Maya

Lots of people who like to cook find inspiration in dishes their parents make, or their grandparents. But what about their kids?

Maya is a baker. She is a dessert queen. She went into the kitchen by herself when she was about 11, picked up a spatula, and never looked back. Blondies, brownies, lemon squares, chocolate chip cookies—the girl has not yet met a stick of butter she could not bend to her sweet-toothed will. “Baking is very satisfying,” she says. “It’s fun to make something and have it come out really delicious and have people like it.”

Now, three years later, Maya dabbles in non-dessert foods—oven carrot fries, for example, and homemade pasta—but those dabblings, while quite successful, do not give her quite the same satisfaction as the sweets. Can’t say that I blame her; snagging a carrot stick from a roasting pan just isn’t the same as sticking your finger in a bowl of cookie batter.

But perhaps it is the reliability of baking that appeals to her, the formulas, the chemistry between the ingredients that all but promises success. “I like to follow a recipe and know it will come out right,” Maya says. So far, so good. Maya started making chocolate birthday cakes a couple years ago, from a recipe she found on a plain old tin of Hershey’s unsweetened cocoa. Unbelievably good. Her next holy grails are a coconut cake and a “death-by-chocolate” torte. Both “seem like real projects,” she says happily. “Sometimes I’m in the mood for something easy, but sometimes I’m in the mood for a challenge.”

It is springtime, and I suppose we should be talking about rhubarb, or fiddleheads, or ramps, etc., etc. All those ingredients are fresh and wonderful (except for fiddleheads—eh), but Maya would compost them in a flash if she had butter, chocolate, and peppermint extract at the ready.

Yes, peppermint extract—or creme de menthe—destined for a batch of brownies that may change the way you think about brownies. These are rich and fudgy, but also fresh and cool, with the tiniest sharp edge from the peppermint. Brownies for springtime.

Mint Brownies

(adapted from How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman)

1 stick butter

2 oz. unsweetened chocolate

1 cup sugar

2 eggs

1/2 cup flour

1 large pinch salt

1/2 tsp. vanilla

1/2 tsp. peppermint extract or 1/4 cup creme de menthe (if using the latter, add an extra tablespoon of flour)

1/2 to 3/4 cup white chocolate chips (the mint mitigates the heavy sweetness, promise!)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease an 8-inch square pan, or line it with aluminum foil and grease the foil (easier cleanup and extraction of brownies!).

Melt chocolate and butter together over low heat. Transfer to a bowl, and mix in the sugar and the eggs. Stir in the flour, then the extracts, then the white chocolate chips. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 20 to 25 minutes. Cool, then pop the brownies in the fridge and chill until cold before cutting into squares.

Jiwon

"I love tofu so much." Now that is a declaration you do not hear every day.

But tofu is one of the foods that Jiwon always has in her refrigerator, along with mushrooms (any kind) and kimchee (home-made). Growing up in Seoul, she remembers waiting for the tofu-maker to come around in the late afternoon. He would announce his approach by ringing a little bell, "like an ice-cream truck," she says. The tofu would still be warm.

Jiwon works long hours and forages leftovers on weekday evenings, but on weekends she often hosts friends, neighbors, or coworkers for dinner. She cooks everything from basic dishes like Chap Chae (stir-fried noodles) —"what every Korean housewife should know," she says—to specialties from her mother's repertoire, such as a pine-nut sauce with soy and garlic served over cucumbers, Asian pears, or cold meat.

When Jiwon was a girl, her mother would send her off in the morning with homemade snacks like sushi, and bread filled with red bean paste, and she DELIVERED a hot lunch to her daughter at school every day. A little extreme, Jiwon says, but not unheard of. Nor did it go unnoticed by Jiwon's classmates. "My mother always gave me more than I could eat myself, so I could use nice food in making friends," she says. "I always had a little entourage around me when it was time to eat snacks." Yet at home Jiwon was not allowed in the kitchen. She was "the clumsy one," according to her mother.

As a result, when Jiwon arrived in California for graduate school at the age of 24, she did not even know how to cook rice. Her roommate, from Chicago's south side, introduced her to that culinary building block called Hamburger Helper, which, Jiwon says, "was okay for a while." Eventually realizing she had to feed herself in a more satisfying way, Jiwon found a Korean cookbook and began making rustic, simple meals. Then she began throwing dinner parties. Then she got interested in deep-frying. "My friends would be sitting around, starving, for five hours, and finally I would serve them this very greasy, clumsy food," she says.

Yet it was the social aspect of cooking and eating that Jiwon valued, and still does. She likes to feed people. It makes her—and her guests—happy. In a couple of hours one afternoon, she creates scallion pancakes called Pajeon; also, Chap Chae with sweet potato noodles, beef, and vegetables; sliced beef in cucumber cups, and stir-fried French horn mushrooms. The evening's guests will be a couple from work and their young daughter. Jiwon has her sights set on the little girl. "I want her to like eating my food," she says. "Then she will want to come back again and again."

Pajeon

1 ½ cups flour

1 to 2 cups water

1 egg

½ pound scallops

1 can crabmeat

2 bunches scallions, chopped into 2-inch pieces

salt and pepper to taste

oil for frying

Dipping sauce: Mix together a few tablespoons soy sauce, a few drops of rice vinegar, and toasted sesame seeds

Mix flour, water, and egg to make a smooth, thin batter (like crepe batter). Stir in scallops, crabmeat, and scallions. Season with salt and pepper. Coat the bottom of a skillet with a film of neutral-flavored oil. Ladle batter into the pan to form cakes approximately 3 inches in diameter, and fry until golden brown. Flip and fry until second side is golden brown. Serve hot or warm with dipping sauce.

Robert

When I call Robert to schedule an interview, he says, "I cook on rocks, I cook underground, I cook in trash cans, that sort of thing." Okay, so he's an extreme-sport kind of cook, a manly-man cook. He probably doesn't do everyday stuff, like dinner.

Wrong. Robert is a former boy scout who cooks for his wife most evenings—nice, normal things like pasta and salmon and potato pancakes.






















Here is Robert with two pasties (pronounced PAST-eez, not to be confused with a certain fringe-y accessory). These meat and vegetable pies are a family tradition that comes from Michigan, where Robert grew up. It's a dish with history, too; it arrived in Michigan with the Cornish miners who emigrated there in the early 1800s to work in the iron and copper mines. Robert's father's father, a sheet metal worker, was the family pasty maker. As a child, Robert found that peeling potatoes for a batch of his grandfather's pasties was a pretty good gig.

His mother, with five kids to feed, found little joy in cooking ("Her idea of a perfectly cooked vegetable was one you could drink through a straw," Robert says), and she gave her son free rein in the kitchen as long as he cleaned up after himself. So he baked. He experimented. He cooked over fires with fellow boy scouts. To earn a merit badge, he made pot roast and cherry pie in an underground, rock-lined fire pit.


Decades later, Robert still goes for the occasional over-the-top (i.e. INSANE) project. With his partner in culinary INSANITY, Mike C., he recently took on a Turducken, a boned chicken inside a boned duck inside a boned turkey, stuffed with sausage and cornbread. Then there was a Timpani, the giant Italian concoction featured in the movie "Big Night" that consists of layers of sausage, cheese, vegetables, and pasta, all wrapped in bread dough and baked. And every Easter, Robert and his wife, brother, and sister-in-law feed sticky buns and eggs cooked to order to dozens of guests who take turns at the table; the record is 121. On camping trips, Robert roasts turkey in a trash can.

Whew. Back to the pasties.

There are different camps when it comes constructing this meal-in-a-crust. Robert's family always makes it with sliced vegetables and diced meat instead of the more typical ground meat. And some people try to get all fancy with additions like, gulp, nutmeg. Robert shakes his head. "People made pasties to use up meat scraps and other leftover bits," he says. "It's miners' food, workers' food, something you could wrap in a towel and eat with dirty hands." These days Robert slices his pasties into wedges and eats them with a fork. But nutmeg? Never.


Pasties

This makes one very large pasty. Robert used to eat a whole one himself, back in the day, but now he says it can serve at least two. He always doubles the recipe and bakes two pasties together in one pie plate.

1 c. flour
1 pinch salt
6 Tbsp. cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
6-8 Tbsp. ice water
1 small onion
1/2 lb. beef chuck, cut into strips 1/2 inch wide and 1 inch long
1 large russet potato, thinly sliced
salt and pepper to taste

Crust: Make a volcano with the flour, sprinkle it with two tablespoons of the water and stir briefly to moisten. Chop the butter into the flour until it resembles coarse meal, then add water gradually and mix with your hands until the dough can be gathered into a ball. Using the heel of your hand, press down hard on the dough and twist your hand three times. Wrap the dough in plastic, chill for at least 30-45 minutes, and then roll out to fit a 9-inch pie plate.
Assembly: layer the meat and veggies on one half of the crust, potatoes first, then onions, then meat, then salt and pepper. Repeat, and end with a layer of potatoes. Fold the rest of the crust over the filling, pinch the edges closed, and poke lots of vents in the top crust with a thin skewer or pointy knife to allow steam to escape. Bake at 400 degrees for 45 minutes, or until the crust is golden brown.

Orly

Here in Brattleboro, it is neither weird nor rare for people to raise chickens in their backyards. I’m not talking about farmers—I mean regular people who just want really good eggs without shelling out $5 a dozen. Or people who fall in love with the cute, fuzzy chicks at Agway in the spring and soon end up with UNcute, UNfuzzy hens that can be a MAJOR pain in the ass to corral into their coop every night. (I have babysat chickens. Not a pretty sight.)

My neighbor, Orly, is one of these people. With six laying hens hanging out next to her garage, she (well, really her husband, Eric) collects a couple dozen eggs every week. It makes total sense that one of the go-to foods in their house is quiche. “I think the allure of it has to do with taking simple ingredients and making something really tasty with not too much effort,” Orly says. Plus it reminds her of a trip she and Eric took to Paris, where they ate little quiches at sidewalk cafés to fortify themselves for miles of walking around the city.

Orly’s father was born in Syria and raised in Lebanon, so she grew up eating middle eastern dishes like me’oday, a veal and potato stew that provoked fights among Orly and her brothers and sisters over who would get the bone marrow. Their Israeli grandmother visited every year and always made kibbeh, a dish of beef, allspice, and pine nuts in a bulghur wheat crust. Orly liked the delicate work of shaping the kibbeh, which “had to be perfect,” she recalls, or her grandmother would take them apart and fix them. Orly’s mom was considerably more laid-back in the kitchen. She was an eyeballer and, for the most part, so is Orly. “I’d make a lousy cookbook writer,” Orly says. The more measuring you do, she reasons, the more dishes there are to wash.

This is not to say Orly lacks ambition: she is a baker who will grind her own pistachio paste for a cake project, and makes pies because she’s a pie purist and finds most specimens lacking. (“Apples with cranberries? I don’t do that,” she says firmly.) With two full-time jobs, though, and two young children, she and Eric often find themselves beyond the kind of meals that require measuring.

But EGGS. Fried, scrambled, baked in a buttery crust. Eggs are perfect.

Onion-broccoli quiche

Orly likes onion, her kids eat broccoli, so this pie-chart of a quiche satisfies everyone. Orly often mixes and rolls out the crust the night before and stores it in the fridge, wrapped up.

1 stick butter, plus 1-1/2 Tbsp.

1 cup flour

1/2 tsp. salt

2-3 Tbsp. water

3 medium onions, sliced thin

1 c. steamed broccoli (optional)

1 c. shredded cheddar or gruyere cheese

7 backyard eggs (these are smaller than store-bought eggs; Orly suggests 5 or 6 of those)

1 cup milk

salt and pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Crust: Combine the stick of butter, the flour, and the salt with a pastry cutter, making sure to leave little pea-sized clumps of butter. Stir in water to form dough. Roll out 1/4-inch thick and place in a 9-inch pie plate.

Filling: Melt remaining 1-1/2 Tbsp. butter in a skillet. Sauté the onions over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until they soften, about 10 minutes, or longer if you want them more caramelized. Sprinkle the cheese into the crust, and layer the onions on top, along with the broccoli if you are using it. Beat eggs with the milk and salt and pepper and pour over the vegetables and cheese. Bake for about one hour. When the quiche is golden brown and “puffy like a soufflé,” Orly says, it’s done.