Ninecooks

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!

Aye, there's the rub

One saucy rib, two saucy rib lovers....

Now, you might think we didn't make enough to eat when the #1 Cooking Group took on dry rubs, wet mops, and barbecue sauces this weekend, and that we had to share. You might think that, but you'd be oh-so-wrong. After two hours of spice mixing and sauce making in the kitchen, and another hour of grilling outside on a perfect Spring evening, our group had created:

• 8 dry rubs for all occasions, from a spicy adobo with hot peppers and dried orange peel, to a ginger-cardamom rub for chicken, to a porcini and pepper mixture, to a cocoa-cumin-allspice rub that we used on a venison tenderloin;
• 2 barbecue sauces, one all-purpose and one with coffee and chile;
• 1 huge platter of skewered mushrooms, zucchini and peppers; and
• dozens of skewers and slices of tuna, tofu, chicken, beef, eggplant, plus the aforementioned ribs and venison, and 2 Cornish game hens!

Mad scientists we may be, but we do know how to feed a crowd! Nobody had to share.

We started by assembling our two barbecue sauces, and we let them burble away on the stove and perfume the kitchen while we mixed the dry rubs. We put each rub in a jar, labeled so we'd remember what was what. Then, we separated each type of meat, fish, chicken, veggie and tofu into two or three batches, and seasoned each batch with a different dry rub or basting sauce.

Then it was off to the great outdoors, where Greg and Ted fired up the kettle grill with Nature's Own Chunk Charwood, an all-natural product that burns hot and clean. On the kettle, we cooked the fish, chicken, and veggie skewers, plus the tofu slices. Ribs, Cornish hens and asparagus went on the gas grill, where we could adjust the temperature more easily.

Back in the kitchen, we sliced and de-skewered and plattered and sauced. And we ate, and ate.

Everything was yum, as Jennifer would say, but maybe the best of all were the rings of pineapple that Jessica had rubbed with sugar and ground hot red chile, and sprinkled with lime juice, and cooked on the grill. Oh boy oh boy.

A good cook's secret weapons

So many condiments, so little time....or is it thyme?

For the next get-together of The #1 Cooking Group, I'm borrowing the game plan of Chef Diane Vatcher, who's coming to Ninecooks the week before to teach a class on grill techniques. Diane, a personal chef in Providence, and former head chef for a major catering company, believes that the secret to good grilling (or good cooking, for that matter) is to have a very good supply of homemade rubs, sauces, glazes, marinades – in other words, your own stash of secret weapons that you can make ahead and store in the fridge or pantry, so you can save time (or is it thyme?) when you want to get a great meal on your grill.

Diane will show the class how to create dry and fresh rubs, and we'll create our own signature rubs to take home. We'll also make BBQ sauces, glazes, and marinades both sweet and spicy. And all of this good seasoning will be put to the test, on chicken, veggies, steaks, ribs and fish.

It all sounds like so much fun that I thought "why not do it again?" with the #1s?

In Ninecooks cooking groups, everyone is responsible for bringing part of the food; that way, no one person gets stuck doing all of the shopping, and we are responsible to each other for making sure all of the groceries are on hand. I send out the individual shopping lists two weeks before we're going to cook together.

Yesterday I sent out the shopping list. Here it is:

"Bring something to grill."

That's it – the assignment! It will be fun to see what people bring, and we'll tailor our rubs and basting sauces accordingly. With a tweak-tweak here, and a tweak-tweak there, Diane says you can adjust any rub to match the characteristics of whatever you're cooking, whether mild-flavored fish or a bistro steak. (I'd better take good notes in Diane's class...)

Though there are many possible sources of the dry seasonings we'll need, there aren't many good ones within 10 miles of the Ninecooks kitchen, and with gas at $3.00 a gallon, I'm not sure that driving the nearly 20 miles each way to the Indian spice market makes much sense. I'm picky about the freshness of the spices in my kitchen, so my first stop will be Penzeys, one of my favorite online sources.

On my shopping list: cumin (whole seeds, and ground); cardamom; coriander; paprika, both the sweet Hungarian and the smoked Spanish; black pepper and whole peppercorns, and white peppercorns, too; fennel seed; rosemary; sesame seeds; chili powder and ancho chile; garlic powder; cayenne; allspice; turmeric; ground cloves; hot mustard.

And those are just the dry spices. Then come the condiments: mustards, molasses, honey, ketchup, lemons and limes, cilantro. The herb garden, finally showing signs of robust growth, can provide chives, thyme and mint.

My nose is excited just thinking about it!

Tagine times three

Maybe it's not fair to start at the end, but here we are, the #1 Cooking Group, happy happy happy with the fruits of a couple of hours of labor this past weekend: an amazing menu highlighting preserved lemons, Moroccan-inspired cooking, and tagines.

On cooking day, we began at the beginning, with Jessica teaching us her method for making preserved lemons. There's no better way to find the paper cuts you didn't know you had than to immerse your fingers in lemon juice and kosher salt! Amid yelps of "YOW" and a few expletives deleted, we each managed to cram chunks of heavily salted lemons into a pint-size canning jar, replacing the lid with a plastic lid and writing the date on top. (The jars will be turned, to redistribute the salt, for seven days, then refrigerated for a month before use. For those of us who are more middle-age, writing the date on the jar is a necessary reminder!)

Of course, just like on television, we had some "ready" lemons for cooking, so it was on to the recipes, each of which use preserved lemons, but with very different results:

• Chicken Provencal with Preserved Lemons, a la Jessica
• Lentils, Spinach and Turkey Sausage with Preserved Lemon (also Jessica's adaptation)
• Swordfish Tagine (my own invention)

To round out the meal, we also made:

• Fresh cucumber salad with herbs
• Couscous

Any of our three main dishes could be made in a tagine (the word "tagine" refers both to the pot, and to the many stew-like dishes cooked in it), or a stockpot or Dutch oven, and to prove it, we used each of those to prepare one of the recipes. I'm embarrassed to admit that I actually enough tagines to have made the entire meal in them (is there a support group for this?!), though the capacity of each is small, perfect for a dish that serves six. As we were cooking for twelve, we would have had to use two tagines per recipe. We decided to try the two in this photo for the swordfish: on the left, a red clay tagine from Morocco; on the right, a stoneware tagine I designed in the studio of my friend, potter Bob Fishman.

Jessica led us through her two recipes, for the chicken and the lentil stew. She has an easy, improvisational style and a "don't worry, be happy" attitude about cooking that makes you feel you can attempt anything. Even more important, she shares my philosophy about measuring (don't), and hot sauce (more is better).

First, into the oven went the chicken, in a heavy stockpot. We cooked the lentils in a Dutch oven on top of the stove. For the tagines we reserved the swordfish dish, for two reasons: the fish cooks quickly, which meant that the tagines wouldn't have to be subjected to heat for long (we did use diffusers on the gas cooktop); and we were able to use the traditional technique of building a "platform" out of celery stalks to set the fish above the steaming liquid in the base of the tagine.

One of the best things about Ninecooks groups is the opportunity to experiment, and if you can't experiment on (oops....I mean with) your friends, how will you ever learn to cook? I cobbled together this swordfish recipe from bits and pieces of other recipes. It looked good on paper, but I'd never actually made it. Turns out it is a winner, not just for a first-time recipe, but a stunningly delicious dish that will definitely make an encore appearance in my kitchen.

Laura used the mandoline to create paper-thin slices of seedless cucumber. After salting to remove some of the liquid, she mixed the cucumber with herbs, sherry vinegar and olive oil to make a light and piquant salad. With 15 minutes left in our cooking session, we debated for...oh...a nanosecond or two whether to make real couscous in the authentic couscoussier, using the rake-and-fluff method, or to cheat a bit and use instant couscous from a box.

You know how this story ends. The couscous was great, the preserved lemon dishes divine, and we even had room for dessert.

SWORDFISH TAGINE WITH CHARMOULA

Charmoula is one of the most popular condiments of Moroccan cooking, like sofrito is to Latin cuisine. It always contains parsley, garlic, lemon and olive oil, but this kicked-up version is more of a relish. This recipe is my adaptation of a recipe for grilled swordfish, combined with recipes for fish tagine, and would work just as well with salmon, tuna, halibut or cod loin. Serves 6.

3 tsp ground cumin
1-1/2 tsp ground coriander
3 cloves garlic, minced
3/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
1-1/2 tsp paprika
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper, or more to taste
3/4 tsp kosher salt
1/3 tsp black pepper
1-1/2 oz fresh lemon juice
1/4 bunch flat-leaf parsley, chopped
1/4 bunch fresh cilantro, chopped
3/4 grilled red bell pepper (or jarred roasted red peppers), chopped
3/4 preserved lemons (12 wedges), pulp removed, finely chopped
1/2 cup small cherry tomatoes, halved
6 oil-cured olives, pitted, halved
3 stalks celery, cut in half lengthwise, then into 3-inch long slices
1-1/2 lbs swordfish steaks or other fish, cut into a total of 6 pieces

For the sauce:
1-1/2 Tbsp tomato paste
1 tsp sugar
3 tsp lemon juice
2 Tbsp olive oil

Make the charmoula: In a small, dry frying pan, toast cumin and coriander until slightly fragrant, about 1 minute. Remove to a large bowl. In the same pan, sauté garlic in 1 Tbsp olive oil until lightly cooked, 1 minute. Add to the mixing bowl. Add paprika, cayenne, salt, pepper and lemon juice. Whisk well. Add remaining olive oil slowly, then add parsley and cilantro. Then, add pepper, preserved lemon, tomatoes and olives, to make a relish. Set aside 1/4 of the charmoula.

Place fish in a nonreactive glass or ceramic baking dish, and rub on all sides with the remaining 3/4 of the charmoula.

In the base of a tagine or Dutch oven, arrange celery stalks to form a “platform” for the fish. Arrange fish pieces on top, along with the charmoula marinade.  Mix together the sauce ingredients, and pour over the fish.

Cover and bake in a 350°F oven, or cook in a tagine, for 15-20 minutes or until the fish is just cooked.