Cobaya dinner at Crumb with Michelle Bernstein

Last night (May 17th for those of you in the future) was the latest Cobaya dinner and I was lucky enough to get a seat. Like I said up in the subject, our chef was Michelle Bernstein. Frodnesor, in his introduction, said that he was interested in her participating in the Cobaya dinners from the start and approached her back in February and she agreed immediately. The timing, I presume, is due to the opening of her new venue, Crumb on Parchment, a few doors down from Sra. Martinez. It's not listed on her website, but they had menus and a special board up so it must be already open.

No matter; this dinner bore little resemblance to what I saw on that menu, and Chef Bernstein had pulled staff from her other places for the evening so it wasn't even the same folks preparing it. I had problems with my pen so my notes are sparser than usual, but I do have down here that this menu was intended to be playful and she didn't want to kill us with too many courses (unlike Chef Hales of Sakaya Kitchen who comes to Cobayas with murder in his heart). So, just four savory courses, a palate cleanser and a dessert. I got the wine pairing too so I'll talk about those as I go along.

First up, an oyster chawanmushi (in a steamed custard) topped with enoki mushrooms and paired with a scallop and uni ceviche. I found the oyster a delicate and nicely balanced little bite. The creaminess of the custard and chew of the mushroom gave it a nice variety of textures as well. The ceviche was also understated, mostly comprised of tender flavorful scallop accented by the rich uni. There was just a touch of citrus in either component which made the wine, Julien Fouet Saumur 2008 whose grassy nose belied a flavor not too far from sucking on a Lemonhead candy, a really nice pairing. I can't imagine that the folks who were drinking whatever bottle they brought with them enjoyed this course as much as I did. I think the guys across from me were drinking a Cotes du Rhone. I know they're serious gourmets and I don't know how they can play wine-pairing-roulette like that. I'd rather drink water.

The second course was slices of a whole foie gras cooked sou vide then roasted served over fava beans, diced carrot and turnips, I think--spring root vegetables anyway--with a carrot-orange reduction. This dish had something of a hearty meat and potatoes feel to it despite not being quite meat and no potatoes on the plate. All the components were well-prepared and the sauce tied the plate together. The wine, Kiralyudvar Tokaji Sec 2006, was mildly sweet and its fruity roundness cut through the richness easily.

The third course was chupe de mariscos, including a prawn cooked sou vide, a piece of fish I believe she said was paiche, clams, mussels, peas and purple potatoes (I could have sworn there were beets in there too but I have been persuaded that I was incorrect) topped with a fried egg and served with squid ink risotto croquetas and aoli (nearly cropped out in the upper right corner of the picture). The rich, flavorful spicy broth was the highlight here along with the crisp-outside creamy-inside croquetas. Nothing wrong with any of the other bits other than maybe the texture on the prawn, but those two components were knockouts. I wish I had been more mindful of the fish but I had forgotten that paiche is such a trendy big deal. A bit of a note problem for the wine for this course; I'm not sure if it was the Mas Sorrer Montant or the Mercy Pinot Noir. I think it was the Mercy. Anyway, it was sharp and tannic and paired nicely with the broth.

Fourth course was New York steak, very slowly cooked sou vide, with a truffle butter demisauce and ricotta gnocchi with celery leaf, chives buds and lily bulb. We were each given a syringe of sauce and instructed to inject small doses into various parts of the steak. Chef Bernstein described this as something she's always wanted to do and as "really cool". It was fun, I'll give her that, but the flavor was lost what with the puddle of the same sauce already on top of the meat. Personally, I thought it could a touch more salt, too. More problematically, I've come to the conclusion that I just don't like the texture of meat cooked sou vide. I like a little chew and various levels of doneness at different depths. It adds interest. Also, maybe it could have been warmer? Good gnocchi, though. I particularly liked the lily bulb with the truffle sauce. If the last wine was the Mercy, that means this was the Mas Sorrer. It was a tart black cherry and rather nice in either case.

Next up was the palate cleanser, a calamansi soup with a chunk of pineapple and a small scoop of mint ice cream. The tartness of the soup was tempered by the slight bitterness of the ice cream and the sweet pineapple.

This, and the final dessert, were prepared by the pastry chef of both Sra. Marinez and Crumb, Vanessa Paz. That's not her with the blowtorch, unfortunately; that's the head chef at Sra Martinez. Check Frod's write-up once he's got it up; he usually has well-labeled pics of all notable participants.

Last up, a disc of puff pastry made with caramel and chocolate, topped with roasted banana, saltay caramel espuma and a little scoop of nutmeg ice cream, served with a couple of chocolate-covered pretzels (one hidden around back) and one of whatever that thin wafer cookie is called. This, unfortunately, didn't really work for me. The pastry was soggy and tough and there was way too much banana which had a bitter edge to it. The rest of the components I quite liked, though, when taken on their own. The nutmeg ice cream was particularly pleasant. I'll have to try making some myself. The final wine pairing was Rock Wall Sauvignon Blanc 2008. It was syrupy sweet with a sour edge to it and I've got to admit I didn't really care for it either.

Despite my faded enthusiasm at the end of the evening, I went away happy. The dinner had a better hit to miss ratio than the last few Cobaya dinners I've been to and those hits were palpable hits. I haven't been to any of Chef Bernstein's places; I really ought to make the effort to seek them out.

I'll link to Frod's post when he has it up. He always has more detail than I can muster and nuanced opinions of the dishes well expressed, so do read his take as well. If anyone else who attended is reading, I'd be obliged if you could post your take in the comments.

As promised, here is Frod's write up. And here is one from Paula of the Mango and Lime and Short Order blogs. No real differences of opinion this time around; we all had a great time.

CSA year wrap-up

Once again I have failed you and brought shame to my family by not cooking anything interesting enough to blog about this week. I've roasted the carrots (yummy dipped in chipotle aoli), pickled the beets (using pre-existing brine. Not fabuluous one day after, but I'll need to give it a couple weeks to really tell how they'll turn out), used the sprouts and chives cold in sesame tofu and hot in duck soup, but none of it is worth more than a line or two to talk about.

The closest to a blogable dish I made was kinpira and that's just thin-sliced carrots stir fried in sesame oil and glazed in soy sauce and mirin. Lovely on a piece of miso-glazed fish, but too simple to post unless I had a huge rigmarole of a story to go with it like the person I stole the recipe from did.

Given all that, probably best to move on to the CSA season wrap-up. I'm not going to go back and review the last 20 weeks of posts so this is just going to be my subjective impression. And my subject impression is that the season went pretty well weather considered. I missed some of the variety we got previous years (beans other than green beans and corn particularly) and sometimes we got not quite enough of what we got, but overall I was happy with what showed up in my half-share.

Part of it, I think, was that I stopped pushing myself to find new uses for everything so I could post three times a week. Relaxing on the blog let me repeat some dishes that I enjoyed having before, although not nearly to the extent that I had planned to do at the season's start.

I cooked some interesting food along the way--the lucuma coconut custard pie was pretty good, the stuffed peppers a good experiment and chicken with grape tomatoes is the only dish whose recipe I routinely have to hand out at work when people smell me reheating it. Nothing as complicated or innovative as previous years, though. I guess that comes from the relaxing mostly, but maybe there was a lack of weird new produce this year. Or maybe not, it looks like I said pretty much the same thing last year.

And, just like last year, I want to clear out my freezer before moving on to Summer cooking plans. To complicate matters, I hope to move to a larger apartment soon which likely means a smaller kitchen (I have kind of an odd set-up here). Whether I sign up for next year's CSA may well depend on how large my new refrigerator is.

I don't think there were any other CSA bloggers this year. Were there any readers? I'd be interested to hear how you thought the season went.

CSA week 18 wrap-up, final week start-up

It's been a while both since my last post and since I've done any serious cooking. Actually, that's not entirely true. While I was visiting my sister, I cooked Thai peanut noodles one night. I don't know that the results were all that interesting, but given the requirements that it not include dairy, pork or shellfish and have adjustable levels of spice, salt and complexity, I think I did well. I've used a few different recipes for peanut noodles in the past and had settled on the trick of switching out half the peanut butter for tahini which keeps it from tasting too much like, well, peanut butter. This time, instead, I used David Lebovitz's recipe which starts with roasted peanuts and has the unusual inclusion of black tea. Leaving out both the chili oil and cilantro caused some problems, but I was fairly pleased with the result and it did go over well with everyone but the 3-year-old. She won't eat anything so I didn't take that critique to heart.

But that was in Ohio where it isn't 85 degrees. Here in Miami, I'm not so interested in spending a lot of time in the kitchen.



Still, this is the final week of the CSA so I should cook at least one blog-post-worthy dish. For that, my eye is on either the beets or the carrots, both of which we have in substantial amounts for the first time all season. Using them both in a cream soup might work, actually.

Beyond those two, the sprouts and chives seem like they ought to be used together too. I could see them both in a cold noodle dish. I never did get around to doing that with the last batch of sprouts.

I would like to plant the basil (in the plastic on the right) since it did come with roots still attached. I have another basil plant that sprouted up into shrubbery last autumn, but spent all its energy making flowers for me to pinch off over the winter and is wilting in the springtime sun and heat. I don't know if this new basil will do any better this season, but it's smaller so I can try keeping it indoors for a while.

Another point of interest this week is the local sea salt (in the packet on the lower left). I just tasted it against the Italian, French, Spanish, Hawaiian and Californian sea salts I've got in the cupboard already and, yeah, the French fleur de sel wins, but the Florida Keys salt came in second. It has a good texture, relatively small crystal size and pleasant complexity to the flavor that cuts the intensity. It's a nice accompaniment to the grape tomatoes. Does anyone see the fact that I have seven types of salt in my pantry as an indictment of my lifestyle? No? Just me then? OK.

In a week or so, after I've used the bulk of this share, I'll write a wrap-up of this CSA season and probably fade out as the summer progresses. If I decide to formally close up shop, I'll let you know.

Southwestern kolokethokeftaide

I didn't intend to make kolokethokeftaide. I hadn't heard of them until a moment ago. I just improvised some squash fritters and ended up making kolokethokeftaide accidentally. This Greek recipe isn't far off from the Turkish kabak mucveri I made three years ago but since I wasn't actually making it intentionally, I ended up with a Southwestern flavor profile which moves it a bit farther away.

I apologize for the quality of the pictures; I ran out of AA batteries for my camera and have had to fall back on my phone's crappy camera. Also, I didn't expect to write this up, as I was just throwing stuff together, so I don't have any process pics to share. Or many measurements.

So, anyway, I grated the two CSA summer squashes, salted them, let them sit a few minutes and then squeezed out an enormous amount of water. I ended up with no more than a cup and a half of squished squash.

To that I added about half a cup of pepper jack cheese, a dollop of caramelized onion confit (really just the caramelized onion I made last week mixed with a good bit of olive oil), a minced hot pepper, a dash of chili powder, one egg and enough breadcrumbs to make a dough that held together but wasn't wet.

I heated my oil and made little Tablespoon-volume patties. Those got fried at just over medium-high heat until just over golden brown. More of a brazen brown.


Tasty stuff. And it tastes mainly of squash, not dough with a bit of squash in it like most fritter recipes make. A nice chewy/creamy texture inside and crisp outside too. Maybe they could use a dipping sauce just to mix the flavors up a little bit, but I didn't bother with one.

CSA week 17 wrap-up, week 18 start-up

Another week of low posting, but I did do some cooking worth mentioning.

As I thought I might, I made a kale and turnip gratin. Unfortunately, there was rather more of both than I counted on, and rather less cream and swiss cheese about than I thought. The results weren't fabulous so I decided to try a fix. Digging around, I found some dried mozzarella, a bit of cheddar a fair amount of pecarino romano and, to substitute for the lack of cream, some cream cheese. I disassembled the gratin, mixed all that in and put it back in the oven for a half hour. An improvement, but still more gooey than creamy so less than entirely satisfactory. The next day I attempted to melt the cheese down and dissolve it into a cream sauce by adding a cup of chicken broth and simmering on the stovetop. Instead, the mozzerella seized up into curds the texture of ground beef. Not bad, really. The turnips had gone soft at this point so I mixed in some noodles for texture and a couple beaten eggs to thicken up the sauce and I ended up with an odd but fairly palatable concoction. Too much of a haphazard mess to be worth a post, though.

In contrast, the pork chops in fennel and caper sauce I made was not worth a post because it's already written up quite adequately on Food.com. It's a Giada de Laurentis recipe that I didn't modify in any notable way. Pretty darn good, though. I do recommend it if you've still got your fennel around.

I bailed on the dill curry I've been talking about, though. I figure that if I've got the ingredients in the house for two weeks and I still haven't made the recipe, then that's a recipe I don't really want to make. And I'm not going to cook something I'm not interested in just for a blog post. Not to please you lot anyway.

On to this week then...



That's callaloo on the right, traded in the extras box for the kale that was in the share. I don't need any more kale. I think I'd like to make mchicha with it again as it turned out quite well the first time.

The green beans I'm going to pickle as the last batch I made turned out great.

For the leeks, I want to do something with a cream sauce. I remember liking a chicken and leeks dish my mom used to make and I haven't done anything using cream with the CSA leeks I've gotten yet.

That squash is the first we've seen in quite some time, isn't it? I know saved some squash recipes for CSA season that I haven't used. I'll have to look one up. I might go with fritters. I could go for fritters.

Potatoes and parsley I'll save until I need them which just leaves the dandelion. Oh, I'll probably have them over pasta in something simple. We haven't had any turnip greens for me to do that with in a while and dandelion should work just as well after a quick blanch.

One final note: I'm going to be out of town next weekend so my half-share is up for grabs. Nobody at work ever wants it when I offer. Do any of you? I use the Coconut Grove pick-up if that makes a difference.

Roasted strawberry banana ice cream

I had been thinking of making roasted strawberry beet ice cream, but, as I've actually been craving ice cream recently, I decided to go a route with a higher chance of creating something actually palatable.

I started by cleaning a pint of strawberries and cutting them into equally-sized small pieces. I added two medium bananas, sliced in half and roughly chopped, tossed them in a Tablespoon or two of demerara sugar, [For those unfamiliar, demerara sugar is essentially old-fashioned brown sugar. Modern brown sugar is made by returning some molasses to refined sugar. Demerara is made by leaving the molasses in.] and roasted at 375 degrees for 1 hour, with one stir in the middle.

I used a fairly large pan and a fairly high temperature to make sure the juices would evaporate. The point here is to concentrate the flavors into a smaller volume so the final ice cream will pack more punch per spoonful.

I blended the results with:

1/2 cup demerara sugar

1 pinch salt

juice from 1/2 lime

2 Tablespoon rum

2 teaspoons vanilla, and

1 1/2 cups cream.

Without the juice to thin the cream out, the result was rather thicker at this stage than the other fruit ice creams mixtures I've made. To compensate, I added 3/4 cup milk.

I was happy with the texture then, but it thickened up in the refrigerator overnight and it didn't seem quite sweet enough at that temperature. So, to thin it some more and adjust the sweetness back up without modifying the flavor balance too much, I added 1/4 cup agave nectar.

That all went into the churn. My kitchen was hotter than I would have liked which have have affected the thickening, but the alcohol and fructose worked against that too. Either way, it was rather softer than I would have preferred when I ran out of cold 25 minutes into churning and it wasn't able to hold on to a lot of churned in air, so it's kind of dense. Well, it'll have to do.

Since I had some on hand, I swirled in some Hershey's strawberry syrup. It's 100% artificial so it the flavor is less Strawberry than it is just Pink, really, so there's some contrast with the ice cream.

Here it is after ripening:

The texture is a little dense, but not hard even straight out of the freezer. If you're not going to have super-premium fat levels, denseness is a good second choice texturewise. I should have blended the mixture either a little more or a little less as there is the occasional tiny bit of fruit or maybe it's a little curdling from the citric acid in the cream. It's a minor unpleasantness. Roasting the fruit let me replace a lot of water with cream so it's richer than other fruit ice creams I've made and the tendency towards crystalization seems to be lower.

Straight out of the freezer the tart berry flavor really pops. After letting the ice cream soften a little, a more rounded fruit flavor emerges. The strawberry syrup brings the berry out above the banana a little bit. The result is reminiscent of the good quality strawberry syrup with pieces of fruit in it you get in ice cream parlors. And that inspired me to add chocolate syrup which creates a passable approximation to a banana split. If I had known it was going to work out that way, I would have roasted some pineapple too and added some candied walnuts. But it's just dandy as is.

CSA week 16 wrap-up, week 17 start-up

Just one recipe post for last week? Sorry about that. There should have been a second, but ice cream is a multi-day process and I got a late start. It was Friday evening by the time I actually ate it in its final form and it seemed pointless to post then. I'll get it up tomorrow. Also, when I went to make the curry I found that half my dill had gone grotty. This week's new batch fills the gap so I'll probably make it tonight. Finally, with the weather heating up the kitchen and my refrigerator full of leftover fried chicken, cooking just didn't seem like a great idea.

On to this week then.

As I said, the dill is going into a curry, if not today, then soon. I was thinking of doing a gratin with the turnips as I've got lots of cheese and just a bit of cream lingering in the refrigreator. That would likely use some of the spring onion and maybe the kale? I did a quick search just now and kale gratin is a thing. Not with turnips generally, but why not?

The grapefruit, I might use for the unusual grapefruit and coconut milk shrip curry I made a couple years ago. I recall it turned out well. Or I might just juice them. I could go for some grapefruit juice.

And finally, the fennel. I have very little experience cooking with fennel and a search turned up many options. I'll have to sort through them to see what appeals.