Dear friends,
Just dropping in for now, in medias res, kitchenwise. My woeful bleatings have been answered by the weather gods, for spring arrived, really arrived, this weekend. 70 degrees yesterday, 70+ today, supposed to hit 80 tomorrow. From our open window, I can smell cut grass, the neighbors’ hyacinths and narcissus, the telltale scent of a thousand grills being lit up (my Greek neighbors, in particular, take their grilling very seriously) and air that smells so clean that it can make you forget that New York City has unhealthy levels of ground-level ozone lately. Bring the spring, I said, and spring, it has been brung.
I should be outside in the park, any park, running on the loop around the reservoir in Central Park, walking 60 or 70 blocks with my fellow urban cranks, maybe even heading out to Coney Island or the Rockaways and pretend that we have a timeshare down the shore. Instead, though, I am reverting to my Bakerinish tendencies and cranking up the oven. Don’t ask me why the inclination to heat up the kitchen increases as the temperature goes up. I guess it’s my own form of spring cleaning. I get the kitchen running, I scrub the floor, I throw all the windows open, I feel like a well-oiled machine.
Today’s kitchen adventures:
Two loaves of whole wheat seeded fruit bread, packed with apricots, raisins, prunes, flaxseed, millet and wheat berries. It comes from a now-out-of-print cookbook written by my bread mentor, a woman who runs a kickass artisan wholesale-retail bakery here in the city, and who kindly let me work nights and weekends in her bakery to see if the bakeshop life was the life for me. (It was, it was.)
Two loaves of whole wheat/oatmeal/pecan bread, from the same cookbook.
Three loaves of walnut/scallion bread. Third verse, same as the first. (I told you she was my bread mentor.) All three of these doughs have been sitting in the fridge overnight, fermenting slowly, unlocking the flavors in the grain, coaxing it out, inviting it to play with the others.
Two chickens, cooling nicely in the kitchen after roasting in a hot oven, seasoned only with Penzeys 4S salt and a lemon stuck up their bottoms. These chickens will appear in tonight’s one-bowl extravaganza, soba noodles with chicken, broccoli rabe and satay sauce. What doesn’t get eaten tonight will feed us all week. Carcasses will be picked clean and turned into soup midweek.
Marionberry ice cream. Now that the weather is getting hot and the kitchen is getting hotter, it’s time for ice cream. When I found Jersey cream at the market at about the same time that The Amateur Gourmet discovered the joy of homemade ice cream and wrote about it with such wit and panache, I knew the time had come. My favorite Italian deli sells bottled marionberries from Oregon. Usually I’m not a fan of bottled fruit, but I make an exception for these. I know that sorbet would bring out the taste of the berries better, but I’m in a real berries + cream mood today, the kind that can only be solved by a pint of cream and six egg yolks. I can’t wait to eat it.
Peanut butter cookies, just because Lloyd asked for them, and he almost never asks for anything.
Should you think it is an act of depravity to stay in on such a nice day, have no fear. I’m going out now, to pick up some paninis for lunch. What, you don’t think I’m going to fix lunch for us on top of all this?