Ninecooks

Cooking groups evolving

Last week, something momentous happened here at Ninecooks, something that started as a little pop in the universe, and then another little pop-pop, then pop-pop-pop-pop. By this morning I recognized the phenomenon for what it was — the big bang — the evolution of each cooking group into its own living, breathing, giggling, self-teaching organism.

For their upcoming cooking sessions, both the #1 Cooking Group and the Wednesday Lunch Group will be making recipes suggested by, and taught by, the group members themselves. One group is doing asparagus variations, the other cooking in tagine pots with preserved lemons, but in both cases we're building our menu around recipes provided by the group. I'll add a couple of recipes to round out the menu or ensure that we're using each food in a variety of ways, and I'll create the shopping lists and figure out the budget.

Every few months we do a bit of brainstorming about what we'd like to cook, new techniques to learn, new ingredients to taste, new pots and pans and kitchen gizmos to try (we managed to make an entire soup-to-nuts menu using a mandoline). Most of the time I take an overall theme and create a menu that combines my own recipes with those I find in cookbooks, magazines, TV shows. Now, as the cooking groups evolve, I'm creating cooking sessions around themes the groups choose, and recipes they provide.

Sharing recipes and teaching each other — these happen naturally when generations of families cook together. And when friends cook together, especially when they do it on a regular basis, they become families, with shared cooking history, shared disaster stories, and shared culinary triumphs.

What could be better than that?

Preserving the lemon

In the four years we've been cooking together, the friends who make up the #1 Cooking Group have learned a great deal about each other. We know who tells great jokes, who dances to the music, who prefers red wine to white, who was a wild kid in college, who likes to wash dishes, who loves their job, who hates raw onions.

Like any family, we've also settled into some patterns in the kitchen. Lucia makes the biscuits, Mary minces the garlic, and Jessica is our go-to girl for salad dressings, hot sauce, kimchee, and preserved lemons. This month, we're pairing a few of her favorite recipes using preserved lemons with my collection of tagines, the conical cooking and serving pots of Morocco. For fun, we'll try at least one of the recipes in a regular Dutch oven or stockpot, to see whether the tagine really makes a difference. Jennifer's the only other group member who uses a tagine for cooking, as far as I know, so we'll be able to draw on her experience as well.

My idea is that when we get together to cook, we'll begin by looking at and tasting three batches of preserved lemons: Jessica's, which have been marinating for a month or more; a batch I started earlier today in a quart-size jar, that will have two weeks to pickle (but won't be ready to use in time for our cooking); and a third batch, of Paula Wolfert's Five-Day Preserved Lemons from Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco. Then we'll each make a jar of preserved lemons to take home.

There's really no substitute for preserved lemons, though some recipes suggest you can use fresh lemon juice or even lemon zest, but why substitute, when the real thing is so easy to make?

JESSICA'S PRESERVED LEMONS
Adapted from Paula Wolfert.

4 large lemons (preferably fairly thin-skinned), scrubbed (about 6 oz. each)
2/3 cup kosher salt
1 cup fresh lemon juice (from 5 large lemons)
Olive oil

Dry lemons well and cut each into 8 wedges. In a bowl toss wedges with salt, and pack them into a sterilized glass wide-mouth canning jar (with a plastic replacement lid, available in the grocery or hardware store where you buy canning jars). Once the jar is full, add enough lemon juice to cover the lemons (don't use bottled lemon juice, or water). Make sure the rim is free of salt or juice, and that the lid closes tightly. Let lemons stand at room temperature for seven days, shaking the jar each day to redistribute the salt and lemon juice. Add oil to cover lemons and store in the refrigerator, covered. The lemons will ripen in 30 days and can be stored up to six months.

Jessica adds: "No surprise — I have never weighed my lemons or measured the salt and lemon juice... I just toss a bunch of lemon chunks in the salt and start packing them into a pint jar. Once the jar is full, I fill with enough lemon juice to cover. The plastic tops for wide-mouth canning jars are excellent. They are much less likely to corrode from all the salt and acid."

According to Paula Wolfert, you can keep the juice after you've used the lemons, and start a new batch of lemons in the same jar. The pickling juice can be used two or three times over the course of a year, and then should be discarded.

You might see a kind of lacy white substance in the jar as the lemons mature. This is harmless and should be rinsed off for aesthetic reasons before you use the lemons. You'll be rinsing the lemons anyway, to remove the loose salt.

Experts differ on whether to use the flesh of the preserved lemons, or just the rind. Paula Wolfert says you can eat the flesh as well as the rind, but Tess Mallos, in Cooking Moroccan, explains that the flesh can be bitter so should be used sparingly, if at all.

One of my cookbooks, The New Book of Middle Eastern Food by Claudia Roden, suggests making preserved limes in exactly the same way. We'll have to try that.

A pot is born

There comes a time in the life of every cook when the desire for the "perfect" pot, or utensil, or coffee mug, takes hold and won't let go. I'm a collector, or more properly an accumulator, of certain things for the kitchen: 1950s melamine splatterware mixing bowls; close to 200 wooden spoons and wooden utensils; cheap blue-and-white dishes from Asian groceries; and, lately, tagines, the conical cooking pots of Morocco.

I feel so fortunate to live in New England, where wonderful artisans working in clay, stone, wood and metal inhabit the forests near the Ninecooks kitchen. I'm even more fortunate that some of these artisans are friends who share a love of cooking and oh-so-kindly invite me into their studios to collaborate on – and occasionally create – the tools of my dreams.

Three years ago I designed and made my first (and only) wooden spoon, after spending an entire day in the studio of Meb Boden in Woodstock, Connecticut. Meb took me through the whole process, from selecting the block of wood (from a tree that had lived on her road), through carving, shaping, polishing, and sealing. It was the experience of a lifetime, and to this day I've never seen another spoon like mine. The spoon fits my hand, the length suits my height, and the shape and unusual patterning of the wood makes me giggle.

My next adventure in design came courtesy of my gig as a food writer for Rhode Island Monthly magazine. I took a full-day course and made a small wooden salad bowl, just the perfect size for one or two. Shaped like an old English dairy bowl, my little creation has a flat bottom that keeps it stable for mixing.

Then came tagines. For the past....oh....nine months or so, I've been collaborating with my friend Bob Fishman (pictured above, in his studio). A potter for more than 30 years, Bob's been teaching me about the properties of the stoneware clay he uses – how it handles thermal shock, how it cures, how it wears, how it takes glaze, and how it cleans. I'd bought some red clay tagines at a "going out of business" sale last summer, and it was clear that the pots were a bit fragile. I showed the pots to Bob, and we began to talk about how to create a more pleasing shape in a more durable material.

We made three or four in our first round. Here's the one I designed and love, though it's entirely Bob's handiwork. (If I'd made this myself on the potter's wheel, I'd still be trying to get the clay to "center"!) It's unglazed on the outside, and glazed in a rich white on the inside.

Now Bob is working on his own tagine ideas, a bit more refined than mine. He's testing glazes and surface design, and I'm going to write some recipes that he can include with the pots.

The #1 Cooking Group gets a chance to take my tagine collection for a test drive in mid April, when we try a few recipes based more or less loosely on Moroccan cooking. Jessica, one of the original nine cooks, often makes preserved lemons using Paula Wolfert's classic instructions, and she's suggested that we try some of her favorite ways to use them:

• Chicken Provencal with preserved lemons replacing half (or all) of the olives
• Pasta with fresh tomatoes and preserved lemons
• Black/French/green lentils with spicy turkey sausage and preserved lemons

Yum to all that! I'll add a fish recipe to the menu, so we can learn the technique of building a "platform" of celery sticks or sugar cane in the bottom of the pot to keep the fish from sticking.

In my cellar-that-looks-like-a-restaurant-supply-store, I have five tagines: three from Morocco, made of glazed terracotta; one Le Creuset, with a ceramic top and cast iron base I can put directly on my gas stovetop; and the one I designed in Bob's studio, which is stoneware that goes into the oven. When all the #1 folks get together, we cook for 18 people (nine cooks and nine spouses), so we'll do some recipes in our standard pots, too. It will be interesting to compare how the same recipe tastes when cooked in the traditional tagine vs. a Dutch oven.

Jessica's sending along her recipes, but we cook in just three weeks, so the preserved lemons have to get going right away. When we cook together, we can each start a jar of the traditional, thirty-day lemons, but I'll also make a batch of Five-Day Preserved Lemons, from Paula Wolfert's Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco, which work well for those of us who haven't quite planned ahead.

To market, to market

Let's face it: cooking with friends is great, but foreplay is better.

Yesterday, the foreplay for The #1 Cooking Group was a couple of hours of food shopping to gather the key ingredients (fish and bread) for our cioppino with croutons and pizza bianca. Lucia, Kitty, Jessica and I set out to Captain's Catch Seafood, our favorite North Providence fish market. For 14 people, we needed 6 pounds of shellfish and 3 pounds of firm-flesh, but mild-flavored, fish for the delicate soup base.

What we wanted, and what we chose instead:

• 2 lbs mussels – always available
• 2 lbs manila or other small clams – we bought littlenecks
• 2 lbs large shrimp (size 26-30) – we bought 21-25 size, because they still had their shells on, and we needed the shells to make our mock fish stock
• 1 lb halibut – we substituted mako shark (yum)
• 1 lb salmon – we got it, and asked the fishmonger to skin it for us
• 1 lb cod loin – we bought scrod instead, because it was beautiful and the thick pieces were perfect for soup

With the fish in hand, we made our way to Maxie's Bread in North Smithfield. Owner Ron Ullman gave us a "tour" of his hand-built, wood-fired brick oven. He described the cycle of bread baking, the different types of bread he bakes as the oven is cooling down to various temperatures, and how he uses six thermocouplers to gauge the temperature of the oven floor at various points in the cycle. Knowing we were making cioppino, Ron had set aside two loaves of sourdough and a loaf of polenta bread – perfect for the giant garlic-and-thyme croutons we made to accompany the soup.

We had a bit of time and decided to stop in at Glocester Greens & Goats, right up the road from Ninecooks. Carolyn and Ray Lapointe tend a small herd of mini-Nubians and, in season, several greenhouses and raised beds where they grow the more than 40 greens and herbs that make up their gourmet salad mix. With the fresh goats' milk, in summer, Carolyn also makes creamy feta cheese.

My family never kept goats (we were New York City folk), but Lucia and Jessica both had goats when they were growing up in more rural locales. Today we all live in the country, in northwest Rhode Island. None of us has goats (though there are sheep and sometimes chickens in our fields), but most of the cooks in our cooking groups have very large vegetable gardens. At Ninecooks we grow herbs, used by all of the cooking groups and cooking classes, and we trade herbs for veggies. (Well, we offer to trade, but also accept handouts of overflow tomatoes and zucchini.) Because we're all gardeners, we don't buy Carolyn and Ray's gourmet salad greens often, but it's nice to meet our farmer neighbors. It's fun to meet the goats, too.

Back in the Ninecooks kitchen, we made our giant batch of cioppino, giant garlicky croutons, and a giant pile of pizza bianca, redolent with fresh thyme and crunchy from our favorite Portuguese sea salt.

 

 

Words to eat by

Each time the #1 Cooking Group gets together (we're making mozzarella in this photo), I start by reading (aloud) a short something to get us "centered", I guess, before we plunge into our cooking. I don't really remember why I started doing this, except to remind us not to take ourselves too seriously, but in the three years we've been cooking together, no one has run screaming from the room. (They're kind, these #1 cooks.)

Sometimes the readings are brief: an Ogden Nash poem here, a famous-chef's-memoir quote there. I try and mix it up, alternating humor, instruction, and inspiration. Pieces like The Story of Purple Popsicles from Zingerman's Guide to Good Eating make us laugh right up front; tales of kitchen disasters, the likes of which we rarely experience in the Ninecooks kitchen, also make us laugh, though we're secretly thinking, "Whew, glad that wasn't us!"

A few weeks ago, Mary passed along a 1997 issue of Whole Earth Magazine, featuring an essay entitled The Ethics of Eating Part II, from remarks by Alice Waters made to the 16th Annual Ecological Farming Conference in Asilomar, California in January 1996. If you believe in the power of cooking with friends and family, you'll want to read the whole thing, but I'll share this very short excerpt with the group when we cook together in early March:

"Not long ago I was invited to give the commencement address at Mills College. When you give a graduation speech, you have permission to be very solemn, and to cover the Big Themes, and to go right to the Heart of the Matter. So I gave a speech in which I tried to answer the questions of what it means to be human and what our lives are supposed to be for. And I titled this speech 'The Ethics of Eating.' I tried to persuade the class that the choices they make when they buy food are serious choices, and that the way they choose food matters.

"But there is another ethical choice we make about food, and that is how we decide to eat it. So this speech is "The Ethics of Eating, Part Two." I want you to choose to eat gathered with other people around the table....

"It's not just the food, it's what we do with it. If we are going to eat ethically, we had better start eating with each other and our children. When you eat together, and eat a meal you cooked yourselves, you are involved with the process in a different way. You shelled the peas, you peeled the potatoes, and you want everyone to enjoy every last bite. These are the kind of meals we should be eating with our children. To paraphrase Wendell Berry, such meals honor the materials from which they are made; they honor the art by which they are done; they honor the people who make them, and those who share them....

"The ritual of coming to the dinner table was once the basis of community. Recently Francine du Plessix Gray wrote an essay in The New Yorker aptly titled 'Starving Children,' which said, among other things, 'The family meal is not only the core curriculum in the school of civilized discourse; it is also a set of protocols that curb our natural savagery and our animal greed, and cultivate a capacity for sharing and thoughtfulness ... the ritual of nutrition helps to imbue families, and societies at large, with greater empathy and fellowship.'....

"If we want kids to join us at the table, we have to show them why. And one of the biggest reasons is that you learn at the table. Above all you learn how to use your senses. And you either use your senses, or you lose them. They get dulled. You settle for the routine and the mediocre, in food and everything else. There is so much information that comes from sensual stimulation -- information that comes to you immediately, even faster than over the Internet. I'm convinced that teaching children to eat food together is the best way to teach them to open up their senses. It will improve their ability to communicate -- not just about food, but about everything. And they will grow up to be wiser, happier people."

That's why Ninecooks believes in cooking with friends and family. In our cooking groups, we share the responsibility for food shopping, we prepare food together, and then we eat together. And when we take the recipes and menus home and share them with our families and friends, our community grows stronger.

Thanks, Alice, for showing all of us the way.