in praise of sardines

Least popular recipe ever*

We all heard the fairy tales when we were growing up. The one where the princess kisses a frog and it magically turns into a prince. Or the one about the lovely damsel who falls madly in love with a hideous beast.

My hope is that those classic tales will inspire you, my undoubtedly beautiful readers, to consider for a moment pressing your lips up against what may at first glance appear to be the frog of the fairy tale. I'm hoping you'll get past your initial aversions, and like the heroine Roxane of another story, take this Cyrano of a recipe on a first date at the very least.

So who, or rather what, is this beast, this Shrek of the kitchen?

Before I unveil my recipe, let me remind you that in yesterday's post I promised to provide a surprising use for my beloved Spanish anchovies. This recipe fulfills that promise.

So, close your eyes and pucker your lips.... no, that won't work. How will you finish reading?

Enough suspense. Without further ado, meet slow-roasted cauliflower with pounded anchovies.

Wait! Before you close that window, bare with me just a little while longer. Beneath his ugly visage, this Quasimoto is quite lovable.

A bath in a generous amount of olive oil and a languorous stint in a very hot sauna (your oven) combine to transform this pale and gnarled member of the brassica family (whose ugly stepsisters include brussels sprouts, cabbage and kale) into a vegetable that even avowed cauliflower haters will not recognize. The alchemy of slow-roasting causes it to lose its faintly bitter and sulfuric disposition and melt into an impossibly tender, sweetly caramelized vegetable with the texture of a fat French fry.

If it is too much to ask you to top an often reviled vegetable with an even more despised pungent fish, try saucing the cauliflower with just a squeeze of lemon or a sauce of minced parsley, olive oil and toasted almonds or hazelnuts.

On the other hand, if it is not the anchovy but the cauliflower that frightens you, then use this powerful anchovy sauce to perk up steamed broccoli or a salad of chicories, such as radicchio, escarole or frisée. A judicious drizzle of the sauce will also elevate to another level your every day roast chicken, lamb chops, or nearly any pasta.

The pounded anchovy sauce is an emulsion of olive oil and anchovies, with a whisper of lemon juice and a rumor of garlic, so it is vital to use your best extra virgin oil and Spanish anchovies packed in olive oil (not, however, the white Spanish anchovies marinated in vinegar called boquerones, which are unsuitable for this sauce). The recipe is similar to the  vinaigrette I used to dress cardoons recently, minus the vinegar.

Go ahead. Close your eyes and open your heart and taste buds to a new world, one where cauliflower and anchovies are as desirable as a cup of Parisian hot chocolate or a ripe summer peach. Be like Julia Roberts in the early nineties. Allow this Lyle Lovett to serenade your tongue.

By the way, this post is my (extremely early) entry for this week's Weekend Herb Blogging (some of us start our weekends sooner than others), sponsored by Kalyn of Kalyn's Kitchen. Once again, rather than an herb, I chose an ugly duckling vegetable, the cauliflower.

For those who were wondering, no this is not my entry for Rachael's ugly food photo contest?

*It may not be as popular in the blogging community as a recipe for flourless chocolate cake and the like, but in my house it is one of our most favorite. But then again, we both love anything involving either cauliflower or anchovies. I never liked the popular kids much any way. Cheerleaders, football players, who needs 'em?

Ducking Thanksgiving (recipes included)

I don't know about you, but I'm thankful that Thanksgiving week is finally over.

The funny thing is, I barely even celebrated it this year.

No, turkeys had no reason to fear me. I yawned at the sight of yet another golden roasted bird on the cover of each and every November magazine and Wednesday food section (and felt sympathy for those poor writers who have to feign enthusiasm for yet another story on the proper way to bake a pumpkin pie, the perils of improperly defrosted birds, or the absurd notion that there is any wine that can stand up to sticky cranberry sauce and sweet potatoes). I decided I wanted none of that, so I (and my blog) took a holiday this year from the topic of traditional Thanksgiving foods.

With N swamped by graduate school and parent-teacher conferences and me searching hopelessly for some sane way to make a living, this was the ideal year to resolve to skip Thanksgiving. Some of our friends went out of town, and we declined invitations to join the celebrations of others. Even my brother, visiting from San Diego, sought his dose of dry white meat drowned in lumpy gravy at someone else's house.

My defenses began to show weaknesses Tuesday morning, however. A plan hatched spontaneously in my mind to go to the farmers market that afternoon in Berkeley, perhaps my favorite outdoor market in the Bay Area. My anti-Thanksgiving resolve completely withered at the sight of multi-hued pumpkins, freshly dug potatoes, wet kale, and soft persimmons illuminated by the market's kerosene lanterns as dusk fell.

Before I knew it, my inner Scrooge, fully (and properly) thawed, was phoning the butcher to order not a goose for the Cratchits and Tiny Tim, but a Liberty duck for N and myself. Alas, there would after all be a meal that, in appearance, somewhat resembled Thanksgiving.

After a fireside dinner of succulent slow-roasted duck and a bottle of Gevrey-Chambertin (a French pinot noir from Burgundy), I don't know if I'll ever be able to go back to the temperamental oversized American bird that needs to be brined, heavily salted, massaged with butter and caressed with spices just to taste reasonably good.

I discovered that no flour-thickened gravy can compete with a sauce made from caramelized duck bones (see recipe below). Nor can the embarrassing avalanche of stuffing, mashed potatoes, and sweet potato casserole compare with the austere simplicity of turnips and carrots roasted beneath the duck in its luxurious fat.

As for pumpkin pie, I'll take mine any other autumn day in the afternoon with a cup of Darjeeling, thank you. I have never understood its allure after that orgy of butter, cream, sugar and tryptophan we call Thanksgiving. So after our duck dinner, we savored a moist slice of Lyndsey Shere's cakey pudding made from soft hachiya persimmons purchased at the Berkeley market.

If you're looking for a reminder of how wonderful roasted poultry can be, I've included my recipe for slow roasted duck, an adaptation of Paula Wolfert's recipe that appeared in her book The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen. Unlike the typical roast duck, this one will not explode like a fat bomb in your oven.

In the morning, I cut my duck in half, slid it into the oven on a bed of vegetables, covered it after 10 minutes, and then forgot about it for nearly 4 hours. The oven's gentle 275˚F (135˚C) heat worked its magic, melting the fat into the meat so that it became as juicy and tender as a good confit. Then, when I was ready to eat, I chose the pieces I wanted, lay them skin side down in a hot cast iron pan and slowly crisped the skin. When the skin released easily from the pan, after about 10 minutes, it was ready. The skin was so crisp, it shattered like glass under the pressure of my fork.

One 5-pound Pekin duck yielded 2 dinners for 2, the breasts one night and the legs another. Believe me, you won't want to go back to dry turkey again.

Recipe: Salsa de Romesco

After a week of culinary classes in Catalonia this past summer, I began to believe the "healthy Mediterranean Diet" was a marketing ruse. A fantasy. A bald-faced lie.

Having devoured quantities of food, wine and olive oil that would have made the Emperor Caligula blanch, my stomach decided to go on a temporary strike. The last morsel of food I recall consuming, between glasses of black Priorat wine, was duck braised in red wine with duck prosciutto, porcinis and prunes. Mediterranean diet indeed!

In hindsight, the most dire consequence of this unanticipated one-day fast was my absence for the lesson on making romesco (the o is pronounced more like a u, so it should be pronounced ru-mes-cu). Fortunately, my chef-instructor and hostess for the week, Alicia Juanpere, had the foresight to save me a taste (and recipe) for the next day, when my stomach lay down its picket signs and I had fully recovered.

The dominant toasted nuttiness of Alicia's recipe for salsa de romesco come from hazelnuts, almonds and bread that are fried in olive oil. She encourages you to pound them in a ceramic mortar with a wooden pestle to form the base of the sauce, but you would get good results in a food processor. Roasted tomatoes and dried nyora (spelled ñora in Castillian Spanish) peppers reconstituted in red wine vinegar contribute acidity, fruitiness and their vermilion color. The combination of roasted and raw garlic adds complexity, while cayenne adds a hint of heat. Extra virgin olive oil (the more, the better) gives the sauce an unctuous consistency. The goal, as in any dish, is to balance the contrasting flavors so that they form a symphony without any one player taking over.

With those alluring flavors firmly planted in my taste memory (the most reliable and active part of my gray matter), I used Alicia's detailed instructions to recreate the meal that I had so unfortunately missed: roast lamb with romesco sauce (pictured above, left).

I substituted one local dried red chile from my friend Lee at Tierra Vegetables for two imported nyora peppers, which are expensive. In appearance and flavor, Tierra's peppers resemble the true romesco peppers used in Tarragona, the birthplace of salsa de romesco, much more than the nyora peppers that Alicia used, which are more available throughout Spain (and online). Easier to find ancho chiles also yield excellent results.

In the goal of achieving the most authentic result, I highly recommend seeking out an olive oil from the region where the sauce originates. The olive oil from this region, a special government protected "denominación de origen" called Siurana, comes from the arbequina olive. The oil from this region, which spans most of southern Catalonia and northern Valencia, is the best I have tasted. Its characteristic after taste of almonds never fails to intoxicate me. An excellent domestic alternative to the Siurana oils are the arbequina olive oils produced by the California Olive Ranch.

My romesco sauce came out so well, that I used it later in the week to sauce a pan-fried ling cod (pictured right) and then as a piquant spread in an untraditional toasted panino (Italian-style grilled cheese sandwich) that featured smoky Basque Idiazabal cheese and Melissa's recipe for membrillo, Spanish quince paste. You could also use leftover sauce as the base for a voluptuous Catalan seafood stew by thinning it with the addition of fish or chicken stock, or, thin it with more olive oil and use it as a vinaigrette for a hearty salad of frisée, escarole and salt cod known in Catalonia as xató (pronounced like château).

For more details and background on salsa de romesco, see my earlier post describing my visit to Tarragona, where I dined at Barquet, the restaurant owned by the chef and author of the most authoritative book (in Catalan) on romesco, David Solé i Torné.

Recipe: Tangy Green Olive Relish

Throughout the summer, I often make some version of olive relish to accompany our excellent local wild salmon.  Because it is both salty and tangy, it balances and flatters the salmon's rich flavor.  To maintain king salmon's natural succulence, I recommend "slow-roasting" (a popular menu description for what is more accurately called "baking") the individual salmon fillets in a 325° oven for 10-15 minutes, depending on the thickness.  To do this, first season the fillets liberally with sea salt (I usually do this about a half hour before cooking), then place the fish (without crowding) in their cooking pan and drizzle each fillet with about a teaspoon of olive oil and a splash of white wine.  It's also best to let the fish sit at room temperature for up to a half hour before cooking it.

Yield:  about a half cup, enough for 4 servings

1/2 c green olives, such as picholine or Spanish Gordal olives (my current fave)
1/4 preserved lemon , skin only, or 1/2 t lemon zest, finely chopped
2 T almonds, blanched, toasted and coarsely chopped or marcona almonds
1 T parsley, chopped
1-3 t lemon juice, to taste
3 T extra virgin olive oil

Pit and coarsely chop the olives.  Combine in a small bowl with the rest of the ingredients.  You will need more lemon juice if you use the lemon zest instead of the preserved lemons.  For convenience, use already toasted or fried marcona almonds, available at Trader Joe's or through the Spanish Table.  Also, if you want to make your own preserved lemons, there's an easy recipe in Chez Panisse Fruit.