Pumpkin quinoa risotto with fried sage and toasted pumpkin seeds

Sometimes, lessons need to be relearned.

This lesson is entitled: Read the recipe first! But the lesson has a subtitle, too: Making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

We had a three-pound bag of quinoa to cook. The dish would be a variation on a wonderful quinoa salad from Rebecca Katz. The event was a healthy cooking presentation and lunch for one of UCSF’s Cancer Resource Center’s retreat days for cancer patients.

Instead of following the directions in the recipe for cooking the quinoa, we followed, sort of, the package directions. These called for one part grain and two parts water. We might have added even more water than that. The recipe, however, suggested one part grain and about one and one-quarter parts water. This latter measurement results in lovely, separate, fluffy quinoa, just right for a salad.

Ours was mush. For the salad we needed to start over. (And we went on to great success with the recipe.) But neither of us were happy about throwing out food. My brilliant friend, F, looked at the glop and said: “Quinoa Risotto.” Thus was born Pumpkin Quinoa Risotto, another of what I call “freezer convenience foods”: frozen overcooked quinoa, frozen pumpkin puree (do you ever use all the cooked pumpkin in one dish?), frozen Romano beans (the one plant that produced so abundantly I advertised the extras on the local garden talk list), fried sage, toasted pumpkin seeds, chili flakes, plus a little broth to thin the mixture. I’ve already made it three times, once for the night before Thanksgiving. It’s an easy dish for any night throughout the winter squash season. Even G, who is not fond of pumpkin, likes the dish.

You can make the dish on purpose, or simply cook some quinoa and freeze it to make your own convenience-food dinners. Two to three-cup portions should serve four. And once you have it on hand, you can go in any direction depending on what you have on hand. Because we were “following” Rebecca’s recipe, we had dded ground spices (cumin and coriander) to our quinoa. These taste great with winter squashes but if they are your least favorite spices, leave them out and go with herbs such as thyme.

F made Mushroom Quinoa Risotto by sautéing sliced mushrooms in butter with some minced garlic in a deep, wide pot. She added sherry and reduced it to a glaze. Then she mixed in the quinoa mush, a little half-and-half, and freshly grated Parmesan. “Dee-licious!” she wrote when describing her concoction. I’ve made a version that loosened the quinoa with tomato sauce; added some diced, home-dried tomatoes, and simmered the combination with Parmesan cheese rinds.

Although I haven’t tried it yet, next on my list is Quinoa Pho: with keffir lime leaves, coconut milk, chicken broth, chili, ginger, garlic, lemon grass, and diced, cooked chicken or turkey.

The bright, cheerful, “souk”-like shop contains just about every ingredient to make a cooking enthusiast’s heart beat faster.

Mike rubbed the bright green herb paste,

pungent with garlic and anchovies, onto the lamb flesh. Earlier in the week, I’d called Mike, a butcher at Bi•Rite Market , a neighborhood specialty foods shop a few blocks from my house in San Francisco. (He is now becoming a high school teacher.) He agreed to bone two legs of lamb for a party I was catering but not to tie the roasts up until I arrived with the herb paste.

We chatted as he tied up the legs, draping the long string around his neck so it stayed clean and untangled. And I thought of all the times I had written that a good butcher, if you cook and entertain, can be your best friend.

By doing the boning, smearing, and tying up, Mike saved me time, frustration, and clean up. I’ve boned just enough cuts of meat and birds to know it takes lots of practice to do well. And tying up a slippery, large piece of meat is not my idea of fun either. With Mike’s help, all I needed to do was carry the well-shaped roasts home and cook them.

Bi•Rite became my familiar as I worked on Hubert Keller’s Souvenirs: Stories and Recipes from my Life (Andrews McMeel  2012). From the meat department, I ordered cowboy steaks and a venison rack. Once I walked in hoping, but doubtful, that such a small shop would have jarred, preserved lemons. When I tentatively asked a staff person about them, I was led directly to the spot where the jars stood on a high shelf.

That happened again and again. A staff member—and often more than one—always stood ready to help me find anything I needed. In a shop crowded with both people and products, I’ve never lacked for as much help as I wanted for as long as I needed. And the shop is a real democracy: everyone gets treated the same way.

Somehow Sam Mogannam, Bi•Rite’s owner and himself a cookbook author (Bi.Rite Market’s Eat Good Food), has managed to choose and motivate the staff so that they appear to be as excited and interested in my shopping as I am. Once a cashier remarked that the vermicelli from Molino e Pastificio I had in my basket and knew nothing about was his favorite. Now that I’ve tried it as well as the company’s Ternetta, I second that emotion.

Bi.Rite features locally sourced foods of all sorts–produce, meat and poultry, and prepared foods, as well as foods prepared in their own kitchen.

We are lucky in San Francisco to have a number of stores that turn into beloved resources. But they can exist anywhere both in brick-and-mortar incarnations and on the Internet. What are your go-to shops?

When I started writing cookbooks, I walked miles through thigh-high snow to the post office to mail the 400-page, typed, double-spaced manuscript. Not. But I do remember a time before in-home fax machines. Late for a dealine, I rushed to Fed Ex and used their then brand-new Zapmail fax service, thrilled that the manuscript would land on the editor’s desk that same day. Today authors and editors assume instant delivery.

While manuscript delivery systems have changed, many book-writing processes have not. One of the most important tools when writing a book in the “voice” of another is a good, old tape recorder. Of course, these are digital. Which I discovered when I took my micro-cassette transcriber to Radio Shack to see if it could be fixed.

That left me with two-plus days of cassette recordings of Hubert Keller telling me stories that would eventually become Hubert Keller’s Souvenirs: Stories and Recipes from my Life. Now totally paranoid that if I used just one recorder it might go on the fritz and I’d lose the precious memories, I bought a digital recorder and kept both it and the micro-cassette recorder running throughout our work together.

After five days of recording, 23 hours of conversation needed transcription. And I had two problems: both the “how” and the “when?!” of the transcription—eventually, there would be about 40 hours—and how to digitize the analog recordings.

One friend hooked me up with someone to do the digitizing but that left the transcription problem. Timothy Ferriss’s 4-Hour Work Week discussed virtual assistants, but how would I find the right one for my project? A lucky question to a yoga buddy revealed the answer: Virtual Assistants Israel. There I found Natalie Washington whose accomplishments included authoring a cookbook. My girl!

Success Angels

She has since started her own virtual assistant company, Success Angels. The native English-speaking college graduates and professionals live in Israel and offer a wide variety of services including transcription, SEO, graphic design, WordPress blogs, administrative work, and personal assistance.

The necessity of emailing those large audio files taught me about Dropbox. That was a relief and a huge time saver. Meanwhile, I wish I knew then what I know now about transcribing. This tip will save you—and whoever transcribes your recordings—massive amounts of time and stress: Record a vocabulary that includes pronunciation and spelling!

Hubert and his wife Chantal have charming French accents which I find easy to understand. But imagine if you don’t speak French and words come at you such as l’Auberge de l’Ill, Paul Bocuse (soft “s”), and Roger Vergé (both “g”s sound like “j”). Imagine having no written notes to refer to, no audio to refer to. Imagine the brain freeze every time you hear one of those words. They will sound slightly different each time, and different in the mouth of each speaker. Now multiply by the thousands.

Bless her heart, my virtual assistant persevered and eventually I had transcriptions that would become the text for Hubert Keller’s Souvenirs. A discussion thread some months ago in the Facebook group, Cookbook Friends, revealed most of us have assistants, be they family members who pitch in for free to a circle of supporters with specific skills including virtual assistants. They can do just about anything that can be accomplished with a computer, telephone or fax machine from reviewing and fixing links on a website to market research to getting flowers delivered.

Even though both Hubert’s name and mine are on the cover of Hubert Keller’s Souvenirs as authors, a whole tribe of folks made the book possible. And for all of them—the chefs at Fleur de Lys, the friends who tested recipes, the ones who listened and advised, the crew (especially our editor Jean Lucas) at Andrews McMeel, our agent Carole Bidnick, and for Natalie Washington, I am so grateful.

White Marrow Fat and Black Coco fresh shelling beans. The “black” ones varied from a deep marine blue to a pearly gray.

Fresh Shelling Bean Season

It’s way too short, just a few weeks. And then we spend the winter cooking with dried shelling beans. But while they are fresh and in season, grab them. Fresh shelling beans take just 20 minutes or so to cook vs. the usual 45 minutes to an hour for dried beans. And their flavor is fresher, too. Perhaps a subtle difference but an important one.

Sure, they need removing from their pods. But this can be a happy task: my sister and I gossiped and shelled beans while sitting in the sun on the deck.

For several weeks, Tierra Vegetables sold Black Coco and Marrow Fat beans. The former can be jet black but this year some were the most beautiful French blue and some were pearl gray, the color of my mother’s beloved “black” pearls. “Cook both types together,” customers were told. And we did. So much easier, too, than keeping them separate, getting two pots of boiling water going, etc.

The cooking could not be easier: a pot of boiling water, a bay leaf, perhaps a sprig or two of thyme, a crushed and peeled garlic clove or two. If fresh herbs are not about, or if the cook lacks the motivation to descend to the garden and back (that’s me); a pinch of herbes de Provence will suffice. Simmer the beans gently, uncovered, ten minutes. Set your timer and then pay attention when it rings. Test your beans. When done, the beans should be tender throughout but hold their shape. If they are half cooked or so, add some salt. Set your timer again—five minutes or ten, you can tell by how far along the beans got in the first ten minutes—and go do something else.

Fresh shelling bean (butter beans) salad with green beans, red onion, nepitella, and garlic flowers

Return as soon as the timer rings. I procrastinated (at which I am expert) and nearly overcooked the first-of-the-season fresh butter beans purchased from Jacobi at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. That would not have been a disaster as I could have mashed them with herbs, more salt, pepper, and olive oil and topped crostini with the rough bean puree. But my idea was to turn them into a room temperature salad with the romano-type green beans that are the one crop doing spectacularly well in my garden this year. (So well, in fact, that the plants intimidate me; more beans ripen every hour.)

When I think of fresh shelling beans, I remember a dish from years ago: a plate of braised, fat white beans teamed with crispy fried artichokes. Oh dear. It remains a dish that inspires dreams. Just yesterday, I noticed piles of artichokes at the Castro Farmers’ Market. Time to try a repeat.

But we are as crazy as bedbugs. Wait, they aren’t crazy, just hungry. Well, we do share that. I confess this as the first bright yellow flower heads of wild fennel appear in fields and roadsides. A new foraging season for wild fennel pollen collecting has arrived. This time last year I kept seeing fennel pollen on menus all over town and saw jars of it for sale. While I dislike black licorice intensely, I love almost everything else with an anise flavor. I wanted some fennel pollen of my own and I didn’t want to pay for it. To learn how to collect it, I did what you’d do: consulted the Internet.

One blog post told me to collect some flower heads and suspend them upside down in a bag, hang that up somewhere, and bat it every time I passed it. The pollen would fall to the bottom of the bag with almost no effort. Now, maybe you have a place where having a bag hanging in your way would not drive you crazy. Or you are very clever and can train your cat to bat the bag about.

Wild fennel pollen. From left to right: most to least obsessively sorted.

But I tried it nonetheless and opened the bag after several days to see what was what. What would be aphids and my first lesson in fennel foraging: Make sure your flower heads are fresh and not bug infested.

A video recommended collecting flowers and simply brushing your hand across the flower heads over your dish. This works. The pollen is fine, very yellow and pretty, but you get very little. The method also practical if fennel flowers live down by the mailbox a few steps away. The closest source I know of is a twenty-minute walk. One way. And straight uphill.

Now that I had some experience, a third source was more helpful. The writer recommended washing, drying, then picking the fennel off the heads. So I did that. Three times. The first batch I dried in the sun and rubbed the flower heads through a strainer. The pollen was mixed with an equal or larger amount of tiny, nearly hair-thin (actually maybe thinner than one of my hairs) stems. The second batch I washed and dried in a very low oven then put through the strainer more carefully and was rewarded with fewer and shorter stems. The third and final batch (even for an obsessive like me there are limits) I washed, dried a little less than Batch 2, and strained and sorted while watching TV. Actually, I listened and just glanced at it occasionally while sorting the pollen. Over and over again. How did it ever become possible as a commercial product?

This year, if I collect any at all, I’ll just forage while walking and then when the season’s over, I’ll just wait for the next year. Local, seasonal cooking in action.

Between us, we have tried any number and find them, for the most part, too complicated and time consuming, or just plain lacking in the sweet nuttiness we want from whole wheat bread. Not to mention great texture.

One exception is Peter Reinhart’s Sprouted Whole Wheat that I found on Rose Levy Beranbaum’s site. I like to sprout wheat berries and add them to my no-knead bread but I’d never used sprouted wheat flour. The next time I went shopping at Rainbow, I found a bag of sprouted wheat flour from Arrowhead Mills. (Sprouted wheat flour can be found in specialty stores that carry good baking supplies and on the Internet.)

The first time I made the bread, I sprouted wheat berries and added them to the dough; the second time I just did the dough straight. Both times, the dough has astonished me. It turns into a perfect description of what you want your dough to be (according to Craig Ponsford in his great whole-wheat ciabatta video): “a gas bag”. Just a container of sorts for the gas the yeast creates.

If you are used to kneading for many minutes before your bread dough begins to develop its characteristic stretch, prepare to be amazed. Even in the first minute of mixing the dough with a paddle attachment on a stand mixer, it begins to form gluten. The dough gets a short rest and then undergoes another two minutes of kneading. And it’s done! Watching the process just blew me away. I need to find out what makes the flour respond this way.

I mixed the dough and gave it the required folds in the early morning, then went to yoga class. The dough was pushing against the top of the container when I returned. Yeeoww! So active! I gave it a light shaping and transferred it to the oiled bread pan. Soon, the dough rose over the top of that. I didn’t get much oven spring, though, so I may have let it over-rise.

If you look closely at the finished loaf (as well as the pictures to the right and left below) you will see the evidence I left behind on the way to over-risen dough. The dough on the left is what I found when I got back from the gym; the one on the right is the loaf ready for the oven. It seems that big bubble came back to haunt me and the finished loaf. The bubble resulted in the hole you can see  slightly below the crust. My solution, eat it before the bread gets dry enough for the top crust to crumble off.

When I bake the bread, I follow the recipe as I found it on Rose Levy Beranbaum’s site with very few changes.

1. Since my ambient kitchen temperature is about 68°F, I use hot (90 to 100°F) water.

2. Also, I don’t use any oil on my work surfaces. Instead, I borrow a tip learned from Craig Ponsford’s 100 % whole-wheat ciabatta recipe. Moisten your countertop with water, pour the dough out on the moist surface, and perform your stretch and fold. You don’t need to oil your bowl either. Just leave it clean, no water, no oil, no flour. Makes for easier clean up, too. The only oil I do use is to oil the bread pan.

But a pizza class at 18 Reasons in my San Francisco neighborhood caught my eye: “Pizza Primer: Making Homemade Pizza and Mozzarella”. I’d been to Rainbow recently and bought some “00” flour. I knew it is the flour pizzaiolos use, but honestly, I didn’t know what it was. A class seemed the venue to find out.

Our teacher, Jill Santopietro, explained that my confusion about “00” flour was understandable. She prefers an Italian, imported “00” flour. In Italy, “00” denotes a very find grind of flour. She told us that the flour used for pizza is a bread flour similar in protein content to all-purpose or slightly higher but with a “00” grind. But, for example, King Arthur’s Italian-style, 00 flour, is just 8.5% protein, closer to pastry flour and she would not recommend it for pizza. I haven’t tried it. Yet. (it’s in the mail now. Next up: compare three “00″ flours!)

Jill made dough with her favorite recipe from imported “00” flour and all-purpose flour. She also made Jim Lahey’s no-knead pizza dough as well so we could taste the difference. The pizzas we baked with her “00” flour dough were crisp, crunchy, and bubbly. The all-purpose dough made pizzas with a slightly chewier, breadier texture. And the no-knead method created a crust that was the breadiest of all. Now, if you love crunchy bread (I hope you do!), then a bread shape that maximizes crunch and crust and is topped with intriguing toppings—anchovies, olives, herbs, olive oil, cheeses, figs, flowers, you name it—tastes just fine. Thank you, I’ll take two.

We all made dough from “00” flour and had enough to each take enough home to make two personal-size pizzas. (The dough needs to rest overnight to develop flavor and fully hydrate the flour.) Since mozzarella is such an important pizza topping, Jill also taught us to shape mozzarella balls from fresh curds. (Belfiore fresh mozzarella curds are available at the Berkeley Bowl on Oregon Street near Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley.) This reminded me of making fresh mozzarella with Laura Chenel and Michael Chiarello. Laura made the fresh curds with a blend of goat and cow milk and we called it “goatzarella.” I can still see Michael stretching the curds and shaping tiny balls, one after another, stuffing each with a cherry tomato. There was such ease and grace in his motion that it looked like a magic trick. But tasted way better.

Several other lessons stand out from the class:

1. Use care when stretching your dough into shape. You can use a rolling pin but try to avoid the edges which would pop all the bubbles the dough developed in its long rise. Or stretch and prod it into shape by hand and accept that perhaps it won’t be a perfect circle. You can see, I hope all the little bubbles in this hand-stretched dough, not just around the rim, but in the center, too.

2. Curate your pizza to achieve success! Use a light hand with toppings no matter how much you love them all.  If you want more, make another pizza! Transfer your pizza crust to a peel dusted with flour or semolina. As you top your pizza on the peel, shake it occasionally to make sure it is not sticking. If it is, peel the crust back and toss some flour under until it moves again.

3. “Never use cooked tomato sauce on your pizza.” Really?! Oops. Jill made hers by straining the liquid from imported plum tomatoes and mashing them with a little salt and olive oil and some dried oregano plucked from the stem. The blast in the hot oven cooks the sauce and results in a fresh, bright taste.

4. Season your pizza with a little salt before baking especially if using fresh mozzarella, a sweet, moist, but bland cheese.

5. Clean the pizza stone between pizzas. Jill demonstrated with a long-handled wooden spatula wrapped with a tea towel secured with a rubber band. “You need one of these,” she said, “to clean off the excess flour from your pizza stone.” So that’s how it’s done! If left on the stone, the flour will burn. Use the peel to transfer your pizza to the oven.

6. You need lots of heat. “Baking between two stones gives you the intense top and bottom heat you need,” said Jill, to bake the pizza in about five minutes. Or you can blast the top of the pizza, once baked, in the broiler. She also suggested lining the sides of the oven as well with terra cotta tiles. “I check to make sure the pizza is brown on the bottom before I take it out,” said Jill. In class, we were so eager to eat our creations, that we did not bake them quite long enough.

The very next day, I put my new skills to use on the dough I’d brought home. I turned my oven heat as high as it would go and let the oven and the two pizza stones that live in there preheat for an hour. (My old Wedgewood stove has no convection.) Then collected toppings including my fresh mozzarella, Pt. Reyes blue cheese, Parmesan, caramelized onions, fig tapenade, minced fresh rosemary and oregano, chili flakes, fresh tomato, and shredded squash blossoms. It tasted so good I’m stopping now to make another batch of dough so we can have pizza again this weekend. Practice, practice.

It’s right across the street from my house and even in its first year, made the San Francisco Chronicle’s annual “Top 100 Bay Area Restaurants” list. Where it has stayed. G and I think of it as a sort of artist’s studio: personal, full of life, and bursting with creativity.

I found Melissa’s honey panna cotta when it was posted on the Tasting Table website but the recipe didn’t seem right to me—too much gelatin. And here’s a cautionary tale: I wrote to Tasting Table asking if they’d tested the recipe and if it was right. Yes on both counts, they assured me. I was having an email conversation with a pal about the recipe and she tried it. It turned out so hard it bounced. Or nearly so. I made the dessert three or four times over, with less gelatin each time, and took the results across the street for Melissa to try until she approved the result. The mistake crept in, I think, when she converted the recipe from gelatin leaves (which she uses in the restaurant) to powdered gelatin (which is what most of us use at home).

The version I’ve posted is slightly different than her original, at least the way she intended the original to be. I’ve added a bit more honey though the resulting dessert is still barely sweet. And since I love richness, I inverted her proportions of cream and buttermilk and substituted yogurt for the buttermilk. I’ve used nonfat Greek-style plain yogurt as well as nonfat plain yogurt. I planned to try whole milk yogurt but shopping habits (I only buy nonfat yogurt) kept interfering. What you use—whole, low-fat, nonfat yogurt or buttermilk—is your choice. Serve in small portions, using 1/2 cup ramekins or perhaps cool-looking tea or coffee cups.

Melissa likes to cook with local ingredients including honey. She developed the panna cotta using honey from Robert MacKimmie’s City Bees. He sells San Francisco neighborhood honey and each has a distinctive flavor. One of them used to be from my own backyard. But that is another story. I used a thyme honey from Provence that my neighbors brought home to me from their most recent trip—a sweet thank you for cat sitting. The dessert shows off the quality and flavors of whatever honey you use, so be sure to use a good one: perhaps from a beehive in your neighborhood.

I like to serve panna cotta with a sauce, maybe an easy berry sauce such as a lightly spiced strawberry sauce or an easy, salted caramel sauce.

I’ve begun exploring kamut and spelt flours in no-knead bread.

They are easy to find here in San Francisco in the bulk section of Rainbow Grocery. These old varieties of wheat have slightly different flavors, nutritional profiles, and baking properties than whole wheat. Kamut tends to have less gluten than modern wheat varieties so I’ve kept the proportion of whole-grain flours (the rye and kamut) to about 30 percent of the total.

To add more nutritional umph, I add some chia seeds and flax seeds for their omega-3s as well as oat bran for soluble fiber. Sometimes I grind the flax; it has a terrific flavor that reminds me of sesame. But it’s also fun to soak it and the chia seeds. Soaking softens the seed coats and turns the mass into a sort of jelly. The whole seeds give the bread a rustic, attractive look.

43 g organic rye flour

99 g organic kamut or whole-wheat spelt flour

241 g organic bread flour

28 g organic oat bran

6 g kosher salt

14 g organic chia seeds

20 g organic flax seeds

354 g water

28 g fresh sourdough starter or 1/4 teaspoon dried yeast

Weigh the flours, oat bran, and salt into a bowl and whisk together until blended. Weigh the chia and flax seeds into a small bowl and add half the water. Let soak a few minutes until gelled.

Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients and pour in the soaked seeds and the soaking water, the remaining water, and the starter. Mix together until you have a shaggy dough. Cover with plastic wrap and set aside at room temperature for 30 minutes. Take a bowl scraper and fold the dough over on itself, folding with one hand and turning the bowl with the other, until you have worked your way all around the bowl. Recover the bowl. Repeat the resting and folding twice more, and then set the dough aside until fully fermented, about 24 hours.

Continue with the folding, shaping, proofing, and baking methods explained in no-knead bread and whole-grain variations.

I was teaching a no-knead bread class and discussing ideas for the San Francisco Food Bloggers’ Bake Sale (We raised over $1400 for Share Our Strength this past Saturday, 28 April!). We were making the fig-fennel variation that is one of my favorites and riffed on other ideas. A bag of dried apricots from a Mariquita Farm Mystery Box that has lived too long in the refrigerator provided the inspiration for this apricot-anise no-knead sourdough bread. It makes great breakfast toast or spread it with fresh goat cheese or ricotta.

In the variation here you will notice that I am now using metric for weights. I’ve been a proponent of weighing ingredients for years. It’s faster, less messy, and more accurate than measuring by volume, not to mention giving more consistent results. But I’ve been using ounces because that is the default measurement on my scale. It was not until a recent discussion with the cookbook author and blogger Jennie Schacht, that she pointed out the completely obvious (except apparently to me) way to clarify the ambiguity in my recipes when it came to liquids. When I’ve called for, for instance, 8 ounces of water, do I mean weight or volume? I think most people wonder: why is she calling for 8 ounces of water? Everyone knows that’s a cup! Jennie’s brilliantly simple answer: “Express the liquids in grams!” So here goes.

To make the apricot-anise bread, use the amounts listed here and follow the usual method for no-knead bread explained in the the no-knead multigrain sourdough bread and variations.

To make a fig-fennel variation, substitute dried black figs for the apricots and use 11 g fennel seed instead of the 8.5 g anise seed.

567 g organic bread flour (or use 57 g whole-wheat flour and 510 g bread flour)

425 g water

170 g dried apricots, chopped

28 g fresh sourdough starter or 1/4 teaspoon dried yeast

8.5g or 9g kosher salt

8.5g or 9 g anise seed

Note: Soak the apricots in some of the water until the fruit is soft. Make sure to use that soaking water in your bread.