Thursday, August 9, 2007

Wild Dreams

The last three weeks have been a whirlwind of intense problematic work and concomitant outsourcing difficulties. Family troubles and tragedies, and friends' equally saddening woes, have added to the general malaise and confusion that accompanies these things. It's not strange for me in such times of stress to sleep wild dreams that vividly imprint, and also occasionally to sleepwalk, which mercifully has not been a problem. Last night's dreams featured a segment in which I was checking into a very grand hotel whose interior was graced with lyrical ironwork not unlike that in The Bradbury Building, except such elements were enameled in apple green with corresponding soft furnishings in assorted lime greens and ceruleans, and had a layout reminiscent of London Heathrow Airport's International Terminal departure lobby in the seventies, but saved by that nice Stateside Sullivanesque turn of the century twist. I vividly see the faces of this dream's people milling around and waiting like me to be taken up to our rooms. Once, while staying at the The Ritz-Carlton: A Luxury Hotel in Chicago (A Four Seasons Hotel) near Watertower Place one weekend, I awoke having had a dream in which I had walked around late in the night in its very swish second-floor foyer completely naked and alone but for the many milling guests and staff who seemed to be keen on helping me. There were no smirks at check-out the next day and I trust it could not have actually happened as some things in the dream were out of place. As a Chicago hostel, I always loved The Mayfair Regent facing onto the Gold Coast, where the Sunday brunch was hard to beat anytime then or now. Sadly, it has been converted into opulent condos. Perhaps the curry I made last night helped last evening's dreams along, or my sleeping mind was just working overtime to sort everything out. I have never taken acid.

Weekdays, work is heavy and demanding and perpetually interferes with what should be restful evenings. It's often the same story on weekends. Since most nights it's cook or starve, I have to divide attention between the stove, and the bread and butter matters at hand. The alternatives are to stand over the stove making an efficient, quickly prepared meal or salad. Dinner may not be evening's end but it is an important occasion for me every day. To obtain more complex flavors on such a harried night a simmered or roasted meat is the solution.

Last night I made Loin of Pork Bolognese, one of my all time favorite dreamy dishes, and something of a salve. Take a lean pork loin, with top fat on, and brown it in a heavy pot, lid off, with some salt and pepper. I add a crushed clove of garlic at this point, husk intact, which is not usually part of the recipe but adds a subtle note to the dish. When fairly uniformedly browned add a cup and a half of whole milk and put the lid on ajar. Turn the heat down. The milk reduces to a bunch of nut brown nuggets after a half hour or so, and, only at this point do you add another cup of milk, scraping the combination of meat juices and milk product away from all sides and turning the roast once again. Heat goes down once more and the lid goes on firmly. After about two and a half hours the pork is supremely tender and ready to transfer to a carving board. The contents of the pot can then be thinned with a little more milk and then brought to the boil and spooned out as a sauce. Fantastic - no herbs, no stock, just the milk and the pork stovetop. This time we served it,untraditionally, with Couscous and Matt made a delicious Greek salad to provide leafy nourishment. Marcella Hazan's recipe from her have to have book is a good starting point. Expect to tailor the ingredients by experience as you cook it again and again and again. I slept much better last night and I don't recall the content of my dreams.
Posted by jonathan at 9:38 PM
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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's interesting how our mental or physical condition dictates our appetites. I dragged myself from my sickbed yesterday for a little distraction on the internets. I had some flu-like thing that made me ache in most portions of the old corpus. To add to my miseries, it was Elvis day on Turner Classic Movies (and really awful Elvis films at that), so I didn't even have the solace of television distraction. Why couldn't I have been felled a day earlier, when it was Joan Bennett day and one of my favorite films of all times, Fritz Lang's The Woman In The Window, was part of the repertoire? But to live is to suffer, as the Buddha supposedly opined. So I crawled to my computer and brought up my bookmarks, but found myself unable to slag through the usual depressing fare of the political blogs. So I brought up Tiny Kitchen, and your litany of tribulations spoke to me. Now when I'm sick, there are few things that can distract me from my tribulations via the digestive tract. Ginger Ale (Vernors, in the bottle), cold fruit and juices, iceberg lettuce are among the few. But when I have the flu, I only want one thing, chicken soup, specifically the chicken soup Mom made, with home made noodles. No matter that the thermometer is in the triple digits outside and the air conditioner is sub-standard. I want my chicken soup. And I'm not even Jewish! Two things make it special: a slow cooked chicken simmered long on low heat, and the home-made noodles. Mother always used a stewing hen for the broth part, a creature that is non-existent in our modern world. A stewing hem by definition is a hen that has ceased to be of use as an egg producer, so she makes her final contribution via the stew pot. Because she is 3 to 4 times as old as your standard contemporary fryer or roaster, the meat is tougher and only edible when cooked long and slowly. But I make do with a fryer, usually looking for the smallest one I can find. You can use the giblets, although I don't. Sometimes the liver can leave what I find an unpleasant undertaste. Cook it in a stew pot with onions, carrots, a couple of stalks of celery and a few sprigs of parsley in plenty of water. Salt and pepper too, of course. DON"T cut and discard the fat - it's what gives the broth its flavor, and it will add a beautiful golden color to the finished product. In a couple of hours your chicken should be done. Strain the broth through a colander into another pot, sort the meat from the bones, and return the broth to the stove. Since aromatics are part of the flavor component, I like to slice a small onion, a couple of carrots and a stalk or two of celery to make the final product more of a one dish meal. Now it's really the noodles that make the dish special. Just three things are needed: 2 large eggs, a sprinkle of salt, and a cup of all purpose flour. Whisk the eggs and salt first, add the flour, and incorporate slowly at first but with a vengeance as you start to achieve dough status. I do this in a medium glass mixing bowl with a three tined meat fork I got as part of a set of cutlery at Dollar Bill's in Grand Central Station a million years ago. If I ever lose this fork, I'll probably just check out. What you should have after the above described exercise is a wet ball of dough on the end of your fork. Plop it onto a small mound of flour on your counter (has to be a smooth counter, since you will be rolling soon). Turn and knead your dough, incorporating more flour in the process, until you have a dough stiff enough to roll with a rolling pin. Now comes the tricky part - getting the dough as thin as you need it. You must constantly flour your surface and keep turning it, always rolling from the center out. What you end up with is a big circle of thin dough, which I quarter, folding each quarter in thirds (once again making sure you have sufficient flour so the folds don't stick togather), then slicing the noodles with a very sharp knife (I use a paring knife). When the noodles have been cut (they will expand with cooking, so I play a game with how thin I can cut them by hand; then again. what's wrong with a wide noodle?), flail them a bit with your fingers and spread to dry. I generally make the noodles before I start the broth, giving them a couple of hours to dry. When the new vegetables you've added to the strained broth are tender, add the noodles and cook over medium low heat for about ten minutes. At the end add as much of the cooked chicken as you like. I generally reserve half of it for chicken salad the next day. The noodle should have an almost rubbery tooth to it. I also make the noodle for things other than soup (it is, after all, just an egg noodle). They're great with Affredo sauce, or buttered as a side dish with thick meat stews. If they're capable of reviving the infirm in the middle of a heat wave, think what they could do for the hale and hearty when there's a winter storm raging outside.

August 17, 2007 at 12:29 PM
jonathan said...

Thank you so much for this Anonymous, and I am sorry to hear you are sick. I love the recipes you've provided. My Jewish friends always threaten me with chicken soup when I'm under the weather and it often does the trick. Not sure whether its the content of the potage or the comfort of it. What's for sure, your noodle recipe is great news and I think I will try it.

August 19, 2007 at 2:43 PM

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