Family Feast New Year's Day 2013

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January 01, 2013
Oakland

Cheese, Tapanade, and Crackers
Olives

Blood Orange and Gouda Salad

Cioppino
Acme Bread










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By Popular Demand

Ottolenghi's Lemon and Eggplant Risotto

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Risotto is such a delightful dish. Comforting, creamy, simple, stable.   And I am a huge fan . As in, I will make me a risotto any chance I get, with any sort of ingredient you can imagine. It doesn't matter--any season.  Spring--lemon and peas;  Summer--tomato and parmesan;  Fall--mushroom;  Winter--butternut squash and pancetta.  If it's in your fridge, you can put it in this Northern Italian rice dish. However, you will want a very specific kind of rice--a high starch, medium- or short-grain rice--in order separate this delicacy from any other rice dish. The high starch means that as you cook it, it releases its starch, making that requisite creamy smoothness to risotto. The most popular risotto rice in the United States is, hands down, Arborio rice. This short-grained rice isn't as starchy as some of its popular Italian counterparts, but it is the most easily procured. However, a  great article from
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Ottolenghi's Salmon Steaks in Chraimeh Sauce

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Oh, what a sauce this is.   What a glorious, glorious sauce. And it comes from our new Jerusalem cookbook, from one of this blog's favorite chefs and current culinary darling, Yotam Ottolenghi.  I need not detail that this blog has featured recipes from Ottolenghi here and here and here and here ,  but I will anyway because, whoo boy, I love these recipes.  This sauce comes from the Sephardic Jews, who resided on the Iberian peninsula until the Spanish Inquisition.  After their expulsion from Spain in 1492, many Sephardic Jews were folded into the Mizrahi communities in Northern Africa and the Middle East.  Such intermingling of people and cultures has produced some culinary superstars; this being no exception.  Indeed, you can taste the Spanish, Moroccan, and Libyan influence on this sauce. Sephardim pride themselves on their chraimeh recipes, and often serve them at Rosh Hashanah and Passover celebrations (whereas Ashkenazim might serve gefilte fish).  The husband
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Ottolenghi's Lamb Shawarma

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Summer. Summer. Summer. Hello Summer. How I  love you. How I am delighted to meet you again after you have been away for a year. How I have plans for us. Big plans. Most of them involve books and napping, but still big plans. Some of my plans also include cooking. So much cooking. Stay tuned for pasta dishes, peanut butter shakes, ceviche, pastry cream. It looks like's going to have fun together, Summer. One of my first plans was to make Yotam Ottolenghi's Lamb Shawarma. Shawarma is the Arabic fast food of choice that is closely related to the Greek gyro , the Turkish doner  kebab, and the Armenian tarna . It is also big on heavenly goodness and is brought to you from Jerusalem via London from the dear, sweet, culinary mind of Ottolenghi.  What a good man. From the Turkish word  çevirme , which means turning, shawarma can be made from chicken, veal, goat, lamb, even fish. We're going to focus on the lamb--which  Ottolenghi ensures will get us as clo se to
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Steak in Sister Carrie // Cook Your Books

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In this  Cook Your Books  series, I have chosen 15 books to read in 2017 based on somewhat arbitrarily chosen categories. My theory (bogus it might turn out to be) is that all 15 of these books will somehow connect to food. And I plan to write about that food.  And it turns out that these entries are a sort of long-form blog-post. So settle in. This eleventh installment is a book set in Illinois . Oh, Desire. With a capital "D." There you are. Haunting around Chicago and New York (and their restaurants) in this old chestnut from the turn of the century. I picked up Sister Carrie   in the Chicago History Museum gift shop while I was wiling away some time before catching my plane from O'Hare back to San Francisco. I needed a book set in Illinois, and there was no way I was going to write about one of my most loathed books Augie March  (with apologies to my father-in-law, who is a big fan) or about the meat exposé  The Jungle  (a great book, but it seemed, well, a
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Ottolenghi's Multi-Vegetable Paella

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Oh, it's true:  I love this cookbook :  Plenty .  First of all, what a great name for a cookbook, and vegetarian one at that.  Such a sense of satisfaction right from the start.  Second, it came my way via a dear friend who knows my cookbook habit, so it has a special place in my heart.  Third, it is the source of the amazing eggplant noodle dish I made this summer--that dish alone made it worth its weight, in part for its sheer deliciousness and in part for its sheer ability to provide something wonderful for people who had become dear to me quite quickly.  My, what a cookbook it is. 
Yotam Ottolenghi, our chef and cookbook author, is an Israeli-born chef who has a little deli (actually four of them) in the heart(s) of London; one of them also doubles as a sit-down restaurant that has been earning rave reviews .  While Ottolenghi himself is not a vegetarian, he knows how to make great vegetarian dishes.  If you're a vegetarian and you do not yet own th
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