Work in progress: Val

Going South on Friday

Friends Adrie and Josh are in town from the Netherlands and we thought we’d treat them to some American southern-style home cooking on Friday night. Shellfish and pork are off the table, but I’m stewing up some chicken and dumplings. (I made the dish pictured here on my recent visit to mom’s.) So here’s the menu for Friday. Josh and Adrie, bring your traveling companion and y’all come!

Starters
Fried Green Tomatoes with a Remoulade Slaw

Main
Chicken and Dumplings
Broccolini Vinaigrette
Roasted Beet and Onion Salad
Green Peas

Dessert
Lemon Marmalade Tart with Fresh Whipped Cream

Champagne, Abita Beer, Iced Tea, Coffee and Chicory

Buon Cinquantesimo, Mark Matassa

Five-oh! Val and I are honored and excited to be cooking a dinner to celebrate Mark Matassa’s fiftieth birthday. Michelle and Mark are visiting us on this, his birthday weekend — and that’s like a gift to us. Here’s a sneak peek at the menu, then I have to run back to the small hurricane of preparation.

PS: This was the opportunity I’ve been waiting for. I’ve been looking for an excuse to get my stand mixer for years — and making the Lemon Marmalade Tart gave me all the justification i need! The longed-for machine arrives today. Buon Cinquantesimo to me!

Tanti Auguri, Mark Matassa

cocktails
crostini misto
peperoni ripieni
bombay sapphire

antipasti
insalata fruitti di mare
oranges in harissa
crostino with manchego and tomato
crémant de bourgogne

primo piatto
risotto parmigiano with roasted bison marrow bones
brunello di montalcino

sorbet

secondo piatto
swordfish steak with a sauce of sweet pea greens
fried purple potatoes with cayenne aioli
broccolini vinaigrette
portalupi bianco

formaggio
pecorino and honey
absinthe

dolce
lemon marmalade tart with fresh whipped cream
coffee

The Solstice wreath 2009

Val gets his herring

Last week here in the Netherlands, Val and I went to the terrific Kröller-Müller Museum — a small but wonderful museum with a powerful collection and a famous sculpture garden situated in a national park. (more about that soon) It is near the little town of Otterlo, which like all little towns near national parks, caters to visitors with lodging and souvenirs and eateries.

On the way in, we spotted a large seafood-vending truck and on the way out we stopped to let Val sample the new herring, which by all accounts, is especially good this year — fat and delicious.

Val perused the case. It had all kinds of fish, shellfish and langoustines, some to be taken away, others to be prepared on the spot. He ordered one piece of herring, which came with diced white onions on a little silvered-paper plate.

He downed it country-style: grasping the tail, tilting his head back and dropping it into his mouth for a big bite. This won him an approving smile from the locals, who had watched with a mild curiosity to see how the buitenlanders would manage the local delicacy. (In Amsterdam, they serve herring cut into pieces, with toothpicks)

The review: Val is already back in the states, but he e-mailed me this description of his herring experience.

The vendor had skinned and boned the herring — the head was off, the spine removed and the two filets held together only by the tail and a small piece of backbone. The fish was slippery — it’s very fatty — so it took a couple of tries and a firm grip to hold it by the tail and raise it into the air. The white onions provided just the right sharp counterpoint to the smooth, fatty, salty, fishy flavor of the raw fish. One bite and I had about half of it — the meat was soft, with a nice texture. A couple of chews, then the other half. Great snack (but left my fingers smelling of fish), all that was missing was a cold beer! I wish we could get these at home.

Here’s a little video in English about this year’s new herring from Radio Netherlands Worldwide. Watch it to learn more about the fish, how it is cured, how it became a national delicacy, how it is prepared and eaten.

Pictures from a walk in the polder

This beautiful place is directly behind our host’s home — it is working agricultural land and a nature preserve with public hiking trails. More on polders in this cool wikipedia entry — scroll down to learn polders’ role in democracy in the Netherlands.

Foodie Amsterdam: a hit and a big miss

Whenever we visit Amsterdam, we like to get a rijstaffel — a Netherlandish-Indonesian tasting feast of 25 or so small dishes, served in three waves from mildly spiced to hot. It is wonderful to dig into the little dishes, savor tender meats in complex sauces of peppers, vinegars, coconut milk, lemon grasses, curries, citrus, fermented pastes, more — this one tangy, this sweet, this charred and smokey, this one dark and roasty. The pleasure of discovery and the pleasure of the palette and the ambling nature of the meal, as tray after tray of little plates arrives, make great rijstaffel more of an experience than a dinner. At a good one, time seems to suspend a little and the whole evening takes on a happy charm.

But not this time. Finding, sadly, that the restaurants we enjoyed in our visits 10 and 20 years ago were no more, we opted for one recommended by New York Times food critic and PBS food show host Mark Bittman. I’d watched and read the cranky Bittman often — he seemed to know his stuff, has eaten and written about food and ingredients from all over the world, and I figured that I would not go wrong with his advice. But I did.

The restaurant he recommended — Tempo Doeloe — fell absolutely flat. The meats were bland and tough, tasting for the most part as if they had been boiled in one big vat of broth and then placed in ramekins with some thin, particularly unspectacular sauces spooned over them. The meal was not served in stages, but was brought out all at once. There were frozen vegetables and canned shrimp, tasteless soggy tomatoes. Too many dishes smelled and tasted the same as others. There wasn’t one thing that surprised or delighted me, not one thing that was any better than takeout I could get in Long Beach. I suspect that Tempo Doeloe was aimed smack at the American family seated at the table next to us who asked for a rice table of all mild dishes and especially no goat meat, but it was a total miss for us. And as this was the splurge meal of the trip — and because I have tasted what a real rijstaffel can be — it was a real let down.

It did provide us with a great excuse to walk around old Amsterdam at sunset and that was the highlight of the evening.

Earlier this week, we had a foodie hit when we had some really good Belgian-style fried potatoes with traditional mayonnaise sauce. In the densely touristed shopping area off the Helligeweg at Voetboogstraat 13 is Vleminckx Sausmeesters, a Beglian Frittes stand that claims to have been in business since 1887 and at this location since 1958. There’s always a line for these perfectly-cooked-crisp-on-the-outside-tender-on-the-inside potatoes that are fried in quickly-consumed batches and served in paper cones with a generous helping of one of a dozen or more sauces — from traditional mayo, to ketchup, satay and sambal. We picked up a couple of small orders and were not disappointed. (In fact it was our second visit to the stand — Josh brought us there on our first day in.) A worth-the-wait cone of street food perfection.

A view of the new Amsterdam Hermitage Museum

Where the Herengracht meets the Amstel: a view of the new Hermitage museum. It has been one of those rigorous museum-going days. Fun and tiring. Too beat to elaborate tonight. For now, this picture.

Pictures of Giethoorn

Before they left for vacation, Josh and Adrie took us for a stroll in Giethoorn, a tiny village that Adrie has been visiting since childhood. The village was founded in 1230 by fugitives from “regions bordering the Mediterranean” who set about excavating local peat, creating lakes and canals and building houses on the resulting islands. These they connected with arched bridges, which they’re still doing today. The original settlers found many horns of wild goats, which historians say had probably died in 1170 during the St. Elizabeth’s flood. They called their town Goat Horn: Giethoorn. Learn more here.

Today, Giethoorn is visited by many travelers, but we were lucky, and in the drizzle we had the walkways and cafe practically to ourselves. Here are a few of our pictures from a rainy-day stroll in Geithoorn.

Ploughman’s lunch and a day of rest

Our sweet hosts are off on vacation — leaving us with paid transit passes and coupons for museum entrance (!) — and we took a quiet day to enjoy our peaceful Amstelveen digs and plan our sightseeing. Today we went to the market to pick up some local meats and cheese and Val prepared a take on a Dutch ploughman’s lunch. He paired dark brown fries roggebrood (pumpernickel) with Dutch butter and aged Gouda cheese, and a grainy wheat bread with zonnepit (sunflowers seeds) with mild goat cheese, Cobergham and Ossenworst.

Cobergham is a mild smoked ham of this region of Europe. We got it in glassy thin slices.

Ossenworst is a sausage originating in Amsterdam in the 17th century — when as the world’s powerhouse trading center, it had spices and steers in abundance. Traditionally, aged steer meat — coarse-ground and mixed with pepper mace and nutmeg — was smoked so slowly and gently, it created a sausage which is essentially still raw. Our still-tasty, but mass-produced, supermarket version was made of lean beef and was probably not aged. Later this week, are going to try to find one of the Amsterdam butchers who still make the sausage the old fashioned way.

Also on the menu: cucumber and butter sandwich, olives, a doughnut peach, a small cherry tart and Cotes du Rhone.

Later we walked through the polder (more on this tomorrow) with its profusion of wildflowers and birds, sheep and calves. And of course, there was an afternoon nap. And, a roasted chicken for dinner. Tomorrow, more countryside exploration.

Rainy Day Cafe Splurge

Gieterse soes met advocaat.

Dinner on the Amstel

We survived a sleepless Atlantic transit … to arrive safe and sound at Amstelveen with a great welcome from Josh and Adrie. We have managed with a small nap to hold off sleep until 11 p.m. So for now, just a picture of the view from our dinner table. And a promise of more to come.

Recipe request: ChickenTonite

Friend Janice wrote this morning to say she’s been following my ongoing DinnerTonight tweets and likes the look of our roast chicken. How do we get such golden brown tender roasty goodness? Here’s the technique:

Preheat the oven to 500° Using cooking shears, cut out the backbone of the chicken and lay it out flat, skin side up, on a baking sheet. Tuck the wings under the body. Sprinkle the skin liberally with coarse salt — no oil. The salt helps the skin crisp, so don’t be skimpy. Roast the chicken at 500° for 15 to 20 minutes, until the skin is crisp and golden. Pull the chicken out of the oven and turn down the heat to 425°. Surround the chicken with thick-sliced red onion and other vegetables (or fruit — grapes or pears are great) and return it to the oven for 30 to 45 minutes until the leg pulls easily away from the body.

Enjoy!

Passover, 2009

Here is our beautiful Passover as guests of Josh and Ardrie — with Judy and Laurie. To see a slideshow of all the pictures, click here.

The company was wonderful and the food was INCREDIBLE — Judy’s light and delicious Matzo Ball Soup (she makes floaters!), Adrie’s superlative homemade chopped liver and delightful — and figgy — haroset, Josh’s perfectly cooked lamb — and a matzo and chocolate dessert cake that was like candy.

And Adrie’s mini-haggadah was perfect! And when all the boys sang the traditional songs, it was very beautiful. I hope next year we can all be together again!

Thank you Josh and Adrie for a wonderful Pesach!

Garden snail

Dandelion

I spent this Sunday at the bulldog beauty contest

I took 1,500 pictures at the Long Beach Bulldog Beauty Contest today. It was such a cool scene, with hundreds of ugly/beautiful dogs and about a thousand people — big guys with long-shorts and tattoos, white-haired grannies with sweaters that matched their dogs, leather-clad dudes whose dogs had spiked collars, arty couples, tanned stylish ladies, 20-something girls that cooed at every puppy, little kids that looked the big-headed dogs eye-to-eye, people in wheelchairs, who rested their hands on stout companions — everybody smiling, feeling connected by their snorty lovable friends. Lots of tightly-curled tails wagging. I was on assignment for Seal Beach Daily, where I’ve posted a slideshow of photos. It was a wonderful, gentle, exhausting day.

Schoog

Much to my surprise, I got a great reaction to my entry in the Superbowl Chili Cookoff we had at work on Friday. I entered in the Salsa category (the others being Chili, obviously, and Guacamole) with a Yemenite recipe called schoog* that my Mom used to make — Yemeni Jews brought it to Israel, where it’s quite popular with falafel. I tied with another entrant in the popular vote; she won the judges’ vote (the organizer quipped that they went for the American salsa. Heh.) But people kept saying good things about it, and several asked me for the recipe, so here it is:

* pronunciation: the ch in schoog is a voiceless velar fricative or, informally, a hard ch, like in loch, Bach or Channukah. In other words, it sounds like ‘K’ ;-)

Another take off

Here at last is the re-designed Night Note, which we hope will accommodate lots of entries and big, beautiful photographs in the year to come.

It has been a busy Fall and holiday here on Covina Ave. Since the Global Economic Meltdown, gone is the season for being a philosopher-artist burrowing her way slowly into the heart of paint. This is a season for readiness. This is a season for keeping the tools sharp. A time to work.

And since the beginning of October, we have been working full-throttle. In the last week in November, Val and I and partner Donna Wares launched Seal Beach Daily — a hyperlocal news project. Think: an online publication — updated multiple times a day — with a mad devotion for one little corner of the world, for its lost pets and city council meetings, for its beach clean ups and Christmas tree lightings, its traffic jams and cable company woes and artists and food and sales tax revenues and what its people have to say.

It’s going great — glowing feedback, good numbers, advertisers, regular contributors, an encouraging community — but it is an all-consuming job. Want to jump into the hyperlocal game? Be ready to get your work on. Be ready to do it all: report it, write it, shoot it, code it, sell it, track it, love it into existence. And you better get yourself an exceptional partner or two, because it is not a one worker business.

So we’re working very hard to start a new business in an historic economic downturn, to be journalists during an historic meltdown of the newspaper industry, to do something satisfying for a living, when most people are just glad to have a job. But, since it has quickly become such a central thing in my life, there will be plenty of time to write about all that in the months to come.

For now, I’m so glad we managed to squeeze in the long overdue Night Note redesign. New: the “latest tweet” in the sidebar in my latest Twitter post. Foodie friends will note I post a picture of our dinner every night on Twitter. And for browsing fun, there’s a continuously updated list of suggested web reads. I’m determined to get posting here into the big blogging mix, so keep an eye on this space.

Above: An osprey photographed taking off at the Seal Beach Pier, the picture originally appeared with this post at Seal Beach Daily.

A perfect Thanksgiving for two

Over 23 years, we’ve done the holidays every which way. Boisterous parties, dinners for twelve, warm family gatherings, once with South Park on in the background and plates set aside for the newspaper late-shifters, once in a black velvet cocktail dress. This year we were in pajamas. Just Val and me in snuggly holiday bliss. It was a quiet and modest celebration, in keeping with the serious and sort anxious season the world — and so we — are in right now.

We spent the day cooking and playing Little Big Planet — this year’s selection for the Cohen Holiday Gaming Season — and at sunset we served up our Thanksgiving roast duck with acorn squash and figs, oyster dressing, Chinese broccoli sauteed with anchovies, sweet potato puree with labne and ginger. We broke out a bottle of the good stuff and gave great thanks for all the goodness in our lives.

NightNote readers, friends, family, wandering strangers, you are on our list! We are thankful for you and hope that your far-flung celebrations were as warm, wonderful and reassuring as our own. Happy Thanksgiving!