The Daydream

When we couldn’t sleep or felt totally wronged by the college cafeteria, my college roommate, Val, and I would describe favorite dishes from favorite restaurants to each other.  Sounds a little torturous, I know, especially after we probably had some Sysco canned green beans for dinner.  But it always did the trick, Val and I would drift off with visions of crepes and sushi all through our heads.

Val grew up in Brookline and had another outpost in the West Village at her Dad’s house.  She had also spent a summer in Aix.  She had a delicious food list.  Mine wasn’t too bad either.  Baltimoreans don’t be so surprised. No other place has our crab cakes, steamed crabs, Tio Pepe’s pine nut roll, Mary Sue easter eggs, Italian pastry shops on Bel Air road, our cheesy Baltimore version of Little Italy, soft shelled crab sandwiches, mussels, Berger cookies, crab chips, the treasures inside Cross Street and Lexington Markets, shall I continue?  All of these items are unique to Baltimore.  Sure you can get a crab cake anywhere, but it probably doesn’t taste remotely as good as the ones in Baltimore.  And while you also might be able to ferret out a soft shelled crab I bet it’s in a restaurant with a white table cloth not on a piece of white bread at a diner in Remington for $5. And if you live in Baltimore I suspect you tend to take all of this for granted.  I did and now I spend my time trying to recreate many of these items.

One other Baltimore tradition is the shrimp salad sandwich.  Shrimp salad is always served at bridal showers, with a side of croissants from Costco.  But more traditionally it is served on white bread with lettuce and tomato.  Eddie’s of Roland Park is the bench mark for shrimp salad sandwiches.  Eddie’s is the bench mark for a lot of things, I don’t know any other grocery store where you can have a grown man follow you around the store and place items in your cart, because selecting groceries is that exhausting?  Their deli is amazing and run like science lab, exacting, precise and very, very serious.  And if they don’t actually wear lab coats they wear something extremely similar.  Whenever I visit Baltimore I make a point to get a shrimp salad sandwich from Eddie’s.  I daydream about this sandwich.

Like crab cakes, everyone in Baltimore has a shrimp salad recipe.  I have tried to make mine as much like Eddie’s as possible.  They manage to keep their shrimp whole, I find they stay on the bread better if cut in half lengthwise.  You can guarantee after all this talk I am having this sandwich for lunch today.

Shrimp Salad for Two

3/4 lb. shrimp (30-40 count shrimp)

1/4 cup mayonnaise

4 teaspoons diced celery

1 tablespoon green onion, green part only sliced thinly

1 teaspoon lemon juice

1/2 teaspoon Old Bay, or your preferred Chesapeake Bay seasoning

1/8 teaspoon dried parsley

1 tiny pinch celery seed

salt and pepper

Heat 1-2 cups of water to a boil over a steamer basket, add the shrimp and steam until just cooked, about 4 minutes.  Cool on ice.  When the shrimp are cool, peel and devein them, then slice (or not) them lengthwise.  Combine the shrimp and the remaining ingredients and chill for 1 or up to 24 hours.

Fideos!

So I just discovered Amanda Hesser’s food blog. A food blog for food bloggers (or the food obsessed); I am addicted. It's full of useful information, arranged in a usable and fun way. Every week they have a contest. Last week’s was for Halloween treats. They haven’t announced the winner yet but I’m routing for the cook that made severed finger cookies, with fake blood and almonds for finger nails. (!)

This week’s contest is for paella. I’m not a big rice fan so I submitted fideos. I’m also not a culinary anthropologist either but my understanding is fideos are more commonly used in Southern Spain, feel free to correct me. My friend George introduced me to them while we were in Spain. To me they really have a better flavor as well. So, no big story here, check out the website and check out my recipe.

Smoky Seafood Fideos - Serves 4

1 - 7 ounce bag fideos (or broken angel hair pasta)

2.5 cups seafood stock

1 cup white wine

1/2 cup water or vegetable broth

1 medium Spanish onion, chopped

3 cloves garlic, smashed

1 teaspoon smoked paprika

1 teaspoon dried oregano

1 bay leaf

1 pinch cayenne

1 nutmeg seed - 5 shavings across a mircoplane

1 - 14 ounce can diced fire roasted tomatoes

200 mg ground saffron (or medium sized pinch of threads)

1 bay leaf

salt + pepper

12 clams

12 mussels

12 shrimp

3 squid tubes cut in to rings

1/2 cup frozen peas

3 tablespoons parsley

1 lemon

Olive oil

salt and pepper

Coat a pan in olive oil, over medium/low heat add fideos and sautee until they become a warm brown color, about 6-7 minutes, using a slotted spoon remove them from the pan and set aside. Reduce the heat add more olive oil to the pan, if needed, add onion and sautee for 5 minutes until almost translucent, add garlic and sautee for another 3 minutes. Add in smoked paprika, oregano, cayenne and sautee for another minute. Increase the heat to medium add tomatoes and bring to a simmer for 3 minutes, shave in nutmeg, return the fideos to the pan and simmer for 5 minutes. Meanwhile bring stock, wine, water and bay leaf to a boil in another pot, reduce to simmering, adding the seafood one species at a time and removing from the pan and reserving. In the stock cook shrimp 2-3 minutes until just pink, squid 1-2 minutes until just prior to opaque, clams a maximum of 6 minutes, discard unopened ones, mussels up to 4 minutes, discard unopened ones. Allow broth to return to a slow boil in between batches. Remove seafood and set aside. Add the saffron to broth and let ‘bloom’ for 2 minutes. Turn the heat off of the broth. Slowly add stock, in 3-4 batches (like risotto) to the fideos , let simmer with broth about 20 minutes, when the pasta has reached desired consistency add in peas and seafood, reheat seafood, let steam for 2 minutes covered. Prior to serving squeeze the lemon over the ‘paella” and sprinkle with parsley. Serve.

Trash Talk

I am not interested in your chocolate layer cake, your brownies or your doughnut, at all. But I will gladly take your anchovies. Or your sardines. I have spent this entire summer bingeing on taramosalata. Working out for an extra 10 minutes so I can reward myself with a handful of crackers, slathered, no, piled high, in salty, pink bliss. Quite simply, I love trashy fish.

We are headed to Monterey at the end of this month for our friends’ Danny and Kasia’s wedding. We are really looking forward to the wedding, wine tasting, a climate different than that of Venus, and the Eden that is California and its delicious food. Jim and I are somehow very lucky to travel to Northern California every late summer/fall and we wine taste and we eat too much and we laugh until we hurt and we drive windy roads and we look around at all the kooky flora and we truly relax. It’s a tradition I hope never ends.

So we are dreaming of our impending vacation. Yesterday Jim asked me if I had read this month’s Bon Appetit article about Monterey. I had not. He said he left the magazine open to the first page of the article. This morning I checked it out, first item on the menu - grilled sardines - yum. I really didn’t need to go any further. But it also said that since fresh sardines are rare in this country outside of this part of California, true, I have never seen them here, they had a cheat method for those without fresh sardines - a sardine dip instead. We were in luck! I had all the ingredients needed just downstairs.

Jim’s kids are good about eating. They aren’t too fussy and we don’t feed them kid food, (which in my opinion should be banned) they eat what we eat and they really enjoy it. Occasionally an item comes up that might be skeptical, like snails. Jim’s son wouldn’t touch them but his daughter popped three right in her mouth and smiled and said ‘yum!’ I’m not sure if she did this to irritate her brother or she genuinely liked them. I don’t care, she ate them. She also likes eel and ikura. Jim’s son was given a surprise this Sunday when I made a snack plate of various whats-its for visiting friends and he asked if he could have some. I made him a kid sized plate of what we were eating, he came back for more and my friend Jessica asked ‘How were the eggs? ‘What eggs?’ ‘The fish eggs.’ Frowny face. Taramosalata not so good all of a sudden. So I made the sardine dip last evening and I thought it was pretty good but Jim’s son told me and made a point to tell me how awesome he thought it was, again and again, and ate so many servings Jim had to tell him to stop before he ruined his dinner. And we told him it had sardines in it and everything was OK. Jim really liked it too.

Sardine Dip - Serves 4 as an appetizer - adapted from Bon Appetit

1 can boneless sardines packed in oil

2 tablespoons chopped Spanish onion

2 tablespoons chopped parsley

2 tablespoons chopped cilantro

salt and pepper

Juice of 1/2 a lemon

1 tablespoon olive oil

Combine the first five ingredients in a food processor, turn on, stream in oil and lemon juice, scrape down sides, turn on again. Serve with table water crackers.

Notes : Good with a dry white wine.

Mayo Wars

Mayonnaise.

Your response was either ‘yuck’ or ‘yum’. I don’t know anyone ambivalent about mayo. I love the stuff and have been known to eat a scoop-full straight from the jar. The people that love it are seriously devoted to one brand or another. My friend Tom likes Dukes - yellow top, my friend Jayme swears by regular Kraft although she has been making rumblings about switching to the olive oil variety. I’m a traditionalist, I ride in the Hellman’s car. I know this seemingly useless information because people like to talk about their preferred mayonnaise and it’s superiority.

Mayonnaise lovers have an acute disdain for those who like Miracle Whip. They like to talk about ‘those people’ while pontificating about their brand. If you happen to be talking to someone who likes a different brand of mayo than yours, you can be certain you have a brother in arms when it comes to mutual sentiments about those Whip eaters. If a sandwich spread war broke out you’d band together to fight them, unified in self-righteous indignation.

But I have a confession, Jim is in The Whip camp. This is equal to me being a Capulet and Jim a Montague. It just isn’t done, and if it is, it clearly has tragic results. It’s embarrassing when my other mayo lover friends open our fridge to get a beverage and say ‘What is THIS?’ I turn a blind eye to it and hope the other condiments don’t catch what it has. To me, it is the I Can’t Believe it’s Not Butter of mayonnaises. White Jello with a bad after taste. If you are near a jar, open it up, give it a shake, watch it jiggle.

I can ignore Jim’s fetish most of the time except when he gets careless and his inner Ohioan can hide no more. He makes this dish called banana salad. It contains: Miracle Whip, sugar, bananas, milk and food coloring. I dared to ask him ‘What color is it?’ The reply, ‘ Depends on the holiday.’ I’m not making this up, I’ve seen it. And it’s not nice to make fun of people either; apparently it’s a regional delicacy. Oh and he relishes eating it - smirking, making noises, staring right at me the whole time knowing I’m squirming, as if he had just plucked a dog turd out of the yard and tossed it his mouth. Now the reason Jim doesn’t like mayo is because as a kid some cruise staffer told him a bowl of mayo was banana pudding, so you can imagine his shock and horror when he dug in. But that just makes his love of that banana salad thing more baffling.

I have heard homemade mayo is totally different than anything we purchase in the grocery store. I know making your own mayo sounds very Martha Stewart on a tear to complicate your life but I looked up Julia Child’s recipe today and it takes almost as much time to make as getting that ridiculous plastic seal off of the jar. And, yes, it is different. I’ll see what Jim thinks when he gets home.

Cod Cakes with Tartar Sauce - Makes 8 patties

1 1/2 lbs. cod

2 eggs - lightly beaten

2 celery ribs - chopped finely

1 shallot - chopped finely

1/2 cup panko

1 tablespoon Old Bay

1/2 teaspoon celery salt

2 teaspoons chopped parsley

1/4-1/2 teaspoon each dried dill and thyme, or fresh if you have it

Saute celery and shallot in olive oil until just translucent, set aside to cool. Cut the cod into large chunks, pulse in a food processor until flaky but not mutilated. Combine dry ingredients in a bowl. Add the eggs to the cod and fold in celery and shallot mixture. Add cod mixture into dry ingredients. Thoroughly mix and shape into 8 patties, place on wax paper and covered in fridge until you are ready for them. Pan sear them in olive oil about 2 minutes per side until they have a decent brown crust. Finish in a 400 degree oven for 10-12 minutes. Serve with tartar sauce.

Mayonnaise - adapted from Mastering the Art of French Cooking - makes about 1 cup

2 egg yolks at room temperature

1 cup olive oil

2 tablespoons lemon juice at room temperature

Place the eggs in a blender, turn on low and start to stream in a couple tablespoons of olive oil. Turn up the speed to medium, as Julia says ‘for whipping cream’ and continue to stream in oil, add in lemon juice. You’ll know when it’s done, it will have the consistency of mayonnaise. The whole blending process shouldn’t take but a minute, minute and a half.

I used my homemade mayo with this tartar sauce recipe from epicurious.com.

Summertime Blues

I woke up yesterday morning and awaited the arrival of my newspaper. No one likes to wait for the Sunday paper. When it arrived at 7:40 I dug through it like a cat in a litter box. The magazine is always the first section I want for the recipe/food related article somewhere near the center but not always. I ripped open the magazine searched either side of the Obama article to find Sam Sifton had put my national dish on the menu, spread out lasciviously like a centerfold. Steamed crabs. Oh Sam - how could you do it?

I had two issues with the article I had not yet read. Firstly, I HAD to have steamed crabs for dinner - somehow. Secondly, I was afraid to read Sam’s article. Saying you like Sam Sifton presently is equal to bringing up religion or politics at a cocktail party but I DO like him and I did not want to stop liking him because of his steamed crab article and subsequent recipe.

I’m an ex-pat Marylander and more specifically 3rd generation Baltimorean. We take our crabs as seriously as a Philadelphian regards Cheesesteaks, a Chicagoan hot dogs and BBQ just about anywhere. It’s a hot topic widely disputed in the region alone.

I eyeballed Sam’s article. I got another cup of coffee, read the travel section, caught up with Bill Cunningham, scanned the front section for my friend Keith’s pictures from India, thumbed the magazine again and decided to go for it. I was impressed. Sam had done his homework. I even wondered to myself had Sam grown up in Maryland? And that article, even his recipe, which I don’t entirely agree with, only made my need for steamed crabs more pronounced.

It’s hard to find a decently sized blue crab in Atlanta, we have them but they are usually too small for the amount of effort involved in order to feed yourself., I once found what we in Maryland would call ‘mediums’ at the fish monger in the Sweet Auburn Curb Market. Another time we had them flown in from Maryland for my birthday, but they were already cooked, so there was no thrill of piping hot crabs. Usually what I do when the urge is too much to ignore is I go Your DeKalb Farmer’s Market and buy Dungeness crabs. They don’t have the briny sweet flavor of Blue crabs but they are a heck of a lot easier to pick. And who I am to complain?

Maryland Style Steamed Dungeness Crabs - Serves 2

1 beer - preferably an ale

11/2 cups water

1/2 cup vinegar, white or cider

(2) 1 1/2 - 2 lb. Dungeness crabs (alive)

1 cup J.O. or Old Bay Seasoning (I prefer J.O. myself but Old Bay is more accessible)

Notes - I buy the crabs as close as possible to the time I am going to cook them. I put them in the sink until I’m ready for them. Really they are fine there for a couple hours, do not put them in the fridge. They should be alive when you cook them. Get a large pot put in the beer, water and vinegar, bring to a boil, add more liquid if needed, put in the crabs and sprinkle with half the seasoning and steam for 20 minutes. Halfway through cooking I turned the crabs over and covered them with the remaining seasoning. Let them cool for about 3-5 minutes prior to eating them.

How to pick a crab is as hotly disputed as how to cook them. I’ll refer you to YouTube, there are several videos there. Mentioned in the videos I watched, although not stressed, is do not eat the lungs. Yes, ‘lungs’, not ‘gills’ if you want to sound like a native. The lungs are just beyond the outer shell and are feathery and triangular. Otherwise everything else in there is consumable. Even the ‘mustard’ as the guts are called. Some people consider it a delicacy, some people think it’s gross. If you don’t like it just scoop it out.

If you want to be authentic about your meal serve it with white corn, specifically Silver Queen, a tomato or cucumber salad or if you’re at the family reunion macaroni salad and deviled eggs. Beer is THE drink, an ale and again, if you’re going for authenticity, it should be a Natty Boh (PBR can substitute) or a Rolling Rock.