Vaut le travaille*

You know what? Fuck the haters. Starting right here with the Cod. Yeserday's posts focused on a DI/DO article and a food blog that were hostile to cooking and food, respectively. To move things in a different direction, I'll invert the dealbreaker question Severson asks, and instead offer an SE/EPI-style trawl post asking what recipes or foodstuffs, despite the difficulty, inconvenience, or expense associated with them, do you love to cook?

It is dangerous to think that food is love, but cooking is one way to express how you feel to the people you love, so claiming that something is too much trouble is essentially saying that the people you are eating with are not worth the effort, at least in the particular case. So, instead, what do you cook not in spite of the effort, but because of the effort it demands on your part? It could be trekking to the only real butcher left in your area for veal bones, or waking up before dawn for bread-related reasons. For a food blogger, or food blog reader, the question of what you will do in the kitchen is more interesting, in my opinion, than learning what 380 DI/DO readers won't do.**

I'll start. Chestnuts. A bitch to peel, no matter what you do, and the skin gets under your nails, and inflames the tips of your fingers. But it ain't Christmas without them, and the Rogers/Gray chestnut, pumpkin and farro soup is the Mr.October of the soup race.*** What ingredient or dish is your way of indicating someone is worth some trouble?

*Apologies to Mesdames Hobby, Cooperman, and Folkman, who did their best.

**After a while, the litany of things people will not do in the kitchen starts to read like some sort of bizzaro culinary 120 Days of Sodom. 

***There's love for Reggie here, despite what you might think. It's about the love, not the hate, here at the Cod, and 04 and 07 make it easier to be gracious.

Comments

[Ulrike Meinhof]

Oh, I like this meme. Three off the top of my head:

Marzipan -- made from fresh raw almonds, blanched and peeled, ground, mixed with sugar and brandy. It's work and it's fun and it's always appreciated.

Nettles -- wearing rubber gloves while cooking them lets your guests know you care about getting the toxins out of their systems in the spring (though I unfortunately don't know anyone who seems to like them as much as I do -- but I've tried!)

Mussels -- this one is kind of a cheat, because really, shellfish are pretty quick and easy, but it still makes people excited when you make them at home. And the soaking, de-bearding, and cleaning process gives you a good opportunity to chat and drink too much of the cooking wine with your guests.

[Rose's Lime]

This is an interesting meme for me... the longer I've steeped in New England self reliance, the more I DIY, to the point where I have to actively encourage myself to consider whether it's worth it. There are maybe three dimensions here... what's economical to do yourself, what's satisfying to do yourself, and how does the DIY compare to the store bought.

Granola - scores on all three - oats, brown sugar, vanilla, cinnamon, oil, nuts - bake at 225 for an hour and you fill the house with yum and fill your belly the next morning and it comes out to about $2.00 a pound vs. $5.50 for the store bought stuff which makes a differnce when it's as good as all that.

Beans - we use a lot of canned beans, but soaking and cooking them yourself allows them to fill with flavor like nothing else. You don't save more than a buck, but it doesn't take much more effort, only a little forethought.

Breakfast baked goods. Muffins, scones, biscuits, banana bread. Baked the night before doesn't count. Put the coffee on, turn the oven on and grab the flour. Score this two - I'm not a great baker, but even if you're Julie Powel, they're never going to be as good as they make at but it's satisfying to have something so fresh, to have done something so nice before you get out of your Pajamas.

Chocolate Mousse - "I'll bring a desert" is usually code for "I'll stop at the store and pick up a cake." I love to make anything that requires melting a block of chocolate with a stick of butter. Chocolate Mousse is lovely and yummy and easy to make. It's basically a chocolate omelet with air in it.

Apple Sauce - I have no idea whether it's economical, but if you're going to go apple picking, you don't feel right unless you come home with as many as you can conceivable carry and the only thing to do with that many apples is apple sauce. Serve warm with cream all winter long to remind you of fall.

Sausage - This is pretty laborious, gorey and messy. The results are usually very good, though sometimes only OK. I don't know why I do it, but I do.

I no longer do:

- Oysters. It's a nice idea to buy a bunch at $10/dozen and schuck them yourself, but even after doing it a dozen times and getting good at it, it's hard to enjoy them when you're sweathing, cursing and covered with chipped shells. Hard for others to enjoy them as well.

[gastropoda]

I have so gotten into the habit of cooking only for print that it's hard to remember an answer to your question. Salpicon comes to mind first, and not that annoying no-non-French-need-reply definition Forelock provides. It's what I first encountered in a Mexican restaurant in El Paso as a filling for soft tacos. I serve it as a main course salad at big parties, and I set aside a huge chunk of my life to do it. It's basically braised beef (brisket is best), pulled into fine shreds with fingers or two forks, and tossed with a chile dressing and all these painstakingly cut into very fine dice: Monterey Jack, Colby longhorn, cucumbers, radishes, tomatoes and avocado. But the beef has to be sourced right, and it has to age overnight with a salt rub. No one loves it as much as I do, but it's the one life-suck I will actually eat once I've spent ages making it.

Enchiladas are also something that can only be made from scratch (I've cheated and learned). I can't make tortillas myself (must be my background in Arizona, where flour were the norm), but I have to make the sauce, starting with charring the chilies. By the time that's done, the kitchen looks as if Charles Manson was my prep cook. And then there is the three-step process of warming, saucing and filling the things. Not to mention grating tons o' cheese and sauteing zucchini and onions or something similar to roll up inside.

I roast a huge batch of red and yellow peppers every fall to marinate with olive oil and a little garlic, from a spectacular Jacques Pepin recipe, but those are eaten only on bread, not used for cooking. The week or so it takes to get through them is a very happy time here. Even though the prep takes nearly as long as the eating.

And then there are grits. You have to order the best from somewhere obscure down south, let them soak overnight in water, then cook them for a couple of hours, stirring and adding cream until they are the American equivalent of Robuchon's potatoes: vegetable converted into dairy. And of course they need shiitakes, diced very small, sauteed for a long time with garlic.

And then there's Roger Verget's summer gratin, which takes almost an afternoon but is one of the most amazing assemblages: onions stewed slowly in oil and layered into a baking dish; eggplant slices roasted with a touch of oil and lots of salt and pepper; a ton of zucchini and plum tomatoes (bought to size), thinly sliced; and a shitload of mozzarella cut into thin slices. You layer everything in rows on top of the tomatoes, top it off with grated Parmigiano and bake it. Then try not to feel bad when it disappears almost instantly.

Jody Adams has an outstanding recipe for a cake that is really a tart without the heartbreak of pie crust, and you could make it with store-bought lemon curd, but it's so much more extraordinary when you grate the zest and juice the lemons and cook it all up with eggs and butter.

Then, you can't make gumbo unless you start with the carcass of the Thanksgiving turkey. You can't serve Indian for dinner to guests unless you make a minimum of ten dishes, all from start to finish (well, you can buy the mango pickles, and the bread, too, if you have a lead thumb). Lasagne is only company-worthy if you put half a day into it, even if you substitute wild mushrooms for the usual meat (and if you buy the pasta; again: some things are best left to the professionals).

Maybe I just never learned to chop fast. One of my older sisters always says there is a big difference between cooking and "fixing food." When you get the time to do the former, there's nothing like it.

And I don't even have a food processor, let alone a dishwasher.