by Holly Hughes
Mimi Miller’s Long-Lost Gingerbread Cookies
Before it finally comes together at the end, this is one sticky dough. Accordingly, it’s better to use a hand mixer; the dough’s sticky stage tends to gum up an electric mixer.
MAKE AHEAD: The dough needs to be refrigerated for at least an hour before it is rolled out and baked.
Makes 60 cookies
For the Cookies
1 ½ cups solid vegetable shortening
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup packed light brown sugar
1 cup molasses
1 large egg, plus 3 large egg yolks
6 cups flour, plus more for the work surface
2 tablespoons ground ginger
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
2 teaspoons salt
1 cup buttermilk
1 tablespoon baking soda
For the Icing
3 large egg whites
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 cups confectioners’ sugar
Green and red food coloring (optional)
For the cookies: Use a hand-held electric mixer to beat the shortening and sugars together in a large mixing bowl. Add the molasses, the egg and the egg yolks, and beat until combined.
Sift the flour, ginger, cinnamon and salt into a separate large bowl. Pour the buttermilk into a large measuring cup or glass and stir in the baking soda to dissolve it.
Add about one-quarter of the dry ingredients and about one-third of the buttermilk mixture to the shortening-egg mixture, and beat to incorporate. Repeat two more times, adding one-quarter of the dry ingredients and one-third of the buttermilk each time and making sure they are incorporated.
Dust a work surface with flour and turn out the dough out onto the surface. Using your hands, blend in the remaining flour by kneading it into the dough. The dough should be soft and a little tacky, but not overly sticky. Form the dough into 2 disks, wrap with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 1 hour.
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Dust a work surface with flour. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.
Work with one disk of dough at a time. Use a rolling pin to roll out the dough on the work surface to a thickness of ¼ inch. Cut out individual cookies as desired, transferring them to the prepared baking sheet. Bake for 8 to 10 minutes or until the cookies just begin to firm up. Transfer them to a wire rack to cool. Repeat to use all of the dough, mixing the scraps together, re-rolling and cutting them into shapes.
For the icing: Beat the egg whites in the bowl of a stand mixer or hand-held mixer until the whites form stiff peaks. Beat in the confectioners’ sugar and vanilla extract until the mixture is creamy. If desired, add drops of red or green food coloring to create your desired hue.
When the baked cookies have cooled, use a dull knife or offset spatula to paint the top of each one with a layer of icing.
HORTOTIROPITA AND THE FIVE STAGES OF RESTAURANT GRIEF
By Michael Procopio
From FoodForTheThoughtless.com
Michael Procopio has knocked around the San Francisco food scene for years, holding many jobs, none of them too distinguished. (He still waits tables.) In his irregular—and irreverent—blog Food for the Thoughtless, he invites us into his cranky gourmet life—like the effort to resurrect a “lost” menu item.
Sometimes, there are things a person takes for granted, thanks to their close proximity or easy availability: a spouse, a friend, a favorite market, a booty call.
When one of them packs up and leaves town, he or she realizes the great thing that was always at hand is now out of reach, only to be replaced by an un-healable abscess of sorrow. Or a substitute, which will be constantly compared to the original, for better or for worse.
Now you can understand my state of mind when, earlier this year, I suffered my own, devastating loss–the spanakotiropita, served at my restaurant since the day it first opened, vanished into phyllo-thin air.
Spanakotiropita (Greek spinach and cheese pies) aren’t especially glamorous by nature. They weren’t exactly the show-stopping feature on our menu, but it was comforting to know they were always there like a fresh box of Kleenex or a shut-in roommate who knows the Heimlich maneuver. They were homey, a little homely, and entirely delicious, no matter what Olympia Dukakis says about them.
I was horrified by their disappearance and mortified by the all-cheese tiropitakia which replaced them.
“But why did the spanakotiropita have to go?” I asked our chef, as if I were a bewildered child asking his mommy why daddy left with that big suitcase or why on earth she was burying a favorite pet hamster behind the rose garden.
“Oh, just trying something new,” he said.
Just trying something new. I wondered to myself if this was the culinary version of a midlife crisis, like getting rid of a dependable car with great gas mileage and the always-there-for-you wife who put you through grad school and replacing them with a 2-seater sports car and a blond with big tits to put out inside of it.
There was nothing I could do but accept this answer from an otherwise reasonable man. But it would be a cold day in restaurant hell before I would ever accept this wholesale abandonment of an old favorite for a new item, no matter how big its tits were.
I found myself flying through Kübler and Ross’s Five Stages of Grief:
1. Denial: I refuse to believe that anything of this horrible magnitude could ever befall my beloved restaurant.
2. Anger: I want to stab these new pies with a steak knife.
3. Bargaining: Perhaps if I get enough restaurant guests to sign a petition, the old pies will come back. Or, just maybe, if I prayed hard enough, they would return.*
4. Depression: I cannot will these new pies to taste anything like the old ones and therefore am considering suicide.
5. Acceptance: I never made it that far.
I was grateful that I was able to process all of this terrible grief within the span of a few days. And when I recovered, I came to a few important realizations:
1. I am a big boy. I can handle this sort of trauma like a champ.
2. I am an able cook and recipe developer. I should make my own damned spanakotiropita if I can’t handle the fact that they aren’t going to be made available to me by my restaurant and the small army of prep cooks therein.
3. If I make my own, I can put whatever I like into them and make them whatever shape I want them to be. I can be the master of my own Greek pie destiny.
And with that realization came a great relief. And, I think, a great recipe.
Hortotiropita or, in American English, Greens and Cheese Phyllo Pies
The great thing about phyllo pies is that you can fill them with anything the voices in your own head tell you to. Go ahead and be inspired: lamb, greens, lemon curd, cement, whatever. Listen to your voices.
You can also shape them however you like. In this case I have abandoned the folded-flag look of traditional pies and replaced it with the shape of my favorite Greek dessert, galaktoboureko, or, in Chinese terms, an egg roll.
This recipe, which is suited to my particular tastes and needs, is merely a guideline. All that matters is that you love the taste of your own filling. Interpret that last sentence however you wish.
Makes about a dozen pastries.
3 bunches chard
1 bunch mustard greens
2 bunches of beet greens, ripped from six large golden beets
2 leeks, sliced into manageable, but not tiny bits
2 bunches of scallions, sliced the same way as the leeks
3 tablespoons of butter for sautéing the leeks and scallions
¼ teaspoon of salt
½ teaspoon ground black pepper
1 tablespoon Aleppo pepper
10 ounces Greek feta, crumbled.
1 cup grated Parmesan
4 Tablespoons finely chopped dill.
1 package of phyllo dough
12 tablespoons of melted butter with which to brush the phyllo shee
ts.
For Garnish (which is purely optional, as is pretty much everything else)
3 teaspoons of sesame seeds
1 teaspoon fennel seed
1. Clean your greens, remove their stocks and stems, and roughly chop. Set aside.
2. Toss 3 tablespoons of butter into the bottom of a large stockpot or a very large sauté pan and melt over medium heat. Add the leeks and scallions, moving them about the bottom of the cooking vessel until they are soft and vaguely translucent. The idea is not to brown them, but rather to weaken their resolve. Add the chopped greens a handful or two at a time, stirring them about with tongs or a large wooden spoon to wilt them/coat them with the butter and warm the leeks and scallions. Repeat this action until all the greens have found their way in. Cover and cook on a medium-low flame, stirring and tossing occasionally until all the leaves are wilted. The contents of the pot will have reduced by about 2/3 their original volume (about 7 to 8 minutes). I hope you do not find this at all alarming.
Do not overcook. Nothing horrifying will happen if they do, it’s just that I want you to be mindful of the fact that the greens will be cooked further when eventually wrapped in phyllo and shoved into a hot oven.
Empty the hot, flabby greens into a colander which, if you are wise, will be strategically placed into your sink. Drain well, squeeze as much liquid out of them as possible without straining yourself or traumatizing the steaming vegetation. If you are the type of person who enjoys such things, reserve the greens, sweat/liquid/unwanted moisture, let cool, and drink.
Spread the strangled greens into a large casserole dish and let cool to room temperature. You may also transfer the greens to a large bowl, but they will take much longer to cool if you choose to do so.
3. When the greens have sufficiently cooled, add the salt, pepper, Aleppo pepper, feta, Parmesan, and dill. Combine well.
At this point, I prefer to transfer the mixture to a smaller vessel, cover it tightly, and refrigerate it until I am ready to use it. Making this a day in advance of baking the pastries is a very good thing. The flavors are more prone to mingle that way.
4. About an hour before you wish to assemble your hortotiropita heat your oven to 450°F and place a rack to the upper third of the oven. Remove both the phyllo and the filling mixture from the refrigerator and let them warm up to the idea of their impending intimacy (room temperature). During this time, you may also wish to melt the butter. (Some people insist upon using only clarified butter for brushing onto their phyllo. I say “bravo” to them, but I find it an unnecessary waste of time. I can think of so many other ways of squandering whatever time I have left on this planet. Very few of them have anything to do with melting butter.)
5. Make certain you have a large enough work surface to accommodate a) your unfolded phyllo, b) a cutting board or prep space wide and long enough to give the phyllo you are working with enough room to manuever, c) a half-sheet pan lined with foil or parchment (which will comfortably hold twelve pastries), and d) a place for your bowl of filling and melted butter, respectively.
6. Place a clean kitchen towel over the surface of the space where you would like your phyllo unfurled. Carefully unpackage said Greek pastry sheets and lay them flat over the towel with a combination of care and confidence. Lay a second clean towel over the phyllo sheets to prevent them from drying out. Which happens much sooner than one might think it would. I find that giving the top towel a very light mist of water from a spray bottle helps. However, I do not recommend over-moistening, because that would be extremely unfortunate for both the phyllo and the person attempting to manipulate the phyllo. Rather, pretend you are about to iron out a subtle wrinkle from this top towel. A few, short mists. If you are unfamiliar with the subtleties of ironing, you may wish to skip this step and just work as quickly as possible.
7. To assemble the pies, place one sheet of phyllo onto your work space and brush with butter from the center and work your brushstrokes to the outside edges. Place 85 grams of filling (yours do not have to be 85 grams, but I do recommend weighing out your filling to whatever amount pleases you to get uniform results) in the left-hand center of the pastry sheet, about 2 inches away from the edge.
Fold the bottom of the sheet up to the center, fold the top down to the center until the length of your pastry is the one you desire. Mine happens to be the approximate length of my iPhone. Give a light brushing of butter to the newly exposed surface. Roll the pastry over until you have reached the end. Place flap-side down onto the awaiting sheet pan. Repeat until you have used up all of your filling.
8. Take the tip of a small knife and pierce each pie to its foundation five times. I cannot stress how important having steam vents is. I took a batch of these to a party this summer, became distracted by cocktail-wielding friends, and forgot all about piercing. Most of them exploded. However, they were still delicious.
9. Brush the tops of your pies with more butter and then pop into the oven to bake for 8 minutes. After 8 minutes have elapsed, rotate the sheet pan, sprinkle the pies with the sesame and fennel seeds, then return to the oven for about 5 more minutes or until the pastry is golden brown. Remove from the oven and let cool for a few minutes because burning-hot cheese is an unpleasant sensation to one’s mouth. Unless, of course, one is mentally prepared for it, as in the case of saganaki.
Serve warm with a beer, some friends, a little ouzo. Whatever you wish to serve them with, just be certain one of those things is a napkin–these are flaky little bastards.
* The spanakotiropita did, in fact, return to our restaurant menu as I hoped and prayed they would. It’s almost enough to make one believe in the power of prayer.
LOBSTER LESSONS
By Aleksandra Crapanzano
From The Cassoulet Saved Our Marriage: True Tales of Food, Family, and How We Learn to Eat
Screenwriter and food essayist Aleksandra Crapanzano comes by her passion for cooking honestly, having grown up in a gourmet-loving household in Paris and New York. Imagine then her frustration, facing a beach house sojourn with a quirky in-law mired in a serious food rut.
Rituals are at once burdens and gifts; this is what makes them worth doing, and having, and keeping. It was a remarkable old woman who taught me this lesson—and how, along the way, not to cook a lobster—and I will never forget it.
John and I had been together a year. I had met his parents and he’d met mine. We had moved in together, traveled together, eaten great meals together, but we had not yet settled into (how could we have?) any enduring rituals. Then when summer arrived, it was time to get serious. Serious, for John, meant introducing me to a tiny beach cottage on the east coast of Nantucket, where he’d spent at least a part of every summer of his life; serious meant our spending a few weeks there with his permanent Other Woman, his great-aunt Margaret, whose cottage it was.
Eighty-two years old and a legend in children’s book publishing, Margaret, John had warned me, was a creature of habit. To be precise, dietary habit. I’d already heard tales of her spartan daily regimen, which consisted largely of grapefruit (three), skim milk (two tall glasses), and a tuna-fish sandwich. Dinner was, without variation and without fail, a cold chicken leg (boiled), two red potatoes (also boiled), and a pile of grayish green beans (ditto). I was twenty-one that summer, already something of a food snob, and spartan wasn’t really in my repertoire.
The first sign of a new world order came on the day we were supposed to pick Margaret up at the ferry terminal. John, who had never before shown the least interest in cooking, suddenly declared, in the voice of an anxious sergeant, that he knew what his aunt liked to eat and how she liked to eat it—and that while we were all cohabiting, he would take charge of the meals, if that was all right with me. I watched in horror as he filled an entire shopping cart at the A&P with water-packed tuna and low-fat mayonnaise. When I reached for a head of garlic, he simply shook his head in dismay, sensing perhaps the inevitable clash of palates in two of the women he loved best. But it was the margari
ne that almost brought our relationship to an early end. It would be months before we again crossed the threshold of a supermarket together.
From that first dinner with Margaret in her cottage, I remember her smiling at me as the three of us clinked glasses over the table, making me feel wonderfully welcome. But the food itself? Let’s just say that, as with any real trauma, the details are buried deep in my psyche.
The following day, I walked up from the beach to find John waiting for me in Margaret’s cherry-red 1967 Buick convertible. “Let’s go get the lobsters,” he called out over the noisy engine. This was promising. I hopped in. Lobsters, corn on the cob, and baked potatoes: It would be messy and buttery and fun. That evening, I was digging out an old T-shirt, knowing I’d be sprayed and stained by dinner’s end, when I looked up and caught sight of John through the window. He was stumbling up from the ocean, through the beach grass, weighted down by an enormous black lobster pot, the water sloshing out by the gallon and running down his legs. As he came up the porch steps, I asked him what he was doing. “If you want your lobsters to taste of the ocean, you have to cook them in ocean water,” he explained. Margaret, I learned, had been cooking lobsters this way all her life, as had her parents. It was hard to think of refuting the idea, even when John described the hours and boxes of Brillo it would take to scrub the pot clean.
The smell of boiling brine brought me into the kitchen, where I found Margaret and John standing at the stove. John was holding the lid down on the steaming pot so the lobsters, despite their desperate tail-banging, couldn’t escape. Margaret had her hand on top of his and was pressing down with her frail fingers. Years ago, when John was a boy, it would have been Margaret’s strength that kept the lid in place. Roles had reversed, but they were still a team. Yet something was terribly wrong. The minutes were ticking by, and the lobsters were still boiling away in the pot. I waited and waited, biting my tongue. After a full twenty-three minutes—not a second more nor less by the stovetop timer—Margaret gave the word and John removed the ruined creatures with a long pair of tongs.