Ninecooks

If you can't stand the heat....

...get out of the kitchen — and that's just what we're doing here at Ninecooks for the next three weeks. We'll be back in mid-July to prepare for Le Grand Aioli, the #1 Cooking Group's annual fete. In true French fashion, the men will cook huge platters of food, the women will grind the aioli sauce by hand in mortars, and a good time will be had by all.

Colorforms for dinner

Shape is everything.

Think about it. Without the concept of shape, the whole premise behind Colorforms, my second-favorite childhood game, goes out the window. Colorforms' three basic shapes — circle, rectangle and triangle — allow you to create any object in the universe, if you add a bit of imagination.

The Japanese bento box is all about shape, too, as well as color and texture. The box itself is a rectangle; the norimaki roll, round; the gyoza dumpling, a half circle. Add a triangular piece of fish or meat, some rice and salad, and it's just like playing with Colorforms. And then you eat it.

The #1 Cooking Group created bento boxes in their final cooking group session of the season (except for Le Grand Aioli, our annual summer fete).

We began by steaming lots of medium-grain Nishiki rice: one cooker for the sushi rice, the other for the plain rice that forms the backbone of the bento.

We prepped ingredients for the potsticker dumplings, which we filled with a tofu-veggie mixture bound with peanut butter and soy sauce. Using small plastic dumpling molds, we crimped our potstickers, crisped the bottoms in a frying pan, and added chicken stock and mushroom-soaking liquid to steam them.

With the teriyaki salmon in the oven, ginger dressing made for the salad, rice bloop-blooping away in the cookers, and potstickers finishing on the stove, we got to work on the norimaki sushi rolls, finger bowls of vinegar-seasoned water and glasses of wine (for courage!) at the ready.

Rolling the sushi is easier than it looks. After a brief demo by me, everyone got the hang of it right away, and we filled roll after roll with Gold's wasabi- and hoisin-seasoned strips of red pepper, asparagus, avocado, cucumber and scallion.

Using some smoked salmon left behind by the Wednesday Lunch Group, and a bit of the remaining seasoned sushi rice, Cathy made a little treat for the cooks in the rectangular wooden sushi press: beautiful squares topped with a sliver of lemon!

With fifteen minutes to spare before our spouses arrived for dinner, we filled the bento boxes, adding a bit of pickled ginger here, some black sesame seeds there. And when we ran out of boxes, we used a couple of melamine trays, proving once again that the #1 Cooking Group knows how to think outside the box.

TERIYAKI MARINADE FOR SALMON OR CHICKEN

1/2 cup reduced-sodium soy sauce
4 Tbsp oyster-flavored sauce
3 Tbsp orange or pineapple juice
3 tsp sugar (or sugar substitute)
Water as needed to achieve a thin consistency

Combine all ingredients in a screw-top jar, and shake. Marinate salmon for 30 minutes, chicken for up to 4 hours.

Cook salmon (or chicken) in the marinade in a sauté pan. When the fish is almost, but not entirely, cooked through (about 5-6 minutes), remove from the pan and set aside. Raise heat to high, and reduce the remaining marinade by half to make a more robust sauce.

The shape of things to come

This weekend the #1 Cooking Group meets its maki. Each Ninecooks cooking group has explored sushi this month; one group made bento boxes, and two groups perfected the maki roll — outside in and inside out. The #1s, who just passed the four-year mark as a cooking group, are the most experienced, so I've been thinking of what we can do that's just a little bit different.

Time to square off — and we've got an authentic wooden Japanese sushi press at the ready!

Making maki

If you don't believe in magic, you've never cooked in the Ninecooks kitchen. In under two hours, presto change-o, the Wednesday Lunch Group turned chaos (above) into order (below), and into the perfect lunch for our final cooking session before the summer.

This month all four Ninecooks groups have been going to the mat — the bamboo sushi mat called a sudare. Each group starts from scratch, making the rice, mixing it with seasoned rice vinegar, sugar and salt in a traditional wooden tub or wooden salad bowl, toasting the sheets of nori, and prepping a variety of fillings including colorful vegetables, fruits, roast beef, seafood salad, peanut butter, and, today, shredded rotisserie chicken from the supermarket. (Actually we were pleased to discover that every ingredient we needed for making sushi could be found in our local grocery store. Given that we live in rural northwest Rhode Island, this means our markets have come a long way.)

For condiments we sampled hoisin sauce and a praline mustard, plus hot chili paste with garlic. We all fell in love with Gold's Wasabi Sauce, a prepared, somewhat mild alternative to kick-it-up wasabi powder, that we found in our market's seafood department; it turned out to be the perfect accompaniment to everything — chicken, turkey, veggies, smoked salmon. Finding the Gold's a bit tame, Pete decided to kick up his wasabi sauce (in the blue rice bowl in the photo below) with...yes...super-hot wasabi paste (on the little cow plate). Wowie zowie.

By the time we were on our second and third maki rolls, we were experts!

A few fearless flyers tried their hand at inside-out rolls, with a sprinkling of toasted black sesame seeds adding dramatic effect...

...abracadabra! Success! The inside-out mango-strawberry variation was a bit gooey, but we figured out how to stop the fruit from sliding out, and the rolls provided a sweet counterpoint to the spicy veggie rolls.

While Bev regaled us with stories of her recent travels in Peru, everyone — including a five-year-old guest cook — mastered the art of making maki.

We did pretty well on the eating part, too, but we'd made far more than we could eat. Practice certainly made perfect, but it also made way too much sushi for our lunch! My lucky husband Ted will find a bit of leftover tucked away in the fridge for tomorrow's dinner.

Cookbooks from faraway places

In high school, I studied Latin. In college, I studied Latin, spurred on to semester after semester by one very adorable professor, whose name I've long since forgotten, though I do remember that he had long hair, and he taught his Latin classes in bare feet.

My parents and teachers advised me to learn French or Spanish. "Latin is a dead language," they warned. How was I to know that the ability to find a museum (or a rest room) in Latin America would be more important in the long term than the ability to translate the writings of Catullus?

Turns out they were right. Latin is a dead language, and I can prove it.

Not one single cookbook of the hundreds in my personal collection is written in Latin.

I have books in Hungarian, Turkish, Thai, Malay, Polish, Vietnamese, Italian — collected on my travels and brought back for me by traveling friends — and books in English from many Spanish-speaking countries I've visited, including Cuba, Mexico and Puerto Rico. One of my favorite travel souvenirs is a cookbook in English, published in the country I'm visiting. These books are difficult or impossible to buy outside the country, but often they represent the most authentic recipes and cooking techniques, and give invaluable insight into the home cooking of their culture.

Barbara, from the World Cuisines Cooking Group, recently returned from a visit to Buenos Aires with a book for my library. How Argentina Cooks, by Alberto Vazquez Prego, was published by Editorial El Ateneo in 2005. Apart from the fabulous empanadas on the cover, there's not a photograph in the book. It's part historical record, part teaching bible. I wish I knew how to read it in the original Spanish, because some of the translations are a bit confusing, and others are, frankly, amusing.

Here's my favorite bit from a section of the introduction called Advertencia (translated as "Forewarning", which, as you'll see, it most definitely is):

Culinary art thrives whenever freedom is given to personal touch as well as to inspired innovations. Modifications will always be at the core of renewal. Provided of course that, as in the case of a regional recipe book like this one, those lapses of genial creativity are duly channeled and trimmed so that the end result does not stand widely apart from what custom has declared as correctly proportioned.

Argentine cooking is by choice restrained in the use of the many spices and diverse condiments. Only those mentioned throughout this book are current, so that in order to keep the flavoring quality as set by local preferences use only those indicated, making allowances for personal taste which will always modify somewhat the indicated amounts by increasing, diminishing or omitting seasonings. In all cases proportions should be kept as indicated if the aim is to reproduce faithfully the ways of the Argentine kitchen. If not, then may your choice be an inspired one.

Forewarning: Improvise at your own risk!

We'll definitely sample some recipes from this cookbook during the coming year. I'm already working on a possible menu for the World Cuisines group. Noodle and garlic soup, asado (beef cooked over a fire), one or two types of chimichurri, and stuffed zapallitos (zucchini). The book starts with soup and ends with half a dozen recipes for yerba mate, a tea brewed from the dried, ground leaves of the Ilex paraguayensis (Paraguayan holly tree). We might have a wee bit of trouble finding the holly leaves at our local supermarket, though the tea is available online, so perhaps we'll just drink strong herbal tea instead.

I can't imagine we'll follow the recipes to the letter — that's not the Ninecooks way — but we'll have lots of fun breaking the rules.