Man with a Pan Read online

  If you segment the two hemispheres of the brain, you might say one is creative and the other is analytic; I don’t know if that’s necessarily true, but just suppose it is. The work I do is extremely analytic. It’s an intense environment where you’re constantly negotiating and dealing with large sums of money. But in the kitchen I get to put together whatever my creativity can dream up.

  I grew up on a fifteen-thousand-acre cattle ranch in New Mexico, and I inherited a love of eating and cooking from my mother and grandmother, who were constantly preparing food and planning for the appetites of the men (mostly me and my brothers) who worked on the ranch. From eating the unique cuisine of New Mexican chefs (definitely not your run-of-the-mill Mexican food, and worth the trip to New Mexico if you haven’t visited), I also developed a craving for all things spicy, which doesn’t work particularly well for either my wife or my kids, though I still try to incorporate spiciness into my day-to-day cooking.

  My oldest daughter is one of the more finicky eaters I’ve ever found. After she was born, I eagerly awaited the day that she would start eating baby food, and I jumped right into making my own baby food. She rejected all of it. And that was just an early sign of what kind of eater she would be. Now that she’s older, she helps me cook, and I find that when she does, she tends to experiment more and tends to eat more. So if I can, I involve her in the meals.

  Before kids, my wife worked, and we had schedules where I would shop for the meal as I came home. I’d stop at the local butcher or the local fish market, and I’d put an entire kind of multicourse meal together before my wife got home. Now that we’re parents, it’s more about rushing home to have food ready for the kids, and possibly even for us, if we’re going to eat together by 5:30 or 6:00 and do some other things around the house. One thing that’s changed with kids is that I do tend to do more cooking ahead of time. I definitely prepare something one day and then freeze it or maybe eat it over the course of a couple of days if I don’t freeze it.

  If you’re just starting to cook, the best advice I have is to be patient, recognize that you’ll make mistakes, and know that not every dish will turn out the way you want it to. In fact, many of mine don’t turn out the way I want them to. So I keep experimenting. Most importantly, get involved with cooking if you want an alternative to the everyday meals that you’re going to see, whether they’re in restaurants or from the food counter at a grocery store or from a takeout. Do it because you want to get in touch with what you’re eating. Know what the ingredients are. Know what you’re putting into your body. Know why you’re doing it. Control the portions. Control the different things that go into it so that you yourself are creating the taste. At a very important level that I think we tend to forget in this society, you’re controlling your health through your food.

  There’s something else about cooking that my wife and I have talked about between ourselves and with other friends who are of a similar age. The women were raised by moms who were coming out of the fifties and left the home—many for the first time in generations—to start working. These moms didn’t pass along to their daughters, who are my wife’s age, knowledge about cooking. So my wife and many of her friends never learned how to cook, and frankly they don’t have a passion for it.

  I’m hoping that by involving my daughters in cooking, they’ll have a passion for preparation, they’ll have a passion for food in general, a passion for pairing foods with other foods, or foods with wines. And I just think food is so much about enjoyment of life. And hopefully, they pick that up. Maybe, if nothing else, they pick up an element of creativity from it.

  Recipe File

  Miso Cod

  This recipe is adapted from one by Nobu Matsuhisa.

  2 pounds black cod fillets (salmon can work as a substitute, but regular cod cannot)

  1 cup sake

  ½ cup mirin

  1½ cups miso paste (white)

  2 tablespoons sugar

  Wash and dry the cod fillets and cut into ½-pound portions.

  In a small saucepan, bring the sake to a quick boil, then add the mirin and the miso paste until dissolved.

  Add the sugar, stirring until dissolved.

  Remove from the heat and allow to cool to room temperature (the refrigerator works well to speed up the cooling).

  In a plastic bag, add the miso mixture to the cod, and allow to marinate for 2 hours minimum, up to 24 hours. If marinating longer than 2 hours, then put it in the refrigerator.

  Preheat the oven to 425°F.

  Remove the fish from the miso mixture and arrange the fish, skin side down, in a baking pan or dish, then place in the preheated oven for 12 to 15 min, until the top surface of the fish is a caramel brown and the fish begins to visibly flake (do not turn over or flip the fish while cooking).

  Serve with coconut rice, garnished with sesame seeds.

  New Mexico Chili and Beans

  This recipe is adapted from the recipes of my mother and grandmother.

  2 white onions, diced

  5 cloves garlic, minced

  2 cups pinto beans (sorted and soaked for at least 2 hours, or overnight, which is better)

  1 russet potato, peeled and quartered

  2 pounds ground turkey (or ground pork or beef)

  2 tablespoons red New Mexico chili, ground or powder (see note)

  1 16-oz can stewed tomatoes

  ½ cup flour

  Sauté the onion and two cloves of the chopped garlic in a sauce pot, preferably cast iron, sufficiently large to hold the beans and their liquid.

  After the onions become translucent (about 10 minutes), add the beans and the potatoes (which, I’ve been told, help to reduce intestinal gas) and 4 cups of water, or enough to cover the beans.

  Bring to a rapid boil and then reduce to a simmer until beans are soft, about 2 hours.

  Meanwhile, in another stove-top pot—also ideally cast iron—sauté the remaining onion and garlic until the onion turns translucent.

  Add the ground turkey and continue to cook until it browns thoroughly.

  Mix in the chili powder to coat the meat mixture thoroughly.

  Add the tomatoes and 4 cups of water, bring to a boil, and then reduce to a simmer.

  Once the chili mixture has simmered for about 1 hour, place the flour in a small sauté pan and heat it gradually, stirring constantly, until it browns (do not overcook).

  Once the flour is a caramel-brown color, remove it from the heat and add it to the chili mixture 1 tablespoon at a time, until mixture is thickened.

  To serve, place the beans in a bowl and then cover with the chili.

  Note: New Mexico red chili powder can be found at Whole Foods in the spice area or at Web sites such as www.hatch-chile.com and www.nmchili.com. As an alternative, you can grind dried chili pods into a powder.

  MANNY HOWARD

  Stunt Foodways

  Manny Howard, a James Beard Foundation Award–winning writer and a former senior editor and former contributing editor at Gourmet magazine, is the author of My Empire of Dirt: How One Man Turned His Big-City Backyard into a Farm; A Cautionary Tale, published by Scribner.

  To secure the love of a beautiful woman, I loaded a dead pig into the back of my late-model Chevy Blazer. It was August 2001. I pressed my buddy Malachi into service, purchased four fronds from a banana tree, a yard of chicken wire, and two yards of burlap. I liberated two dozen granite cobblestones from behind the flimsy fencing of a municipal landscaping project and drove the Blazer one hundred miles east, straight out to sea and the tip of Long Island. I had a promise to keep. It mattered little that I had only the vaguest notion about how to deliver on it.

  Lisa and I met one night in the dead of winter. If her affection for her “summerhouse friends” wasn’t the first topic of conversation, it was the second. It became very clear very quickly that if I didn’t win their approval, Lisa and I were going to have a problem. This was going to be trouble if I fell hard for this hard-charging beauty from Jackson, Mississ
ippi.

  Spring came quickly; summer, too. A reckoning was upon us both. No stranger to the grand gesture, early one Wednesday morning, over coffee, I announced that the coming weekend I would prepare a special feast for her summerhouse friends. I would roast a whole pig.

  The declaration had the desired effect. I received an e-mail from Lisa shortly before lunchtime notifying me that the entire house had been made aware of my plan and everyone was excited by the prospect of a roast pig for dinner on Saturday night. As an aside, Lisa inquired where I intended to roast this pig.

  On the beach, of course, was my confident reply.

  “Have you ever roasted a whole pig anywhere before?” asked Malachi after I described the caper, a fever dream revealing itself to me as I spoke.

  “How hard can it be?” I replied, incredulous.

  Malachi said that he thought roasting a whole pig might be quite difficult, never mind enormously time consuming. “How about burgers?”

  I explained that the whole point was to put the residents of the summerhouse on their heels. Get them watching the food. Take the focus off me. Everybody loves burgers, but this was too big a job for burgers. Lisa had told me that her friends were enormously curious about this new boyfriend named Manny. She said that more than one of the guys (protective of her in a brotherly sort of way, she preempted) had inquired about my lineage.

  Malachi and I arrived on Friday evening; Lisa met us in the drive-way and made the introductions. I barely retained a single name. To my surprise, there were nearly two dozen residents of the summerhouse. The alarming numbers had nothing to do with my inability to engage socially, however. The pig was all I cared about. We needed to dig a deep pit in the sand, as well as prepare a fire and superheat those granite bricks, all before breakfast the next day.

  That night, with help from Lisa’s protective brotherly types, we dug the pit. Just after dawn, while the cobbles baked, Malachi and I stuffed the pig with papaya, jalapeños, limes, and other bright fruits. We wrapped the critter in banana fronds, sealed the leaves with soaked burlap, and encased the package in wire. Finally, we lowered the ungainly cocoon onto the granite bed and covered it with four feet of sand. Everything was going just the way I had planned.

  I spent the intervening hours trying to learn everyone’s name and attempting to limit my beer intake. We unearthed the pig. It was hot and fully cooked, but to my horror it looked like an East River floater. The beast wasn’t roasted. I had steamed it in the sand. At best you could call it poached. Whatever it was called, dinner was a wrinkly abomination—not the least bit appetizing.

  The assembled crowd had doubled in size, but no one in it understood what had happened. They were all drinking, and they were getting hungry. We only had moments to make it right. The sun was setting and the women were rooting around in beach bags for sweaters and shawls.

  Malachi delivered a clearheaded appraisal: “We’re fucked.”

  Not yet, I thought. The meat might have been ugly, but it was cooked. To make it attractive and that much tastier, we just needed to hack the carcass up into grill-size hunks and caramelize it. I retreated inland to buy as much charcoal as I could find in town. Malachi took up a surreptitious collection of kettle grills from neighboring decks. We finished off the pork on an assembly of flaming taiko drums set at odd angles in the sand. Their orange glow was the only light to eat by.

  * * *

  This instinct for the culinary high-wire act has manifested itself regularly since Lisa and I married and started a family. I’ve shucked hundreds of oysters for a driveway crammed with parents in order to celebrate our daughter’s second birthday (and I’ve found numerous, similarly flimsy excuses to repeat the effort). I have tempted the fates by preparing paella for fifty, cooked outdoors on the grill. “This is the traditional way paella is prepared,” I boasted to any guest who dared approach their host, the dervish at the grill. Nobody needed to know I’d never made the dish before.

  I can trace the source of this unwieldy urge to overreach directly to my father, a trained chemist from England who worked here as a rocket scientist on the Mercury rocket mission for NASA. He made a mythical, breathtakingly spicy curry whenever he entertained at home. In fairness, though, my impulse for stunt cooking is a dangerous mutation of his much more benign intentions.

  I can recall sitting cross-legged in my footy pajamas under my parents’ kitchen table, the bare bulb at the ceiling casting a harsh light over the mayhem beyond the table’s unvarnished maple legs. Every time my father assembled his friends, he served a curry. I marveled at his ability to single-handedly prepare a massive pot of fiery food while presiding over a riot of 1970s booze- and dope-fueled, shaggy manliness. It was a meal he encouraged me to share, always with the same disastrous, and apparently hilarious, results.

  I know now that this vindaloo was less the orthodox hot-and-sour stew, with its uniquely Goan amalgam of the Portuguese colonial influence married to the region’s countless culinary traditions, and more the Brick Lane pot of fire. But like most things my father bothers doing, this curry was imbued with potent storybook origins. According to Dad (though, mind you, he had me convinced that he was a Spitfire pilot during the War, and I believed him right up to the moment I could do enough math to suss that when the conflict ended, he was not yet eight years old), his recipe came to our kitchen directly from a much grander one half a world away in Africa.

  One evening long ago, while he was completing his postdoc at Imperial College in London, Dad succeeded, after many failed attempts, to convince his roommate, Amir “Johnny” Tar Mohammed, to phone his mother, originally from India, at home in a wealthy suburb of Entebbe, in Uganda. Dad wanted the recipe for a proper Indian curry. The two of them squeezed into a public phone box, and Dad fed coins into the slot to keep the line open while Johnny interrogated his mum. “And you know, old Johnny had never once been in the kitchen of his own house,” he’d remark with equal incredulity whenever he retold the story.

  When Mom and Dad immigrated to America, Dad carried his curry with him. In Brooklyn, he measured the single tablespoon of red chili flakes, counted out six green cardamom pods, leveled a tablespoon of dried celery seeds, and measured one teaspoon of turmeric with masterly precision, brushing excess grains of the impossibly yellow powder from the spoon back into the plastic bag. Resealing it with a red paper-covered wire twist tie, he’d return the bag to its place in the cupboard. And though much of Dad’s work was done with a steadily emptying glass of Johnnie Walker Red in one hand, his fidelity to that recipe, scribbled into a laboratory ledger and delivered across thousands of miles all those years ago, served as his keel. It drew Dad and his posse—Peter, Richard, Mark, and their wives and girlfriends—together as they free-poured drinks, cracked endless quarts of Rheingold, and fired up yet another joint. I sat spellbound, uniquely privy to the secret rituals of grown-up joy.

  Years later, bound for college and committed to the recreation of the social magic conjured by that vindaloo, I hectored Dad for the recipe. By then, it had been at least a decade since Dad had made a vindaloo. He and Mom split when I was eleven, and adventurous, time-consuming, boozy curries had been replaced by dutiful dinners that sacrificed ambition on the altar of practicality. (The rotation was as follows: a consistently medium-rare roast top round, rubbed with salt and diced garlic, served with steamed broccoli and what was then, in the eighties, called wild rice but came out of a cardboard box; a sautéed quartered chicken served on top of a large helping of Uncle Ben’s white rice and covered with a tomato ragout, next to steamed green beans; spaghetti accompanied by a sauce of tomato and ground meat, seasoned primarily with bay—or on occasion, fresh clam sauce with a side of steamed cauliflower.) Dinner was served promptly at 7:30 every evening that my sister, Bevin, and I spent at his apartment. We were latchkey kids, free to do whatever we wished until then, but attendance at dinner was an immutable rule.

  He got no argument from us. The ritual was a balm; his studied resolve, a legitima
te anchor. Raising children takes determination, dedication, and, most of all maybe, a keen sense of timing. If dinner had not been ready for the table as Bevin and I tumbled through the front door every evening, the delicate table fellowship he worked so hard to build would not have stood a chance.

  What I could not know then was that Dad was locked in what he believed was a life-and-death battle with entropic collapse. As best I can tell, for those first few years, the failure of his marriage was the epicenter of an emotional disaster, the shock waves from which threatened his status as our father.

  My birthright, that curry, my demand for its secret, signaled the end of his battle for family coherence and the age of the family dinner. When I asked him for the recipe, he balked at first and insisted that he’d forgotten all about it. But I pressed and he succumbed, quietly pleased, I hope, by my plan to carry his vindaloo into the future. And so, from memory, he recited the recipe while I scratched it in black ink onto the unlined pages of a black composition notebook. And in time, his vindaloo in my hands achieved minor celebrity status on campus.

  * * *

  With the family dinner a thing of the past, Dad and I occasionally teamed up for a cooking adventure. Easter was the occasion for one of our most desperate acts. In a moment of perverse revelry we conspired to cook a rabbit. “The Easter Bunny! Brilliant!” we chortled as we drove to a live market in Sunset Park, one of the few places in the city where a rabbit could reliably be found back before the dawn of all this culinary to-do. We used a cookbook as our guide, but we must have gone terribly off course along the way because the result was a soggy, pallid sop.

  In stunt foodways, success is always preferable, and an at-the-buzzer save is a delight, but it is not a necessary outcome. Carrying the plastic shopping bag with our still-hot, skinned rabbit across the street from the urban slaughterhouse to the car was its own discreet victory. While Easter supper lay in ruins on the plates before us, we were, of course, horrified, confounded by the unpalatable pulp, but the yuks and sniggers that dish has generated in the decades since puts stewed Easter Bunny solidly in the win column. Effort is its own reward.