Fergus Henderson's Roast Bone Marrow and Parsley Salad

[Yes I saw this dish properly prepared on No Reservations too and learned that I overcooked it, rendering the marrow. That's probably why my marrow didn't have a lot of flavor to it. I've finally gotten my hands on some more marrow bones and made it again with rather better results. I bought a new camera in the meantime so I have much better pictures too. I'm going to put them in a new post so click here to take a look.]

If you watch any foodie-centric television (as opposed to the ever more downmarket Food Network) that name should seem familiar to you. Any time a foodie show travels to London they stop by Henderson's restaurant St. John and talk to him about his single-handed revival of country English cooking using all the other bits of the animal than what you normally eat. And if you've been watching reruns of Anthony Bourdain's old series Cooks Tour then just a few weeks ago you saw him calling this particular recipe his choice for his death-row meal.

Henderson popping up all over the place inspired my recent declaration that I want to cook and eat more organ meat (and my resulting disappointment at how little I've found available). Well, that and most of a bottle of wine. The latter is a general requirement for most of my declarations. Anyway, I'm pleased to have found that Whole Foods carries marrow bones and to have found Henderson's recipe on-line. So here's my chance to see what all the fuss is about. I'll let Fergus give you the details:

Roast Bone Marrow and Parsley Salad
from The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating, by Fergus Henderson

- serves four

twelve 3-inch pieces of veal marrowbone [the packaging my marrowbones came in doesn't actually say what animal it came from. It's about veal-sized though]
a healthy bunch of flat-leaf parsley, leaves picked from the stems
2 shallots, peeled and very thinly sliced
1 modest handful of capers (extra-fine if possible)

Dressing:
juice of 1 lemon
extra-virgin olive oil
a pinch of sea salt and freshly ground pepper
a good supply of toast
coarse salt

Put the marrowbone pieces in an ovenproof frying pan and place in a hot 450 degree (F) oven. The roasting process should take about 20 minutes depending on the thickness of the bone. You are looking for the marrow to be loose and giving, but not melted away, which it will do if left too long (traditionally the ends would be covered to prevent any seepage, but I like the coloring and crispness at the ends).

Lightly chop your parsley, just enough to discipline it, mix it with the shallots and capers, and at the last moment, dress the salad.

Here is a dish that should not be completely seasoned before leaving the kitchen, rendering a last-minute seasoning unnecessary by the actual eater; this, especially in the case of coarse sea salt, gives texture and uplift at the moment of eating. My approach is to scrape the marrow from the bone onto the toast and season with coarse sea salt. Then a pinch of parsley salad on top of this and eat. Of course once you have your pile of bones, salad, toast, and salt it is diner’s choice.
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That's the way I like my recipes: conversational and explanatory. But enough of that, you want to know if it really was the exquisite experience I was promised. And the answer is: not really. The marrow didn't have much character and was usually overshadowed by the parsley salad. And by itself it paled beside a good butter. It wasn't bad, mind you, but a death row meal choice it was not. I suppose I might have got sub-standard marrowbones. They were previously frozen; maybe that affects the taste. If I'm going to stuff myself with toast and fat, I'd rather have the buttered breakfast turnips that I made last month. I don't think that's quite a death row meal either, but if I had a week left I think I could find a spot for it.

mafé - groundnut tomato stew

If you watched Top Chef this week you'll have seen one of the judges, Chef Tom Colicchio, repeatedly disparaging one dishes' combination of tomatoes and peanut butter as if he had no idea that it's a traditional West African combination (as traditional as an African combination of two new world plants can be, anyway). The chef who made it was clearly going for a standard chicken in peanut sauce--she served it over couscous so she knew the African origins and didn't just stumble on recipe independently--but if she explained that the fault lay in the preparation of the dish and not the conception, it didn't make it to air.

That's a problem I've had myself. I mean preparing a peanut-tomato dish, not malicious reality show editors making me look like a jerk. I've tried it a few different times and I've never come up with something worth eating. Colicchio's ignorance and/or lousy attitude was sufficient impetus for me to give it another shot.

I found a lot of different variations on the basic idea on-line, but I settled on this recipe for the Senegalese version, mafé, mainly because it hasn't been adjusted for American kitchens and sensibilities so I could do that myself.

I really wanted to use mutton or maybe goat but I've settled on buying my vegetables at Whole Foods in the CSA off season for lack of a better choice and their in-house butcher is more focused on semi-prepared meals for harried professionals than on offering a decent selection of meats or cuts. They didn't have any pork belly either so that dish is going to have to wait until I make a trip to Publix or maybe order something through the mail if I don't like the looks of what they've got. On the other hand Whole Foods does carry marrow bones so that should be a nice meal (and a post) some time soon. Anyway, I settled on beef given the choices offered. For vegetables, I've got a sweet potato and a carrot that should suit and my CSA yukina savoy survived all my refrigerator troubles fairly unscathed.

For the cooking method, I've discussed the better way to make stew in a Western kitchen (browning the meat and then a low slow braise in a 300 degree oven) before. You didn't get the full story then because that was a simple stew without any vegetables. Adding vegetables complicates things because they don't all take the same time to cook. For this recipe, I browned the beef, removed it from the pot, browned an onion and a couple jalapenos, returned the beef and stirred in two Tablespoons of tomato paste (I like the sort that comes in a tube) and a couple handfuls of roughly chopped cherry tomatoes. That would be two standard sized tomatoes if I could find any that taste anything like an actual tomato. And that goes into the 300 degree oven.




After an hour the tomatoes and beef juices have formed a rather nice sauce. The low heat keeps temperatures below boiling so it doesn't thicken and dry up. I stirred in the sweet potato and carrot and returned the pot to the oven.



After another half hour I added the yukina savoy.

After twenty more minutes I added a cup of fresh(ish)-ground unsweetened, unsalted peanut butter and enough water to thin the sauce out a bit. The original recipe says it's done now, but I put it back in the oven for ten minutes to let the flavors blend a little. Oh, and I should mention that the original recipe calls for Maggi sauce. From what I can dig up, that's an all-purpose sauce made from vegetable protein that tastes something like soy sauce. Whole Foods didn't carry it, but they did have a bottle of another brand of vegetable protein sauce at the salad bar. It seemed somewhere between soy sauce and Worcestershire sauce to me. I used just a little soy sauce in the mafé and, as I neglected to replace the Worcestershire after the big refrigerator melt-down, some Pickapeppa sauce which tastes surprisingly similar considering its complete lack of fermented fish.

So how did it taste? Like peanut butter. The one cup I added walked all over the other flavors. The tomato had cooked down, mellowed and blended with the other flavors over the two hours of cooking so it had no chance against the peanut butter. Stews generally taste better the second day so I'm hopeful the situation will improve, but for now it's one more failure in my peanut-tomato recipe history.


OK, it's tomorrow. The overnight flavor-melding doesn't seem to have helped much, but on the bright side I was able to get my hands on some Maggi sauce. I think the comparison to soy sauce must be more by way of use than flavor. There is a slight resemblance but Maggi sauce has smoky, vinegary and meaty notes you don't find anywhere in soy. I can see why it's a staple in West Africa as it goes beautifully with peanuts. Mixing in a generous amount gives a result something like satay peanut sauce. I think it salvaged the dish and the lack of it at Whole Foods was probably why the chef who made peanut chicken on Top Chef ended up in the losers' circle.

Late Summer Vegetable Quiche

I've changed my mind since the last time I wrote about quiche. I spent a couple paragraphs back in January disparaging the idea of crusts. But when I actually ate that crustless quiche, tasty as it was, I missed the extra texture and flavor elements a crust contributes. On the other hand, a proper crust is still a pain in the butt and still likely to end up mushy on the bottom and dried out around the top so I wasn't entirely sold.

But I saw an interesting alternative on an episode of Sara Moulton's new show: Weeknight Meals or something like that. She made a savory version of a graham cracker crumb crust by leaving out the sugar and using a plain cracker. It looked like she used a Trisket or something akin but annoyingly she never showed the actual recipe on-screen and I can't find it anywhere on her website. I think I'm supposed to buy the cookbook. So, failing that I used the whole-wheat flatbread I had on hand--made a cup of crumbs, added four Tablespoons of melted butter and blind baked it for ten minutes at 350 degrees. When I've done this with graham crackers or nilla wafers the crusts held together after baking and cooling, but this one stayed a bit crumbly so I had to move it around carefully. I think the added sugar melted, spread out and held bits together in the sweet crusts. In this case I spread cheese around inside the crust before adding the quiche fillings in the hope that it would melt into the crumbs and serve the same purpose.

Those aforementioned quiche fillings were the last of the CSA squash and eggplant (surprisingly well shredded by my food processor) which I salted, let sit for a half hour and gave a squeeze to get out some moisture and then quickly browned to add a bit more flavor, a bit of ham, some sliced cremini mushrooms and a bit more cheese on top. The quiche itself was five eggs mixed with a cup and a quarter of half-and-half (more or less. It was my leftover milk and cream from my last ice cream.) and I topped it all with slices of tomato.

Here's the result after thirty minutes at 375 degrees and one minute too long under the broiler.


And here's a look at the crust. There's a notable note of the cracker's flavor and few crunchy bits along the sides (as there was no exposed crust during baking). Mainly the crust adds structural integrity which was notably lacking in the crustless quiche I made. My advice at this point is that a savory crumb crust is well worth making but you need to choose your crackers and cheese carefully to match the vegetables. The Lincolnshire Poacher cheese and whole grain crackers I used, although they went nicely together, didn't work particularly well with the eggplant and squash. Probably something in a Swiss would have been a better choice. Still it was palatable enough even if it missed the harmonious synergy I stumbled into last time.

Maple Ice Cream with lots of bits in

I mentioned a few posts back that I've been looking through some ice cream cookbooks for interesting recipes. This one comes from Bruce Weinstein's Ultimate Ice Cream Book. And like the recipe I made from David Lebovitz' Perfect Scoop it was praised so much more than my original creations that I'm of a mind to stop making ice cream altogether (or at least stop sharing it with my coworkers).

Weinstein does a couple interesting things in his recipe that I haven't seen elsewhere: making the custard with less than half of the total dairy and adding a couple teaspoons of flour. I can see the latter helping thicken the ice cream, but I'm not sure what effect the former would have. Other than, by leaving most of the dairy cold, speeding the cooling process enough to turn ice cream making from a three day to a two day process which might be reason enough on its own.

I should note that despite the good reception the ice cream got, it would have been rather dull without mix-ins. Maple is a familiar and rather simple flavor that needs a bit of help to sustain interest. Weinstein pads his book's recipe count with a half dozen minor variations. It was difficult to put my own twist on it when he thought of a bunch of them first. I decided to use three of them by mixing in chunks of frozen banana, peanut butter candies (Weinstein suggests Mary Janes but I couldn't find any. I don't think I've seen any Necco-produced candies in Miami; maybe they don't distribute this far south. I used the crunchy wafer-y peanut butter candies you see in bags on pegs in the corner bodegas and I think they worked better. Mary Janes are chewy and probably stiffen up when frozen. The candies I used retained their crunch which was a nice contrast.) and candied pecans. I had some raw pecans leftover from a rocky road ice cream I made (with difficulty as my freezer was having difficulty maintaining below-freezing temperatures) a couple weeks back. To candy them I just tossed them with brown sugar, salt and butter and baked them at 350 degrees for ten minutes. I used plenty of salt to add some extra flavor interest to the ice cream. I also wanted to add a bit of hot sauce just for little extra kick, but I forgot. But if I was going to go that route I really should have skipped the candy and included chunks of breakfast sausage instead. Hmm...they probably wouldn't freeze well, would they?

I think having all three mix-ins, and plenty of them, really elevated the ice cream so I should feel a little better about it than I actually do. And a maple ice cream isn't all that hard to make smooth and creamy. The textural difficulties I've been having with my ice cream recipes come more from using yams or sapotes or whatever as structural components.

Anyway, here's Weinstein's recipe and you can decide for yourself what you think:

Maple Ice Cream

6 large egg yolks
1 cup maple syrup (I used grade A dark which is a little strong for pouring on pancakes but good for this sort of thing)
2 teaspoons all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup half-and-half
1 1/2 cups light cream (I used heavy cream as a) that's what I've got and b) what sort of wimpy ice cream uses light cream?)
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

1. In a medium mixing bowl, beat the egg yolks with the maple syrup, flour and salt. Set aside.

2. Bring the half-and-half to a simmer in a heavy medium saucepan. Slowly beat the hot half-and-half into the egg mixture. Return to saucepan and heat on low heat. Stir constantly until custard thickens slightly (170 degrees).

3. Pour the custard into a large clean bowl (through a strainer if you overshot and your eggs scrambled. If there's just a little thickened layer on the bottom of the pan don't strain it out as it's useful in thickening the mix and will get broken down during churning).

4. Cool slightly, then stir in cream and vanilla. Cover and chill to 40 degrees. (Usually this takes a night, but with this technique I'll bet it could be done in four hours.)

5. Churn in the usual way and mix in whatever you want to mix in. Ripen overnight in freezer.

Back in business

The repair-guy came in a fixed a major water leak in the replacement refrigerator which, he said, should do the trick. But the next day it was still at 50 degrees so I complained again and, sick of my whining, the handyman (who outsources his appliance repair so it's not the same guy) came by and gave me an actually new refrigerator. Yay!

In retrospect, the replacement refrigerator was technically working correctly. The compressor was pumping out cold air, but with an underpowered fan dribbling it in and a leaky door seal letting it right back out again it may have just been approaching a new equilibrium in the safe temperature zone very slowly. Or maybe not. I can't say I care much at this point and I'm sure they can find a tenant who'll use it mainly to store vodka and mixers who won't mind if it's a little warm.

I've been off restocking and slowly getting back into the cooking mode. Now that I don't have a regular audience of people trying to figure out what to do with their CSA share I have to raise the bar on how interesting a dish has to be to be post-worthy. After this post, anyway; this post is mainly human interest.

I decided to try using the multi-grain blend I had such trouble with a while back. Since then I learned that adding salt to whole grains makes them take forever to cook and I figured that must have been my problem. It still didn't come out right this time around, but it did come closer. The baby garbanzos were less undercooked and the Israeli couscous less overcooked at the ten minute mark. Unfortunately, not salting meant that the pasta--the couscous and the orzo--tasted pretty crummy. If any of you have forgotten to salt your pasta water you know that salting afterwards doesn't entirely fix the problem. Plus I didn't get to toast the couscous which is an important step in building flavors. I stirred in shrimp, prosciutto and a bit of onion sautéed in olive oil and seasoned with smoked paprika and thyme and I ended up with an OK dish, but it could have been a lot better. I'm done with ill-conceived grain blends.

Another not quite note-worthy dish I made this week is beer battered chicken gizzards, squash, eggplant and mushrooms. The main goal here was to use some of the surviving CSA vegetables before they finally started rotting. Looking around at the various beer batter recipes I settled on this interesting one that calls for separating an egg and folding a meringue into the batter. One egg white is too little to beat in the mixer so I had to do it by hand. I think I managed a pretty good job considering and the batter ended up nicely light and fluffy. Briefly. The first batch turned out beautifully, but the process of coating the chicken and vegetables burst the bubbles pretty quick. I'll use a recipe with baking powder next time. The batter is yellowish because I used the Gullah-style seasoning mix I picked up in South Carolina a while back. I was going to recommend taht you mail order it from the Gullah Cuisine website and I think you should because it's just what southern fried chicken is supposed to taste like, but you can't. Sorry. I had a few different dips planned but I didn't make any because I didn't want to mask the flavor.

And I made another loaf of no-knead bread and once again I screwed it up. I keep forgetting to adjust for the humid Miami weather and make it too wet to support its weight when it rises. It's tasty (as I add whole wheat and rye flour) but it's dense and too flat to make a sandwich with. It's still good for croûtons and at least I've figured out the problem. Next time I'll do better.

I also made an ice cream, but that deserves its own post so more on that later.

Still alive

I haven't abandoned the blog, but after coming back from a long weekend I found my replacement refrigerator at 60 degrees so I'm not yet ready to restock and get back to cooking. Once I do, unless I get distracted by some other ideas I intend to explore using unusual grains more and looking through ice cream cookbooks to see what tricks they've found that I haven't figured out on my own.

Also, since I don't have weekly shipments of vegetables to deal with I hope to get out to dinner more so I might start some restaurant reviews. I've noticed that the Miami Beach area is over-covered but there aren't many bloggers looking at restaurants around Miracle Mile where I live so I might be able to contribute something to the discussion.

Anything else I could do that would keep you guys reading in the CSA off season?

An ignomious end to my CSA subscription

I had big plans for cooking this week. I even had jotted down a written menu to make sure I had everything covered and all the ingredients I need and I never do that. But on Sunday my refrigerator broke down. And not in that nice way where the fan dies at the same time as the actual refrigerating bit so the cold food stays safe in an insulated box while you look for solutions. No, my fan kept running, blowing in warm air and nice defrosting my freezer and bringing my refrigerator into the bacterial-fun zone.

I salvaged most of the produce (along with the cheese, the booze and a few other bottled items I hadn't broken the seals on), but they're slowly wilting in a neighbor's fridge. Everything else I had to trash. There are a few things I could still cook even with my reduced means, but I've been eating the defrosted leftovers from previous weeks' cooking. That seemed like a sensible plan before I wrote it down; Now I'm not so sure. Maybe I'll cook something tonight.

I look forward to getting the refrigerator repaired or replaced so I can start anew.