the SIMMER blog

out and about

SIMMER is out on submission. I am freaking.

Also, coming soon: enchiladas.

Sunday I made this recipe for roast pork loin with tarragon, mustard, and cream. Though, being me, I didn't make it exactly as written. Pork chops instead of pork roast, garlic instead of shallots, and dried tarragon instead of fresh. Though I don't usually sub dried herbs for fresh, except in the case of rosemary or thyme. But the Penzey's tarragon is really good quality and rehydrates into nice big sprinkles, so a teaspoon of that added with the butter and garlic to the pan I browned the pork chops in resulted in a delicious sauce with just the right amount of herbiness in its creaminess.

Then again, any recipe that calls for a cup of heavy cream is pretty much bound to be good, right?

Another post about not posting

Ah, but this time, it's different! This time it's not just a drive-by excuse that I'm busy with SIMMER revisions for my agent (though I totally am). This time, there are teaser pictures!

squash it in the bud

I had a really fabulous soup at lunch this week and now I can't stop thinking about squash. (The lunch was with my agent, so maybe this should go under "book news" too?) We are definitely getting into squash season, and of course acorn or butternut varieties lend themselves really well to soup. This one had a little coconut foam on top, but that wasn't what I liked about it. There was, I think, a slight truffling. And there are three ways to get me to eat and love anything:

1. deep fry it.
2. truffle it.

3. both.

Seriously, if you breaded and deep-fried it and drizzled it with truffle oil, I would eat a tire.

So with squash on the brain I bought a butternut and a couple of delicata. The delicata I will probably stuff. But the butternut, ah, the butternut.

 

There's a dish we used to get at Dino, an Italian restaurant in DC, that combined roasted butternut  squash with pasta and ricotta. It's been so long since we had it there that I can't quite remember what the original had in it -- was it spiral pasta or noodles? were there walnuts? garlic instead of shallots? -- but I can remember the at-home adaptation, and it sure is a keeper.

 

No real recipe. Just some steps.

 

Slice a couple of shallots, and saute them in a large pan with a little butter over medium heat. They will crisp up and get brown, almost like a softer, fancier version of the Durkee fried onions. Set these aside for later use. While they're browning, put your pasta water on to boil.

 

Peel the top half of a butternut squash, and cut it into little cubes. (Usually I am not a fussy cook, but in this case I like to keep the cubes square, so I save the round part of the squash to roast and eat later. Just scoop the seeds out and pop it in the oven. Wow, that was a long digression.) Saute the cubes in the same pan you used for the shallots. Add olive oil and/or butter before the squash so it doesn't burn. Cook until soft.

 

By now your water should be boiling, so toss in the pasta. Shorter shapes are usually better: gemelli, mini-penne, or my personal favorite because of the name, strozzapretti ("strangle the priest".)

 

Deglaze the squash pan with a little liquid, less than a quarter-cup. Vermouth, white wine, water, or chicken broth all work fine.  I tried beer once and it made the sauce too bitter, but this will depend on your beer, so experiment if you like. You're not trying to make a liquid sauce, just getting the browned flavor bits off the bottom of the pan. Once that's done, turn the heat off.

time of the season

So last week in Philadelphia it got down to 40-some degrees at night. I thought we'd retired the air conditioning. It is, after all, halfway through October.

But: Indian summer. This week it's 70. And the farmer's market is an odd mix of seasons, with cucumbers and tomatoes still in fairly full effect, but a massive influx of fall's treasures too. Especially apples, which I wish I'd captured on film.

I always shop at least two places, every week. There's the farmer's market for produce and the regular store for deals. Local plums and Lean Cuisine, fresh garlic chives and frozen corn. I need some of each. The food budget is tight but by shopping smart on the supermarket end of things, I can eke out a few extra dollars for local apples. There are few foods where buying the farmer's market version makes such a difference. For years I never ate apples. Now, I do. The difference is the variety. Honeycrisps. Stayman Winesaps. The occasional Cameo or Macoun. They're expensive, but they're like another food entirely from the mealy, misnamed Golden Delicious over at SuperFresh.

And like I said, I wish I'd captured the apples on film, but I didn't. So instead you get this picture of fall bounty: carrots and turnips and parsnips. Harbingers of the season to come.

how to ruin a book

Q: What's the best way to ruin a book that's perfect?

A: Write it.

This is the problem I always have. First drafts and revisions both. Revisions, in this case.

In my mind the book is perfect. I know exactly what I want to do. I know the sequence of events, the building tension, the emotion that belongs in each scene, all that stuff. A pure and beautiful concept expressed in a balanced, true, compelling way. I can see it in all its glory. But then in the process of writing it down, I have to compromise. Scenes won't come out right. They're too choppy or too long or too flat. Or I realize that I need to switch the order because, dangit, she has to get the job before she can lose it, or I desperately need to cram this backstory in somewhere but it ruins the tension if she spends three pages thinking about something that happened seven years ago, etc etc. Or a character ends up saying or doing something completely unconvincing to move the plot along, just because I'm impatient to make things happen. So it's imperfect on the page. Whereas in my mind? It can be as awesome as I imagine it is.

This is just a phase, of course. It happens with every book. Before I start writing it and then again during revisions. It makes me not want to write, but I have to write. Because that's the only way to get through the messiness. In my mind it's perfect. On the page it's flawed. But then I work through it, and shift things, and reword, and add or subtract, and then hours or days or months later, you know what?

It's not perfect, but it's pretty darn good.

So... guess I should get back to that.

busy with revisions

Too busy to cook. Too busy to post. Must focus on agent revisions to prep book for submission -- the editors are hungry and must be fed. Metaphorically, of course.

In the meantime, please accept this guava.

The Highest Form of Dog: the Coney

So, I love to cook. Hence the food blog. But cooks aren't just born that way. In order to love cooking, you need to fall in love with food, and in order to do that, you need to eat. A lot. Which I have, over the years. And one of the things I love to eat is the Coney Dog.

It's a regional specialty. Don't be fooled by the fact that its name is derived from Coney Island -- it's actually a Detroit thing. And as I learned from my dad (himself a tremendous source of food knowledge), Michigan has stricter meat laws than other parts of the country. All their sausage has to be made from skeletal meat. So, no snouts in the hot dogs.

So you take a high-quality, natural-casing hot dog, and you put a not-too-thick meat-based chili on it, and slap on cubed raw white onions and a few squirts of yellow mustard. That's it. If you want to get fancy with it, you brown the bun in a little bit of butter beforehand.

I could eat a zillion.

Silly things I have done in the name of the Coney:

1. while flying from Philadelphia to Knoxville connecting through Detroit, stopped at the National Coney Island stand in the Detroit airport and asked for two dozen raw dogs and a brick of chili to go, to deliver to my parents. The manager was puzzled, but gave me what I needed, at an extremely reasonable price. Mom and Dad were extremely appreciative.

2. while making the same trip in reverse, stopped at the same National Coney Island stand to place the same order and take dogs and chili to my husband, who is also a fan. Quoth the manager: "Oh, it's you."

3. for my husband's birthday, placed an order for a Coney Kit, which includes the dogs, chili, buns, onions, and mustard. And a hat.

4. wore the hat.

Break out the champagne!

Still learning the software, and playing with the whole blog concept, but here's some great news to kick us off...

SIMMER has an agent.  Whoo-dog!

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Elisabeth Weed, of Weed Literary, has taken on the book, and we're working on some revisions before taking it out on submission. I couldn't be more excited! I haven't actually been living with the book for that long -- I got the idea for it in January, so it hasn't even been a year -- but it's come together amazingly fast, all things considered. Now, you have to remember that I've been trying to break into print for more than 10 years, so there was a lot of learning and building that led up to the 10 months of writing and the 10 (crazy, whirlwind, overwhelming) days between sending out the MS and signing on the dotted line.

But anyway.

I HAVE AN AGENT! And she's awesome. As a matter of fact, she's an angel.

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(And not just because I'm desperate to find pictures for the blog and I happened to already have a photo of an angel statue from Biltmore Estate in Asheville, NC. Um... okay, a little bit. But Elisabeth really is awesome. Yay!)

I'm planning to alternate between book news and food fun, so I think my next post will probably be about one of the finest foodstuffs available in America today: the Coney Dog.

But other than that, all I can say is, stay tuned. Things are going to get wild!