weekday.

Assaggi Mozzarella Bar

Assaggi means "tastings," though for a while I thought it meant just plates because of the nice collection of ceramic plates on the wall. The specialty is a mozzarella plate with buffalo mozzarella, buffalo ricotta and burrata along with condiments like grilled zucchini, roasted peppers and green tomato marmalade. This is ideal for sharing and the four of us also shared the salumi plate with prosciutto, salami, speck and a couple of other cured meats.

The cheeses were creamy and delicate and paired very nicely with the condiments. While the portions were not huge, the combination of plates was enough to make us all comfortable with just ordering pasta as a main course. I got the dill tagliolini with Dungeness crab meat and green peas, which was different and tasty. Others seemed quite happy with their choices as well, though I didn't taste any of them. The hard crust bread was delicious and they brought more when you asked.

We accompanied with a very nice Aglianico, a black grape varietal from the Basilicata and Campania regions of southern Italy, which I don't think I'd ever had before. It was among the more moderately priced selections (the online menu doesn't have it so I don't have the details) and turned out to be very good value, with a rich, mineral taste, quite velvety. We liked it well enough to order a second bottle.

It's a testimony to the richness of Italian cuisine that this Bethesda restaurant can carve out its own distinctive niche among Italian offerings and introduce us to things that are new. All in all, very pleasant and worth revisiting. Note to those who care about this, it is fairly noisy and we even had a table at the end of the bench that was not in the noisiest part of the restaurant.

Rehoboth restaurants

We ate at two great restaurants in Rehoboth over the weekend, Espuma and Mariachi. They were coincidentally the two closest restaurants to our B&B on Delaware Ave. but I had picked them independently based on reviews in Tripadvisor and Rehobothfoodie.

Espuma is a truly innovative fine dining experience, based on Mediterranean cuisine. I had a ham hock ravioli starter, which has a surprisingly delicate pork taste, and a beautiful halibut filet that managed to be nice and crispy on the two sides and creamy and moist in between. Another in our party had the signature bacon and eggs, with the egg soft-boiled and somehow enshrouded in a crispy crust. The four of us made a dent in the menu, which had just changed that day. Other dishes included a beef cheek cassoulet with melt in your mouth meat, a classic paella with a wonderful smoky flavor, and the 3-day Berkshire pork. When our first two pinot noir choices were not there they gave us a nice discount on a more expensive pinot. Plus, the bartender is very creative and I had an unusual absinthe mojito with a very complex flavor that I grew to love.

A little downmarket the next night was Mariachi, a warm and friendly Mexican a cut above in quality and freshness. We shared the guacamole and pupusa starters and I had the marinated pork chunks (masitas de puerco), which was very good.

It was a treat to have such good choices and to be able to walk there. Our favorite Rehoboth restaurant, Back Porch, won't open before Easter.

Red Hook Lobster Pound

Food trucks are all the rage here and elsewhere and none is more sought after than Red Hook, offering authentic Maine-style lobster rolls. So there I was stupidly standing in line in the rain with two dozen other people waiting for the truck to open for business in front of the Subway at Wisconsin and Albermarle. But, hey, in nice weather, the line would probably have been much longer.

The lobster roll is great, no question about it. Lots of lobster, toasted bun -- I got the Maine-style with the mayonnaise dressing though many were ordering "Connecticut" style (warm butter) because of the inclement weather. Didn't get the "meal" -- an extra $3 gets you chips and soda (real Maine soda!). It's better than the very good lobster roll at Persimmon and more generous than the one at Tackle Box. Would I stand in line 20 min. or so again to pony up $15 for lunch -- probably, but certainly not every week.

The service, once they got going, was very efficient -- a big plus, especially when it's raining. Of course, it stopped raining about the time I got my roll and retreated to my car to eat it.

The DC lobster truck is a spinoff from a Brooklyn restaurant. I wonder how much they will expand the operation -- just one truck for DC, but other trucks for Va. and Md.? Or several trucks everywhere? We'll see.

Red Hook does a pretty good job of alerting their Facebook and Twitter followers where they will be. It's social networking and smartphones that make these mobile gourmet snacks possible in the first place. Unfortunately, it means that like all trendy places, they will be mobbed if they are any good.

Pork coddled in olive oil

Once in a great while you come across a new technique that opens up undreamed-of flavors. Marcella Hazan's pork loin braised in milk was that kind of revelation and it is a dish we cook at least once a year.

This dish, again from Paula Wolfert's Slow Mediterranean Kitchen, is a similar revelation and promises to become a standby. Our first encounter with a coddled dish came only a couple of weeks ago with the salmon coddled in olive oil at Marcel's. I had already dog-eared this recipe in the Wolfert book and was eager to try it after sampling the salmon dish.

This called for boneless pork shoulder cut into 2-in. cubes. I used the pork shoulder I had bought frozen from Blue Rooster Farm (though I think the pork actually comes from a neighboring farm). It looked so red in the package I wondered at one point if they had accidentally given me beef. But it looked like a pork shoulder cut and real heritage pork, of course, belies that ill-advised campaign about "the other white meat."

One of the things I enjoy about cooking is playing butcher, and I enjoyed cutting this off the bone and into cubes. A recent issue of RealEats described a butcher course for hobby cooks in California and I would happily take one if it was offered here.

The cubes then are tossed in a mix of coarse salt, crushed black peppercorns, 2 bay leaves crushed to a powder, bruised fennel seeds and 2 sprigs of thyme. The pungent smells of the spices as you worked them in the mortar was terrific. You seal the meat and spices and put in the fridge overnight. The next day, you squeeze the cubes in one layer in a dutch oven and cover with 2 c. of EVOO. I had recently decided it was worth spending the extra money on a premium imported oil like Colavita rather than Whole Foods 365 brand because something I read suggested that the WF brand was something less than highest quality. Very little of the oil actually goes into the meat and Wolfert suggests using the oil again after draining it off afterwards, but that didn't seem very appetizing to me.

You bring the oil slowly to a boil on top of the stove and then put in a 250-degree oven for 2-1/2 hours, inserting a half-head of garlic. Wolfert says to keep the oil from boiling too much and browning the meat. I'm not sure how you avoid browning the meat, though. She talks about it remaining pink, and I will set the temperature lower next time, but this pork definitely got brown on the outside -- while remaining pink on the inside.

The meat is done when you can tap a chunk and it falls into pieces. It's hard to describe how good that first bite tasted when I pulled out a chunk, tapped it into pieces and tasted it. The savory pork, the pungent spices, the silky oil, the garlic all conspired to create a very special balance of flavors. I set it on the screen porch to cool and warmed it slowly again for serving.

It is served with Tuscan beans. I used cannellini soaked overnight, and then cooked a couple of hours with 2 bay leaves, a dried hot pepper, and 2 peeled cloves of garlic. Wolfert says to serve the warmed-up pork on room temperature beans but we decided that next time we would warm up the beans again, too.

For the final assembly, you drain the pork and let the meat drippings settle in the drained off oil, pour off the oil and make a vinaigrette with the drippings, whisking in 3 Tbl of fresh oil and 1-1/2 Tbl of red wine vinegar, and dress the beans with that. You mound the beans on a platter, sprinkle paper-thin slices of red onion soaked in wine vinegar over the beans, add the pork chunks and garnish with arugula. We accompanied very nicely with a Cotes du Rhone.

Clear Creek Distillery

Addie Bassin's had a tasting by Clear Creek Distillery, which is based in Portland, Oregon and makes grappas, eaux de vie and liqueurs. The owner, they said, studied distilling methods in Alsace and Switzerland and makes genuine European-style digestifs.

It's all true. The Williams Pear brandy is on a par with any Poire William I tasted in France, and the pinot noir grappa has the pleasant bite of a good Italian grappa or a nice marc. These pleasures don't come cheap -- $25 for the 375ml bottle -- but I'd had a hankering for a good eau de vie and grappa for some time.

The liqueurs at the tasting were not my cup of tea, but then not everyone likes the dry alcohol taste of eaux de vie, so each to his own. The rep also had a Mirabelle and a Kirchwasser that Addie Bassin's doesn't carry but it seems Ace Beverage does, so I will pay them a visit one of these days because both of those were on a par with a high-quality European product. I tasted the muscat grappa, but didn't like that nearly as well as the pinot noir.

One quirky specialty was a spruce brandy. This, the rep admitted, was not a true brandy like the others, which are actually distilled from the fruit, but a grain alcohol infused with the flavor of tender spruce buds. I enjoyed it, but it's doubtful that I would pay $50 for the 375ml bottle that this very labor-intensive product commands, even if it were available here.

Kudos to the owner, Steve McCarthy. He took a liking a quarter-century ago to these European fruit brandies and realized that his parents' Oregon orchard, which grows particularly fine pears, would be ideal for transplanting the tradition to the U.S. They also make a single malt, which I'd be interested to try sometime.

Our first set of guests to try it really liked the pear brandy. Oddly, the distillery rep said they serve the eau de vie from the freezer, which I think sacrifices a lot of the subtle flavor of the brandy. I remembered too late the technique of some places in Europe of swishing some ice through the snifter and then pouring the brandy in to help open up the flavor. Will try that next time.