Where has Frost Street been? Hard at work, of course. 80, 90 hours a week, again, since the last time I was here. My blog, after weeks of neglect, has gone stale.

When your food blog starts to turn, you have to fall back on provisions. No time to cook, no energy to dine out, you'd best throw together some ready-made, well-preserved nourishment.

This is an embellishment on antipasto all'Italiana, a collection of dried cured meats (prosciutto san daniele, domestic bresaola, genoa salami, and the salt-cured fatty pork cheek known as guanciale), marinated artichoke hearts, and olives, spruced up with some cheeses (bufala and locatelli romano), fresh basil, and tomatoes. Of course, you have to round the lot out with some extra virgin olive oil, good aged balsamic vinegar of Modena, and a bottle of chianti, slightly chilled. Have a good crusty bread at the ready, and you've got a soul-mending meal that takes more time to shop for than it does to prepare -- and fits snugly into a busy lawyer's schedule.

You can find just about all the ingredients you need for this simple but satisfying spread at Fairway.

Posted by jeremy at 01:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Lisa has explained to me that no authentic Polish Easter table is complete without a green bean casserole. I have no basis to dispute her contention, so I dutifully prepared this traditional holiday dish.

There are those who claim that the green bean casserole was first created in the Campbell's Soup test kitchens in 1955. I can only assume, given Lisa's insistence on the dish's inclusion in our Easter dinner, that this attribution is a lie spun by power brokers of the McCarthy Era in an effort to marginalize the national achievements of a Soviet Bloc puppet state. Campbell's, I surmise, is either: (a) the arm of the military-industrial complex charged with perpetuating this propaganda; or (b) a stooge of the Unamerican Activities Committee which -- having built fifty years of goodwill on a lie -- cannot even today admit the truth.

My own theory is that the green bean casserole was actually invented by Sigismund Augustus, the legendary king of Poland and Lithuania, who helped spread Renaissance thought and culture among the Slavic Peoples from the Carpathians to the Baltic Sea.

Posted by jeremy at 01:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

For amateur cooks with significant others, Valentine's day is not so much an occasion as it is a dare. Around the city, restaurants are offering over-priced menus full of precious - often heart-shaped - morsels to con love-struck men into picking up a padded check. Last year, bound by the constraints of my government wages, I decided to take the dare. I resolved to make a Valentine's Day dinner for two right in my own kitchen.

I had a lot more free time back then. So naturally, I spent two days preparing a four-course dinner.

Lisa has been steadily broadening her gastronomic horizons since we started dating. Valentine's day seemed to me to be the perfect opportunity to introduce her to a staple of culinary seduction: raw oysters on the half shell. I happen to have an oyster knife and a kevlar glove in my kitchen, but if you don't you'd probably be wise to skip this course. Oysters are a bitch to open.

On the advice of a female friend (who has seldom steered me wrong), the next course was heart-shaped ravioli. I know, it's as sappy as you can get, but you won''t believe how much it can impress a woman when you not only prepare her a winning meal, but sublimate your masculine revulsion long enough to shape it into cutesy little hearts. The ravioli were filled with lobster meat, mascarpone, and tarragon, and were dressed with a white wine and caramelized shallot beurre blanc. I even tried to dye the pasta dough pink with red bell pepper puree. This is not a good idea -- when boiled, red pepper puree mixed with egg-yolk pasta turns orange.

The red peppers came into play in my next dish as well, this time as a garnish. Here's something that will certainly turn the stomach of any singles out there. Basically, you take strips of red pepper about 1 cm wide, and cut little wedge-shaped cuts into them like this:

Just cut off the pointy top corners, and you've got little red pepper heart garnishes. I used them in a dish I made to suit Lisa's tastes. She loves chicken, she loves cheese, and she loves red sauce. So I took a whole chicken, removed the skin in two pieces before deboning (a complicated process that I may try to explain in a later post), cut away a boneless breast with the first joint of the wing still attached, butterflied it, and stuffed it with artichoke hearts, prosciutto san daniele, and three kinds of cheeses (mozzarella, parmagiano, and pecorino romano). I wrapped each stuffed breast with half the skin of the chicken (both to hold it together and to give it a crispy shell), baked it in the oven, and served it with a tomato-cream sauce (garnished, of course, with the little red-pepper hearts). I did all the prep work the night before, and ate the dark meat for dinner on February 13.

Admittedly, the heart-shaped ravioli were a bit much, but there really is one classic Valentine's Day dessert that you can't just ignore: coeur à la crème. There are special molds made just for this dessert, which is essentially a no-bake, no-crust, no-egg cheesecake that you allow to drain in cheesecloth overnight so it becomes firm. I know Lisa isn't really into cheesecake, but I thought if I dressed it up with a little chocolate and some raspberry sauce she'd like it. After all, it's heart-shaped.

Now I've got two coeur à la crème molds I will never use again.

This year I've had a lot less time to prepare. Lisa has already told me she wants me to make her something like the potato tart with salmon she had at Escoffier. So I'm going to Citarella tonight to pick up some fresh salmon to cure. The only real question is whether it has to be heart-shaped.

Posted by jeremy at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Lisa and I had a small get-together with some of my college friends and her high school friends on New Year's Eve. I usually try to serve something special on New Year's. Apparently I'm not the only one. At 2 p.m. on Wednesday, the checkout line at Citarella was so long it wound all the way through the store and out the front door. The wait at the fish counter was about an hour. It took me about an hour and a half to get two lobsters, some Wellfleet oysters, and a 2-oz. tin of Osetra caviar. Fairway was almost as crazy, but the cash-only express lanes were quick as usual. Plus, they had some killer wild mushrooms this week: hard-to-find and super fresh.

I took my first shot at butter-poached lobster Wednesday night. This method, pioneered by Thomas Keller at the French Laundry and since plagiarized by hautes cuisiniers across the country, requires you to plunge the lobsters in boiling water just long enough to kill them (30 seconds or less), extract their meat, and cook it in beurre monté (butter that has been emulsified with water as it is melted so it doesn't separate).

Although the results were tasty, I made at least two mistakes. First, although I got the claws out in one piece, I forgot to remove the blade of cartilage from the center of the larger part of the claw. Lobster isn't supposed to be crunchy. Second, I either cooked the lobster too long or heated the butter too much, because the meat was as firm as that of a boiled lobster, and the whole idea of butter poaching is to keep the meat tender and soft. Oh well. Nobody but me seemed to mind, so I can't be too disappointed. The full New Year's Eve menu can be found below.

Happy New Year everybody. Have a great 2004.

New Year's Eve Menu

Wellfleet Oysters on the Half-Shell
Crepe of Duck Confit, Shredded Green Onions and Chinese Barbecue Sauce
Wild Mushroom Ravioli with Parmesan-Cream Sauce
Butter-Poached Lobster with Potato Gratin, Asparagus Tips, and Saffron-Vanilla Butter Sauce
Chocolate-Dipped Strawberries

At Midnight:
Osetra Caviar with Blinis and Crème Fraîche
Champagne

Posted by jeremy at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I've resolved to make chocolates for everyone this Christmas: my secretaries, my landladies, and Lisa's family. Last Christmas I made truffles, as I've done several times before, and brought them to Lisa's aunt's house as my contribution to dinner. In the intervening year, I've been to Jacques Torres' Chocolate in DUMBO (just a stone's throw from my last job as a clerk in the Brooklyn courthouse), and he's got a novel approach to specialty chocolates. Instead of the spheres or cups or bars one usually associates with such treats, Mr. Chocolate makes little squares of tasty fillings and enrobes them with chocolate.

This is pretty clever. You can basically spread your ganache or caramel or buttercream or what-have-you out in a big sheet, cool it, cut it at regular intervals, and then pour tempered chocolate over the pieces. Much more efficient than the traditional hand-rolling of ganache into little globes that then get rolled in cocoa powder or hand-dipped in tempered chocolate.

I plan on making six different varieties of chocolates, and have purchased six little throwaway rectangular aluminum pans -- which I will line with parchment -- to try to recreate the Torres System. Here's the menu:

• Raspberry-Dark Chocolate ganache coated with white chocolate
  
• Mint-Dark Chocolate ganache coated with dark chocolate
  
• Hazelnut-Dark Chocolate ganache coated with milk chocolate
  
• Spiced Rum Caramels coated with milk chocolate
  
• Lemon-White Chocolate cream coated with white chocolate
  
• Grand Marnier-Dark Chocolate ganache coated with dark chocolate
  

We'll see how many of these I actually get done tonight. I've already got all the ingredients, so from here on in it's just a question of willpower.

Posted by jeremy at 04:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Frost Street Dining Club has returned after a long hiatus. Since it hasn't been discussed on this blog before, a brief history is in order.

The third year of law school is a kind of limbo. In your first year, you're run through the gauntlet of the socratic method in the primal disciplines of Anglo-American law: contracts, torts, property, criminal law, and civil procedure. This is the process that supposedly teaches you to "think like a lawyer." Then in your second year, you take your grades from those classes and show them to potential employers, one or more of which will hopefully offer you a summer job on the basis therof. This happens in the fall. Unless you royally screw up your summer (or, in the case of public-sector jobs, unless adequate funding isn't available), this is probably the job you will take after graduating law school and taking the bar exam. Meanwhile, you are supposed to take courses that will introduce you to other substantive areas of the law, such as constitutional law, the law of corporations, tax law, antidiscrimination law, international law, administrative law, etc.

Of course, a couple of weeks actually practicing in these areas will teach you more than you'd ever learn in a semester of cold study. But we continue to hang around law school for a third year, because that's the way it's been since American universities foisted on us the peculiar notion that the study of law should be treated not as an undergraduate discipline to be followed by an apprenticeship, but as a post-graduate degree program. It is, of course, mere coincidence that this innovation allowed those very universities to squeeze an extra three years of tuition and fees from a segment of society particularly likely to be able to afford it. In short, the third year of law school is utterly superfluous as an academic matter. As a social/professional/extracurricular matter, it may not be, but the typical 3L will usually have a lot of free time on his or her hands.

By the middle of our interminable third year, my roommate Tony and I had spent a lot of this time cooking. We grew increasingly ambitious, until we got to the point where the dishes we wanted to make were too expensive for us to pay for ourselves. Rather than foot the bill for, say, a $100 whole foie gras of which we could only eat about 20%, we got the idea to spread the cost around by cooking for our friends, and asking them to chip in for the ingredients. We figured this was a win-win situation: we'd get to try our hands at cooking things we'd never be able to prepare just for ourselves, and our friends could enjoy an extravagant meal at a fraction of the price they would pay at a restaurant. Thus, the dining club was born.

We came up with this plan in February of our 3L year; by graduation we'd had three dinners in the living room of our apartment at 1 Frost Street in Cambridge. We brought the concept with us to New York, but work got in the way frequently and at inopportune times. In the past year and a half, we've held only one dinner and been forced to cancel another. But today we're back with a new menu. I just hope we can find all the ingredients we need. Anybody know where in the city a guy can find raw pig's feet?

Posted by jeremy at 09:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)