Gastrodome: Easy Living

Tuesday's Child Is Full of Grace

I always have ambitions to write up a storm the day after my grades are turned in, but it usually takes me two weeks to really get going. Often that’s because there’s holdover business from the academic year, especially in years where I’m department chair, but also because it’s only at that moment that I allow myself to fully take in how worn down I feel. So it’s a few weeks of cooking, reading, arguing with friends about academia, and so on before I get back into the guts of some manuscripts.

This year I went from hobnobbing with a famous author at graduation,

hanging out in the backyard at Alumni Weekend reading and hanging out with a few alums,

to doing some cooking.

First off was my first attempt at poutine. I made a gravy from a chicken-feet broth and a schmaltz-based roux. I confess I’ve only had it once, a restaurant version that I didn’t think was very good, but it’s suddenly become easy to find cheese curds in markets, which made me think again of this famous Canadian delicacy, eh. I thought my version was pretty good—better, at least, than the restaurant one.

Speaking of things that are becoming easy to find, more and more Korean fried chicken places are popping up in this region. They’re pretty close to Taiwanese fried chicken when they’re good, but without the basil and a few other touches. Unfortunately a fair number of the ones I’ve tried have not been so good. This one, Soko Bag, in Phoenixville PA, was quite good—worth going out of your way. Phoenixville generally is kind of a nice town. If I were going to live in Philadelphia’s northern suburbs, it would probably be my top pick of a downtown to live in, though I also like Ambler’s little strip of stores and restaurants.

My next big effort was one of those spontaneous total guesswork meals. I had some lamb stew cubes, I wanted to make a kind of curry preparation, but I also had a fair amount of puff pastry in the freezer and I wanted to free up some room. So I kind of worked my way through what I had and it came out pretty well. I cooked broth and wine with a roux, a mirepoix of onion, garlic and carrot and and a Kashmiri-style curry mix, added the browned lamb cubes once it thickened just a bit, and let that stew for a while. Then I put that in puff pastry, added some zucchini and turnip, and baked it until the pastry browned. Given the amount of unplanned half-assery involved, it came out pretty damn good.

Next up, I had some chicken livers that urgently needed to be used. I often make a chicken liver pate with them but this time I wanted to try something new, working against a skeptical table of wary eaters. I went with a Michael Solomonov recipe for grilling them with onions and grapes, which required an overnight draining from being coated with salt and baharat. I hedged my bets by making some skirt steak bits in garlic butter and a tomato-cucumber salad. Two out of three of us liked the livers, so that’s a win, and everybody liked the skirt steak, so nobody was left hungry.

I wanted to remake some pesto-and-ground chicken meatballs we’d had recently from the New York Times cooking app, but one of my diners doesn’t like meatballs but does like patties. I was not going to contest the complicated gustatory semantics involved in that preference, so patties it was, with some harissa and a pistachio-based pesto that I made and a salad on top, in bread. The size and shape passed muster and I think the flavor did also.

For Father’s Day I got up early to try a new recipe for sweet buns with a kind of sugar-cocoa crust. These, I gotta say, did not work at all. They didn’t really rise properly and had a texture more like a biscuit, and the crust did not function at all like the recipe described it. They weren’t terrible, but they weren’t good.

I was the lucky recipient of a dinner made by my family, however, and that worked spectacularly well—a variant on mac-and-cheese from the NYT app that combined the dish with the components of French onion soup.

With that happy memory, back I go into the manuscript!