Never gave much thought to parsnips. I mean, why should I? Parsnips. Albino carrots, really. With skinny tails. Easy to overlook in the root vegetable department.
Y’know? What’s a parsnip ever done for me?
Parsnips don’t do my laundry, or help with good hair days, or pay my taxes, or remember to DVR American Idol. They don’t take good photographs, or vacuum the rug, or sing at all prettily, and they don’t help make dinn– oh.
They do. Turns out they make an excellent dinner.
I recently came across this little verse and I think it’s sort of fantastic.
They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon.
It was written by Edward Lear in 1871 as part of a longer poem called The Owl and the Pussycat. I’ve only just heard of it – how is that possible? The poem is funny and charming and ridiculous, and discusses a “beautiful pea green boat,” a singing owl (an “elegant fowl”) and a “land where the Bong-tree grows.” And, as we’ve learned, something called a runcible spoon.
Illustration by Edward Lear
A runcible spoon. Couldn’t you just eat that up? Isn’t that the most satisfying morsel of verse? Don’t you want something you can call runcible?
Well, I do. I looked it up and found out that runcible isn’t even a real word; Edward Lear just made it up and put it into several of his poems. Isn’t that the greatest thing you’ve ever heard?
Here are six things I’d like to runcibly eat with a spoon:
1. Chocolate Ice Cream
2. Curried Squash Soup (here’s the recipe)
3. Aunt Marie’s granola with cranberries, pecans and dates (here’s the recipe)
4. An entire jar of peanut butter. Or Nutella.
5. Apple Betty (recipe here)
Chicken Tortilla Soup
Adapted from Rebecca Goldfarb & The Social Table
Ingredients:
Directions:
Preheat the oven to 375ºF. Once the oven is hot, roast the garlic: leave the garlic bulb whole and slice off the very top of the bulb, exposing the individual garlic cloves. Drizzle some olive oil to cover the exposed cloves, and wrap the entire bulb in some tin foil. Place the foil-covered garlic straight on an oven rack and roast for about 45 minutes, until golden brown and fragrant. Remove from oven and set aside.
In a large pot, bring the chicken stock to a boil. Add the whole chicken breasts and lower the stock to a simmer. Poach the chicken in the broth until fully cooked, about 25 minutes. Remove the chicken from the broth and let cool on a plate. Bring the stock back up to a boil.
Once boiling, add the diced onions, tomatoes, and chipotle pepper to the stock. Squeeze the individual cloves from the head of roasted garlic into the stock. Reduce soup to a simmer and cook gently for about 30 minutes.
While the soup is simmering, shred the cooled chicken breasts.
Once the soup has been simmering for about 30 minutes and smells a bit smoky from the chipotle, remove the chipotle chili from the soup and discard. Add the corn, lime juice, cilantro and shredded chicken. Simmer for an additional 10 minutes or until the chicken is warmed through.
Serve with a handful of shredded cheese, some toasted tortilla, and a spoon, runcible or otherwise.
Serves about 8.
Well people, apparently it is almost the middle of October. How does that keep happening? I look away for one second, and all of a sudden it’s time to get another haircut and I can’t leave my apartment without a coat. A coat! Yesterday I was clamoring about the oppressive summer heat radiating from the city’s sidewalks, and today I need a coat. I bet tomorrow I’ll be asking for a warm hat and mittens.
You know what else? I’m already in level 5 at school. Level 5! Level 5 means that, when I go to class everyday, I’m not actually in “class” – I’m one of the students working the lunch shift in the school’s restaurant, L’Ecole. Kind of crazy, no? I cook lunch for people! REAL people, who will eat the REAL food that I cook for them. Almost like a real chef! …Almost.
We rotate stations in the kitchen, from garde manger (appetizers and cold salads) to entremetier (specials) to poissonier (fish) to saucier (meats and sauce) to patissier (pastry). I haven’t hit all of the stations yet, but here are a few highlights from my rotations in saucier and patissier:
Doesn’t look half bad, huh? I’ve also been responsible for making buttermilk-poached chicken, a mango-yogurt terrine, mint-chocolate chip ice cream sandwiches and and braised rabbit, but alas – no pictures.
In addition to our everyday work in the kitchen, we level 5 students were assigned a menu project which was, incidentally, due today. The project consisted of designing a menu, including at least 4 courses, and writing a report on it, complete with pictures of your plated dishes, a wine pairing, and a food cost analysis. In short, a glorified blog post (minus the cost analysis business). Needless to say, I kind of enjoyed doing it (again, minus the cost analysis nonsense. Me and math are not the closest of friends.)
I chose to create a seasonal menu, complete with my favorite, toasty warm fall flavors (note the ample use of apples and butternut squash). Here is the menu I chose:
Course 1: amuse-bouche – ham and cheddar toast with pickled apple
Course 2: curried squash soup with apples, crème fraiche, and a popover
Course 3: herbed goat cheese and zucchini tart, served with baby greens, pumpkin seeds and apple cider vinaigrette
Course 4: chicken cassoulet with white beans, roasted Brussels sprouts and butternut squash (apologies – no photo).
Course 5: apple meringue “cupcake” with cinnamon-sugared doughnut holes
Sound like something you’d like to eat? Maybe? The squash soup, at least? Ok.
Curried Squash Soup with Apples, Crème Fraiche and a Popover
To me, squash soup is the epitome of fall – warm and smooth, with a hint of sweetness and spice. Eating it makes me want to own lots of cozy sweaters and watch football and drink hot cider. My recipes for the soup and popovers are adapted from Ina Garten and Gourmet magazine (rest in peace, old friend), respectively.
Ingredients:
For soup:
For popovers:
Directions:
Warm the butter, olive oil, onions, and curry powder in a large stockpot, uncovered, over low heat for 15 to 20 minutes, until the onions are soft and translucent. Stir occasionally, scraping the bottom of the pot.
Add the squash, apples, salt, pepper, thyme and chicken stock to the pot. Bring to a boil, cover, and cook over low heat for 30 to 40 minutes, until the squash and apples are very soft.Remove the sprig of thyme.Puree the soup coarsely with an immersion blender, or in the bowl of a food processor fitted with a steel blade.
Adjust seasoning and serve hot, garnished with a dollop of crème fraiche and a drizzle of pumpkin seed oil.
To make the popovers, first preheat the oven to 450 degrees F.
Next, sift together the flour and the salt in a medium bowl.
In a small bowl whisk together the eggs and the milk. Add the milk mixture to the flour mixture, stirring, and stir the batter until it is smooth.
In a preheated 450°F. oven heat one or two 6-cup muffin pan for 5 minutes, or until hot, and then brush the cups with the melted butter, and fill them half full with the batter (you should be able to fill about 8 muffin cups).
Bake the popovers in the middle of the 450°F oven for 20 minutes, then reduce the heat to 375°F, and bake the popovers for 20 minutes more, or until they are golden brown and crisp.
Makes roughly 3 quarts of soup and 8 popovers.
Well readers, it’s finished. C’est fini. Week 1 of culinary school. It began on Tuesday morning. I woke up well before my alarm and showed up to school way too early, and as I changed into my official chef’s whites in the locker room, I was grinning from ear to ear. How cool is this? I thought to myself. I have chef’s whites! I’m wearing chef’s whites! Hah! Eat your heart out, Bobby Flay.
…It was then that I looked in the mirror and realized that, between the checkered pants, the white neckerchief and the white cotton cap, my “awesome!” chef’s whites made me look like a clown in a snow suit. Ah well. At least everyone else would be wearing the same thing.
I marched upstairs to the level 1 kitchen and took my place at an empty station. I looked around the big, industrial kitchen filled with stainless steel pots and pans and countertops, sizing up my classmates and trying to resist the urge to burst into uncontrolled laughter from sheer nervousness and excitement. Just then, a round-bellied man in a tall chef’s toque and a thick french accent called everyone up to the instructor’s station at the front of the class to begin.
And so we began, and I’ll tell you, it was a hell of a week. We met our chef instructors – Chef S., our lead chef, the round-bellied frenchman, and Chef W., our chef instructor, a tall, lean American. Chef W. began by warning us of the dangers of the kitchen, using words like “horribly disfigured for life” and “I don’t even want to think about it,” and Chef S. began teaching us the correct way to chop vegetables, explaining that you should never mix carrot trimmings with turnip or onion trimmings, (“no eefs, buts, or anytheeng,”) lest you want everything to turn into “a freakin’ zoo.” Noted.
On Wednesday we met Chef T., who gave us a lesson on food safety and sanitation, mostly by regaling us with horror stories of food poisoning and industrial processing plant standards and national food-born epidemics. I learned all about viruses and parasites and bacteria, and about how I (and you, too, dear reader) have probably been exposed to more of these things than is nice to think about. I learned that it’s important to ask questions about where my food comes from and also to stay away from the street vendors who sell soft pretzels.
On Thursday we tackled stocks, from chicken to veal to beef to fish and back again. In french: fond de volaille blanc, fond de veau brun, marmite, and fumet de poisson. We also got a nice treat when some students from the level 2 classroom brought by a dish for us to sample: a plate of mushrooms in mustard sauce. We all grabbed spoons and scooped up the mushrooms, chewing thoughfully and swallowing slowly to better appreciate the flavor. Not bad, we agreed. Thanks, level 2 students!
After all of us (including the one pseudo-vegan student in the class) had tried the mushroom dish, a giggling Chef S. informed us that, rather than a plate of mushrooms, we had all just consumed a plate of veal kidneys. (Zey are veel keedneeys! Hahaa!)
Apparently it was offal day in the level 2 kitchen, and hazing day in level 1. Cool.
I know that in roughly a month it will be our turn to initiate a new class of unassuming level 1 students on offal day, but for now I’d like to forget the offal (awful?) incident and tell you how to make french onion soup (gratinée à l’oignon). It goes down much smoother than kidneys, anyway.
French Onion Soup
From level 1, session 5 of the French Culinary Institute
Ingredients:
Directions:
Place a large soup pot over medium heat. Melt the butter in the pot and add the onions, letting them cook and soften for 20-30 minutes. Once the onions are soft, increase the heat and continue to cook for 5-10 minutes, until the onions have caramelized and are a deep brown color. Season lightly with salt and toss the flour over the onions, stirring to combine. Add the garlic and cook for 2 minutes.
Add the sherry or wine and let the mixture reduce for a few minutes. In the meantime, bring the stock to a simmer. Add the hot stock to the onion mixture, bringing to a simmer, and cook at a low simmer, covered, for 20 minutes. Season to taste with more salt and pepper. Preheat the broiler to 400º F.
Cut the baguette into slices, and place the slices at the bottom of a heat-proof serving bowl. Ladle hot soup over the bread slices, filling the bowl to the rim, and sprinkle a healthy layer of cheese on top of everything. Place the bowls on a sheet pan and place in the broiler for about 5 minutes, until the cheese is brown and bubbly. Serve immediately.
Serves soup for 4.
I recently finished a book called Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously. It was written by a woman named Julie Powell (Amherst graduate, holler) who gave herself one year to make every single recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1. Just so we’re clear, that’s 524 recipes. In 365 days. I won’t ruin the book by telling you exactly what happens to Ms. Powell over the course of the year, but I will say that the result of such an ambitious project involves aspic, sautéed kidneys, bone marrow sauce… and Potage Parmentier.
Having never attempted a Julia Child recipe, I was inspired by reading Julie and Julia and, not being an offal girl myself (though I will admit that liver does have its merits), I decided to give Potage Parmentier a try. All that means is potato soup, by the way. In this case, it means potato leek soup. But, in keeping with my affinity for all things French (toast, fries, kisses, etc.), I prefer to call it Potage Parmentier. If, dear reader, you are of the “freedom fries” sort who finds this sentiment unpatriotic and/or communistic, please feel free to disregard the French name and just call this soup “delicious.”
Because it is. Délicieux! And, most importantly, it’s easy. Julia Child herself called Potage Parmentier “simplicity itself to make.” Amen to that, JC. All it takes is some peeling and chopping, and then everything gets thrown into a big pot (and if you have a roommate like mine who is an expert potato peeler, all the better). We made the Potageon Saturday, before Andy, Alyssa, and Sadie came over for dinner.
At first, peeling and chopping and boiling away, I was excited. So quick! So easy! I even threw a rind of parmesan cheese into the simmering pot to liven up the soup’s flavor. But then, after some immersion blending, I started to doubt myself. The puréed soup looked unappetizing. The color was a light-yellowish-beige, and the whole thing smelled less than slurp-worthy. It just seemed sort of… eh.
I needn’t have worried. My brave dinner guests took hot bowls of soup, topped with a splash of cream, crispy pancetta, and fresh chives, and sat down at the table. After many precautionary announcements detailing the quickness with which I could get pizza delivered, if necessary, we all picked up our spoons.
After that, I don’t really remember. Just a lot of slurping, I think. I do recall hearing the clinking sound of metal on ceramic…sort of like spoons scraping the bottoms of bowls. Actually, between the wine, the creamy, bacony Potage, the sweet strawberries and these cookies,
(which should really be called “death by chocolate cookies,” but that’s a whole other post), I’m surprised I didn’t black out entirely.
In any case, it seems I was able to snap only a few blurry photos of the evening. Mostly empty bowls, as it turns out. Well played, Mrs. Childs… well played.
Adapted from Julia Child’s recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1
Though it doesn’t call for many ingredients, this soup is hearty and filling. To cut the richness, you could omit adding the cream at the end (though, really, this wouldn’t be something I endorse). The parmesan rind adds a round nuttiness to the flavor of the soup, which pairs nicely with the topping of crisp, smoky pancetta. If I had a food mill, I’d use it instead of a blender to purée the Potage. The result would be a slightly thicker-textured soup, which I prefer. But, to each her own – purée away, if you’re so inclined (or if your kitchen lacks certain food milling appliances). Either way, reheated leftovers make deliciously satisfying lunches and weeknight dinners. Even without leftover chocolate cookies for dessert.
Ingredients:
Directions:
Combine the potatoes, leeks, and onions in a large stock pot. Add chicken stock (or water) to cover the veggies with an extra inch or two of liquid. Add the salt, cover, and bring to a boil.
Lower the heat to bring the mixture to a simmer, and add the parmesan cheese rind. Simmer, covered, for 40-50 minutes.
Remove the parmesan rind from the soup (it will be very soft and melty), and let the mixture cool slightly before puréeing to desired texture (using an immersion blender, regular blender or evasive food mill). Add more salt and some pepper to taste. Reheat over a low flame until ready to serve.
While the soup is reheating, toss the chopped pancetta in a large frying pan and sautée until crispy. Drain over paper towels.
Off the heat and just before serving, stir in cream by spoonfuls (I let my dinner-mates add the cream to their own bowls – it’s fun and doesn’t let you under- or overdo it). Top with some crisp pancetta and chives. Slurps, I mean, serves 6-8.
