I started off the end of the week cookery with an interesting pasta preparation that I read about in the New York Times: spaghetti all-assassina, purportedly invented in the southern Italian city of Bari. The basic idea is that you water down and heat up some tomato sauce, put some olive oil in a pan, put uncooked spaghetti in the pan with the hot olive oil, put some of the watery tomato sauce in the pan so that the spaghetti begins to cook, add more if necessary to get the pasta slightly more uncooked than al dente and then let the water run out so that the barely-al-dente spaghetti gets a bit charred in the pan before you roll it up in a ball and serve it. Reader, it works and it’s really pretty easy to do. This is likely to make a return visit to the house, though it’s pretty splattery.
Friday I made a version of a poke bowl—quick-seared mostly raw tuna steaks sliced thinly over vegetables and rice with a soy sauce-centric dressing on top. I was kind of depressed as I started the rice to find out that I didn’t have any short-grain rice on hand, which is ideal for this. I go through rice much faster than any other grain in the house, which is both a function of making it often and when I make it, making a fair amount of it. It’s getting hard to find sushi-grade tuna around here—the fishmonger nearby mostly just carries tuna steaks that are ok for grilling or pan-frying but that I don’t think work as raw or mostly raw fish. Maybe we’re getting to the point where the global taste for sushi is pretty much spelling the end for tuna, as Sasha Issenberg (and others) have predicted. I remember as a kid thinking that raw fish was impossibly exotic. At my father’s urging, I tried it once when I was ten and thought it awful, then rediscovered it with great gusto about six years later, realizing that what I’d mostly tasted the last time was too much wasabi. But I also remember being stunned when visiting Long Island as a teenager and having a grilled tuna steak at an outdoor barbecue—it was so delicious and wholly unfamiliar. Up to that point, tuna was just that vile crap in a can, served with too much gloopy store-bought mayonnaise. So if tuna is the latest victim of our voraciousness, I’ll miss it greatly—which, I suppose, is a confession of the voracious preferences that have done it in.
Next up, I committed to making okonomiyaki, a Japanese dish I’d never made before and actually have never had in a restaurant either. I know about it, and I’d thought about doing it before. The NYT app had a recipe for it, and so did several of my cookbooks. Making it with thin-sliced pork belly would have required a trip to H-Mart and on this Saturday I was just too tired for that (it’s not so far as the crow flies, but driving up Baltimore Pike and then into Upper Darby is one of those dense-suburban drives where you gotta have your head in the game—a lot of traffic on a narrow road with retail and with a lot of required lane changes). So I decided to use some prosciutto I had in the fridge instead. That’s the whole point of the dish, according to every description I’ve ever seen—it’s an opportunity to use up some thinly-sliced whatevers you’ve got in the fridge. But basically, it’s a layered pancake (if you’re making the Hiroshima style of the dish) using batter made with dashi, the seaweed-and-smoked-tuna broth that’s at the heart of Japanese cuisine. Many versions use cabbage, pork belly, noodles and eggs—I more or less went with that only prosciutto instead. It came out great except that I think I used too many soba noodles so that layer was a bit too thick and a bit unsightly and maybe also kept one side of the batter from crisping up as much as I would have liked. Also a keeper scheduled for a return visit soon—I have a lot of ideas for other things that might go into it, and I think it’s a dish where technique plays a role in getting it just right.
I finished the weekend off with whole grilled chickens. This is a personal favorite of mine that I worked out years ago. A small amount of charcoal and wood at one end of a Weber grill, whole chickens with garlic and herbs (still going strong in my garden, but I think the end is in sight) under the skin, slow-cooked over a couple of hours. This time it took frustratingly longer than that because the chickens hadn’t completely defrosted when I started working with them, so we were all on the edge of being hangry by the time I plated some smoky (but not smoked) moist chicken along with some potatoes and squash and a small salad. I try to leave the weekend with at least one major leftover for a week-day meal and in this I succeeded—one of the two chickens is now waiting in the fridge for its starring role in a leftovers dish this week.