les plateaux Mont-Royal

Just a few weeks ago it seemed like Au Pied de Cochon's summer seafood extravaganza was still just getting off the ground. There were lobsters and shellfish of all sorts, but they and an outrageous roasted mahi-mahi* with fiddleheads and ramps combo were on offer strictly as off-menu specials.

fig. 1: Le Plateau PDC

Just last week, though, Au Pied de Cochon's seafood was back in full effect, as evidenced by the platter of coquillage you see above.

That's the "small," the "Plateau PDC." It runs just under $50. This year Au Pied de Cochon offers four more seafood platters, and each one gets more plentiful, and more intricate. They also get kinda tall--we passed one on our way in that looked like the Eiffel Tower. There was talk of lobsters and seared fish with some of the bigger platters. I can't even imagine what the biggest and baddest of the lot--"Le Gros Verrat"--entails. Its price tag? $350. Our "Plateau PDC" made for a very substantial appetizer for three (along with some cromesquis, of course), so I guess "Le Gros Verrat" would make a very substantial appetizer for you and twenty of your friends? Who knows? All I know is that the quality is unbeatable. So is the creativity.

Au Pied de Cochon has its novelty dishes, of course (Duck in a Can, Foie Gras Poutine), but it's not really a place you associate with molecular gastronomy. That said, the most pleasant surprise of the night came with one of our massive oysters (but not the one you see in the picture). This is one had a mysterious pale translucent cube nestled next to the oyster. I really had no idea what to expect. Could have been lychee jelly for all I knew. Turns out it was something way better, and way more clever: sea water. Eaten together, the sea water jelly just melted in your mouth and mingled with the oyster, taking the natural brininess of that lovely Atlantic oyster to a whole other delectable level.

Sure, we live along a Seaway, but sometimes the Atlantic seems awfully distant. If you've gotta be landlocked, this is definitely the way to do it.

aj

* Apparently it was Atlantic mahi-mahi and the Novia Scotia fishermen who landed it had never seen one before (they don't generally make it this far north [!]), so Picard & Co. got it for a good price.

ps--TY, Jr.!

Après-brunch

Speaking of minimalism. Get a load of this:

fig. a: summer line

If you're not sure what you're looking at, they're macarons. Real Parisian macarons.

I'm not sure what we ever did to deserve her, but C., god bless her soul, came back from Paris and within 24 hours she was sitting at our breakfast table sharing some of Pierre Hermé's summer line* of macarons with us. We could hardly believe it. She even brought them in these cute little specially designed macaron travel-packs.

fig. b: l-r: Céleste and Ispahan. Beautiful, non?

I don't know how many people eat Pierre Hermé macarons for brunch with a cup of coffee, but I highly recommend it.

I should clarify, though. We had them as an après-brunch dessert.

And, no, we're not in the habit of having dessert with breakfast or brunch, but we know when to make exceptions. I mean, just look at them.

And then there's the way they taste... What's the word? Well...

Ispahan: rose-infused crème au letchi (a.k.a. lychee cream) and raspberry gelée de fruits--Hermé's signature creation gone miniature--no rose petal on top, but...

Macaron Mandarine & Baies Roses (a.k.a. Nameless Mandarin Wonder): this poor thing doesn't have one of those fancy trademarked names for some bizarre reason, but its combination of mandarin orange and pink peppercorn was nearly as exotic as the Ispahan

Céleste: passionfruit crème de mousseline, rhubarb and strawberry gelée de fruits--relatively straightforward but perfectly balanced

Satine: cream cheese crème de mousseline, orange and passionfruit gelée de fruits--that cream cheese crème de mousseline made this one the most surprenant of the lot--beautiful white satin finish

Carrément Chocolat: as the name suggests: chocolate to the max--ultra-dark chocolate ganache, candied cocoa nibs, and ultra-dark chocolate gelée--it's become known around here as Plus-que-parfait Chocolat

And then, in the blink of an eye, they were gone.

fig. c: après the après-brunch dessert

Makes me want to go to Paris and hang out in Place St-Sulpice. Or better yet: the Jardin du Luxembourg. Hmm...

aj

ps--TY, C.!

* That's right. In Paris pâtisseries apparently have spring, summer, fall, and winter lines. I guess there's some degree of seasonality to the baked goods at our local pâtisseries (pumpkin pie around Canadian Thanksgiving, et al.), but seasonal lines?

keep it simple

'Cause I'm easy, yeah, I'm easy...--Keith Carradine, "I'm Easy"

I guess if you always have access to the best quality meat, well, then you can be as adventurous as you want with it. Kind of like cooking with wine--I'm sure everything tastes even better if you happen to be in a position to cook with high-quality wines, but most of us have had limited experience (if any) with doing so. As a result, when we, here at "...an endless banquet," get our hands on really good meat, our tendency is to, yes, keep it simple (just as when we get our hands on a really good bottle of wine our tendency is to, well, drink it--we're kind of old-fashioned like that). The point is, in both cases, we want to really taste the difference.

So when we were lucky enough to get a gorgeous pork rib roast that had been sourced, slaughtered, and dressed by a friend of ours (!),* we turned to our friends from London's River Café to give us a little guidance on pork and minimalism.

fig. a: Ca Cook Boo!

If you're not familiar with Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers' River Cafe Cook Book Easy and Italian Two Easy: Simple Recipes from the London River Cafe, you love Italian and Italian-inspired cuisine, and you're a believer in keeping it simple, well, you really ought to be. As the titles suggest, most of their recipes require a minimum of ingredients, a minimum of time, or a minimum of effort, and some fall under all three categories. Some of our favorites contain literally three ingredients and take just minutes to prepare. Seriously. And don't let the vaguely glam cover of River Cafe Cook Book Easy throw you: the minimalism of the content is mirrored by the minimalism of the books' design. Virtually every photograph is taken from directly overhead, and many feature a stark white background. Seriously perfect.

fig. b: lemons on their way to the grill

The one we chose on this particular occasion requires two ingredients, just a few more if you make a salsa verde to go along with it (and we highly recommend that you do).

Pork chops with lemon

4 pork chops
1 lemon

Preheat a large cast-iron pan over medium-high heat. Preheat the oven to 400º F (200º C/Gas 6).

Season each chop generously with salt and pepper (okay, you need two more ingredients), put the chops in the pan and sear them on each side quickly, no more than 30 seconds per side. Take the pan off the heat.

Cut the lemon in half. Squeeze the lemon juice over the chops, and place the squeezed lemon halves in the pan along with chops. Roast in the oven for 10 minutes. Press the lemon halves on to the chops and baste with the juice. Roast for another 10 minutes or until firm to the touch.

note: if you don't have a cast-iron pan that's large enough to fit four chops, sear them in batches in a cast-iron pan, and then transfer them to a preheated oven tray and continue with the recipe above.

[recipe from River Cafe Cook Book Easy]

Now, the oven recipe works like a charm, but it being BBQ season, a few weeks ago we decided to adapt the above recipe for the grill.

We rubbed a little bit of olive oil into the chops before generously seasoning them. We took a small cast-iron pan, added a tablespoon of olive oil to it, and brought it out to the barbecue with us, and we cooked the lemon halves in the pan on the grill while we grilled the meat over a hot flame. Before flipping the chops we used tongs to pick up a lemon half and rub it all over the chops. Total cooking time was almost the same as above and we tried to flip the chops as little as possible. The lemons got nice and caramelized and we served them alongside the chops and drizzled a little of the delicious sauce they'd created overtop.

When we started our chops looked like this:

fig. c: raw

When we finished cooking them they looked like this:

fig. d: cooked

And minutes later they'd been picked clean.

This recipe really doesn't need anything additional--the flavors are honest and clean and pretty much perfect as is. All you really need to finish the ensemble is a vegetable side, a salad, and a glass of wine. But, if you wanted to dress them up just a little, you can't go wrong with this salsa verde:

Salsa Verde

2 tbsp parsley leaves
1 tbsp mint leaves
1 tbsp basil leaves
extra-virgin olive oil
1 garlic clove
1 tbsp capers
3 anchovy filets (1 or 2 will do, if you're using salt-packed)
1 tsp Dijon mustard
1 tbsp red wine vinegar
black pepper to taste

Finely chop the herbs, put into a bowl and cover with olive oil. Chop the garlic with the capers and the anchovies. Add to the herbs and mix together. Stir in the mustard and vinegar, season with black pepper and add more olive oil to loosen the sauce.

Serve a spoonful over your chops. Also excellent with steaks--grilled or roasted.

[recipe from River Cafe Cook Book Easy]

aj

* TY, S.!

The Face of Gen F

fig. a: Adam & the Miracle of Fruit

As you can see, Adam & the Miracle of Fruit played to a full house the other night at Librairie Drawn & Quarterly.

It's kind of hard to tell from the snapshot above, but at the time Adam was well into the second half of his show, the half dealing with the mystery of "the lady fruit," a fruit whose appearance is just as suggestive as its name,* a puzzle that took him from Thailand to Montreal, Montreal to the Seychelles, and back again. Hence, the rapt audience.

fig. b: the mysterious "lady fruit"

"The lady fruit" has a number of lurid nicknames (even more lurid than "the lady fruit," that is), but its official name is the coco-de-mer, its native habit consists of two remote islands in the Seychelles, and if you want to know what it looks like up-close, you can see a kid-friendly, G-rated photograph of it directly above (complete with official coco-de-mer permit).

The long and short of it is, throw together apricot beer by McAuslan, cupcakes by Reema, cocktails by Michelle, ribald tales by Adam, some Paradise Nut husks, a hollowed-out Coco-de-Mer, and a ripe--and I do mean ripe--durian fruit and what you get is a good time--an ultra-exotic good time.

fig. c: still life with durian

Seriously, when was the last time you attended a book event and the crowd bounced a fresh durian up to the front of the stage like a beachball?

I thought so.

One more thing: for a sneak peek into the magical mystery tour that resulted in The Fruit Hunters (or if reading your copy of the book has left you starved for visual accompaniment) check out Adam's website/photo-journal.

Actually, I changed my mind: one more thing: more photos of the launch (including a couple provocative ones) can be found here.

aj

* Describing the plant's whole bewildering apparatus, Adam writes, "It's almost pornographic, yet so natural."

Generation F

fig. a: The Fruit Hunters

Only one week in print and already Adam Leith Gollner's The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Obsession, Commerce, and Adventure (Doubleday Canada, Scribner) has gotten itself embroiled in a full-blown tale of, well, nature, obsession, commerce, and adventure. Yes, The Fruit Hunters has been receiving all kinds of accolades from the likes of The Montreal Gazette, The Toronto Star, The National Post, and The New York Times since its release, but over the weekend Mr. Gollner and his book helped generate a craze the likes of which the fruit world has not seen since Kiwimania. Within hours, not only had a New York Times story on miracle fruit (one of The Fruit Hunters' featured fruits) shot to the top of their "most emailed" list, but the Miracle Fruit Man, North America's best (only?) source of miracle fruit, was totally sold out of these little red taste-enhancers.

fig. b: From New France (a.k.a. "[le] lieu ou les sauvages font secherie de framboise, et blues tous les ans"*)...

fig. c: ...to Brazil

But there's more to The Fruit Hunters than mere hype. Much more. Mr. Gollner's book is encyclopedic in its scope (Borneo to Budapest, coco-de-mer to Calville Blanc d'Hiver, fruitarians to fruit detectives, Ah Bing to St. Hildegard von Bingen), and utterly devoted to giving the wide world of fruit--and the bizarre characters who populate it--its due. It also happens to be a rollicking ride that's nearly impossible to put down.

Regular readers of "...an endless banquet" might recognize Mr. Gollner as a long-time associate and recurring character in our own ongoing tales of adventure, where he's carried the monikers "A.," "Adam," and "the Fruit Guru." We thought it might be nice to do an interview with him in anticipation of the official Montreal launch of The Fruit Hunters (details below), and he was kind enough to take the time from his whirlwind book tour to answer some of our questions.

AEB: A noted gourmand** once wrote an essay entitled simply “Food.” The first section bore the heading “Fresh Figs” and it began like this: “No one who has never eaten a food to excess has ever really experienced it, or fully exposed himself to it. Unless you do this, you at best enjoy it, but never come to lust after it, or make the acquaintance of that diversion from the straight and narrow road of the appetite which leads to the primeval forest of greed. For in gluttony two things coincide: the boundlessness of desire and the uniformity of the food that sates it. Gourmandizing means above all else to devour one thing to the last crumb. There is no doubt that it enters more deeply into what you eat than mere enjoyment.”

Reading The Fruit Hunters, it seems pretty clear that the pursuit of fruit eventually led you to that primeval forest. If so, when did you get there, and what was the fruit involved?

AG: That quote has an almost alchemical quality. It transmutes the base sinfulness of gluttony into a golden promise of hope, the hope that your greed is somehow aligned with God’s inner wishes for humankind’s happiness. It almost absolves the gluttons amongst us of our boundless desires. Nature is infinite in its diversity, it seems to suggest; shouldn’t all our banquets therefore be endless?

The forest – from the latin foris, meaning outside – has always been a place for outsiders. I have long been fascinated with all things sylvan (not entirely excluding Sylvain Sylvain LPs, although as I type this I grow momentarily wistful; it is as though I can just make out the soft contours of a grove near my childhood home, its swamps rippling with reeds and tadpoles, its trees teeming, I was convinced, with gorillas).

But let’s stick to the figs. This “noted gourmand,” with her (his?) essay on fresh figs, reminds me of the self-professed “fignatics” in The Fruit Hunters. Perhaps it’s true: if you’ve never eaten a food to excess maybe you’ve never really experienced it, never attained that transcendental merging of hunter and hunted. This argument helps dissipate the guilt swirling around some of my own more indulgent fruit experiences. The author might argue that I wouldn’t have been able to understand the lure of fruits without overdosing on them. A seductive notion. Nevertheless, I still recall the moment of moments where I hit my nadir – or was it my zenith? It matters not; that moonlit revel in the treetops of my own primeval greed forest took place on a trip to Borneo.

I was staying in the hotel Telang Usan, which is run by members of the Orang Ulu tribes. I’d been gifted a chempedak, an army-green, rugby-ball-sized fruit filled with honey-sweet orange chunklets of syrupy deliciousness [to even begin to understand the alien splendour of the chempedak you have to see it to believe it--ed.]. Chempedaks, I wasn’t yet aware, also happen to give off a putrid stench that befouls any enclosed space. It does this as a way of luring apes and jungle cats in the hopes of being eaten and thereby having its seeds dispersed.

That afternoon, I’d taken a couple of tentative bites. Unimpressed, I left the fruit on the nightstand of my third story hotel room, alongside a bunch of other weird fruits I had no idea how to eat. Some of them resembled pink cupcakes covered in op-art swirls; one other unwieldy aberration looked just like a punching bag when I discovered it hanging off a tree.

I’d been spending my days going to all sorts of obscure fruit markets in pursuit of a pitabu that I’d heard tastes like orange sherbet and raspberries. Unfortunately, it wasn’t in season. As a result, I was making feverish plans to come back to Borneo. Poring over guides to the fruits of Sarawak, I was making lists of all these obscure fruits I just NEEDED to experience. I distinctly recall photographs of tampois with pearly, transluscent interiors that made me almost tremble with desire. My guides from the Malaysian department of agriculture insisted that I’d need to come back at least three or four more times in order to taste them. Even then, there’d still be some fruits I wouldn’t be able to get to. The world’s greatest authority on the region’s fruits, Voon Boon Hoe, hadn’t even tasted them all, and he’d lived in Borneo all his life.

After dinner at the hawker stand nearby, I came back into my hotel in an obsessed stupor, dizzy from the tentative scheduling and list-making. As soon as I walked into the lobby, my nostrils were smacked with a penetrating funk of sulfurous decay. My chempedak! Its gaseous third-floor emanations had overrun the Telang Usan. The gentle tribespeople on night-duty at the reception area didn’t seem to mind (in fact, one of the hotel employees – a descendent of the Iban, also known as the Sea Dyaks, a once-ferocious tribe that practiced head-hunting – ended up taking me to eat langsats near her grandma’s longhouse, which had the motto “We believe in infinity.”)

I was mortified about my fruit-bomb, and quickly smuggled it out of the room. Escaping through a rear entrance, I sat down in a vacant lot covered in stray greenery and started pulling the fruit’s sections apart. The smell was actually quite pleasant here in the open air. I will now enter the present tense and quote from The Fruit Hunters:

“Crouching under a streetlight as the moon wavers in the thick haze, I dig in. Its flavor has improved since the afternoon – it seems to be at its apex of ripeness. The taste is somehow familiar, yet elusive. With every bite I try to place the flavor. Then it hits me: Froot Loops! Tasting it triggers a recollection of how, as a child, I’d use my allowance to buy boxes of Froot Loops. I’d sneak away and covertly eat bowlfuls in bed under the covers while reading Archie by flashlight. Soon all that remains is the skeleton of a chempedak at my feet. I’ve eaten it all, my hands tearing it apart, the fleshy globules offering themselves to me. I can still feel fructose crystals coating my teeth like icing.”

I had entered the temple. Luckily, within a few days, I snapped out of my temporary fruit insanity. Realizing that I too believed in infinity, I came to accept the impossibility of experiencing every fruit out there. The recognition that fruits are never-ending was a sweet release from the need to find them all. From then on I could focus on what I needed to do: tell the story of fruits and humans.

AEB: The impression one gets from The Fruit Hunters is that the world of the fruit-obsessed is a world of raw fruitists. Is the world of ultraexotics necessarily edenic? Is there another fruit underground, one obsessed not only with exotica but with cooking, preparing, or otherwise transforming their finds?

AG: Yes, and her name is Michelle Marek, bless her soul. [Aw, shucks!--ed.]

AEB: In the book’s discussion of the modern marketing of fruit, you point out that analysts create pie charts to detail the percentages of consumers who like their fruit “firm, soft, juicy, tangy, sweet, dry or moist.” Conspicuously, “ripe” is missing from this list. Is this because “ripe” would place control back in the
hands of farmers and put fruit marketers out of a job? Pardon the Sex and the City-like phrasing, but is “ripe” the new ultraexotic?

AG: Yes! Although fruit marketers do come up with interesting fruit slogans like “delicious handful of goodness” or “the snack that quenches,” so they aren’t all bad.

AEB: On a related note: The percentage of the general populace who have tasted a ripe fruit off the tree is abysmally low. Is there any hope of de-exoticizing ripeness? Is there any hope of there being a future demographic known as Generation Fruit, one that places a high priority on ripeness and seasonality? What would it take to get there? An apple tree in every yard?

AG: You are speaking of nothing less than a fruit revolution. Could it happen? I hope so! Generation Fruit sounds like a sweet, strange generation. Whether or not we can reclaim seasonality remains to be seen. It’s imperative that we continue supporting local farming communities, but what about bananas, mangos, pineapples, citrus fruits, etc? Buying them in coming years will offer crucial support to developing nations, with their economies dependent on agricultural exports. But what about all the oil needed to transport and grow them? As Generation Fruit knows, solving the food crisis entails solving the fuel crisis. Are Montrealers prepared to give up fruits for eight months of the year? Fruits don’t grow here between November and June. How will members of the progressive community get their five-a-day fix of different colored fruits? It’ll be interesting to see what posterity has up its sleeve. Fruit trees instead of manicured lawns would be an excellent start. To eat the best fruit you need to grow your own. Kids: plant the seeds now! Join Generation Fruit! Who knows how things will change? Nobody could have predicted five years ago that miracle fruits would become a flavor-tripping trend sweeping the nation. The point is, things are always changing. Despite the doomers prognostications, maybe we’ll find viable alternatives to fossil fuels. I hope that Generation Fruit will find a way.

AEB: In the book, you mention returning underwhelming fruit to supermarkets for a refund. Do you think this practice might encourage the large supermarket chains to source better fruit? Is that possible on such a large scale? Do people even want good fruit? (I’m thinking of the “peach breeder for the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture” who likes his peaches crispy.) Is it possible to get beyond convenience?

AG: Some people like their peaches crunchy. I don’t think they’ve ever tasted a proper peach; certainly not anything like those Baby Crawfords the three of us sampled in Morgan Hill a few years ago. There are some innovative breeders, like the Zaiger family, who are working on improving the fruits we eat in our supermarket chains. Floyd Zaiger is convinced that good fruits can be mass-produced. As he told me, “If we look hard enough, we will find them.” He creates hybrid fruits in an all-natural way, without any genetic modification, simply by mixing flowers together, birds-and-bees style. I don’t write off all commercial fruits. Honeycrisp apples and Tulameen raspberries are pretty good, aren’t they? I think things have improved in many ways over the past century. Ask your grandparents what fruits they ate in their childhood: most of them didn’t have any fresh fruits. An orange was an inconceivable luxury. Bananas were rarer than blond morels. I do like the idea of returning subpar fruits and getting a refund, although I don’t ever do this at Jean Talon. Big stores, however, always comply. It sends a message. Plus it’s kind of like the fruit-world equivalent of “culture jamming.” Perhaps soon we’ll see Generation Fruit flash mobs.

AEB: What’s your own personal fruit holy grail, the one that got away, the one that’s still out there?

AG: For me, it’s the paradise nut. It’s a fruit container that looks like a bran muffin. It contains seeds that apparently taste like Brazil nuts, only far superior. They’re called sapucaias in Portuguese. They were proof, to early European missionaries, that Brazil was literally paradise on Earth. Even though these paradise nuts captivated me from the start of this fruit adventure, I never did end up tasting one. I’m ok with it, though. As Emily Dickinson once wrote, sagely: “Heaven is what I cannot reach! The Apple on the Tree.”

Adam Gollner brings the miracle of fruit, if not the miracle fruit, to the Montreal launch of The Fruit Hunters, Thursday, June 5, 2008, 7:00-9:00 PM, at the Librairie Drawn & Quarterly (211 Bernard West, Montreal).

For more information: (514) 279-0691.

aj

* Rough translation: "The site where the savages make dried raspberries and blueberries annually."

** The "noted gourmand" was Walter Benjamin. His essay "Food" was originally published in 1930. Occasionally Benjamin liked to quote himself in his essays, attributing these citations to "a perceptive critic," or something to that effect.

Good Deeds Done Dirt-Cheap

fig. a: howdy, neighbor!

"You do one good deed for someone... I imagine it's habit-forming.
--Ben Wade, 3:10 To Yuma

All you hardened cynics out there are going to laugh, but, sometimes, when I imagine the world around me, it looks something like it does in the picture above. The trees are tall, the houses are modest but well-kept, you can smell the scent of home-baking wafting down the street, and neighbors (all of them of the good variety) call out to one another. There's a certain karma to this world. Just as the good neighbors greet each other on the street, good deeds are met by others.

The real world is a little more complicated, of course. In fact, I bought The Book of Good Neighbor Recipes a few years ago, thinking it might contain some ideas for the next time I got invited to a barn-raising. The book starts out on a promising note, with a wistful account of things "As They Were" in Texarkana, TX, of "floating island and fruit cake" and hunting trips that "netted bushels and bushels of giant pecans, black walnuts, [and] hickory nuts." But the lustre wore off quickly. The book turned out to be an elaborate advertisement for Ac´cent seasoning:

Some of our readers may be learning about Ac´cent for the first time in this book, so a few words of explanation are in order.

Ac´cent is the pure crystalline form of monosodium glutamate. Derived solely from vegetable protein sources, its distinctive and unique property is to bring out and strengthn the natural flavors in food without adding any flavor, color, or aroma of its own. It is a basic seasoning to be used along with salt and pepper...

I guess that's where the "modern tempo" in the book's subtitle fits in.

Anyway, the problem with the Leave it to Beaver-ish world you see above isn't just that you can't see what's in the cupboards of those lovely bungalows, it's also that you can't see what's outside the frame. Sure, there's a nice park and a fire station, a town hall and a library, but, like I said, it's a little more complicated than that.

A couple of weeks ago, my beloved ten-speed bicycle was accosted by thieves in the night. Thankfully, they didn't succeed in making off with it, but they plum near broke my poor bike trying. The lock was twisted and bent into a pretzel, and my forks and my front wheel were not that much better off. The lock was so mangled I couldn't even get my bike undone in order to take it to the shop. What to do?

fig. b: some girls have all the luck

Well, that's where the firemen you see in the picture above came in.

We happen to have a fire station just around the corner from AEB HQ in a queer old building that used to triple as the local town hall and library. So I dropped by to ask the firemen for their advice. They didn't even blink. They just asked me for my address and said they'd meet me there in two minutes. I ran home and, true to their word, a fire truck pulled up outside of my house literally two minutes later. Five (!) firemen got off the truck, rolled up their sleeves, and promptly got to work. Using some heavy-duty tools and a little elbow grease, they freed my bike within about another minute or so, wished me luck with the repairs, and were on their way. Now that's what I call neighbourly.

In order to thank them and spread the love, I dropped by the next day with a pitcher of lemonade, and some special-edition chocolate chip cookies to go with it.

fire house cookies (makes about 4 dozen cookies)

2 sticks unsalted butter
3/4 cup light brown sugar
1/4 cup dark brown sugar
3/4 cup white sugar
1 tsp. vanilla
2 Tbsp. water
1 egg
2 cups flour
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. baking soda
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
1/2 cup pralined almonds, chopped (recipe follows)

Preheat the oven to 375°F. Mix together the flour, salt, and baking soda. Set aside. In a mixer, cream the butter with the sugars and beat until fluffy. Add the vanilla, water and egg, beat to combine, then add the flour mixture. Mix well, and stir in the chocolate chips and almonds. Drop rounded teaspoons onto a parchment-lined cookie sheet and bake for 8-10 min. Cool on a rack and serve with milk or lemonade.

pralined almonds

1 cup almonds, toasted
3/4 cup sugar
water to moisten the sugar

Line a cookie sheet with a piece of parchment paper. Place the sugar and water in a heavy saucepan and bring to a boil. Watch the syrup carefully and stir occasionally with a heat-proof spatula. Allow the syrup to begin to colour, aiming for a medium golden caramel. Quickly add the almonds, stir minimally and pour out onto the paper-lined sheet. Careful, it's really hot. Flatten the almonds with your spatula so they are evenly distributed and let cool. Break into pieces and store in an airtight container. Use in the above-mentioned cookies, or sprinkle on ice cream.

Instant karma.

m

M's Mid-May Menu

This meal was inspired by a book that we've often leafed through longingly since we received it as a gift last Christmas, but which we've never actually had occasion to use because a) we don't live in California, b) it's a cookbook that takes seasonality very seriously (as you can tell by the subtitle), and c) every time we looked at it, we just wished the market was in full swing. The book, of course, is the one you see above--The San Francisco Ferry Plaza Farmers' Market Cookbook--it was co-written by one of our favorite food writers, Saveur's Christopher Hirsheimer,* and it's really a gorgeous cookbook that's chock-full of good ideas.

Actually, scratch that. This meal was inspired first and foremost by a bunch of asparagus--a particularly beautiful bunch of asparagus. Michelle has a connection to Quinn Farm on Île-Perrot that produces some fine asparagus, and the first of this year's crop had just started to come in. She got a bundle so fresh, so tender, and so naturally sweet that you could actually eat them raw, but we knew that as soon as we cooked them--as long as we cooked them with care--they'd be bursting with flavor. And that was when Michelle turned to The San Francisco Ferry Plaza Farmers' Market Cookbook. She had a good feeling about this one, and her instincts were right on the money. She could have easily made the Shaved Raw Asparagus with Lemon Vinaigrette, but she had a taste for something warm. White Asparagus with Mandarin Orange Mayonnaise was out of the question because her bunch of asparagus was absolutely, positively green. Cecilia Chiang's Asparagus with Soy-Sesame Dressing sounded intriguing, but she was leaning towards Californian/Mediterranean. And then she came across this note accompanying asparagus recipe #4, Roasted Asparagus: "Many European cooks bundle asparagus with string and boil or steam them in salted water, but for the simplest, quickest, and tastiest preparation, roast the whole spears in the oven or, if your grill is hot, over a charcoal fire." Well, our grill wasn't hot, but Michelle liked the rest of that quote, especially the part about simple, quick, and tasty.

Roasted Asparagus

1 pound asparagus spears, tough ends snapped off and spears peeled
extra-virgin olive oil for drizzling
salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
shaved Parmigiano-Reggiano for serving

Preheat the oven to 400º F.

Arrange the asparagus spears in a single layer on a baking sheet. If your asparagus spears vary in size greatly, separate them into groups of thick spears and skinny spears so that it will be easier to remove the skinny ones first, as soon as they're ready. Drizzle the spears with olive oil and season with salt and pepper.

Roast the asparagus until the ends are easily pierced with a knife, about 7 minutes for skinny spears and 10 minutes for thicker ones. Transfer to a serving platter, drizzle with a little more olive oil, and, using a vegetable peeler, shave some cheese over the tips. Serve hot.

Serves 4.

Finding an accompanying main was easy. She just thought "spring" and "California" and the next thing she knew she was flipping through Alice Waters' Chez Panisse Café Cookbook, and not long after that she'd found the one. Of course, this recipe requires a bit of special equipment, but then we love cooking with a brick.

Pollo al Mattone with Lemon and Garlic

4 chicken legs
Salt and pepper
Extra-virgin olive oil
1 branch thyme
16 garlic cloves
1 tsp chopped lemon zest
1 or 2 garlic cloves, minced
2 tbsp chopped parsley
Lemon wedges

special equipment: a brick or two

Bone the chicken legs, opening them out into large flat pieces but leaving the skin intact. Trim the excess fat from the edges. Season both sides of each piece with salt and pepper and refrigerate.

Warm 1/3 cup olive oil in a small saucepan over medium heat. Add the thyme branch and garlic cloves, and bring the oil to a simmer. Reduce the heat to low and stew the thyme and garlic very slowly until softened, about 15 minutes. Carefully remove the garlic with a slotted spoon and set aside. Reserve the garlic-flavored oil but discard the thyme.

Heat a large cast-iron skillet over medium heat. When the pan is hot, pour in the reserved garlic-flavored olive oil and add the chicken legs, skin side down, in one layer. Lay a piece of parchment paper or foil over the chicken, then weigh the chicken down with a brick or two. Cook for about 15 minutes, checking the chicken from time to time to make sure the skin is browning evenly, and adjusting the heat so the legs are not cooking too quickly. Turn the legs over and cook for 5 minutes more, uncovered. The skin should be golden and crisp, and the flesh should be tender when probed with a paring knife. Blot the chicken legs on absorbent paper and arrange on a warmed platter. Put a few of the reserved cooked garlic cloves on top of each leg.

Mix together the lemon zest, chopped garlic, and parsley (all of which should be chopped at the last minute), and sprinkle this gremolata over the chicken. Garnish with lemon wedges and encourage your guests to mingle the flavors as they so desire.

Serves 4.

You could hardly ask for a better spring meal. The asparagus did burst with flavor--especially after Michelle added those Parmigiano-Reggiano shavings and a final drizzle of olive oil. The chicken had the loveliest crispy golden skin to it, and the combination of the confited garlic and the gremolata was out of this world. A clean white wine, a tossed green salad, a loaf of bread, and you're done. Plus, neither recipe is particularly hands-on, which made the combo perfectly manageable for a weekday night.

Our first bunch of asparagus of the season... Aside from a couple of snow crabs, that's really our first real taste of spring this year. Fiddleheads and ramps must be just around the corner.

aj

*Hirsheimer is the former executive editor and one of the co-founders of Saveur. She's still a contributing editor to the magazine.

Top Ten #25

fig. a: the now sound

1. Kim Jung Mi, Now

fig. b: the good, the great, and the ugly

2. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, dir. Seth Gordon

3. potsticker potlucks (call a bunch of friends; have them each make a different potsticker filling; buy potsticker wrappers; assemble the potstickers posse to fill and seal the potstickers; steam and/or fry them to perfection; devour; repeat as needed)

fig. b: bang, bang

fig. c: a mickie most production

4. Terry Reid, Bang, Bang, You're Terry Reid + Donovan, "Wear Your Love Like Heaven"

5. Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos, dir. Crowder & Dower

fig. d: get off

6. V/A, Nigeria Special: Modern Highlife, Afro-Sounds & Nigerian Blues, 1970-1976

7. Peanut-Butter Destroyers

8. My Winnipeg, dir. Guy Maddin

9. chicken gumbo and gombo zhèbes

fig. e: just one of those days

10. Destroyer, Trouble in Dreams

Italians Do It Better,* 4th rev. ed.

fig. a: Italians doing it better

There were all kinds of surprises waiting for me when I got home from work the other day.

fig. b: Atwater flowers

First off, no one could accuse Michelle of not bringing me flowers anymore because she'd visited the Atwater Market early that afternoon and picked up these beauts. Okay, they weren't exactly for me, but still...

Her real adventure, though, began not long after her trip to the market. That was when she made arrangements to visit Antonio Pettinicchi all the way out on Sauvé East. That was when she got the real treats.

fig. c: olive tree

Now if you're not familiar with Antonio Pettinicchi (we sure weren't until about a week ago), all you need to know is that on his farm in Molise he produces exceptional olive oil strictly according to traditional methods (hand-picked olives, cold pressed, stone millstones, etc.), all of it is absolutely organic, his only North American outlet is in Montreal, and the quality/price ratio is such that many of the city's finest kitchens have taken note. Every year he comes to town for about a month so that he can do a little wheeling and dealing, and every year he sells out swiftly.

Antonio was there to greet Michelle and he immediately took a shine to her--the fact that she'd arrived by bike didn't hurt. He let her sample both his extra-virgin olive oil and his extra-virgin wild olive oil and Michelle was suitably impressed. Both were outstanding--light, yet intricate--but the extra-virgin wild olive oil was the one that really blew her away--it had a wonderful pepperiness to it the likes of which she'd never encountered before.


fig. d: olive oil bottle composite

Then Michelle got introduced to the rest of the Pettinicchi line, including...

fig. e: green olives

...beautiful, plump green olives...

fig. f: canned pomodorini

...lovely canned pomodorini, artisanal cavatelli, heaven-sent balsamic vinegar and vin cotto, and a gorgeous array of confettura, including quince-apple, Barbary fig, and...

fig. g: confettura di melone

...this exotic white watermelon number. In other words: abbondanza!

It didn't take us long to begin enjoying our spoils. We uncorked a bottle of wine and opened up the green olives, and a little later we transformed one jar of pomodorini into a simple, delicious sauce for the cavatelli that highlighted the natural sweetness of the tomatoes. We were going to just wing it, but then we decided to see what Marcella Hazan had to say, and we found this comment introducing her Tomato Sauce with Onion and Butter: "This is the simplest of all sauces to make, and none has a purer, more irresistibly sweet tomato taste." She adds that this sauce is "unsurpassed" for potato gnocchi, but that it's also excellent with certain factory-made pastas, such as spaghetti, penne, or rigatoni. We took liberties and had it with the cavatelli.

Tomato Sauce with Onion and Butter

1 cup canned imported Italian pomodorini, with their juice
2 1/2 tbsp butter
1/2 medium onion
salt to taste
1/2 - 3/4 lb pasta
freshly grated parmigiano-reggiano cheese

Put the canned tomatoes in a saucepan, add the butter, the onion (don't chop it), and the salt, and cook uncovered at a very slow but steady simmer for 45 minutes, or until the fat floats free from the tomato. Stir from time to time. Taste and correct for salt. Discard the onion before tossing the sauce with the pasta. Serve immediately, sprinkling liberal amounts of parmigiano-reggiano overtop. (You'll find that the cheese marries particularly well with this sauce because it's one of Hazan's specialty butter-based pasta sauce recipes.)

Serves 2.

[based on a recipe from Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking]

Marcella was right about that sauce, but then she's never led us wrong. And its butter base allowed us to keep Antonio's olive oil strictly for bread-dipping.

The next morning we trotted out the white watermelon preserve and discovered that it has these incredible caramel notes to it and that it's equally good on toast or on yogurt.

Antonio is only in town for a couple of months, he's rapidly running out of some of his products already, and once he's gone he won't be back again until next year, but if you'd like to get in on the action you can contact him and arrange your own personal rendez-vous. Of course, certain specialty food stores in Montreal and environs carry Pettinicchi products, but wouldn't you rather buy your olive oil from the man himself?

Les Importations Antonio Pettinicchi
1579 Sauvé East
Montreal
Ph: (514) 996-1900
email: info@pettinicchi.com
www.pettinicchi.com

Personally, I was so impressed and so eager to meet Antonio that I convinced Michelle to take me to Sauvé East just two days later.

fig. h: Pettinicchi's Montreal offices

Once again we took our bikes (that's Michelle's there on the right).

fig. i: Pettinicchi's wild olive oil

And when we got back home we sampled some more Pettinicchi wild olive oil.

Need one last final push? Check out what Nancy Hinton of La Table des Jardins Sauvages & SoupNancy has to say about Antonio and his olive oil.

aj

* Of course, there are exceptions to this rule:

Those of you with an interest in Patience Gray, edible weeds, Tuscany, Italian cuisine, and Italian culture more generally might want to check out Adam Federman's "Paradise Lost" at The Whetting Stone, which chronicles the melancholy story of Carrara, its fabled marble, and those who sought it (including Gray and her partner, the sculptor Norman Mommens) through the ages.

File under: "It's a strange and beautiful world"

Mon pays c'est...

An interactive map based on Gary Paul Nabhan's new book Renewing America's Food Traditions: Saving and Savoring the Continent’s Most Endangered Foods appeared in The New York Times the other day. The map is essentially a fancier, interactive version of this map

fig. a: RAFT map of North America

and it highlights the plight of the 93 endangered foods discussed in Nabhan's book--93 out of his ever-expanding list of over 1,000 such foods. As you can see, in order to do so it divides North American into about a dozen food "nations"--geographic regions that share particularly strong food-based commonalities. Rolling over each region with your cursor allows you to see a list of some of the region-defining foods that are now endangered there. Thus, the Pacific Northwest gets the name Salmon Nation because of the Snake River Chinook salmon's threatened status, and the region's other endangered foods include everything from the Gillette Fig to the Olympia oyster. On the other hand, the Southwest's Chili Pepper Nation designation refers to the threatened El Guique New Mexican chili pepper (and not necessarily to the region's musical preferences), and its endangered foods range from Chapalote popcorn to the Wild Tomatillo of the Continental Divide. The Northeast consists of Clambake Nation and Maple Syrup Nation.

(If you have no idea what I'm talking about, or can't picture the interactive aspects of what I'm describing, or if you'd just like to take a look for yourself, you can find the fancy interactive map here and the accompanying article here.)

As The New York Times makes clear, the book's somewhat paradoxical advice is that, in most cases, consumption is the key to preservation--reintroducing many of these foods to your plate is not only a way of rediversifying one's diet while also eating more regionally, it can also be a way to ensure that these foods don't disappear entirely.

In the case of the Montreal region that would mean reintegrating three endangered items--"hand-harvested wild rice," the Chantecler chicken, and "American eels of Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River"--into your diet. "But, wait," you say. "What about the 'Sugar Maple of the Allegheny Plateau'? I thought we lived in Maple Syrup Nation." Well, I haven't read Nabhan's book yet, so all I can do is go by the the maps (schematic though they may be), the article, and the online information provided by RAFT and Slow Food USA, but by the looks of it Maple Syrup Nation sweeps right around Montreal (forming a crescent to the south, east, and north) and we actually belong to Wild Rice Nation, which encompasses a long swath of land that cuts across Southern Quebec, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Manitoba, slivers of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Saskatchewan, and a healthy chunk of Ontario.

Now, we're no Ontariophobes, but I'm not sure how attached Michelle and I feel to Wild Rice Nation. We like the idea of the famous Chantecler Chicken (the pride and joy of Oka, QC) being raised in a sustainable manner and we definitely wouldn't mind if the unagi at our neighborhood sushi bar was local, but neither of us have ever really associated this region with wild rice. We were pretty sure we were living in Maple Syrup Nation, or Fiddlehead Nation, or maybe even Ramps Nation. And from time to time we'd been known to decamp and show allegiance to Clambake Nation, Crabcake Nation, Corn Bread & BBQ Nation, Gumbo Nation, and Chili Pepper Nation too. But, seriously, if we're not a part of Maple Syrup Nation, why the hell do we have a bottle of fresh eau d'érable

fig. b: the elixir of life

in our refrigerator at the moment? (One that we bought not two blocks away from here, no less.)

Still, it makes you wonder. What are the foods that define us as a region? What are the foods that we can't afford to lose? And how does the RAFT map affect the notion of a distinct society?

aj