With the exception of canned tuna, I've always been afraid of canned fish. My father used to bring home cans of mackerel in miso and sardines in sweet soy sauce to accompany his evening beer, and sometimes he offered a piece or two to me. At the tip of his chopsticks, these fish pieces glittered with oil and gooey sauce, reflecting the fluorescent lamp above our dining table. Often spattered with stray bits of strangely metallic skin and unidentifiable mixture of bones and guts, the fish out of the can never looked attractive to my child's eyes. My revulsion reached the crest when the fish was shoved just under my nose, where the fishy smell became almost overwhelming. I would recoil from the offending piece and make a face, as my father, now tipsy, placed the piece in his mouth, loudly lamenting his daughter's lack of appreciation but his face betraying his amusement.
So, it's a mystery that I started buying tinned seafood lately. The first was the smoked oyster in a tin that I picked up at a Vietnamese market along Broadway. Perhaps because the smoked oyster pasta came out well, I became bold and bought a tin of sardines next. And it was no ordinary tin of sardines--it was "Sultan's" sardines in chili oil, imported from Morocco.
There's a good chance that I was knocked out by the awesomely nostalgic package. It conjured up an image of a small village store with dust-covered merchandise slumbering in the darkness, sheltered from the sweltering heat outside. The Arabic writing on the other side of the box only added to my exoticism. The problem is--exoticism wasn't quite enough to make me open the tin. Once I opened it, I'd have only so many hours to use the fish before it goes bad. So, the tin sat in the cupboard for a few weeks before I finally made up my mind to use it.
When I opened the tin, I was surprised by the generous size of the fish inside. Somehow, I was expecting anchovy-sized fish cluttering the space, but instead, what I found was two plump pieces of sardines almost bursting out of the tiny container. Despite the annoyance of scales left on the fish, the small nibble I had of the sardine was fantastic. I had expected it to be fishy, oily, salty and maybe somewhat stale, but it was none of these. Thinking that I could eat this right out of the can, maybe on crispy toasts, or with grated daikon and ginger, I started cutting the cabbage--the other main ingredient of the evening's meal.
Sultan's Peperoncino (Spaghetti Peperoncino with Cabbage and Moroccan Sardines) (for two)
In a large pot, boil plenty of water. When the water is boiling, add a generous pinch of salt and add spaghetti. Cook to al dente.
Meanwhile, heat olive oil in a pan and fry the garlic and chili pepper. When it starts to smell nice, add the sardines. After a minute or two, add the cabbage and stir-fry them, crushing the sardines into bite-sized pieces. Salt to taste.
Transfer the pasta into the pan, mix, and serve when the pasta has a nice coat of olive oil.
Since the sardines weren't super-salty anchovies, the pasta came out to be a little milder than I'd expected. It could have used some more salty kick, perhaps, but it was a pretty nice comfort meal. I'm still not sure if I would gladly join my father in his occasional fish-in-a-tin drinking spree, but I'd be definitely buying these Sultan's Moroccan sardines again and again. Next time, I want to try cooking something Japanese with them--perhaps my father can enjoy it with me.
I don't like oysters.
In fact, it's probably safe to say that I positively hate them.
Not that I've ever gotten sick from one, but I'm repulsed by the bitter, briny taste of their slimy guts. I can't eat them in any way--deep-fried, cooked with rice, in a hot pot, let alone raw.
So, I don't know why I decided to pick up a tin of smoked oysters at the Tai Nam Food Market yesterday. I was wandering up and down their maze-like aisles filled with exotic food stuffs--like canned shrimp paste, shredded young coconuts meat in syrup, a dozen different rice papers. Then I saw tins of oysters. Some were as is, others were treated: cured, salted, and smoked. Somehow, I wanted one. I didn't know what I would do with it, but before I knew it, the tin was in the basket. I really don't know why.
I wandered around some more (actually for an hour or so--the place is a wonderland!), got a Vietnamese lunch box at Ba Le Sandwich Shop on Broadway, had it on the beach, and biked home. Then I had to face the small, nonthreatening-looking tin of oysters. What would I do with it? To make matters worse, Patrick isn't big of oysters, either. I should open the tin and see what it tastes like, I thought, but didn't have the balls to do it. The tin sat on the kitchen counter as I googled "smoked oyster" in the dining area. Having had virtually zero experience with oysters (let alone a good one), I needed some idea of what flavors would go well with the oysters. Someone baked the oysters in its shell with Vietnamese chili sauce, quail eggs and scallions. That sounded good. Someone else baked a flan with smoked oysters and parmesan cheese. That might work, too. Yet another made a pasta with oyster cream sauce. Hmm.
Then the idea struck. A double oyster linguini! I'd picked up a pack of exceptionally perky oyster mushrooms at the same market. I could pair the oysters with oyster mushrooms. Ha. Obviously I was in a rare, bold mood for a dish based purely on a (bad) joke. Cream sauce should work fine with both the oysters and the mushrooms, but I needed something punchy, something that'd stand up against the oysters' strong flavor. Black peppers? Garlic? But they didn't seem to be the one, although I did end up using them in the final product. Further googling didn't yield too many useful suggestions, so I was left to my own devices.
I opened the can and was amused to see its content faithfully mirroring the rather unappetizing graphic on the box. Inside, greenish brown baby oysters about half the size of my thumb were squished against each other in three neat rows. The texture seemed to be very close to that of cooked liver (something else I'm not terribly fond of). Am I being too daring? I wondered. All the recent news of Chinese poisonous products--food or not--started circling around in my head. What do I do? For an answer, I stared at the oysters. Look thy enemy in the eye, and thou shall defeat it, right?
The oysters were preserved in cotton seed oil, which bore a yucky green tint from the oyster juice. The oil might contain the strongest flavor of the oysters; something a real oyster lover would treasure, I thought, but since we weren't the most enthusiastic lovers of oysters, I figured I could drain the oil to tame the flavor. I rinsed the oysters with a bit of leftover whiskey, hoping that the whiskey might add some interesting flavor compatible with the oysters, while rinsing off the excess pungency.
Following the usual steps for a cream-based sauce, I made the double-oyster pasta in about fifteen minutes. In the final product, I didn't taste much of the whiskey, but rinsing part seemed to have worked pretty well; the oysters had become surprisingly edible. There was a hint of their oceanic and bitter flavor, but it was tame enough that we, the two oyster haters, could actually enjoy the sauce infused with oysters. The smoky note, which became the primary flavor, also helped tame the wild oysters for us. We surprised ourselves that we could actually enjoy oysters, but there was room for improvement. There was something lacking in the pasta. I thought something more spicy--like crushed chili pepper or even curry powder--might liven up the complex but somewhat flat sauce. Patrick thought more cream might be good. Writing this now, I wonder something even crazier--like cherry--might work with them or not. Though my first experiment wasn't a success to be announced with fanfare, I'm definitely going to play with this cheap ingredient more. (A tin costs about $1.50.) When winter comes, I might try Patrick's other suggestion: a seafood chowder with the smoked oysters added to the base as a smooth purée.
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Tai Nam Food Market
4925 N. Broadway, Chicago, IL
We spent much of the weekend packing our infinite belongings and moving them to our new apartment. We're taking it slowly, using three weekends to complete our move, but with close to 30 boxes of books and other heavy stuff, the first weekend was tiring enough. I'm having that weird sensation that I (wow!) have arms and legs--these are the body parts I'm not usually aware of, unless they feel heavy with some dull pain at the core, like they do now. Given the physical work, I didn't do much of interesting cooking; I stuck to the easy, reliable food like scrambled eggs with sausage (Saturday breakfast) and plain old French toast (Sunday breakfast). Saturday night, though, I was in a rare mood for sashimi and Japanese sake, and wanted to go to Kuni's, a good, cozy Evanston sushi place.
Somehow, we ended up at Trattoria D. O. C., on the same street but millions of light years apart in terms of cuisine. Well, not "somehow." It was the outdoor seating that did it. When we parked on Main Street, just west of the D.O.C., the golden combination of sashimi and chilled Japanese sake was still the winner in my head. But the Japanese combo's throne was short-lived: as soon as I saw the white-clothed outdoor tables basking in the warm, late-afternoon sun, I couldn't say no to the al fresco dining at the D.O.C. It was too good of a weather to waste indoors--temperatures probably in the 70s, with slight lake breeze to freshen things up. And of course, I knew the D.O.C.'s excellence in pizza making. Adieu, sashimi; adieu, sake--I'll have a clandestine rendezvouz with Italian goodness.
I thought that the Italian goodness was going to be pizza. Granted, pizza was a part of it, but the meal convinced me about something else: Trattoria D.O.C. is one of the best places in town to get fried food. Let me explain.
There was a good number of people crowding the bar area of the restaurant, but we were seated right away; not too many customers wanted the outdoor tables, apparently. From the specials, we ordered tuna tartar and fiori di zuccca, and decided to share a potato rosemary pizza. It turned out that they were out of tuna tartar, which we substituted with beef tartar. I had a glass of soave--a drinkable yet flavorful white wine on the dry side, with a strong muscaty taste and slightly spicy finish. Patrick had a red. (I don't remember what that was.)
I'm split between the fiori di zucca and the potato rosemary pizza in terms to the best item of the meal. (The beef carpaccio was good and came with fantastic parmesano shreds, but the lemon juice completely overpowered the flavor of the beef, thus leaving some room for improvement.) The zucchini flowers were stuffed with mozzarella and anchovies, dressed with light batter and deep-fried. It was my first time to eat zucchini flowers although I've been curious about them for a while. D.O.C. version was decidedly more exciting than the traditional recipe of ricotta and egg for stuffing. And it worked fantastic: the batter was light and fluffy but a little resilient; the mozzarella was rich and supple; and the oceanic, salty flavor of the anchovies was a wonderful accent to it all. The refreshing vinaigrette on the greens which the zucchini flowers were served on balanced out the oil. So, my first experience with deep-fried zucchini flowers was awesome. We shared four flowers between the two of us, but I could have finished the whole plate with a glass of white wine and be merry.)
On the other hand, the rosemary potato pizza was nothing to be slighted. On a crispy yet stretchy (i.e., not a cardboard pizza) and flavorful crust, thin slices of golden-yellow potatoes were gleaming with olive oil. The crust bubbled and charred beautifully in parts, and some of the potato slices were starting to crispify, just like very good kettle-cooked chips. There was just enough rosemary to complement the earthy sweetness of the potatoes. Mozzarella was so buttery that I suspected the pizza baker used the ancient cook's trick of adding a dollop of butter to everything. (Then again, maybe he did.) It was a sauceless pizza, but also a sublime one.
Had I not been to Spacca Napoli, I would give the D.O.C. the title of Chicago's Number One Pizzeria, but unfortunately I'd been to Spacca, so that title isn't available to the D.O.C. Yet, it is definitely one of the best in town. (I tend to think that pizzerias that bake a few sauceless pizzas might be decent ones--I don't think a pizzeria without an absolute confidence in its crust would want to serve it without the palate-drenching marinara slathered on it.)
So, the pizza was excellent. But the fiori di zucca might have been even better. I was amazed by the batter that was light and fluffy but never mushy, flimsy or fragile. It was spirited, if I may put it that way. Combined with a large platter of light, crispy and awesomely oceanic fried calamari (that didn't require marinara) that we'd had there before, the fiori di zucca totally convinced me that Trattoria D.O.C. knows their fried stuff. I'm not a fried food enthusiast, but within my limited experience, I dare say the D.O.C. is probably the best place to get fried food. And instead of the staple sodas of the fast food joints, I can get good wine at this restaurant. What not to love, right?
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Trattoria D.O.C.
706 Main Street, Evanston, IL
847.475.1111
We Japanese love to massacre modify different Western cuisines to make them suit our taste. (You might remember the soy sauce-based mushroom spaghetti I wrote about a while back.) One of the frequent victims is the Italian food--there are quite a few spaghetti dishes that you don't see anywhere outside of Japan, or outside of Japanese cooks' kitchens. We might add miso to a simple tomato sauce to give it an extra depth of flavor. "Natto," fermented soybeans, also makes its appearance in spaghetti dishes. We might even use "shiokara," various seafood, often squid, marinated and fermented in its own innards (I know it sounds gross, but a good one can be fantastic) as a base for the sauce.
Though I'm not a huge fan of "natto spa," as this type of spaghetti is often called, I am deeply in love with another perennial Spaghetti Giapponese: spaghetti with spicy pollack roe. Spicy pollack roe, originally from Korea, is raw pollack roe preserved in salt and red chili, and is usually eaten with a bowl of rice or as an accompaniment for sake. Mentaiko, as it's called, can be a little bit daunting for someone with an aversion to oceanic flavor (I had to overcome my initial revulsion, too, since mentaiko smells pretty fishy), but once you get over it, it can be quite addictive. Mentaiko loses some of its wild fishiness when it's cooked, so spaghetti with mentaiko (or "mentai spa" in short) is one of my favorite dishes that involve this ingredient.
I don't know who invented the "mentai spa," but it's a pretty simple dish. In fact, I might venture to say that its simplicity faithfully reflects the simplicity of Italian pasta dishes. The main ingredients are the spaghetti, mentaiko, butter, soy sauce and nori (seaweed you find wrapped around your "maki" sushi). It's simple, but the fishy, salty mentaiko, the fatty, rich butter and the aromatic nori blend extremely well with each other. And it's ridiculously easy to make; it's one of the easiest meals to cook, even if you don't know how to cook at all. Indeed, there's no knife involved, either, other than the butter knife you might use to transfer the butter from the butter case to the pan.
Spaghetti with Spicy Pollack Roe (for one)
First, boil the pasta in plenty of water with a pinch of salt. While the pasta is cooking, squeeze the pollack roe out of its thin skin. To get the tiny roe out of the fragile skin, I like to cut one end of the roe sack and pull the sack between two chopsticks tightly held together, but if you aren't used to using chopsticks, you can also do this by breaking the sack open and scrape the roe out with a spoon. When the pasta is al dente, drain the water from the pot, remove it from heat, and add butter, pollack roe and soy sauce. Mix well. The pollack roe cooks by the heat of the pasta. Place the pasta on a plate and top it with shredded nori and shiso leaves, cut into thin strips.
The other day I made this spaghetti for lunch, for the first time in many, many years, and totally fell in love with it again. The punchy heat and fishiness of the mentaiko had morphed into incredibly delicate hint of spice and oceanic flavor, and the butter's dairy richness held it all together. (Just writing this makes my mouth water... Ah!) For folks out there with higher seafood tolerance, I highly recommend this Japanified Italian recipe. Oh, yeah, you should eat it with a pair of chopsticks, too!
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Mentaiko can be found in freezer cases in Japanese or Korean markets. They may come in fancy packages, since they're a bit more expensive. (I think I bought mine, a fake-wood box of 7 oz for $12 or $16.) They're expensive, but you really don't need a ton of them to give flavor to your dishes, so a relatively small package should last you for a while. I got mine at the H Mart (801 Civic Center Drive, Niles, IL).
It seems positively unlikely (or negatively likely, am I supposed to say?) that there is an authentic home-style Italian restaurant just a few blocks from a gang-infested stretch of Howard, but there is. Tucked between a flat, nondescript bank building and Fish Keg, a fried fish take-out (whose fried fish are actually pretty tasty), Cucina di Donatella serves authentic cooking of your lost Italian mamma. It's classic, but not in the marinara-smothered-overcooked-pasta kind of way; it's classic in you-might-find-the-same-food-in-a-Roman-trattoria kind of way.
The open-kitchen restaurant is small with about 8 tables, but the menu is extensive. Not to be missed is the handmade pasta dishes that take up about half the menu, but there are also nightly specials that show up on the chalk board on the wall, as well as in the almost chant-like recitation by the waiters who seem to emphasize their staccato Italian accent. Though meat and fish entrées sound great, we usually succumb to the temptation of simply prepared pasta dishes.
Tagliatelle alla Boscaiola
Patrick's favorite is the spinach lasagna, which puzzles me as to how in the world Donatella, the owner chef you can often glimpse in the kitchen, makes this usually heavy-with-greasd dish so light. The strong, green flavor of the abundant spinach is definitely the most prominent feature of this dish. My favorite might be a medley of mushroom pasta with black truffle oil (this was one of the specials last year, during the mushroom season), but unfortunately, this might be harder to encounter. There are also pasta dishes that I've never seen anywhere else. One of them is the pasta al prosciutto con burro e salvia (wide, flat pasta rolled with prosciutto and sage in butter sauce). The butter did get a bit much for me toward the end of the meal, but the combination of the salty prosciutto and the fragrant sage was quite delightful.
Gnocchi Genovese
When we visited Donatella's kitchen a few weeks ago, Patrick had Gnocchi Genovese and I had Tagliatelle Boscaiola (fetuccini-like flat pasta with carrot-and-mushroom meat sauce sans tomatoes). Both were excellent in a simple and clean way. The Gnocchi was extremely tender yet still had just the right resilience against my teeth, and the basil-infused olive oil never got overwhelmingly oily. The parmesan cheese sprinkled over the white wine-based meat sauce on my dish was a pleasant (and salty) complement to the otherwise very subtle mix of flavors. But the true BANG! was the appetizer, bruschetta with chopped mussels (see the photo below). The crusty bread was literally piled high with mussels. I'm usually not a huge fun of mussels, but this one was fantastic. The oceanic kick of the mussels was perfectly balanced with the strong zest of freshly chopped garlic and the sharp, green flavor of the Italian parsley.
The service seems to fluctuate. When it's excellent, it's amazing; unintrusive, knowledgeable, friendly and swift. When it's slow, it can be reeeeeeeeeally slow (but never snooty). So, don't go there starving. Bring a bottle of wine (it's BYOB), sit back, enjoy the conversation with your party, and when they're ready, you'll be served an excellent, reasonably priced classic Italian. Many reviews (including this detailed one from Sun Times) rave about their desserts, too--I just have to try some soon!
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La Cucina di Donatella
2221 W. Howard St.
773.262.6533
Parking is available along the alleyway on the west side of the building.
Where did the shiitake mushrooms go? The last time I saw them, they were happily waiting for their time in a brown bag on the counter top. They were now nowhere to be seen. Did I throw them away by mistake? I didn't remember doing that, but since I know my formidable power of forgetfulness, I figured I tossed out the brown bag without thinking much about it.
"I think I threw out the shiitake mushrooms by mistake," I told Patrick, who was reading something about the Mac's developer conference on Monday. "It's so stupid; I don't even remember doing that, but the bag isn't here, so I think I did it."
"Was that in a paper bag, on the counter?" asked Patrick. He sounded a little anxious. Yeah, I said. "I think I tossed it in the trash," he confessed. "I thought that was the bag of the muffins we ate for breakfast."
He shook the brown bag before tossing it, but the slightly dry, rustling noises of the shiitake mushrooms convinced him that they were the paper muffin cups. Ouch.
So, there went the main ingredient for our Spaghetti Giapponese con Fungi--the easy dinner I planned for the evening. This flavor loss was significant, but I still had some oyster mushrooms and normal white mushrooms, so I decided to stick with the plan, with a bit of alteration.
Originally, I was going to sautée the mushrooms in butter and shallots, add salt and some turning sake, and mix with the pasta. Now that the most significant flavor agent is gone, I had to find something to patch the gap with. What I decided upon is "kobucha," a sort of instant drink made from kelp*. Kobucha usually comes in an airtight can with a tiny plastic spoon, and you dissolve a spoonful of the powdered stuff in hot water and drink it. The drink has a slight green tint, just like green tea. Since its basic ingredients are powdered kelp (kobu, or kombu), salt, sugar and flavoring amino acids, kobucha is widely used to enhance the umami (one of the five basic tastes; the sensation of the full richness of flavors) in Japanese home cooking. I don't like kobucha as a drink, but I'm quite fond of the oceany flavor that it adds to the otherwise straightforward dishes.
So, here is what I did with the pasta with one missing mushroom:
Ingredients (approximation, as usual):
Method for Spaghetti Giapponese con Fungi:
I used just enough olive oil and butter to sautée the mushrooms without getting them burnt, and there's no cream or cheese involved (although you could add them and make it a richer dish). Most of the flavor comes from the mushrooms and shallot, enhanced by the powdered kelp in kobucha. It's a rather simple pasta, but it's chock full of flavor. Although its ingredients are rather oriental (especially if you manage to protect shiitake mushrooms from the evil hands of your significant other :P), but the simplicity is (I think) similar to that of real Italian pasta dishes we enjoyed while in Italy. This went quite well with the light rose, a leftover wine from a few days before.
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* In the U.S. and in Europe, the word "kombucha" is used to refer to a Chinese-origin fermented tea that is drunk for health purposes. I don't know how this confusion started, but the these are two different drinks.
In the desolate food scenery of Chicago's downtown (unless you have lots of change to spare, or you love old-fashioned stake houses), Avec's interesting and reasonably priced food is a rare find. And it goes well with the vast range of Mediterranean wine the restaurant offers. I realized its existence during my short slave work (read: unpaid internship for English majors) with a women's magazine. According to the reviewer, the restaurant's concept sounded pretty cool. I made a mental note to pay a visit.
The first time we went there, we fell in love. The decor was beautifully clean and minimalist, with a long wooden counter and a long communal table stretching all the way to the back of the long and narrow room. At the end of the long room was a wall of various glass cubes, adding just enough splash of color to the otherwise natural/woody color scheme. The idea is that the space is communal, where you squeeze into your share of the bench, with your elbows almost hitting your (equally delighted) neighbors. Conversation may not take place between total strangers, and it may not be a small Mediterranean village outside of the large glass window, but the possibility is still there. (I especially enjoyed eavesdropping on the conversation next door, and watching people in slightly hip clothing.)
And of course, the food was fantastic. I especially loved the crostini with puréed horseradish and parsnip, topped with arugula and shavings of parmesan-like cheese. So, when we went back to Avec the other day, I was eager to have that crostini again.
Now, part of Avec's concept is that the menu constantly changes, presumably to accommodate the ingredients in season (as well as to give the regulars little surprises every time). As such, the menu didn't have the parsnip crostini any more. (It was replaced by bruschetta with roasted beet.) The lesson: come prepared to be surprised, and don't form too emotional of a bond with any one item on their menu. (Of course I learned the lesson too late; I'm now determined to try replicating the crostini myself.)
Before I recovered from the initial shock of the loss of my beloved parsnip crostini, Patrick and his sister ordered a carafe of Italian white. Made from Pecorino grapes, Caldora was a wonderful white. It was very crisp and very dry, but had a subtle, citrus-like aftertaste. It wasn't on the menu, so we owe this pleasant surprise to our waiter. (We also owe it to the vintners as well, who have revived the cultivation of the rare, endangered Pecorino species of grapes.)
After a careful discussion, we settled on four of the small plates. Avec offers small ($4-12) and large plates ($12-18), which are perfect for sharing. Each small plate is about the size of a smallish individual entrée, so the larger the party is, the more you get to try. The first to arrive was the escarole salad with smoked pork and black eyed peas, with sherry vinaigrette. The smoky pork was quite wonderful, but I would say that the crusty, focaccia-like bread that came with it was even better.
The smash-hit of the night was the whipped brandade, a creamy, dip-like dish from France. A bit of research yielded that brandade is made with rehydrated salt cod, milk, fresh cream and (sometimes) potatoes. Our version has a bit of olive oil drizzled on top, and came with little slices of garlic bread to scoop up the hot, creamy goodness. The salt cod gave it enough oceanic flavor without overwhelming the concoction with fishiness, and the richness of the fresh cream was rather sublime. Considering how many calories and how much cholesterol this blasted thing must harbor inside, we probably shouldn't be eating this too often, but I could eat that thing every day, all day long. (Maybe not, to be honest--I'm not good at too much grease--but it was very good.) We would have licked the cazuela clean, had it not been so hot, coming right off the burner.
We also had house-made red wine sausage with pistacio and black grape relish (served with rosemary polenta) and Tasmanian trout "steak" with chili ginger sauce. Both were very good, but I'm omitting the details to keep the post within a certain length. Avec is a little brother of the people who run the renowned Blackbird (a few blocks down the street from Avec). At Blackbird, innovative, seasonal entrées go for about $30-35. I'm sure Blackbird has awesome food, but at that price range, it's a birthday-dinner kind of place. Avec isn't: the check for the three of us, which included four small plates, two carafes of wine, three coffee and a dessert (caramel coffee cake with espresso ice cream) was around $85, and we were quite happily full.
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Avec
615 W. Randolph St., Chicago, IL
312.377.2002
Blackbird
619 W. Randolph St., Chicago, IL
312.715.0708
© Copyright 2007 - All Rights Reserved. Don't even think about trying it!
