Tomato Toast
Ingredients:
1 Large Heirloom Tomato
Olive oil
Salt
Crusty bread
Anchovy filets
Garlic clove
Steps:
Grate tomato on largest holes of a box grater into a bowl. Discard the skin. Drain liquid from the pul through a fine mesh sieve. Add pulp back to bowl and drizzle with 1 Tbs oil and a pinch of salt.
Toast bread in olive oil, let bread soak of the oil.
Smash garlic and rub on toast. Should smell very garlicky.
Spoon tomato pulp onto toast, finish with flaky salt and anchovy filets to taste.
Rigatoni Barese
Ingredients:
Rigatoni pasta
Hot italian sausages
Garlic, minced
3 cups spinach
Parmesan
Canned San marzano tomatoes
Salt
Basil
Olive oil
Steps:
Boil water, cook pasta to al dente
Heat 2 Tbsp of olive oil in a pot on medium high, cut sausages from casings and break up in oil. Brown for 4 minutes.
Remove meat but leave the oil in the pot. Add garlic and gook until fragrant
Add spinach and wilt. Add tomatoes and juice. Simmer, breaking up the tomatoes as needed until spinach is cooked, about 4 minutes.
Add meat back to pot and mix well.
Add pasta and mix. Shred parmesan over the pasta and add salt and pepper to taste. Serve immediately with basil as garnish.
Greek Salad
Ingredients:
3 bell peppers, different colors
Ripe heirloom tomatoes
1 Cucumber, sliced thin
1 red onion
Feta
Oregano
Olive oil
Lemon juice
Steps:
Slice tomatoes horizontally. Put in a bowl and salt liberally.
While tomatoes are resting, slice peppers vertically and cut onions into rings. Add to the bowl with tomatoes. Add feta, drizzle olive oil and lemon juice and sprinkle oregano over the bowl.
Toss and serve immediately.
Bolognese
Ingredients:
1lbs beef (80% is preferable, can sub pork)
1 yellow onion, diced
2 large carrots, minced (smaller the better)
2 large celery stalks, diced
Butter
Olive oil
1 cup whole milk
1 cup dry white wine
1 can san marzano tomatoes, chopped (keep the juice)
Nutmeg
Steps:
Over medium high heat, add a 3 tbs of oil, 3 tbs butter, and diced onion. Cook to translucent. Add celery and carrots, cook for 4 minutes.
Add beef, pepper, large pinch of salt to the pot and crumble meat with a spoon. Cook until raw appearance goes away, lower heat to medium.
Add milk and simmer, stirring frequently until dissipated. Add 1/8th tspn nutmeg.
Add wine and simmer until dissipated, stirring frequently. Add tomatoes and stir to coat. Lower temperature to low and barely simmer for minimum of 3 hours. Sir occasionally.
Fat should separate. If too dry add water. Taste and correct for salt. Should be almost dry and creates about 2 - 3 cups of sauce.
Mix 2 cups of sauce with al dente pasta (thick like linguine) and add ¼ cup pasta water to coat. Serve on plates with more sauce and add butter, pecorino romano cheese.
Potato Salad
Ingredients:
Red potatoes (quartered)
6 hardboiled eggs
Celery stalks
Green onion
1 cup mayo
Dijon mustard
Relish
Garlic powder
Steps:
Boil potatoes until soft enough to poke with a knife. Cool in a strainer.
Mix mayo, mustard, relish, salt, garlic powder and pepper to taste in a bowl
Add potatoes and chopped hard boiled eggs
Chop celery and green onions, add to bowl and mix
Refrigerate for minimum 4 hours, though preferably overnight.
Seafood Simple: Salmon with Dill
I must admit something first. This isn’t my first recipe from Seafood Simple. In fact, I accidentally made this recipe once when I started working on an old family recipe for salmon without realizing there was no dijon mustard in the fridge. Just olive oil, dill, salt, pepper, and into the oven. Maybe a squeeze of fresh lemon at the end for some zing. With that said, the family recipe calls for fourteen minutes in an oven at 400 degrees, which, by Ripert’s standards, is practically burning it.
The reason I went for this recipe first was because it felt so familiar. Salmon can be found practically anywhere and I’ve made it a regular part of my weekly “whip something up in the kitchen after work” repertoire. If you cook up a bowl of rice and maybe a roasted veggie, you have a meal in 20 minutes. It’s not the chicken of the sea, but it’s pretty damn close. The fish is fairly easy to make and can be very forgiving if a mistake is made. I’ve been eating fourteen-minutes-at-400 salmon my entire life. It’s very much palatable at that temperature but after making Ripert’s version, it is a mistake, short and simple.
The equipment needed for this recipe is a baking dish and a metal skewer. The baking dish makes sense, but the metal skewer required some thinking. My mind immediately went to salmon fish-kabobs, which seems more apropos for a Red Lobster than Eric Ripert cookbook. That notion, thankfully, was wrong. Ripert calls for a metal skewer to be poked into the thickest part of the fish for five seconds after cooking. Once removed, it should feel warm to the touch against your wrist. If the metal skewer is warm, the fish is done.
This technique made me nervous. The recipe calls for an oven heated to 275 and a cook time of 15 - 18 minutes. From previous experience in the kitchen, salmon should be cooked through like chicken so the fact that this particular salmon came from an air sealed container from Key Foods for $5 further strained my nerves. But, as I’ve learned, Eric must be right and I have been wrong this entire time. The fish that emerged from my oven was juicy and fresh and melted on my tongue. The olive oil and dill complemented the fattiness of the fish nicely.
There are some helpful tricks Ripert adds to the recipe that takes the dish from good to great. First, the salmon and dill should rest in the fridge for an hour. I believe this is more for the fish’s reaction to cooking than serving as a marinade of sorts. Perhaps it firms up the skin and meat, but I’ll have to do more research on this. Second, at the lower temperature of 275 degrees the white fatty stuff, or albumen, remains in the fish, providing a silky flavor that coats your tongue. The combination of lower temperature and longer cooking time is what gives the fish its restaurant quality texture and taste.
Overall, I recommend this recipe to anyone who has an oven and wants to eat semi-restaurant quality fish. It is hard to mess up and even if a longer cook time produces that albumen at the bottom of the filet, the fish will still taste delicious. The dish has impressed friends with minimal effort; it is simple, delicious, and a great introduction to Ripert’s style of cooking.
Cooking Through Seafood Simple by Eric Ripert
It is by no means an original idea; we have Julie Powell and her adventures through Julia Childs' Mastering The Art of French Cooking to thank for this endeavor. In fact, several friends have taken on similar tasks, most notably an impressive undertaking of the Half Baked Harvest cookbook, documented recipe by recipe on a friend's private Instagram Story. Others have taken on similar projects. Youtube chefs like Andrew Rae have become famous for working through real and imaginary recipes in television shows and movies. All became better at what they do and I'm a fan of their works.
These are a few notable and personal examples of utilizing others' work for pushing personal boundaries, learning a craft and challenging oneself. I'm sure countless others have also documented their work not just for the benefit of providing structure to their efforts but to hold themselves accountable as well. To those unnamed culinary self-taught academics, I wish the best of luck.
For myself, the challenge comes not from a place of needing structure or accountability or any other need for self improvement, though I'm sure the endeavor I plan to pursue will certainly offer those benefits. No, I wish to take on this challenge solely for the not-so-lofty and ignoble purpose of "why not?"
It is something to do just because the challenge is there to take on.
A friend of mine told me he got into mountain climbing because when he sees a mountain he simply must get to the top for the sole reason that it is there. I climbed Mount Rainier with him and discovered the feeling at 12,000 feet at the expense of sensation in my fingers. It’s some deep rooted, prehistoric urge which induces tunnel vision to the end goal.
The act of mountain climbing, to those who like to stay on flat ground, is a very silly thing to do. It doesn’t achieve anything for a bigger purpose. And yet, people all over the world see mountains and decide they must get to the top. The urge must stem from the human instinct to see if we can do it.
But I digress. Cooking from one’s own kitchen is not mountain climbing, nor should it be held in such high regard, yet the sentiment remains. Without any ulterior motives or self indulgent aspirations, the project can take on a life of its own. Let the process guide itself. Who knows, maybe something will be learned about cooking along the way. But that's not the point. At least, that's not the main point.
And so, with a small New York City kitchen, half a dozen or so grocery stores in a 10 block radius of the Upper West Side, and importantly, time to do so, I plan to work through Eric Ripert's Seafood Simple.
On face value, one can assume this will be, well, simple. It's in the name, isn't it? But there's TK recipes in the book and I've never fileted a fish. Or shuck an oyster. Or eaten monkfish for that matter. And so I ask myself, "Why not?"