This is a recipe from The Zuni Cafe Cookbook, a cookbook I’ve long dismissed as too complex, too fussy, too–well–not me. Flipping through it now, the recipes are long-winded, they go on for pages, and the pictures are too few and far between. And yet this is a cookbook that has something to say–I can’t deny that–and every now and then I pick it up and hope that I may stumble across something that will win me over. Tonight was such a night.
It’s a super simple Zuni recipe (“Pasta with Spicy Broccoli and Cauliflower”), a recipe that spans only two pages, and yet now I will attempt to reduce it to just a few short paragraphs.
1. Take cauliflower and broccoli and slice it into 1/8th-inch slices (about as much as you think can fit in your saute pan). Heat about 1/4 cup of olive oil in the pan on medium heat and then add the cauliflower and broccoli, leaving behind the stray bits for later:
Cook until the cauliflower and broccoli are brown on the edges. Don’t move them around!!
2. Once browned, add salt (a light sprinkling) and more oil (this is why it’s not so healthy, I added a lot of oil) and then the rest of the cauliflower bits from the board. Then add 1 Tbs capers and toss around. Then let cook until the edges begin to brown again.
3. Drop 1 pound (or so) of penne or fussili (or any pasta, really) into a pot of boiling salted water. Try to time it so the pasta will be done when the sauce is done.
4. When the broccoli and cauliflower has shrunken by 1/3rd, reduce the heat, add more oil, and then add chopped anchovy (6 filets), chopped garlic (six cloves), 1/2 teaspoon fennel seeds, and 4 to 8 pinches red chili flakes. This is a highly unusual step–adding the garlic and flavorings AFTER the vegetables have cooked–but it makes the flavors way more pungent. Stir them around and cook for a few more minutes.
5. Taste! Is it tasty? Judy Rodgers says, “Every flavor should be clamoring for dominance.” (She also has you add olives and toasted bread crumbs, but I didn’t have any on hand).
6. When the pasta is done, toss it with the sauce and look:
You’ve made broccoli and cauliflower oily, unhealthy and terrifically delicious! It’s a great pasta dish. You can add cheese if you want, but I didn’t have any. And so, the Zuni Cafe cookbook gets a pat on the back tonight. Well done, Zuni. Well done.
People of the world, aren’t you tired of tiny cookies? You know the kind I’m talking about. They’re the kind that you end up making when a recipe says, “Drop cookie batter by rounded tablespoon onto ungreased baking sheets.” That’s what the recipe says for Nestle’s Oatmeal Butterscotch Cookies, which I made again tonight (here’s the recipe from the first time I made them). They’re great cookies–sweet chemical morsels embraced by wholesome natural oatmeal–and I definitely enjoyed them when they were small. But tonight I wanted them bigger.
To make them bigger here’s what I did: I used an ice cream scoop. I scooped out big blobs of batter, pushed the little handle on the scoop and dropped them on to parchment paper placed on my cookie sheet. The recipe was to make two dozen, I made nine. Then, instead of using the time allotted on the bag, I baked them until they were flat and brown around the edges.
And you know what? I got exactly what I wanted: big, smile-inducing cookies. Everybody loves a big cookie. So don’t cowtow to the tiny cookie gods just because they yell at you from the side of a bag. Get yourself an ice cream scoop and make your cookies bigger: you’ll be glad you did.
Earlier this year, Keith McNally–owner of Balthazar, Pastis and the newly opened Morandi–wrote an open letter to New York Times food critic Frank Bruni accusing him of sexism. McNally wrote: “Bruni has never given a female chef in Manhattan anything more than one star, ever….On the two momentous occasions that Bruni saw fit to hand a woman two stars (both outside of Manhattan) he flatly refused to mention that the chef was a woman. This is peculiar, because when the chef is a man Bruni often makes quite a song and dance about it.”
Most people, myself included, found McNally’s rant to be misguided: as a response to Morandi’s one star (the chef is a woman), it came across as sour grapes. The issues it raised, though, are important ones: why don’t female chefs in New York have more stars? Is it sexism or do female chefs just not aspire to the same heights that their male counterparts do? What’s going on?
The way I understand the star system, four star restaurants must offer everything there is to offer when it comes to fine dining–stellar service, a beautiful setting, and highly accomplished, innovative, breathtaking food. A four star restaurant must fire on all cylinders all the time; it must succeed in every way that it’s possible for a restaurant to succeed. And because four star restaurants are all so similar (Jean-Georges, Daniel, Le Bernardin) it’s easy to judge the aptness of other star appointments based on how close they are to the ultimate dining experience.
Annisa–Anita Lo’s two-starred restaurant on Barrow Street–gets very close. I ate there for the first time last night with my friends Lauren and Julie and our meal was delightful in every way a restaurant meal can be delightful. The service was exemplary, the setting was lovely, and the food was extraordinary. Take for example, this first course: Seared Foie Gras with Soup Dumplings and Jicama:
This dish was a triumph on several levels. First of all, the execution was flawless. The soup dumplings were cooked perfectly, the proportion of foie gras to dumpling to broth was right on. Second of all, it was incredibly creative, it was innovative and exciting. It mixed the unfamiliar with the familiar, street food with fine dining. Like the end of a good book or play, it felt surprising and inevitable: I had a catharsis in my mouth.
My entree was equally thrilling–veal with veal sweetbreads:
I’ve had sweetbreads elsewhere, but I’ve never had sweetbreads as glorious as these. They were crispy, caramelized pockets of meaty goodness. The veal was perfectly cooked, as you can see in the picture. And the cabbage provided perfect vegetal contrast; the sauce was fruity–rhubarb, if I remember correctly–and all together, eating this was a sublime experience. I was recently asked what I wanted for my last meal, and if this were what I was served I’d be happy to die. Only I’d want this for dessert:
That’s a goat cheese cheesecake with candied beets. Look how colorful and inventive: it makes me think of Miami or Mardi Gras. And then there was a poppy seed bread pudding with lemon curd that was equally amazing. These desserts dazzled, as did the whole meal. So why doesn’t Annisa have three stars?
This is a question I want to take seriously. I don’t want to make up my mind that Annisa deserves three stars for political reasons without balancing the matter against what I know about how stars are awarded. Luckily, Frank Bruni has given us a blueprint for what makes a three star restaurant a three star restaurant in his re-review of 11 Madison Park.
He writes: “I gave Eleven Madison two stars in February 2005, and while I normally wouldn’t review a restaurant again so soon, Mr. Humm’s food — not the new table settings, not the tweaked lighting — made me do it. I can’t have beef tenderloin in a bordelaise sauce this dense with marrow — this druggy — and stay mum. I can’t cut into such impeccably roasted duck — glazed smartly, but not too sweetly, with lavender and honey — and shut up about it. That would be a dereliction of duty. It would be just plain mean.”
So, clearly, enhanced performance impresses Bruni. It comes down to the food, and that makes sense. The New York Times archive only has a little blurb about Annisa, not the full review, so it’s hard to know what it was marked down for. The blurb says: “Ms. Lo reaches far and wide for ideas and influences, without strain. Throughout, her cooking is defined by good taste and good judgment. Fish is infallible at Annisa.”
So what went wrong? Or did anything go wrong? Maybe Anita Lo doesn’t aspire to be a three-star chef. Certainly her peer, Gabrielle Hamilton, doesn’t. As quoted by Frank Bruni in his one-star review of Prune, Hamilton wrote in a Food & Wine essay: “I wanted an unassuming way to slip into the shallow end of the pool of New York City restaurants. I wanted to cook for my neighbors.”
Maybe that’s all Anita Lo wants too. Annisa certainly feels like a neighborhood joint. But my suspicion is that Ms. Lo wants more. She kicked Mario Batali’s ass on Iron Chef America and Batali is a three-star chef twice over (Babbo, Del Posto). She was a contender to cook at the White House; she was a Food & Wine Chef of the Year. She means business and she is, perhaps, the female chef best primed to shift the gender paradigm as it now exists for chefs in New York (and elsewhere): how fitting that Annisa means “women” in Arabic.
Here’s hoping that Bruni pays Annisa a visit sometime soon. It’s a perfect opportunity for him to challenge (or at least address) McNally’s claim that he’s sexist and an even better opportunity for Lo to get the extra star that she so richly deserves.
1. Does anyone have the recent Gourmet Magazine with Jane & Michael Stern’s road trip tips for Maine? If you do, can you put the places they mention in that article in the comments here? Thanks!
2. If anyone has any tips for where to eat in Maine (in particular, near Kennebunkport) let me know!
The other night at Chip Shop in Park Slope with Kirk, James and Diana we’d stuffed ourselves silly with fried fish, fried potatoes, and fried beer (ok, the beer wasn’t fried). Then Kirk tried to kill us. “Who wants to share deep fried Twix bars? They’re awesome.” In all my years of adventurous eating, I’d never had a deep fried candy bar. So I said I was game. So was James and, eventually, Diana. Here’s what they brought out, photo by James:
First of all, kudos to Chip Shop on their thoughtful presentation (notice how they’re stacked and dusted with powdered sugar?) Second of all, look at Kirk’s beer: he had a Monty Python Holy Ale. I took a sip and it made me say Ni! Ni! Ni! Ni!
Anyway, after staring for a bit we finally lifted our forks and dove in. And OH MY LORD: you have no idea what you’re in for when it comes to a deep fried candy bar. It’s not just sick, sweet decadence: it’s much more than that. The chocolate and caramel MELT within the crispy batter so that it becomes almost unrecognizable in its goodness, like a whole new category of sweets you never knew existed. Words fail me now. All I can say, is if you’ve never had a deep fried candy bar you really should. I plan to have one every day until I die which, if I really have one every day, may happen sooner rather than later. You’re all invited to say “Ni” at my funeral.
Occasionally, I answer reader mail on the blog. Today I received the following message:
Dear Adam,
My friend and I are from D.C. and are heading off for college in the fall. We’re both avid readers of your site and really into food/cooking. We’re coming up to NYC for 2 days at the beginning of August and we’d like to know what places are MUST go-tos (preferably) that are cheap, as we’re poor college kids); we want to hit all the classics for pizza, bagels, etc. What are your suggestions?
The pasta you see above may call to you and cause you to eat your computer screen, but don’t be fooled. Before I put that pasta through Amateur Gourmet Pasta Rehab, it was a bland, boring mess. Two ingredients came from the farmer’s market: fresh corn and basil. The corn, as I should’ve guessed this time of year, wasn’t very sweet (even though it was advertised as sweet corn). The recipe (which you can read here) came from Michael Chiarello who is that suave-looking guy on the Food Network. I don’t blame him for this pasta being bland, but–strangely enough–I do blame him for the Arab-Israeli conflict. Go figure.
So I’ve had this experience before: the pasta’s in the pot boiling away (in properly salted water) and you’re making the sauce and you taste the sauce and it tastes pretty excellent and then you take the pasta out just before it’s done to finish cooking in the sauce (an essential step, I think, so the pasta and sauce are united as one) and then once you’ve turned the heat up and let the liquid all evaporate (when the pasta and sauce are united as one, you should be able to drag a wooden spoon across the bottom of the saute pan and just see the bottom of the pan) you taste and it’s pretty bland. That’s what happened with this pasta. Some might’ve fallen on their knees and screamed out, “Why!! Why, God, why!?” and then broke out into “Why God Why” from Miss Saigon but not me. Here’s what you do to make bland pasta better:
1. Add salt. Well, duh. But this is a tricky step. At this point, there should already be salt in the pasta (from the cooking water) and in the sauce itself because, before you added the pasta, you properly salted it. So if you add too much salt here, there’s no going back. So a light sprinkling, a stir and taste: better? Don’t overdo it, especially if you’re going to add cheese.
2. Grate lots of Parmesan or Pecorino into a bowl. I say into a bowl because if you do it directly over the pasta, it’ll quickly melt and you’ll forget how much you added. So I grate a big bowl full of cheese and then scatter the cheese over the pasta while it’s still in the pan, stir it through and taste. That’s key for pasta rehab: taste taste taste after each step! How does it taste now with the cheese? Less bland? Need more salt? After steps 1 and 2, salinity should not be an issue. The rest of the steps will just help with bumping up the flavor.
3. Grind some pepper over it.
4. Sprinkle some red pepper flakes over it.
5. Give it a drizzle of olive oil. Yes, that last step may seem strange but it’s a VERY Italian thing to do as I’ve seen Mario do it on TV, I’ve read Marcella Hazan’s instructions to do that and then, of course, Dominic DeMarco does it to the pizza at Di Fara. The cold olive oil provides an uncooked fruity olive oil finish to what should be, by now, a very delicious pasta.
Stir that through and taste again. How did we do? Use any of the ingredients in steps 1 through 5 to fix whatever problems your pasta has. If it still tastes bland, you must’ve done something really wrong. Maybe pasta isn’t your thing. Maybe you should take up knitting?
