When I was in France earlier this year, I had it in my mind that I would write a cookbook. I wasn’t exactly sure what kind of a cookbook I would write, but I had in mind something that reflected how I liked to cook; namely, all day, with sometimes quite complicated recipes and hard-to-find ingredients.
I’m the type of cook who will either abandon a recipe right in the middle of cooking it because I’ve forgotten a crucial ingredient, say, galangal, or I’ll just march right out there in blowing snow to go get it. Aside from pastry and dessert making, I love to go to the ends of the earth to find ingredients. I hate substituting “in a pinch.”
So my modus operandi was usually to cook on a Saturday, doing the shopping that morning and then cooking all the rest of the afternoon, watching cooking shows while I cooked and leisurely sipping Cuivrée, and that’s what I wanted this book to reflect. It was to be called The Saturday Cook.
To this end, for a month in France, I was busy assembling recipes from everywhere; the Internet, my own cookbooks, and then I went out and bought cookbooks in French at the bookstore in Bordeaux and started picking recipes that I liked and translated them into my MacBook laptop. I made a few, too, and sometimes the results were spectacular. I even went as far as to design the first few pages with my own food photography; I was well on the way.
Alas, when I got back to Montreal, one day I was playing the guitar along to some jam tracks on my laptop and it started stuttering, so I did what I normally do to balky machinery: I hit it. The rest can be guessed.
I trashed the hard drive. All was lost. I replaced the hard drive but the guy who replaced it said there was no way he could get any data off the old one. All that effort, all those translations, that whole month: gone. But I wasn’t about to give up. I took the hard drive to a data-recovery service in Montreal operated by a really nice Russian guy. But data recovery is not cheap. It took him a month and in the end he was only able to rescue 27 text files. It cost me $450, and there was only one recipe that was recovered that I either didn’t already have duplicated somewhere else or that I could track some version down of on the Internet.
Here’s the list of some of the recipes (that I had miraculously emailed to someone before the hard drive crashed) that I intended for my book, and at the end there’s the recipe that I made in France that was so spectacular that I wrote it down. It’s the only one that survived . . . a $450 recipe.
Asian Tomato and Mushroom Chicken (à la Marengo)
Asian Vegetable-stuffed Beef Rollups in Teriyaki Sauce
Balinese fried chicken
Beef Rendang
Bucatini with Prosciutto and Feta
Burmese beef and potato curry
Burmese chicken curry
Chicken Jalfrezi
Chile dogs with homemade chili sauce on Knackwurst or Frankfurters
Chile-garlic dip
Cucumber-Garlic Raita
Cucumber-Shallot-Chile Salad
Farfalle with roasted cherry tomatoes, goat cheese and kalamata olives
Fresh homemade pizza å la Luzzo’s in New York
Ginger Beef
Hmong curry
L'Express Raviolis Maison (fresh raviolis in a hunter’s mushroom sauce)
Late-night Leftover Pasta with prosciutto and parmesan
Linguine with Prosciutto, Gorgonzola and Basil
Magret de canard with honey dijonnaise
Nachos with four cheeses, pancetta, garlic, olives and jalapenos
Thai Green Chicken Curry
Pacific Rim Kobe Steak Salad with Sesame-Ginger Dressing
Penne with Chicken, Feta and Dill
Pita Rapture with chicken or beef, peppers, onions, lettuce and cilantro with a Caesar dressing
Quesadillas with three cheeses, bacon, jalapenos and cilantro
Seekh Kebab (ground beef on skewers)
Sri Lankan Cucumber salad
Sri Lankan Mulligatawny
Sri Lankan pork curry
Szechuan-style Chile Shrimp
Tandoori-Style Chicken Burgers with Cumin Yogurt Sauce
Thai Beef “Mussaman “ curry
Thai Beef and Basil Flat Rice Noodles
Thai Spicy-sweet Roast Chicken
Tomato-Onion-Chile Salad
Yang Chow Basmati Fried Rice
And the $450 recipe:
Asian Tomato and Mushroom Chicken
Ingredients:
6 boneless, skinless chicken thighs, halved lengthwise
1 medium onion, cut in thin crescents
4 medium very ripe tomatoes
8-10 shiitake or matsutake mushrooms, thickly sliced
4 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 cup cilantro, finely chopped
1 1/2 tablespoons Sambal Oelek
3 tablespoons Mirin
1 cup chicken broth
5 tablespoons sesame oil
3 tablespoons peanut oil
Method:
Brine chicken in 4 cups warm water with 4 tablespoons salt and 3 tablespoons sugar for 15 minutes. Remove from brine and pat dry.
Heat 3 tablespoons sesame oil and 1 tablespoons peanut in large nonstick frying pan on medium-high. Brown the chicken one one side in hot oil: about 7 minutes. Turn and brown other side for an additional 4 minutes. Remove from pan and set aside.
Add 1 tablespoons sesame oil and 1 tablespoon peanut oil and sauté mushrooms until water has completely evaporated and mushrooms have reduced by half and are browned on both sides.
Remove from pan and set aside. In remaining oil, fry onions until limp, about three minutes. Add garlic, sauté two minutes. Add tomatoes. Sauté about 5 minutes; add back mushrooms. Sauté another 5 minutes, then add chicken, Sambal Oelek, mirin and chicken broth. Stir to combine. Simmer covered, for 10 minutes. Add cilantro and simmer for 5 minutes.
Serve over basmati rice.
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