Finger Lickin’ Good

I was, by all accounts, a precocious child. Once, when I was about seven or eight years old, a woman my mother knew ran into the two of us at a local restaurant. I had ordered a creme brulée for dessert and the waitress had just brought it to our table when the woman approached to say hello.

“Well hello! Isn’t this nice, two ladies having lunch!” She winked. “And what are you having, little lady? Oooh, some yummy vanilla pudding! How nice!”

I looked up at her, annoyed that she’d interrupted my consumption of this delicious dessert, my spoon hovering impatiently over the shattered surface. “It’s called creme brulée,” I informed her. “It’s a French vanilla custard with a burnt sugar crust.”

“Well!” She paused. “Isn’t she something!” Oh, I was something alright. Exactly what…well, I’ll leave that to my mother to say.

But just because I was correcting my elders’ culinary lexicon at eight doesn’t mean I was a food snob. Far from it. I liked my McDonald’s and Roy Rogers as much as the next second grader — possibly more, since I was willing to try almost anything on the menu.

For a long time, I was partial to chicken nuggets. For me, it wasn’t so much the chicken (or McDonald’s case, “chicken”); it was the intoxicating honey/chicken nugget duo. See, when it comes to choosing a nugget dipping sauce, some folks fall into the BBQ sauce camp, others prefer sweet and sour sauce, but me, I always went for the honey.

I loved dipping the crunchy chicken into the gooey, sticky honey, and most of all I loved eating something savory with something sweet. Admittedly, I always preferred Roy Rogers nuggets. For starters, the chicken tasted more like real chicken (as opposed to the gristly, multi-colored stuff I found inside McDonald’s nuggets). But what set Roy’s nuggets apart was the coating: it was lightly spiced, which made them killer partners for some thick, sweet honey.

Fast forward about 20 years, and I can’t even remember the last time I saw a Roy Rogers. But I still crave that heavenly combination of crunchy chicken and honey. So when I found this recipe from an old issue of Food & Wine, I knew I had to make it.

Think of it as a sophisticated, worldly version of chicken nuggets and honey: Chicken braised with spices and saffron, then coated with a paste of chopped almonds, honey and rose flower water and baked until golden. The result is tender, aromatic chicken with the crunch of almonds and sweetness of honey. This isn’t finger food — you’ll need a knife and fork — but if you’re anything like me, you’ll suddenly realize you’re using your fingers to get every last, sticky morsel. It’s that good.

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High and Dry

In my family, Thanksgiving is a Big Deal — the sort of holiday that I and about two dozen family members and friends look forward to for months. I’ve been known to start thinking about it as early as July.

Traditionally held by my mother, the holiday involves 30lb turkeys and massive crocks of sweet potatoes and vegetables, all eaten on tables decorated with dried leaves and votive candles. Mom doesn’t mess around.

And just like a football coach wouldn’t run a new play at the Super Bowl, my mother doesn’t serve a dish at Thanksgiving unless it has been tested and tweaked and tested again. It’s serious stuff, this Thanksgiving business.

So a few years ago, my mom decided to experiment with a new turkey recipe that claimed you could cook your turkey in about 2 hours at a very high and dry heat and yield the most succulent bird you’ve ever tasted. No basting, no turning, no stuffing. Just bake the bird at 450°F for a couple of hours. The claim sounded improbable, but she figured if it didn’t work out, she’d only wasted 2 hours of her time. She could always fall back on her stand-by recipe.

The turkey turned out fantastically and has since become our Thanksgiving standard. But I started wondering if the same method could be applied to other meats and poultry, particularly chicken. After looking into it, I found that Barbara Kafka has been touting this method of roasting for decades, often to the skepticism of cooks like Julia Child (who was quoted as saying she “hates” this method).

I was a little fearful of jacking my oven up to 500°F to roast a chicken, so I found another, similar recipe by Thomas Keller that roasts the chicken at 450°F for about an hour and is positively fantastic. The high, dry heat caramelizes the surface of the skin and melts excess fat and water out of the chicken, which bastes the bird as it cooks.

Thanksgiving is a special day, where I’m surrounded by loved ones and eat holiday fare that I look forward to all year. But this chicken recipe is something special that I can eat all year round, making even an average Monday night something to look forward to.

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“What, will these hands ne’er be clean?”

Peeling butternut squash is one of those unfortunate and unpleasant tasks that, to my dismay, almost always end up being worth it.

If recipes requiring peeled and chopped winter squash wound up being eh or even just okay, I’d swear off peeling squash forever. But the sad fact is, the payoff is usually tremendous. So I soldier on.

Sure, all that slicing and peeling is tedious, but that’s not what bothers me most. What gets me is what the little buggers do to my hands.

At first I thought I was the only one who had this problem. Every time I’d get the brilliant idea to peel and chop a butternut squash, my hands would end up looking chapped and raw, with a strange film covering the surface of my skin. No matter how many times I’d wash my hands and slather them with lotion, that strange sensation wouldn’t go away. I felt like Lady Macbeth.

But then I heard more family and friends making the same complaint. “I just spent all afternoon chopping up squash,” my mother once said to me over the phone, “and now my hands look like I stuck them in acid. I hate what that vegetable does to my skin!”

So it isn’t just me. And after a little Googling, I came across a scientific paper entitled “Butternut Squash (Curcurbita moschata) dermatitis,” written by two dermatologists. Apparently, a compound in butternut squash can cause contact dermatitis, a localized rash or irritation of the skin. This isn’t necessarily the case for everyone, but it happens to enough people that now I don’t feel like I’m crazy.

You can imagine my reaction, then, when I saw a phenomenal recipe for saffron risotto with roasted butternut squash, for which the first instructions read, “Peel squash, remove the seeds and chop into 3/4″ cubes.” Oh no, not that again. But the recipe looked so good and I couldn’t get it out of my head. There had to be another way.

That’s when it came to me: rubber gloves. A perfect solution? As it turns out, nearly, and it was certainly better than raw hands or — horrors — no risotto at all. I threw on a pair of tight-fitting rubber gloves and peeled away — a task that does not become any less tedious with gloves, but at least I didn’t need to sacrifice my skin in the process.

So problem solved. I peeled the squash, the squash didn’t peel me, and I made a risotto that was most definitely worth the effort.

Edited to add: If you’ve had a bad skin reaction after peeling and chopping squash, wash your hands with cool water and soap, then rub some cortisone cream all over your hands.  This should help heal the contact dermatitis, though the rash and strange sensation will not disappear immediately.

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A Root Most Sweet

What’s in a name? Well, if you’re a sweet potato, not much.

Sometimes called a yam, sometimes called a sweet potato, the sweet potato is actually neither a yam nor a potato.

What what?

Yes, it’s true. All three are basically underground organs where plants store their starch. But that’s about where the relationship ends.

Yams are tropical “tubers,” the place where tropical grass and lily plants hold their starch, and are native to Africa, South America and the Pacific. They come in varying textures, colors, sizes and flavors and have been know to grow up to 6 feet (yes, 6 feet) in length.

Potatoes, on the other hand, are tubers of a stem plant that bears yellow or silver flowers and are native to moist, cool regions of Central and South America.

So then what is a sweet potato, that wonderfully syrupy starch that so many of us eat at holiday dinners, often adulterated with a hefty dose of marshmallows and brown sugar?

Sweet potatoes are actually root vegetables — which are similar to but different than tubers — and are the storage root of the Ipomoea batatas plant (helloooo botany). They are native to northern South America, but today China is the sweet potato’s biggest consumer and producer.

There are a slew of different varieties: some dry and starchy, others moist, some deep orange or purple and others pale yellow. The “garnet” and “jewel” variety are the kinds you find most often in the supermarket, usually labeled as “yams,” which — as we have just established — they are not.

So…why do we call them yams?

There are a couple of theories. The prevailing one seems to be that yam is a derivative of a Western African word meaning “to eat” as well as the word for true yams (“nyami” and “anyinam”). African slaves brought to America started calling sweet potatoes “yams,” the term spread and then in the 1930s, food marketers ran with it, promoting sweet potatoes as yams in their advertising campaigns. To me, that’s sort of like saying, “Hey, let’s promote turnips by calling them parsnips!” But whatever, clearly I don’t think like a food marketer…

Happily, they got the “sweet” part of the sweet potato’s name right. There’s an enzyme in sweet potatoes that, when heated, breaks down all that starch into a sugar that’s about a third as sweet as table sugar. So the longer you cook those babies, the sweeter and lovelier they will taste.

Boiling or steaming will cook them too fast and you will lose some of the sweetness. But if you roast them…mmm. You will be rewarded with a delicious, soft and mouth-watering accompaniment to any fall meal, no sugar required. And if you whiz them in a food processor with some vanilla-infused half-and-half, butter, salt and pepper? Sweet heaven.

So whatever you call them, if cook them right, you’ll be in for a treat.

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On Chocolate, and Craving

I have a confession to make.  You may find it shocking, but here it is:

I don’t crave chocolate.

I know.  Unthinkable.  Some of you probably just closed this window, never to return.  At least allow me to explain the genetics that gave rise to this deficiency.

Growing up, my father was surrounded by chocolate fanatics: his siblings, his parents, every relative within a 50-mile radius.  When it came to dessert, my grandmother’s attitude was, “If it’s not chocolate, why bother?”  It could be chocolate-flavored dust and she wouldn’t care; it was chocolate.

And yet when presented with the choice of, say, chocolate or vanilla ice cream, my father would unfailingly choose vanilla.

My grandparents were baffled.  How could this be?  What kind of strange creature had they brought into the world?  Sure, he was a straight-A student and destined to become a doctor, but then there was…this.  My father, the vanilla sheep of the family.

And then one day he met my mother, who inexplicably also favored vanilla over chocolate.

“Imagine that,” my grandmother would tell her friends.  “He found someone out there just like him!”

So I’m working with a stacked deck here.  Don’t get me wrong: I love chocolaty things.  Nothing beats a thick, moist slice of chocolate cake or warm, gooey brownies.  And clearly I have a thing for chocolate pudding.

But sit me in a restaurant and throw a dessert menu in front of me, and nine times out of 10 I will make a non-chocolate choice.  I really, really like chocolate; I just don’t crave it.

I do realize, however, that I’m in the minority on this one and that some people hold fast to my grandmother’s “if-it’s-not-chocolate-why-bother” mantra.  So when my boyfriend and I had friends over this Friday, I decided to succumb to popular demand and make a chocolate dessert — a notable concession, since I had just made chocolate pudding the week before, which would do me on the chocolate front for a while.

I decided to go with the Kate Zuckerman’s Chocolate Bête Noire, a flourless chocolate cake that is one of the most intense chocolate desserts out there (they don’t call it the “black beast” for nothing).  I guess I figure go big or go home.

This recipe is perfect for a dinner party because the batter can be made up to three days in advance and thrown into the oven just before your guests come.  The result is a slightly warm, dense and creamy explosion of chocolate flavor, made more complex by the addition of a vanilla bean (adding stock to my belief that the addition of a vanilla bean will make anything taste better).

The chocolate lovers groaned with delight.  I must admit, although I tend to find flourless chocolate cakes overwhelmingly rich, this one went down easy — maybe a little too easy, given the second slice I cut for myself and a few others…

My grandmother would unquestionably give this dessert her stamp of approval — and possibly a standing ovation.  But always my father’s daughter, I couldn’t help myself: I served it with a fat scoop of homemade vanilla ice cream.  Genetics be damned.

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