An Alice Waters New Year

You know how sometimes you make love to your partner and it's just unbelievably good, and then a few hours later you do it again and it's even better, and you feel giddy and kind of amazed at yourself and your partner? Yesterday was like that, but with food.

We woke up around 11:00 with the mildest of New Year's Day hangovers and set out to fix breakfast/brunch. I was going to make scrambled eggs, as I usually do on lazy mornings (usually Sundays) when we have nothing to do but eat and relax. I really love making scrambled eggs because they're easy and so good. I just throw in whatever's handy - garlic, onion, roasted red peppers, spinach, smoked salmon, etc - and top them with cheese. I almost went this route yesterday but then decided to get ambitious.

A few months ago I bought The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters. I could - and should - write an entire entry about her and this book. The gist of it, as the title suggests, is that if you use high quality ingredients (especially seasonal, locally-grown produce) you don't have to do much at all to create delicious meals. For a person like me who is just starting to really learn to cook, it is a fantastic primer. Anyway, so far the only thing I had made from this book was focaccia, which turned out pretty well, though this is due more to the fact that I managed to pretty successfully replicate the discontinued anisa focaccia from Ramsi's than anything else. Anyway. I thought it would be fun to cook something from the book for breakfast (which was quickly turning into brunch). What would Alice Waters have me do with eggs? How about a soufflé? I had never made a soufflé before and the idea of cooking something that was supposed to get light and fluffy but may very well fail to do so was a little intimidating. But one of my informal New Year's resolutions was to cook more, so I decided to go for it. Neil and I also decided to use her recipe for fried potatoes, which was incredibly simple: cut them into chunks, boil them, fry them, season them with salt.

The soufflé recipe called for goat cheese, but we decided to use Boursin instead, having just bought a couple of packages of it because it was on sale. I started cooking. I created my first roux, then my first béchamel. I marveled at how the texture changed as I added the milk. In went the cheese, then the egg yolks. I beat the egg whites until stiff peaks formed and folded them in. Then I poured it all into a baking dish and popped it in the oven.

This whole undertaking was complicated by the fact that our oven has been running hotter than it's supposed to. We bought an oven thermometer and at first it seemed to be off by about 25°. We adjusted it accordingly but the temperature fluctuated wildly. This did not bode well for my delicate soufflé.

While that was baking Neil prepared the potatoes.

We take cooking very seriously.

We couldn't figure out why they weren't browning as they were supposed to until I realized that while we had halved the amount of potatoes (the original recipe made 4 servings), I had absently told Neil to use the full amount of oil. Oops. He poured off the excess and after spending some time on a paper towel-covered plate before serving, they were fine.

Finally, it was time for the soufflé. I pulled it from the oven and it immediately began to deflate. It didn't matter, though. It was still beautiful. I inelegantly got it onto our plates with a spatula, Neil added the potatoes, and we sliced a red grapefruit in half. We had planned to make mimosas with a bottle of Toad Hollow Amplexus, but in the end we decided that we didn't want to use such a decent bottle of wine for that purpose, so we drank it by itself.

The soufflé, though inglorious on the plate, was amazing. Neil and I looked at each other in disbelief as we ate, unsure of how something so good could have come out of our own kitchen. The creamy, herby flavor of the Boursin subtly permeated the silky texture of the eggs. The potatoes were just barely browned and tasted of olive oil; they were not as they had been intended, but were delicious anyway. The wine was dry and crisp. We were both truly giddy during and after this meal (the wine surely helped with that). We decided that such a wonderful brunch had to be followed with an equally impressive dinner. Back to The Art of Simple Food we turned.

The focaccia recipe that I had made once before could also be used for pizza crust, so we decided to have pizza and Caesar salad. Among the combinations of toppings that Alice Waters suggested was gorgonzola, figs, and rosemary, and we both thought that sounded great. I set to work making the dough for the crust, and while it was rising we went shopping. At Barnes & Noble I bought Julie & Julia, a book by a woman (Julie Powell) who cooked every single recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year's time. I'm about halfway through it and I'll surely blog about it when I'm done. Anyway, we returned home to find that my dough had risen impressively. I split it in two, put half in the freezer, and prepared the remainder to become pizza.

Meanwhile, Neil was busy with the salad. I have to tell you that we eat the bagged Dole Caesar salad kits all the time. That is, in fact, the only sort of Caesar salad that has been consumed in this house. Alice Waters, of course, was having none of that. First we cut up some country-style bread, tossed it in olive oil, and baked it to make croutons. Never mind the salad; I could have eaten them all fresh out of the oven. Neil washed our head of organic romaine and, as instructed, dried it in small batches with the salad spinner. When it was all washed and dried we rolled it in a clean towel and put in the fridge to await dinnertime. Then we made the dressing: crushed garlic, red wine vinegar, lemon juice, olive oil, anchovies, egg yolk, black pepper, and Parmesan cheese. "This is not like any Caesar dressing I've ever seen," I said. But truly, what did I know of Caesar dressing besides that which came out of a plastic envelope? I remained hopeful.

When the dough had gone through its requisite periods of rising and resting, I flattened it, brushed on some olive oil, and sprinkled it with gorgonzola. Neil had soaked the dried figs in water and then cut them in half; they went on next. Then we pulled the leaves off a couple sprigs of fresh rosemary and added more cheese. We baked it for 10 minutes, keeping a careful eye on it because of our wonky oven. While it was baking we tossed the romaine with the salad dressing.

The pizza was incredible. The funk of the gorgonzola, the sweetness of the figs, and the pine-like flavor of the rosemary combined beautifully. The crust was perfect; thin but not flat, crispy on the outside but soft within. I declared the pizza so good that I almost didn't want to eat it; I didn't want it to be gone.


The salad, too, was wonderful, and not like the Caesar salad that I am used to. The garlic gave the dressing a surprising bite, but it was tempered by the cheese and the croutons. The romaine was fresh and crisp quite unlike our usual bagged salad.

With this meal we had a bottle of Bloom Gewutztraminer, which was just sweet enough and complimented the food quite well.

What a wonderful day. A food blog isn't necessarily the place to go into this, but for the past decade or so I have battled with myself over my writing. I used to think of myself as a writer and I did quite a lot of it. It was an important part of my identity, and it was That Thing that I did that made me lose track of time, made me feel like I was merely a vessel through which some greater force was doing the work. Writers - and people who have other sorts of passions - know what I mean. It's the thing that makes the rest of world drop away. Writing, for a variety of reasons, usually isn't like that for me anymore. But yesterday, despite my unfamiliarity with some of the mechanics of the process, cooking made me feel that way. And that was quite a revelation.

For lunch today we had leftover pizza and salad. Tonight we're fixing one more Alice Waters recipe, an onion panade, along with more salad. Tomorrow it's back to the real world of work and busy-ness and, for the most part, meals that don't require a couple of hours of preparation. But this has certainly been amazing two days of food, and I hope I bring at least a little bit of this feeling with me throughout the rest of the year.