20 avril 2007
Manresa-Passard (5): the tao of Carrot
This chapter of the Manresa-Passard series will follow the path of carrots (and spinach) to two different dishes. So let us go back to Love Apple Farm and the woody Santa Cruz hills, where, early in the morning, David is picking rainbow carrots with the moral support of a quiet and attentive companion.
Young spinach is also gathered.
I suppose it's useless to comment on those lovely carrots' name.
Round, pale-colored heirloom carrots soon join their purple friends.
This morning's crop, including a large vat of fresh spinach, is sent to Manresa's kitchen. Vegetable cooking, says David, is so much maintenance! So much sorting, cleaning, washing, trimming, peeling, etc. There's far more work in a kitchen like Manresa's, devoted to vegetables as it is, than there is in a more carnivorous kitchen that, on the other hand, does not rely so much on home-grown products. A much overlooked fact.
I have a chance to fully realize that as I decide to wash, sort and trim the spinach. It is, indeed, the best way I have found to take pictures in the kitchen without being too much in the way. With both hands in cold water, I pick, tail and drain, and when I see something interesting, I quickly wipe my hands on my apron and click away.
For instance, I can take this portrait of Julie as she checks the vin jaune for the lobster broth.
And I can watch the preparation of all the carrots: this morning's crop for the dessert and other carrots for the purée.
The cleaned roots will be slowly boiled with rosemary sprigs under a protective layer of paper.
Julie blends and sieves the carrots.
Here is Alain Passard's amuse: spinach (my spinach!) with hazelnut oil, toasted sesame seeds, puréed carrots with orange juice.
And his dessert: carrots in araguani chocolate sauce.
15 avril 2007
Warning: durian inside!
They're as cute as can be, round, golden, endearing and apparently trustworthy. Well, handle them with care — they're loaded. These innocent-looking little cakes are potential bombs. They are filled, yes sir, with DURIAN! The little scales on the surface are supposed to make them look like a durian; like the sea-urchin's needles, like the rose's thorns, they are a natural code which means WATCH OUT, IT HURTS. Indeed, either you like durian, and in that case you like it a lot, or you don't like it, and that means you loathe it. So it's better to approach these sweet little things fully informed. You've been warned.
I found the recipe in a small book about Malay and Indonesian
pastries that I bought at Hong Kong airport. It looked challenging, so
I tried. Result: very good, a bit filling, with a soft crumbly buttery
pastry. Serve with lots of tea. Now I can say the recipe is really easy
as long as you don't make the durian paste at home. You have to use
sweet durian paste, which doesn't quite have the offensive flavor of
fresh durian, but retains much of its unmistakable, shall I say,
stench. Once a durian, always a durian.
Want to try?
Start by getting a tube of Thai durian paste
at any well-stocked Asian food market. A 200-gram tube will yield 18 to
20 small cakes. Open the tube and roll teaspoonfuls of the paste
between your palms in order to get about 20 small balls. Put them on a
plate, within hand's reach.
You will also need:
- To preheat your oven to 350 °F,
- To cover a cookie sheet with parchment paper,
- To put 100 g of softened butter and 2 tablespoons of icing sugar in a bowl. Beat them, using hand beater, until light and fluffy.
- Add the yolk of 1 large egg and keep beating like mad until you get a mayonnaise-like substance. Turn off beater.
- Using a spatula, add 150 g flour. When you have a smooth, yellow dough, you may refrigerate it for 15 minutes but I don't think that's really necessary.
Now you're ready to shape your cookies.
Take
a tablespoonful of cookie dough in your hand, roll it between your
palms into a round ball, then flatten it on your palm into a 6-7 cm
disk. Place a durian ball in the middle, then gather the edges of the
dough over the durian paste, covering it completely. Make a ball, roll
it between your palms and give it a slightly oval shape. Place it on
cookie sheet. Repeat the process with remaining ingredients.
Now
comes the fun part, the trickiest too: using the tip of fine scissors,
make little snips on the surface of cookies, making sure you don't
pierce the dough. The idea is to get small scale-like slits that will
make your cookies look like baby durians
and cute enough to make you feel like slapping them in the face or
covering them with big smooches, depending on your mood. But please
don't do that, they're fragile. Rather, brush them with beaten egg yolk
(with a few drops of cold water added) and bake them for 16 minutes
(that's my oven. In yours, it may be 15, or 17 minutes. You know those
tricks ovens like to play.) Cookies should be golden on top.
Let them sit outside of the oven for 5 minutes, then cool on racks.
13 avril 2007
Manresa-Passard (4): vegetable portraits
Before we go on with our menu, let us have a closer look at some of the wonderful vegetables grown by Cynthia Sandberg at Love Apple Farm for Manresa restaurant.
Purple kohlrabi, top and bottom parts.
Bok choy.
Parsnip tops, proudly wearing a few prunus petals.
Pea flowers.
Young potato plant growing in a bucket.
The flower shoots of an Italian type of broccoli.
And cabbage, the fractal-loving vegetable.
Romanesco.
(To be continued...)
11 avril 2007
Passage du Prado, Paris
Between the Gare de l''Est and the Grands Boulevards lies one of the most fascinating areas of Paris. To my knowledge, it has no particular name, sometimes it is referred to as "faubourg Saint-Denis", but it is actually located either way of the lower part of a street of that name. Past the Gare de l'Est and the Gare tu Nord, the street stretches out toward Montmartre in a different area. It is by no means elegant and bears not the slightest trace of gentrification, which makes it precious. It is still a business district — glass wholesale stores are nearby on rue de Paradis and for, I believe, centuries, there have been many leather workshops between faubourg Saint-Denis and Poissonnière. The leather industry has attracted, decades ago, a sizeable Turkish and Kurdish population. Who shares the neighborhood with North Africans, Chinese, Indians, Pakistanis, Carribeans and Africans further to the East on boulevard de Sébastopol (where you will also find an excellent Sichuanese restaurant, one of the few in Paris). It is probably the most ethnically diverse small neighborhood in Paris (not counting the suburbs). During the better part of the 20th century, this used to be a theatre district. It still is, with many of the theatres still active. The main landmarks are two triumphal arches erected by Louis XIV in the 17th century: porte Saint-Denis marking the beginning of rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis and porte Saint-Martin marking the beginning of rue du Faubourg-Saint-... (<-- insert proof of attention here). The place also bears relics of former waves of immigration: old Yugoslavian food shops are still there on rue du Château-d'Eau. Describing the many riches this neighborhood has to offer would definitely take too long.
In the Faubourg Saint-Denis, for ages, walls have been speaking. Kurdish political posters, concert announcements, always new but always pretty much in the same style. Not very food-oriented? We'll go back to food quite soon. But before that, we are going to talk about architecture.
"By the way, have you ever seen the passage du Prado?
— No..."
I
feel so lucky. I am actually going to introduce someone to this
extraordinary place. And I'm all the more certain that they will like
it that I know the place doesn't look like much from outside. Better
than that: it looks like nothing. It is not easy to spot from the street. But once inside, you get, so to say, a slap in the face.
This beautiful Art-Deco covered arcade is home to Turkish pizza places, Turkish coffee houses, Indian DVD stores, Pakistani pastry shops and restaurants, barbershops either Turkish or Indian, the latter adorned with a huge portrait of Sharukh Khan above the window, and even a Mauritian restaurant that looks pretty good. The arcade brilliantly sums up the whole neighborhood under its magnificent, intact, incredibly cruddy period glass ceiling from which hang some scrumptious glass-and-metal ornamented panels. All year round, rain or shine, the light is lovely in spite of the thick layer of greasy black dust caked on the ceiling elements. Or maybe not in spite of it — maybe partly because of it.
What do people go to the passage du Prado for? For a plate of rice and curried chickpeas, doused with fluorescent green chatni; for a close shave in one of the barbershops; for the latest Bollywood musicals (3 DVDs for 10 euros that day, all starring Sharukh, naturally); for a lahmacun (Turkish pizza) to nibble on; for a leisurely chat while fiddling with a string of beads; for a game of backgammon and a cup of coffee; but not for browsing, and certainly not for sightseeing. Not one tourist in sight, obviously. Now call it dirty, call it seedy or creepy if you will, but the passage du Prado is a goldmine, an artistic and social treasure, a finely tuned ecosystem — and I'd be very thankful to you if you never spoiled it for me. Don't come in by busloads to check if my description is correct. Be respectful, be discrete. Come alone, or by two or three. Do not disturb the fragile balance of this still unspoiled, unique place.
Indeed — how long will it go on? I do not know. It has been going on for quite some time and I'd be very happy to see it last a bit longer. As far as I know, it is the only covered arcade in Paris — at that level of architectural beauty — that has not yet been whitewashed, manicured, scraped, cleaned, gutted and scaled, gentrified, cutified, deprived of its immigrant population and converted into a shopping mall for rich people. Of course, a bit of cosmetic cleaning would do no harm. But just a bit. Please, do not overdo it. Do not murder my arcade. Do not expel the Turkish pizzaioli, the Indian barbers; do not let in Jean-Paul Gaultier, fashion magazine offices, Annick Goutal perfumes that smell of pricey hookers, Thai designer shops. I have nothing against those things — honest. But at least, leave that one to us, to the Parisian people. Run a mop through the ceiling panes if you will, but pray, do not change anything.
And as I write this, I know that, if the caudillo of the West suburbs gets regrettably elected as president, this arcade will have a lot to worry about. It will not be alone in that. The Karcher (one of his favorite words) is pointing its little head. Like everybody in France, I have to bear with the opinion polls continuously hammered into our heads and causing a slow, regular shooting pain. And although I have been courageously dealing with it as every French person has for months, I am beginning to feel a bit weak. I do know what polls are worth, especially with said caudillo being former head of the police (he has recently resigned but I do not believe it makes a difference), but the constant pressure from the outside world makes me now close to breakup. I am longing for the end of that election, while I am also increasingly dreading it.
Well, sad thoughts have never made things any better, I think as we finish our lunch of curried lamb on basmati rice at the Pakistani coffee shop. But it is true that these days, thinking of the Current Occupant (as Garrison Keillor calls him) getting ready to bomb Iran, and the certainty that nobody will be able to prevent that, well ça craint — a French way of expressing intense pessimism. Suddenly two small plates land on our table, laden with a delicate sweet pilau, probably made at the owner's home, brought in a plastic bag and distributed to everyone in the restaurant. Rainbow-colored, bursting with ghee and the smell of green cardamom, this small offering looks like a discrete encouragement not to lose hope.
09 avril 2007
Manresa-Passard (3) : the leek's path
We are still at Love Apple Farm, it is 9 AM and chef David Kinch is pulling young leeks out of the ground.
Just by the way, the leeks at the San Francisco farmers' market do not look quite the same. You cannot have it all: size and finesse. Thin young leeks, in French, are called "poireaux crayons" (pencil leeks) and, in Normandy, "porette" (doesn't translate).
Back to our pencil leeks, then. One of Cynthia's dogs is very proud to sit beside them for the picture, as if he had pulled them out of their patch himself.
Oh, here's the other one. They sort it out by the beet patch.
Back at Manresa, David does not waste time. He cleans and trims the leeks immediately.
A thorough wash...
Julie, Alain Passard's assistant, slits the leeks lengthwise to achieve, after cooking, a "millefeuille" effect.
By 8 PM, the result is on the tables: stewed young leeks in oyster juice.