Halbes Hänchen und Salat

Step two: Reach for your jar of imported St Lawrence Market Churrasco Chicken Sauce. This might be hard to source. Your best options is to hire a sauce mule.

Beribboned jar of churrasco chicken sauce

Step three: Cover half of the half chicken with sauce (because a whole half a chicken is too much for one person)

That looks like a lot of sauce, but there's tons left in the jar

Step four: Enjoy your chicken by candlelight.

Romantic chicken dinner, direct from the styrofoam clam

You must try these. Just fry up the wings as you would for Buffalo wings and toss them in the sauce. A little goes a long way since the sauce is basically a sticky sweet and salty caramel. Next time I think I’ll add a bit of orange juice or rice wine vinegar. Or I’ll use the sauce from David Chang’s wing recipe. Here’s a simplified version. The original calls for brining, cold-smoking and confiting the wings, then browing and pressing them in a cast-iron pan, and then glazing them.

Here are two recipes for soup from the 1975 edition.

Soup
Mrs. Wallace Kusler

Peel potatoes and fry, when done add milk, some cream and salt and pepper in amount needed for family and serve. This is like soup.

Wine soup

The Christ Wolf family have a recipe that came from Russia with their grandparents and sometimes they still use it if someone gets sick. It really is good when you come down with a cold. The recipe is as follows:

Take 3 c. water, 1 1/2 c. port wine or white wine. Cook and add 1/4 c. sugar. Add 1 handful of oyster crackers. Set aside and beat 2 eggs into 1/2 c. cream. Beat this into the broth. If it is too hot it will curdle.

The German-Russian Pioneer Cook Book from Eureka, South Dakota

Who doesn't love fried cheese?

Stuck with a bunch of mustard greens (which are far from my favorite) from my latest CSA share and looking for recipes other than greens with garlic and olive oil, I asked for ideas from Facebook friends. Colin came to the rescue, suggesting saag paneer.

This batch of paneer was the best I’ve managed yet, and the result was delicious. I used this recipe. I didn’t have fenugreek leaves but otherwise I followed the recipe pretty much as written. Next time I’ll at least double the chiles. I used serranos from the garden, which were pretty hot but small.

Saag paneer – pretty damn tasty

Buying a fish from the grocery store is always a gamble, not because of the quality but because the people behind the counter rarely have a clue and can’t perform such tasks as descaling nor can they answer the question “Is that fish descaled?” If I had the tools and skills for descaling a fish, I could confidently eat whole fish all the time. Instead, I eat it only on Saturdays when I can go to a fish monger.

Excuses and excuses. Roasting a fish is as easy as roasting vegetables. Drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper, roast in a pre-heated oven until it looks done. Easy.

The recipe says 350°F for 30 minutes, but those numbers are for a larger fish than I would buy. It also says to broil for a few minutes at the end, but my gas stove has no broiler, so I just crank up the gas, and cook in the bottom of the oven. Using a pan with a rack is key to keep the skin crispy and thus easy to peel away, making the fish as easy to eat as to prepare.

I have a mouthwatering recipe for roasted fish in my Les Halles Cookbook that calls for braising vegetables and reducing wine, which all sounds amazing, but is 300% more work than my version which, as you can guess, is the one described in The Joy of Cooking.

I served the fish with a minimalistic fennel salad.

Washed-up, shore-worn sea turtle skull for scale.

While it looks and sounds an awful lot like a vodka caipirinha, the magic of the cocktail is that it uses honey rather than cane sugar. Even better for us, the bartender was using local honey from the mangrove. Being something of a self-diagnosed Honey Snob, I convinced him to let me taste the honey by itself off the back of a bar spoon. The nearest approximation is the dark rich flavour of buckwheat honey, which is what I’d recommend in this cocktail if you can get it.

Dawa
3 Key limes, quartered and muddled
2 oz vodka
3/4 oz honey (more or less depending on your taste)

Quarter and smash the limes, add the honey, top with ice, add vodka, stir well, and top with ice to serve. The vodka stands way back out of the way and lets the flavour of the honey and limes take the stage.

Don’t forget your sunscreen.

The answer, as always, was booze.

In a 1L mason jar, I infused 40 fresh bay leaves in 750ml of vodka. Everything I’ve read suggests that this won’t work nearly as well with dried bay leaves, and works better still with bay leaves that are still tender on the plant – which is what my pruning produces primarily.

After 4 weeks I strained the leaves out. The colour had changed quite substantially, and the aroma was definitely bay.

As an aside: I had no problem dumping an entire bottle of vodka over a garden herb in an unproven experiment, because vodka is stupid.

The next step was to add the sugar. Internet recipes suggest blending the infusion with simple syrup on a 1:1 ratio. But for a liqueur, I didn’t want to water down the bay flavour (or dilute the booze) quite that much, so I did it slightly differently. First, I reserved 500ml of the infusion. The remaining 250ml of infusion I gently heated with 250ml of water, 450g of sugar, and the bay leaves. It simmered for 10 minutes, and then I let it cool before straining and blending it with the pure infusion.

The result is excellent. Even straight! It should, apparently, improve after a month of aging in the bottle. Given that I have more than a litre of it, I’ll get to test that hypothesis.

I’m eager to try it in myriad cocktails, but the first thing that sprung to mind was to build on the herbal flavour and have it with a really herby gin. I happen to have been gifted a nice bottle of Monkey 47, which I keep around for just such whims, and I’m sure it would be equally excellent with something like Hendricks or Gin Mare. In this cocktail, stay away from gins that make you think of blueberries and sloe and rhubarb. Nobody wants to drink fruit punch spiked with cucumber and bay leaves.

2 inches of cucumber, chunked and muddled
2 oz Monkey 47 gin
3/4 oz bay leaf liqueur
dash celery bitters (optional)

Shake, strain, serve. Fantasize about sitting in the shade of that bay laurel tree.

A friend here in Berlin, who knows of my pie shop fantasies, emailed me to say he was going to visit a pie shop in Berlin-Kreuzberg, Hemingway’s Pie Factory and would let me know if they were any competition.

Suddenly, I was inspired to bake a pie.

The all-important imported pie plate

I had been reading about the comeback of non-hydrogenated coconut fat and so decided to try making the pie crust with coconut fat instead of lard, shortening or my usual favourite, butter. Thus the pie was vegan for no other reason than I was curious.

You can do worse than follow the Joy of Cooking’s instructions for fruit pies. In short, you want five cups of fruit for a pie. For flavour inspiration, I turned to epicurious.

About 5 cups of fruit

At the market that morning, I had already bought a beautiful pint of sour cherries and some ok looking peaches. Turned out to be just enough for five cups of fruit. Some sugar, some cardamom, some vanilla, 3 tbsp of flour, and ta-da pie filling. Yes, this is how I bake.

The brawn behind the operation: Sebastian pitted the cherries.

Coconut Oil Crust

• 3/4 cup coconut oil
• 2 cups flour
• 1 tsp salt
• 3-4 tbsp ice water

Coconut oil melts really quickly. I had to work quickly both when blending the pastry and when rolling it. I wasn’t entirely successfully rolling out the top and I ended up putting the dough back in the fridge and rolling it out again.

Not the most beautiful pie crust. Ignore the front part.

I used a slotted spoon to scoop the filling into the crust so that the pie would not end up too runny.

An artistic pie shot

Homemade pie

The pie was delicious. The crust was flaky and light – and did not taste of coconut. Four of us had healthy portions of the warm pie. It tasted great warm and the leftovers were devoured for breakfast the next day. Homemade pie for breakfast is sublime.

I’m not sure I’m ready to compete with the Pie Factory but it’s a start.