Sage & Browned Butter

It never quite stays the same, but the same basic two ingredients do: butter and sage. The butter must be browned and the sage, fresh. Most of the time over these is poured cream, which bubbles into a sauce. But this last, it could be said, just dilutes the flavor.

It was taken from two friends' repertoires, both of whom exalted it.

The one loved gnocchi more than the sauce she bathed them in, but aren't gnocchi a vehicle for sauce? She made gnocchi to bring decadence to our poorly deprived college lives of hippie lentil soup and mac n' cheese. The time-consuming and detailed labor of gnocchi were supposed to bring us out of the fraught, gaudy world of a small New England liberal arts school to somewhere more expansive. Like, say, Italy, after which she pined by kneading dough and smooshing it delicately with a fork.

But the sauce. Her method was to pour some cream into a saucepan with lots of fried sage leaves, simmer it down until it thickened into a sauce, and salt it to taste. This made a sumptuous covering for the pillowy lumps. As such rich sauces are bound to, it drew us all salivating in only to leave us for dead at the table, feeling sick and wanting to collapse into our half-finished plates.

The other was following a recipe for pumpkin ravioli with brown butter and sage, and was enamored, in her self-consciously understated way. She dropped sage leaves into melted butter and burned the butter just so. This is the base, and sometimes the whole, of every permutation of my sauce.

I have a kind of paranoid respect for the flavor of sage and browned butter. I don't think it should be messed with. Olive oil is, I feel, an evil addition to it. Other herbs, even black pepper, should be shunned from sage. Garlic is too much competition, and its cloying, under-your-fingernails savoryness clashes with sage's sharp scent.

The furthest I have strayed from the holy diad has been to incorporate bacon and finely chopped onions. This may have been too far.

I do think that the recipe for pumpkin ravioli had it right: the flavor of sage and browned butter should be paired with something a little sweet. But I rarely do this. I have become more attached to the sauce than its place in a dish. I pour it over any old pasta. Once I even put it on chicken and mashed potatoes.

Once the sage leaves have become brownish and brittle in butter, I often remove them before the cream makes them soggy. These crispy, butter-soaked leaves are hard not to devour on the spot, but I like to sprinkle them as a flavorful garnish.

Roasted Bell Pepper Obsession

Sometimes I cook a dish not to feed or for a subtle balance of flavors, but out of single-minded, monistic, shameless, worshipful obsession. It works like this: I didn’t need four adjectives to describe this kind of obsession, especially not both of the first two. But to have more of one thing, I need a variety of sameness. How do I create more roasted bell pepper? By adding other things, flavors spinning around a center always just to the side of roasted bell pepper. The center is almost the sauce, everything bound together in cream. The other things are just drawn out aspects of the original: bacon smokey like them, smoked paprika essentially the same as them, but dried and powdered. Then there are those forgotten things: onions and garlic sauteed in olive oil. What metaphor to turn to (the search for which is itself a good metaphor for what it is to organize a dish around a single ingredient)? Melody, harmony, and rhythm?

1 pound tiny yellow, orange, and red bell peppers
1/4 pound bacon ends
1 smallish onion
4 cloves garlic
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 cup heavy cream
2 teaspoons smoked paprika
a pinch of black pepper
salt to taste

Chop onion and garlic finely. In a large saucepan on medium-low sautee onion and garlic in olive oil. Sprinkle with a pinch of salt. Stir every few minutes. Heat a large cast-iron skillet to medium heat. Cut tops off of bell peppers, slice in half, and de-seed. Drop bacon ends into skillet, then bell pepper halves. Stir bell peppers when bottom sides blacken a bit. When bacon ends are a little charred, and majority of bell peppers are somewhere blackened, transfer into large saucepan with onion and garlic. Mix together and add smoked paprika and black pepper. Add heavy cream. Stir every few minutes while the sauce thickens. It should take maybe fifteen minutes to thicken. When it’s the right consistency to stick to pasta, add salt to taste.

Scraping the Bottom of the Barrel: Photos

Beets and Parsnips.

Beets and Parsnips, roasted. Ugh, what a phase.

One of the many pear tarts that never made it here. Or maybe this one was apple?

One of the strangest meals. Those two white patties are ground turkey with egg, flour, chiles, garlic, onion, and... some other stuff, possibly. Those are just boiled potatoes to the right. The sauce, really, was the tasty part: spicy brown butter sage cream sauce.

What happened to the beet frosting? It frosted a nonwheat spice cake.

A biscuit made entirely with yogurt for liquid. Yogurt had the effect of keeping it a little too moist. It was also very dense.

Collard green stems with olive oil, garlic, paprika, and red wine vinegar.

Using wikipedia as a guide, stir-frying is my favorite thing these days. This red cabbage and bok choy was stir-fried with soy sauce, lemon juice, brown sugar, hot sauce, garlic, ginger, and sesame oil. That omelete is yellow, isn't it?

Quinoa with Tomato-Bacon-Beet-Spinach Sauce

What's most notable about this sauce is that it is red. Not tomato red or beet red, it's more fake blood red. The color seems wrong to me; bacony tomato sauce should not hurt the eyes to look at. To me it's a color that on the whole doesn't fall into the category of edible. Eating it is a very disjunctive experience: what I taste is not what I see. This is probably because I have learned throughout life to anticipate taste from appearance, along with a number of other cues. Foods "look tasty." This sauce, rather than looking tasty, or even looking like sauce, looks like raw meat, blood, candy, or some kind of overzealous berry. Looking at the food while eating it, rather than creating a suturing movement like this paragraph, creates more confusion than the following metaphor: the sewing machine sticks and the needle breaks.

I might even say, in one of the more postmodern gustatory aesthetics, that good food causes such renewing sensory rupture. Of course, ideally it does so more subtly than by blaring a neon red siren in your face and then handing you a plate of tomato sauce. Comfort food, on the other hand, strives toward a mimetic reproduction of your preconceptions. There can never really be, but comfort food may accomodate. What we have in this opposition of comfort and "good" is an appallingly bad account of what makes food good. Food full of the unexpected and disjunctive may still be bad, mediocre, nauseating, or even inedible. And comfort food also may be all of these things. This is not a way of evaluating the goodness of food, but a way of defining differing aesthetic modes. "Good" and "comfort" might be better termed "high" and "low."

What brought me here? Beets. The color of one of the oldest vegetables jars me into having to convince myself that tomatoes and bacon in fact taste like tomatoes and bacon. It has such an effect, I think, because it reminds me of blood--fake blood, and therefore of the permeability of bodily boundaries. We have become used to putting substances in our mouths and swallowing them. In fact, depending on the account of childhood psychological development you subscribe to, there may never have been a time when we were not used to it. Nonetheless we generally have come to think of the process of eating as not at all at odds with being contained within our bodies. Voiding waste is only slightly more threatening to this sealed bodily conception. But as much as straight male psychology at some unconscious level depends on rejecting it entirely, there is no avoiding it: things enter us and exit us through multiple orifices, including us. And blood, although generally this only exits. But from the plate in front of me deep red sauce enters.

1/2 large onion
1 small red beet
2 cloves garlic
7 medium frozen tomatoes
3 strips bacon
handful or two baby spinach
juice of 1/4 lemon

3 teaspoons dried basil

1 teaspoon dried oregano

1/4 teaspoon black pepper
salt to taste (1/2 teaspoon?)

Fill a large saucepan 1/2in up the rim with water, add frozen tomatoes, and put on medium-high heat. In another large saucepan begin frying bacon on medium heat. Peel and finely chop onion, beet, and garlic. When bacon is browned on both sides (but not crispy), remove onto a cutting board or plate. Scrape blackened bits from bottom of pan with spatula. Reduce heat to medium-low and add onion, beet, garlic, black pepper, and a pinch of salt. Tomatoes should be about thawed at this point. Remove from heat, drain water, remove skins, and chop tomatoes into large chunks. Put tomatoes back on medium-low heat to begin reducing. Stir frying onion mixture every few minutes. When onions are very soft (maybe 25 minutes), transfer tomatoes to frying saucepan and add basil, oregano, and lemon juice. Stir. Continue reducing sauce. When it's the right consistency, add baby spinach. Allow it to wilt for a few minutes and then stir it into the sauce. Salt to taste. Serve over pasta or quinoa.

Spicy Orange Sauce

1 large orange
1 egg yolk
2 tablespoons sweet chili sauce
2 teaspoons sugar
1/2 teaspoon crushed dried chilis

Zest orange and reserve orange zest.  Juice orange, removing any seeds.  In a large saucepan combine orange juice, orange zest, and egg yolk with a whisk.  Put saucepan on medium-low heat, stirring with whisk.  When it begins to bubble, add sugar, sweet chili sauce, and dried chilis while continuing to stir.  Reduce to a saucy consistency (it should flow, but thickly).  Remove from heat.

I made this to accompany baked tuna filets, and liked it very much.  Maybe it would go well with other things?

Ate My Soul and Gave Me The Recipe

As we discussed earlier, dear nonexistant readers, the ostensible purpose of a recipe is to facilitate recreations of the same result.  But of course this is not the whole story.  When you’re most in need of a recipe is when you’ve never made what the recipe tells you how to make.  At such a delicate time you take care to follow the recipe exactly.  Having never followed the recipe before, it is easy to misunderstand the recipe.  Sometimes, by sheer luck, the first time comes out flawlessly.  More often there are some kinks, which over the next few attempts, are worked out, and finally a satisfactory result is produced.  After this point, if you need the recipe at all any more, it is more as a memory map than an instruction set.


What is it you have created?  Your creation conforms to the limited contours that the recipe provides.  If you were after a replica of what the author sought to instruct you to make, however, there is no way of confirming this.  Sometimes there are photos, which often provide a more forceful impulse than the recipe itself--you see the photo and think “I want to make that.”  It’s sometimes easy to make it look right, sometimes it isn’t.

All these masturbatory, death-of-the-chef preoccupations aside, whether or not the recipe changes, you change.  At least, this is one way of accounting for culinary disappointments.  Tonight I made pasta with tomato-cream sauce and shrimp for dinner, and I ate it, but only because I was hungry.  The flavors were weak, and the textures even a little nauseating.  I’ve made pasta with tomato-cream sauce in countless different ways, some less satisfying than others.  And I keep making some form of it because I remember a few delicious instances of this dish.  But this time it’s been long enough I wonder if I have any idea what I’m after.  If I made what to me was a wonderful pasta dish a year ago, and ate it today, would I like it much?  There really isn’t any way of finding out empirically.  If I wrote down the precise recipe for those times when I made a particularly spectacular rendition, I doubt I would be able to reliably cook it again.  And I doubt I would want to.

A recipe is a much more intriguing beast than it may have appeared.


The general shape inconsistently described above also applies to me writing this entry.  Through writing, what I wanted to write changed.  What I thought I was writing changed.  These changes can hardly be tracked by the writing itself to create something coherent.  To me it appears that throughout the entry I forgot what I meant to write, and began on a new, somewhat related tangent.  By the end forgot the import of everything I had just written, summing it up as "intriguing."

saucy leftovers: roasted chicken and mashed potatoes

sauce:

2 tablespoons butter

1/3-1/2 cup heavy cream

1 tablespoon mashed potatoes

~12 fresh sage leaves

1/2 teaspoon salt

sauceand:

a small pile of pieces of roasted chicken

~1 cup mashed potatoes

melt butter in a large saucepan on medium-low heat.  once melted, add sage leaves and fry until crispy.  butter should brown a little, but not blacken (if it does heat is too high).  remove sage leaves with a fork and set aside.  add heavy cream, tablespoon of mashed potatoes, and salt to saucepan, and stir thoroughly with a whisk.  lower heat a little and simmer until sauce reaches a somewhat thickened but still flowing consistency--this should take only a couple minutes.

heat up chicken pieces and mashed potatoes in somehow (a microwave probably), pour sauce on top, and garnish with crispy sage leaves.

when there's too much basil and some tomatoes are on the verge of rotting... and bacon

4 medium-small fresh tomatoes
2 strips bacon
1/2 of a medium onion
1 clove garlic
1/2 lemon
small handful of julienned fresh basil
2 springs fresh oregano
1 teaspoon black pepper
salt to taste (you probably won't need it, the bacon is of course salty)

Chop the half onion and garlic as finely as possible.  Sautee in a bit of oil on medium-low heat (don't burn).
Chop the two least ripe tomatoes into small chunks.  In another pan with a little oil at the bottom simmer these tomatoes.
Stir the onions and the tomatoes every couple minutes.  When the onions are fairly soft (10-15 minutes?), chop the bacon into small pieces and add to the pan of onions.  Turn the heat up a little, and fry for two or three minutes.  Then add the simmering tomatoes, and the black pepper.
Slice the remaining tomatoes radially, julienne the basil, and pick the leaves from the oregano stems.
Once the sauce in the pan is very thick, add the remaining tomatoes, basil, oregano, and squeeze the lemon half.  Cook just until the basil is wilted.
Eat over pasta.

Eggplant Sauce #1

1 large eggplant

3-4 tablespoons soy sauce

2 tablespoons canola oil

2 large cloves garlic

~1/4 cup sweet chili sauce

1 tablespoon cayenne pepper powder

2 tablespoons rice vinegar

1/2 cup coconut milk

Peel eggplant.  Slice into ~1cm medallions.  Lay out medallions on clean surface, and cover liberally with salt on both sides.  Let liquid drain out for about half an hour.  Clean salt off with cold water, and chop into ~1cm cubes.  Chop or crush garlic.

In a large pan on medium heat fry eggplant and garlic with canola oil.  Stirring occasionally, fry for five minutes before adding a tablespoon of each of the following: soy sauce, sweet chili sauce, rice vinegar.  Mix in and then cover.  Every few minutes scrape and stir to keep eggplant from burning, keeping pan covered when possible.  Remove from heat once eggplant is thoroughly soft.

Transfer eggplant into food processor and add coconut milk and cayenne pepper powder, as well as remaining soy sauce, sweet chili sauce, and rice vinegar.  Puree.  Taste it, and add more soy sauce, sweet chili sauce, cayenne pepper powder, and rice vinegar until it tastes strongly enough.

This is to go with rice or rice noodles, analogous to peanut sauce, I guess.

Rather than cayenne pepper powder, sriracha or some other potent hot sauce would probably taste better.  I'm not so sure that coconut milk goes so well with eggplant.  Maybe some other liquid should be used to thin the sauce to the right consistency, perhaps even a little water.  After all the eggplant fried in oil is rich enough.  Next, I think, is an eggplant-cream sauce for pasta.

Without Vodka

Those bottles of pink sauce in the store always seem to list vodka in their ingredients, but I have to wonder if it imparts any particular flavor, being vodka. This sauce is similar, but less tomatoey, and with mushrooms and pine nuts. [And wine, though it's quite good without it.] Recipes are generally presumed to be finished. But I've varied this sauce so many times... Sometimes more tomatoes, sometimes fewer, sometimes tomato sauce (though I really don't recommend tomato paste--that gives it a sickly, blunt, cardboard flavour), sometimes no mushrooms or pine nuts. And I've tried varying the herbs a lot. Paprika might be nice. Hot chiles are what you would expect--and some people I'm sure would really hate the result. Rosemary is probably a mistake. Sage would certainly kill it. If you have it, fresh oregano and basil really are vast improvements over themselves dried.

1/2 onion

1 1/3 cups heavy cream

4 roma tomatoes

6 crimini mushrooms

2 cloves garlic

4 tablespoons grated parmesan

2 tablespoons pine nuts

3 tablespoons olive oil

2 tablespoons butter

1/2 teaspoon black pepper

1 teaspoon dried oregano (or 1 tablespoon fresh leaves)

1 teaspoon dried basil (or about 10 fresh leaves)

[1/2 cup white wine]

Oil a large saucepan on medium-low heat with 2 tablespoons olive oil and melt 2 tablespoons of butter in it. Put a small saucepan on medium heat. Chop finely onion and garlic and transfer to large saucepan. Don't let the onions burn. Toast pine nuts in small saucepan until well browned but hopefully not blackened. Put pine nuts aside in a bowl. Oil small sauce pan with 1 tablespoon olive oil and turn heat to medium-low. Slice tomatoes into quarters and then 5mm slices and transfer to small saucepan. Don't let the tomatoes stick to the pan. Add a pinch of salt to both pans. Chop mushrooms in half and then into slices and stir into large saucepan. The goal here is to cook the onions until soft and at the same time begin reducing the tomatoes into a sauce. Add black pepper, oregano, basil to large saucepan. [When onions are mostly cooked, add white wine and let it boil off for a minute or two.] Once the onions are done, transfer the tomatoes to the large saucepan. Stir in heavy cream. Once the cream begins to boil, adjust the heat so that it boils just gently. Add toasted pine nuts. Reduce sauce to an almost pudding-like consistency, occasionally stirring to keep from sticking to the bottom of the pan. Grate in parmesan while stirring. Salt to taste. Remove from heat. Serve over pasta.