noodsletter #.0030
Mom's spaghetti, a bread baking book rec; recent work.
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Also! Hope you have a nice Thanksgiving, if you celebrate. I’ll probably send a squib of a newsletter out for paid subscribers with snaps of my meal: it’s gonna be super basic (my kid requested corn on the cob (??) and turkey, so…), although I did pick up a slice or two of foie gras.
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Book Bit
Tending to forget that the account of the Good Samaritan, in Luke, is an anti-Semitic parable.
Tending to forget that Plato advocated totalitarianism.
La Noche Triste.
Aharon Appelfeld escaped from a Nazi labor camp at the age of eight. Eight. And spent three years hiding in the forests of Romania and Ukraine.
Jerzy Kosinski did nothing of the kind.
Edith Metzger.
Anaxagoras committed suicide by starving himself.
In the first year of the eighty-eighth Olympiad.
And when asked near the end how he wished to be commemorated, said schoolchildren should be given a holiday.
From Reader’s Block, by David Markson.
Some Work Stuff
We, like everyone else in food media, have been working ourselves ragged for Thanksgiving. In particular, we sort of inadvisably took on this massive project that I’ve proposed in some form or another for years, but was never taken seriously/dismissed because it would take too much work for too small a reward in traffic: a full game plan for Thanksgiving, complete with shopping lists, prep lists, and timing charts. This being ChefSteps, where everything is extra, we did two: an “ultimate” Thanksgiving game plan and an “express” one.
While these both use all ChefSteps recipes, they’re obviously of somewhat more limited utility than they could be otherwise, but I still think the exercise is useful for literally anyone, since it illustrates clearly the kind of spacing out of prep activity required to pull of a large meal successfully, and with as little stress as possible. While I pitched the idea, and I was involved in producing these things, the lion’s share of the work was done by Sasha Marx, Nicholas Gavin, and Rick Wallace—and it was an insane amount of work.
Of course, we were also putting out recipes, both for Thanksgiving and…because we got recipes coming out of our ears. And there were two graphical treatments: a parametric analysis of popular pie doughs and a video about using a scale to measure out ingredients. It’s been intense!
Cran-Pari! (and Cran-Pari Negroni Sbagliato!)
Why You Should Use a Scale (Video)
While I was out in Seattle, I also got a preview of some stuff coming down the pipeline in the next couple weeks: a vegan “foie gras” terrine and a vegan candy cap mushroom ice cream, courtesy of Matthew Woolen. Suffice it to say, both were fantastic.
The Bread Baker’s Pocket Companion
Andrew Janjigian, the mind behind Word Loaf and baker and pizza maker and recipe dev extraordinaire, just released his pocket companion for baker’s book, which is illustrated by Johanna Kindvall.
If you bake at all, I think it’s a worthy purchase. It has a lot of very useful information, particularly about ingredient substitutions and quantities, including an amazing list of spice volume-to-weight conversion. If you develop recipes at all—professionally, or for yourself—highly recommend picking one up. Also, supporting Andrew is good because he just sends out recipes for free, all the time. What’s up with that?
“News”
Literal children working at meat-packing plants.
Wayne Rooney making sushi in Dubai for a puff piece in CNN for … no reason that I can ascertain?
A Manchester restaurant critic is up to no good.
Took me a second, but…wow!
Pearl Oyster Bar is closing. I’ve never been a big fan (lobster rolls aren’t good? Not Pearl’s, just…any lobster roll), but reading about the economic challenges of a seafood restaurant in America always makes me sad.
For example, there are many reasons why sushi is so wildly expensive.
Maybe they should all go into mecha-crustacean-taxidermy! (This crab bot is amazing!)
Keep meaning to pick up the Woks of Life cookbook.
Mushroom Pasta
Since I started my new job, I’ve had to take two, week-long trips, during which I did no cooking at all—a very odd experience for me. I typically cook three meals a day, every day, and it rarely occurs to me how much time I consequently spend not just chopping vegetables and fiddling with fire, but also on thinking about what I am cooking, what I am going to cook in the future, and, of course, the ever-scrolling mental list of all the stuff I’ll need to clean up.
I also rarely think about how much I rely on cooking as a time of decompression, or how it essentially functions as a kind of mindless activity in which I allow myself to not think of other things. While there’s the obvious concomitant stress of paying attention to cooking things well and not injuring myself while doing so, the hours I spend in the kitchen are hours in which my thoughts mostly stick to a kind of script: do this, not that, what’s next, don’t be impatient, give it a minute, you’ll get it next time, etc. I’m not thinking about much of anything other than cooking when I cook (although, if I’m being perfectly honest, I do spend a fair amount of time in the cooking doldrums—staring at the oven door when something’s been slotted in there for “just a couple more minutes,” say—worrying about the fact that I have not finished revising my book).
All of which is to say, these trips have been illuminating, if a little depressing, since I’ve had to spend all those hours I usually spend cooking doing nothing, or worse than nothing, as when I spent election night watching the vapid coverage on cable news.
What I’ve come to realize, belatedly to be sure, is that I often sit around just yearning to eat specific things, and then I’ll then organize my life—dinner plans, the time I get off work, what I do when I first wake up—and my mind—drawing up ingredient lists, juggling the demands of my desires with the alimentary needs of my family—in order to satisfy that yearning. When you have no recourse but to eat out all the time, this is at once both easier and more expensive, I suppose; you can go out anywhere you want, as when I went to a not very good yakitori restaurant in Seattle. But it’s also far more difficult if what you really want to eat is something no one else will make, like my mom’s mushroom and anchovy pasta.
It’s not a matter of technical skill; it’s very easy to make. It’s just that I doubt any restaurant would put this dish on their menu, although, oddly enough, I once ate at a very decent Italian restaurant in Phnom Penh that did. If you go to an Italian restaurant and they have a mushroom pasta on the menu, it will probably take the form of pasta ai funghi—mushrooms, garlic, and cheese.
This one foregoes cheese entirely, and it’s more of an aglio e olio iteration that happens to contain mushrooms and anchovies. Made badly, it’s greasy and mushroomy and salty and quite peppery; that’s the way my mom used to make it, and I loved it. Made with a little attention to detail, it’s basically the same, just not greasy.
For whatever reason, as I got on the plane to go home from both trips, I had an overwhelming desire to eat this specific pasta when I got home. And I did, because I was no longer imprisoned in my otherwise very nice hotel room.
The key with this recipe, as with any aglio e olio-type thing, is you want to emulsify the oil with the pasta cooking water at the end. Not doing that properly means you’ll get greasy mushroom pasta, which I like, but maybe you’d be put off.
Otherwise, you can do whatever you want with the ingredients. You can cook the mushrooms hard—cooking off all their water and browning their cuts sides completely—or you can undercook them to that soft, almost slimy consistency that American steakhouses do so well, but if you undercook them, you may need to add more fat, as undercooked mushrooms hold onto a bunch of oil. You can add three cloves of garlic, or one, or 10, and the same goes for the anchovies—it just depends on your tolerance and enthusiasm for these things. If you don’t have wine, just use water, although I’ve made this with dash and/or chicken stock and it works (although it tastes a little odd). Add a ton of chopped fresh chilies or ground dried chilies if you want it spicy; add celery leaves or chopped parsley for a little freshness. You could, if you wanted, even add cheese.
Ingredients:
1/2 lb (8 oz) good, or decent, spaghetti (De Cecco, ok, Ronzoni, no please)
2 tablespoons butter
8 oz button mushrooms, cleaned a nd sliced thinly
Big pinch of salt, plus more to taste
Couple grinds of black pepper
3 cloves garlic, peeled and minced
1 shallot, peeled and minced
3 anchovy fillets, minced
Splash of vinegar (sherry/red wine)
1/4 cup (60 ml) sake or dry white wine, or water
Splash of soy sauce
Handful of parsley, minced (optional)
Lemon wedge (optional)
Bring a 3-quart saucepan of lightly salted water to a boil.
In a 12-inch skillet, 14-inch wok, or a pasta pan, melt butter over medium-high heat until foaming stops and add mushrooms. Sprinkle with a big pinch of salt and a couple grinds of black pepper and toss to coat in fat. Cook, tossing and stirring occasionally, until mushrooms have dumped all their moisture, moisture has cooked off, and mushrooms begin to brown (optional) or until mushrooms are thoroughly browned.
Meanwhile, add pasta to boiling water. Cook for 1 minute less than packaging directions for al dente, stirring occasionally to prevent sticking.
Once mushrooms are browned, add garlic, shallot, and anchovy, and stir/toss to combine. Cook until it smells incredible, about 1 minute; do not let garlic burn.
Add a splash of vinegar, and toss to combine. Add wine (or water) and, using a wooden spoon, scrape up any browned bits on the bottom of the pan/pot. Add splash of soy sauce and bring to a boil; cook for 1 minute. Once alcohol has boiled off, reduce heat to simmer.
Once pasta has cooked, using tongs, transfer pasta to mushroom sauce along with 1/2 cup of pasta cooking water. Increase heat to high and cook, stirring and tossing constantly, until pasta is just al dente and sauce is emulsified and creamy-looking, adding additional pasta water in 1/4 cup increments if sauce breaks or starts looking oily.
Turn off heat, add parsley (if using) and toss to combine. Taste for seasoning, adding additional salt if necessary. Serve immediately with lemon wedge alongside.