a guest post by Cole Timothy Callahan

*an editors note

Cole Callahan once told me that the best hangover cure was a slice of pizza and a rootbeer before noon.  Indeed, the first morning I deliriously followed this advice, and followed Cole into the Italian neighborhood of Boston near his home, I understood something fundamental about my friend and his gastronomical knacks.  Cole is like a doctor in and of the kitchen, curiously testing recipes while reading up on the chemical components of baking, or the physical properties of egg whites.  He is especially adept at pairing foods and moods. What’s even more impressive is his inability to compromise and settle for a mediocre meal when the exact meal required for, say, a morning off, will take a mere twelve hours more.  Curiously, for Cole, food often serves as a salient counter to some previous hours’ vices…  Like a true chef…  He currently works as a pastry cook for Lucca Back Bay in Boston. Without further ado, enjoy…

xo Pascale

Breakfast of Champions

by Cole Callahan

It has been ages since you have had a proper breakfast, but just now you have a need for something civilized.  Luckily, it is the night before the meal in question and you have time, though not much (you got home from work at eleven), but it is time enough.  You know you want eggs; you know you want the yolks runny.  You have had a drink and your stomach is cavernous, a feeling you know will fill by morning.  You fantasize about a bread to soak in some runny egg yolk, filling up the space.  Salt to satisfy your palate.  In the end you know that what you need isn’t something to bring your belly to helium balloon standards but to meet your requirements of richness and satisfaction. It’s late and, to your dismay, time runs short.  Your favorite bread book insists that all French bread recipes require a preferment. Determined, you go through the book again, and find a recipe you want and realize that you’ve desired it all along: English Muffins. What could be better than a breakfast staple from childhood but made from scratch?  Looking over the recipe you agree to delay sleep, but the end justifies the means.  You open the refrigerator:

Take out 1 Tbsp. of Butter to reach room temperature

With the butter coming to temperature, your mind moves to tomorrows breakfast.  In a bowl you mix:

10 oz. (2 ¼ Cups) Bread Flour

½ Tbsp. Sugar

¾ Tsp. Salt

1 ¼ Tsp. Instant Yeast

1 Tbsp Butter (Room Temp.)

Mix until all ingredients are well acquainted.

Pour a glass of wine, light a cigarette, break out your St. John Ashtray and lament the ban of smoking in seemingly intelligent countries.

Mix the ingredients with the paddle attachment, when homogenized add:

6 oz. Milk or Buttermilk

After two minutes the dough should form a ball, if the dough shows a resilience to these instructions do the following:

Add more flour if a ball has not formed

Add more milk/buttermilk if dough is too stiff.

In either case, give about one minute to make sure any ingredients added have fully incorporated.

Now is time to exchange paddle for dough hook, or if mixing by hand, time to put the dough on a lightly floured surface.  Knead for eight minutes by mixer or ten minutes by hand.  The dough should be tacky and pliable.  If you and your dough agree upon this description, transfer to an oiled bowl, roll dough ball to coat and cover with plastic wrap.  The dough needs 60-90 minutes to recoup before round two; in other words, it needs to double in size.

Break the dough down to 3 oz. portions and shape them into boules.  If not familiar with this technique it is a simple process.  Put the portioned dough on a very lightly floured surface, place your hand on top of the dough with your fingers arranged like a cage and move your hand in a circular direction until you have a little round ball with decent surface tension.  This process can be used with any dough to form dinner rolls.  Again, let the dough double in size.

Now it is time to drink more wine and have another cigarette knowing that the end is near.  Bring your oven to 350 degrees while enjoying your vices.  Once the oven has preheated get a pan good and hot; add vegetable oil, wait a few seconds and add the boules.  Don’t get hasty and add them all at once, you need at least and inch between them to get a good sear.  Once golden brown, flip your bread and color the other side.  You should now have what resembles an English Muffin in your pan.  Grab a spatula and move the English muffins to a sheet tray lined with parchment in your oven.   Add more boules to the pan but keep in mind that it takes 8 minutes to cook your product through.

Once cooked, put your muffins on a rack to cool.  It’s late and you want to sleep and bring their demise about quicker but patience is important when making bread.  Give them a half hour on the cooling rack.  Wrap them in plastic and go to bed knowing that you were better off taking the time to make English muffins from scratch instead of buying them from the store.

When you wake up, cook the eggs (sunny side up is preferable, and if so, don’t salt the yolk until the eggs are on your plate).  Get a cast iron pan good and hot and add some butter.  Put the split English muffins face down in the pan and cook until golden brown.  Finally you can appreciate your labor.

a guest post by Nomfundo Sarah Msomi

*an editors note*

“I worked and reworked several drafts, not least to reflect the past eighteen months, a mobile concoction of food, love, loss and politics, spilled across three continents.” So writes Nomfundo Msomi in the opening paragraph (which I cut, not for its lack of brilliance) of a piece that ends with Potato Pizza.  The recipe is cited to an Eduardo, transcribed, and likely changed, by Nomfundo, though the reader will, especially after reading her post, wonder where it came from before and where it will venture next.

This long-anticipated post was written by a lady who has had a tremendous academic and epicurean influence on my life. I was first so delighted just to read it, having lived across oceans from her for some time now, and because (in her own words) “We reached a consensus on the critical role of food and travel philosophies in charting change, although they are infused, for better or worse, with whatever it is we currently stand for, and wherever it is we currently stand.” Nomfundo currently stands on Oxford University and, not only in the gastronomical sense, stands for originality – in her culinary courage and in the uniqueness of her taste and cooking.  She reminds me that as we age we are able to trace our growing and changing personal flavors, the people that affect our hungers, the places that inspire new cravings.  So, dear readers, what/who has affected yours?

xo, Pascale

How to Build a Country From Potatoes and Flour

by Nomfundo Sarah Msomi

Lack of emotional control is often associated with immaturity, effective and righteous anger with seniority, selfless nurturance with maturity, and jealousy with coevaleness. These associations mean that age and generational symbolism have often been used to naturalise situations of conquest…

– Jennifer Cole and Deborah Durham, Generations and Globalization

“How to build a Country from Potatoes and Flour,” or Eduardo’s recipe for potato pizza, marks the day I learned to eat again. I first tried it in Cape Town towards the end of a blue period where I craved only steamed vegetables, brown rice and aggression. Needless to say, my attitude towards food was an extension of my emotional well-being, and certainly a mirror through which I disapprovingly viewed myself; rough as grain, and dreadfully tasteless. I had left my home of five years (first love, first job, and a box that has since been discarded, despite my oath to return for it), landing in Johannesburg in the midst of a recession that was being vehemently denied. I attended interview after interview, and eventually grew tired of outlining the merits of a Liberal Arts education to strangers who cared only about whether or not I owned a car (but what did you study?). It was around the time my parents decided to renovate the house that I lost my appetite completely. I turned to Al Jazeera in a room that no longer had walls and developed a sour hatred for chicken in all its dry, pale forms. I buried myself in graduate school applications, emerging for the occasional cheerless howl on Garageband when the electrician allowed it. A few months and an adjustment of planets later, I took my miserable appetite to the Cape of Storms where I lived among ghosts, Europeans and revolutionaries. It was there that I met the sort of friends who would lend their last R15 to pay for parking at the airport, and sit while you look for his plane from the balcony as it heads towards Rome.

The first time I met Eduardo he was standing in the kitchen, obstructing the path to my room. I resented the presence of an Italian in my culinary safe space, and stubbornly declined when he offered helpings of his cooking. Faithful to roughage, my stomach tightened when he made carbonara (which I dared to attack with a knife), and I initially felt nothing for farfalle with butternut and sage butter. How that kitchen was a place of resistance! I suspect he could sense the antagonism, the stench of arrogance that cried out for bread and warmth, and my aversion to a male European, an Italian, rising to a clichéd gastronomic pinnacle on my turf. He attacked back by opting out of what I felt were delightful dishes of (mostly) cumin and beans. One evening I agreed to help him prepare pizza– he said it would be unifying, I figured I might as well learn how. Our housemates watched television as we cooked the first of countless meals together. He measured the flour and opened a packet of yeast, the same brand my mother uses for dombolo. I stood across from him in silence, helping to pour tepid water slowly into a bowl full of yeast, flour, salt and sugar. He maintained his stance, as a Taurus is prone to do. I watched the potatoes brown through the oven’s glass door, as I would many more times, cut uniformly and coated in olive oil. It was wonderful and unusual; the potatoes were soft in the centre and crispy on the edges, and the oil fried the dough ever so slightly. We shared the final pie after everyone had eaten, and reused the aluminium pans for quiche a few days later. Resistance did not crumble per se, but I ate. I ate out of curiosity. I ate to subdue butterflies. I ate for a painful transition. I ate for psychological violence and displacement. I ate for a relationship severed by youth and an ocean, not by a lack of love. I ate because I never got to say goodbye. I ate because my parents were hoping I would return healthier and more confident.  I ate because I had been holding my breath. I ate for lack of emotional control and effective, righteous anger. We ate because we were building a country from carbohydrates, democracy and little else. We ate because we were home, even if we did not know how and why we were there in the first place.

I hardly cooked over the next three months, save a few stir-fries and a nutmeg-heavy lamb stew that we keep vowing to recreate. Everyday we ate homemade ciabatta; we cooked mfino, sweet potatoes, baked pumpkin with chevre, and occasionally enjoyed taleggio from the farmer’s market an hour away. I prepared the antipasto while Eduardo brought the sweetness out of the vegetables from our CSA box, courtesy of Abalimi Bezekhaya where he interned. My passion for making salad dressing returned with zeal. But ingredients and culinary romantics do not take centre stage this time. Stomach + psyche, patience and sincere appetite define this chapter, for not all things shared are appetizing, nor do we always wake up hungry.  That potato pizza, starch-heavy, prepared as resistance, as stability, at the onset, initially in silence, with love, at least for two, re-ignited my desire to cook and eat.

Potato Pizza di Eduardo

300g bread flour

Powdered yeast (1 bag, or7g, I think)

2 teaspoons salt

1 teaspoon sugar

A tall glass of tepid water

olive oil

2 large potatoes

2 cloves of garlic, roughly sliced

A few sprigs of rosemary

Switch the oven on the lowest possible heat. It must reach at least 40 degrees Celsius.

Pour the flour into a bowl. Make two shallow holes (slightly larger than a thumbprint) somewhere on the surface. In one hole, add the packet of yeast and the sugar, and in the other, add the salt. Mix together by hand. Slowly add the water, mixing the dough (by hand) to avoid lumps – this may happen in five or six increments. It’s unlikely that you will use all the water. Your dough will be slightly liquid – easy enough to pour, but composed – a mass. Don’t be afraid! It’s not meant to be solid or bouncy, just slightly elastic. Your dough is ready when it (only slightly) sticks to your fingers, and is free of lumps.

Switch the oven off and cover your bowl with a moist tea towel. Place the bowl in the oven (switched off) for 2 and a half hours. This step depends on the season, on where you live and on your sensibility to climate change, energy etc. You can avoid the oven and put your dough in the sun, on the windowsill or on a radiator if the weather agrees, but a warm oven is reliable.

Slice the potatoes (you can peel them if you’d like, the thinner the better) and garlic, and place in a bowl with the rosemary to taste. Add olive oil, a pinch of course salt and mix.

Once your dough has risen (to at least twice the original size), coat your hands in olive oil to avoid sticking, and pour it evenly (you may need to stretch/pull it out of the bowl somewhat, since it will be malleable) into a baking pan lined with parchment paper (if you wish) and very lightly coated in olive oil. The more oil, the crunchier the base, but fried pizza is not optimum. Carefully add your toppings (see picture), and bake until brown (20-25 minutes, depending on your oven. Each to her own pizza!) at 220 degrees Celsius.

This is versatile dough and you can change your toppings. Add homemade tomato sauce and mozzarella if you wish, or bake it solo, adding fresh rocket and prosciutto just before eating on warmer days. Great for dinner parties, for lunch or with dinner. It keeps well, and responds favourably to a glass of wine while you’re preparing a meal.

The restaurant communities in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and other major cities are moving fast to help raise money for the Haitian earthquake relief effort, and Diner’s Journal will do its best to keep passing on the word as plans are made.

So far, Philippe Massoud of Restaurant Ilili is proposing restaurants in New York make Jan. 24 Haiti Dine Out Night, with 10 percent of sales going to charities specifically targeted to Haiti. (Which ones those will be are still to be determined.)

Servers, if they like, are being asked to donate 5 percent of their tips that night. So far, he has Hill Country, Bar Breton and Aldea – but he’s hoping for 20 by the end of the day.

He’s called Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Danny Meyer, Mario Batali and the New York Restaurant Association. “All the big players,” he said. “I’m trying to hit the social responsibility gene.”

Meanwhile, 20 percent of sales and tips at Knife + Fork in the East Village on Jan. 20 will go toward relief efforts. And on Jan. 27 The Bell House bar plans a host of bands and other entertainment, with all of the money going toward the relief effort. They’re looking for donations.

In San Francisco, the vegans are getting together for a big bake sale Jan. 23.

Tonight in Los Angeles, the Haitian native George Laguerre, owner of TiGeorges’ Chicken in Echo Park, is holding a dinner to raise money. And in Seattle, Waid’s Haitian Cuisine and Lounge holds fund-raisers tonight and Friday. In Chicago, a long list of benefits can be found at Billy Dec’s blog.

Mr. Dec’s company runs Rockit Bar and Grill and Sunda, a Buddakan-like Asian mega-restaurant. He and “The Bachelorette” star Jillian Harris turned their Saturday tweetnmeet at the newest Rockit Bar and Grill in Wrigleyville on the city’s North Side into a fund-raiser. From 9 p.m. to 10 p.m., a minimum donation of $20 gets free drinks and appetizers. The Chicago club and small plates emporium Le Passage is hosting Haiti fund-raisers for the next three Fridays.

And The Hartford Courant reports that Burtons Grill, a New England-based restaurant group, will donate 15 percent of its revenue of Monday’s sales from its four restaurants to the William J. Clinton Haiti Earthquake Relief Fund. The chain has restaurants in Boston, Andover and Hingham, Mass., and at Evergreen Walk in South Windsor. The restaurants are open from 11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m.

RECIPES

diri ak djon djon (rice with black mushrooms)

This is my absolute favorite Haitian dish, and in fact one of my favorite foods.  The recipe below comes from A Taste of Haiti by Mirta Yurnet-Thomas and the Thomas Family.  She explains,

“Diri ak djon-djon is native to the northern part of Haiti, where the djon-djon mushrooms are grown.  Considered a delicacy, they are not used in everyday cooking.  They are black, very small, and have an inch-long inedible stem.  When boiled, they release a gray-black coloring, giving this recipe and many others a distinctive aroma, flavor, and color.  This rice is usually served with a meat or fish dish.  A cast-iron pot is preferable.

This photo is from the Haitian restaurant, Ambiance, in Canarsie, Brooklyn. Here it’s served with pigeon peas.

you’ll need.

• 2 cups of long grain rice (although I’ve reproduced this with arborio which was crazy!)
• 2 cup dried black mushrooms (in Haitian markets like the one I go to in Flatbush, you can pick up djon-djon mushrooms)
• 2 TBSP olive or vegetable oil
• 3 garlic cloves, minced
• 1 small onion, finely chopped
• 1 sliced shallot
• 4 cloves
• 2 sprigs of thyme
• one cup Pigeon Peas (or a 12 ounce can already cooked)
• 1 green scotch bonnet pepper
• salt, pepper to taste

*optional – if you can find it, include a tablespoon of Tritri – a tiny fish in the sardine family that is dried and used in rice disheswhat you’ll do.

• If you’re using dried beans, you’ll need to cook them in 6 cups of water and a teaspoon of salt for 1 to 1/5 hours, or until tender.
• soak mushrooms in 4 cups of water for 10 minutes.  Boil the mushrooms on low heat for 10 minutes.  Strain the mushrooms, reserving the liquid.
• in a cast-iron pot, add oil and heat to medium.  Stir in garlic, onion and shallot for 2 minutes.  Add the rice and stir for 3 minutes.  Add the mushroom water, salt, cloves cooked pigeon peas and tritri.  Bring to a boil until the water evaporates.  Lower the heat, stir the rice, and place the entire scotch bonnet pepper and thyme on top of the rice.  Cook while covered for 20 minutes.  Remove the hot pepper and the thyme.  Stir well and serve.

• 4 cups all purpose flour
• 2 cups soft butter
• 1 cup milk
• 1 TBSP pure vanilla extract (if you’ve ever had the deep red and beautifully aromatic Haitian Vanilla, then you will have long forgotten the other stuff and it’ll already be in your cupboard.  If you have access to a Haitian Market, go pick some up!)
• 1 TBSP rum (Barbancourt, of course)
• 7 eggs (separate yolks and whites, stiffly beat the whites)
• 2 cups sugar
• 2 TSP baking powder
• 1/4 TSP salt
• 1 – 2 TSP lemon zest

• Cream the butter and gradually add the sugar and beat until light and fluffy.
• Beat the egg yolks in a large bowl and gradually add to the butter and sugar mixture.
• Sift together all of the dry ingredients.
• Add the milk, alternately with the sifted dry ingredients to the mixture.
• Gently fold the egg whites into the batter and turn into a buttered and floured cake pan.
• Bake in a preheated 350 F oven for 45 minutes to an hour, or until a toothpick stuck into the center of the cake comes out clean.
• Cool, and serve.

a guest post by Nicole Levine

*an editors note:

Nicole Levine is a pseudonym, a nom de plume, a shout-out to one of my favorite fictional characters of all time.  The true unnamed author asked me to keep her identity anonymous, perhaps fearing the possibility of a forced confession, one with her signature at the top of this page.  It got me to thinking about the nature of this post, of food and unrequited crushes.  Often, when there is an overwhelming presence of feeling, it is easier to sit down and ravish a bloody steak, or a fat piece of warm bread, than it is to name every moment which led you to that meal, every flutter that keeps you eating, and every hunger that you keep quiet.  I hope you’ll try her recipe — the bread was superb! — and, at the author’s recommendation, have it for breakfast with your morning coffee.

xo, Pascale

a guest post by Nicole Levine

When he appears at your house on a snowy December night, you will thank the fates for a long lost love. You also curse the fates for bringing him while your apartment is an embarrassing mess and your kitchen empty. THIS is the one I want to marry, you silently scream at them. How can I convince him to marry me if he thinks I don’t know how to keep house? But the fates deposit him in your kitchen and depart without sticking around to watch you look their gift horse in the mouth.

The ensuing weekend is filled with breathless nights and giddy laughter and thoughtless acts of takeout. Sushi, halal buffet, pastries and coffee – all food is eaten with the object of refueling rather than sustaining. As in, once you get that hunger problem taken care of, you can move onto the next thing. Although you want to prove your womanhood by doing something drastic, like baking bread, you resign yourself to the fact that time is limited and you can’t waste it waiting for dough to rise.

At the end of the weekend, he comes by the cafe as your shift ends to say goodbye. You walk him the three blocks to the subway. He lets you hold his hand. In public. And kiss him over the turnstile. You are smart enough not to look back at him once you’ve turned away. You’re even smarter not to cry. You’ve almost convinced yourself that you’ve almost forgotten all about it when he calls a few days later to tell you he is coming back for New Year’s.  The fates are giving you a second chance to show your worth. Telling you, go buy groceries – good ones, and clean the house, and BAKE. And you’re smart enough to listen.

The day before he returns, you bake your grandma’s sweet bread for the first time.  This, you feel, is a true test of your mettle: subtly sweet, dense yet light; grandma’s bread always exuded warmth, love, and quiet competence. You heat the milk and pound the cardamom and knead and knead and hold your breath while the dough rises. You lovingly form the dough into braided loaves and, towards the end, keep watch through the oven window to ensure that the bottoms don’t burn. Out of the oven, sweet smelling and golden-beige, you know your bread is perfect, and your are confident.  As you take in the bread’s aroma, breathing deeply, you are infused with a sense of security in your own womanhood.

The second time he enters your apartment, his eyes take in the braided loaves sitting on the spotless granite countertop, and he looks at you with a new respect and something that could almost (if you weren’t smart enough to know better) border on love.

When the fates give you these presents, it is often only a matter of time until circumstance takes them away. And circumstances, being what they are, keep him out of your reach until the fates are kind enough to return him. But in the meantime, you can bake off some of those perfect loaves and rest assured of your worth as woman, and his sureness of that value.

The Frost Family’s Swedish Christmas Bread

2 cups milk
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup shortening (butter)
2 cups flour (to start, uses lots more)
1/2 tsp. salt
15 cardamom seeds
1 pkg. yeast
1 egg

Yields 2 loaves

Begin by heating the milk over a low heat in a medium saucepot. You do not want the milk to boil – just heat it until a little steam rises off the top. While the milk is heating, remove the cardamom seeds from their pods and pound fine. (This was my job when I was a little girl, and I accomplished it by placing the seeds inside a dishtowel and hammering with a mallet. Now I am a grownup, and have realized that my coffee grinder performs this step equally well.) Remove milk from heat and whisk in the cardamom, sugar, and shortening. Set this mixture aside and allow it to cool to room temperature.  When the milk is cooled, activate the yeast in a little tepid water and add it to the milk, mixing thoroughly. Transfer to a large mixing bowl, and add in two cups of flour and blend until smooth, with no lumps. Cover the resulting viscous liquid with a warm, damp dishtowel and let it rise until doubled in bulk (or for one hour, whichever comes first).

Once doubled, add one beaten egg and mix, adding flour gradually until you get a stiff dough. Knead the dough on a clean, well-floured surface and form it into a smooth ball. Clean, dry, and grease the inside of your mixing bowl and roll the dough-ball around inside until it is uniformly greased. Cover with your damp, dry dishtowel and let rise until doubled in bulk.

Shape the dough into loaves, braids or rolls. My mother contends that loaves bake more evenly, but as an aesthete, I prefer braids. If one is vigilant towards the end of the baking process, one may ensure that the bottoms of the braided loaves do not burn. Place your loaves on a lightly greased baking sheet, and let them rise for roughly another hour. This is a good time to preheat your oven to 350f. Bake your loaves at 350 for a half hour to 45 minutes.

Set your timer for 20 minutes, and rotate the pan if it looks like the loaves are baking unevenly. At the 30-minute mark, the tops of the loaves should be beige, and the bottoms should be browning nicely. Remove the loaves when the tops are golden beige, before the bottoms have a chance to blacken.

If you have followed the process correctly, your entire house will smell amazing and you will feel an overwhelming sense of accomplishment.