White Beans and Kale
White Beans and Kale
Cooking for groups, pork pozole, olive oil cake (with recipes), NYC's Little Cleveland, a fabulous but now dismissed cocktail, book and movie recommendations, and links we've loved!
Email to Ann
Re: Code Names, Saturday night
Dear Ann,
Thanks so much for hosting dinner and game night. To recap, for dinner, because I know it can be hard to keep track of:
1 soy and citrus allergy
1 gluten free
1 vegetarian
1 lactose intolerant.
Look forward to seeing you!
M
To which, when Ann read it to me on my waking, I said, “Oh for crying out loud,” (actually, it was probably F*#k that). But after a cup of coffee, after the cobwebs had cleared, we began to toss out ideas for the meal.
Ann has a band of former writing students whom we adore and with whom we have a regular game night. They are a delight, but they’re representative of American habits these days. Cooking for groups, even for four people, can be a struggle, with all our allergies and intolerances (which range from deadly to inconvenient). I was reminded of this again when I invited my NYU journalism class to our apartment for a make-up class/dinner last Sunday, 14 people in our 411-sq-foot oasis.
It’s a type of cooking I think a lot about, cooking for groups. Great fun to cook for lots of people at home, but it takes some planning.
You have to offer a vegetarian course, always. You want to keep your grocery bill under budget. You want to be able to enjoy yourself once people arrive. And if you’re me, you want to make sure someone brings a dessert, since I can’t make them myself—that puts me over the edge. (After a meeting with my student Julia about her food essay, she asked if she could make a lemon-olive-oil cake for Sunday. Um, yeeeah!)
As we move into the year’s main entertaining weeks, I want to open today’s newsletter with the dishes I chose for last Sunday’s dinner for 14 in our teensy apartment because the dishes were fantastic. Katelyn even asked for the recipes. “I’ll put them in this week’s newsletter,” I told her (see PDFs below).
So:
Planning
Budget
The mechanics of serving (aka serving 14 while still being part of the party).
Planning: This means, for a Sunday soiree, write down your menu and make a shopping list by Friday. Do all your shopping on Saturday (and any possible prep, chopping mirepoix, soaking legumes, if you have time). Cook the main dishes Sunday morning after coffee and paper and proper hurkle-durkling. Go uptown to the bar Haswell Green’s to catch the Browns game (take that Ravens!), return two hours before party time to clean, set up, and finish the dishes you’ve already mainly cooked.
Budget: As the resident cheapskate in our household (I’m thrifty, I should say, not stingy), one of my go-to group dishes is East Carolina BBQ, which I’ve written about before. It’s an unfailing crowd pleaser and economical. A five-pound, bone-in pork butt will feed 15 to 20 people ($1.50 to $2.50 a head, depending where you shop). So I love using pork butt; it's delicious and inexpensive. But on this Sunday night, I also wanted to show my food-writing class a food they weren’t familiar with.
Pork pozole. No one in the class (ages 23 to 32) knew what this was nor had they had the dried corn that is the main ingredient. The base of pozole is corn that has been treated with lye, a process that makes the corn’s vitamins absorbable in our gut and gives it a beguiling flavor. This corn is called hominy. (It’s also used to make masa and hominy grits.) Pork pozole can be made ahead and reheated as needed.
Put the pork in a covered pot in a 300˚F oven for three hours, and simmer the corn for two hours or until toothsome (you can return to hurkle-durkling for this stage of the cooking). When ready to finish before guests arrive, cook chopped onion in oil, add spices (good chili powder, smoked paprika, cumin), squeeze in five or six whole canned tomatoes, add the corn and its cooking liquid, shred the pork and add that as well. Serve with lime, cilantro, and sliced radishes. Done.
What then for the vegetarian offering (vegan if possible)? Beans of course!
But not any beans. Not the beans in plastic bags that sit on grocery store shelves forever. I am talking about beans that are freshly dried. I’m talking about Rancho Gordo beans (which I wrote about recently, because the company’s founder, Steve Sando, has a great new book out). I would go so far as to say you don’t really know what beans can be until you’ve had a Rancho Gordo bean. I had on hand a pound and a half of his hominy for the pozole (two pics above), as well as a package of gi-normous Royal Corona beans.
These beans are so delicious, all you need to do is to cook them in a pot of water with a halved onion, a couple of carrots, a bay leaf or two, and a fat pinch of salt. At the last minute I threw in a bunch of kale and that was it. The legumes are so protein-rich they almost taste like meat.
Carrie had to arrive late, when the bean pot was all but empty. But I wanted her to know the glory of the bean and here was the perfect way to show her: I put one cold bean, no liquid, on a spoon and asked her to taste it.
“Wow,” she said, eyes wide. Seriously, they’re astonishing.
Mechanics: pork only needs reheating, as do the beans (add the kale 5 mins before serving so it’s still bright green). Serve yourself from the stove top. Easy.
A half hour before guests arrive, slice radishes, pick cilantro, slice limes, warm the baguette, pour corn chips into a bowl.
I served corn chips with the pozole (for crunch), and the fabulous baguettes I can get at Frenchette at the Whitney Museum up the street are as good as any baguette in Paris.
It was a fabulous dinner (thank you for the orange wine, the Chianti, and the St. Émilion, you know who you are) and a fabulous class discussing this week's assignment, the personal essay, using a food or a specific dish, as the anchor. It truly was an old-fashioned West Village literary salon. Julia, a Toronto native, said on departing, “This is why I moved to New York. To do something like this.”
Well … me, too.
If you’re cooking for a crowd this season, give one of these recipes a try
(Julia found the above recipe on a Pinterest account and a blog, View From Great Island, by Susan Lightfoot Moran. It was outstanding.)
Little Cleveland in Midtown Manhattan …
Once I had the beans, corn and pork cooked last Sunday morning, I headed to Haswell Green’s sports bar on West 52nd Street. Here gathers one of the strongest, if not the biggest and most enthusiastic of all NFL backers clubs, the Big Apple Browns Backers of NYC. It’s led by Browns evangelist, Mayor of 52nd Street, Pope of Haswell Green’s sports bar, Noah, 42, retired digital executive and Cleveland Heights native.
It’s nothing short of a Little Cleveland in the heart of this New York City (Noah even ships in kegs of Great Lakes beer!). I see my old neighbor, Henry Frontini, now an actor in NYC.
An old babysitter of mine in the late 1960s, who lived around the corner from me in Shaker Heights, a long-time NYC mergers and acquisitions lawyer, introduced himself: “I don’t know if you remember me, but I used to babysit you,” he said. Now he always saves me a choice seat.
Little Clevelands thrive throughout the world (London and Australia hosting the biggest internationally). For all of us all over the world who hail from Cleveland, these clubs give us the opportunity to reconnect with the city we love. And I personally commune with my late father, one of the biggest Browns fans who ever lived. I spent every Sunday of my childhood watching the Browns with my dad.
It’s an enormous comfort in this great metropolis to be able to go home, just a subway ride away.
What we’re drinking …
Brandy Alexanders! My dad loved a Brandy Alexander (and it’s post-prandial brother, The Stinger), and he served it with delight to guests who lingered after dinner in our smoke-filled living room. It’s a fabulous dessert of a cocktail. But I had no idea that it had become completely out of fashion until, researching it for my cocktail book, I found this from cocktail historian David Wondrich in The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails: the Brandy Alexander was buried by, of all things, the craft-cocktail movement itself.
“Only with the cocktail revival of the twenty-first century did its popularity finally fade, despite its impeccable pre-Prohibition pedigree,” he writes.
With holidays approaching, it’s time to revive this time-honored concoction.
The Brandy Alexander
1-1/2 ounces Cognac
1 ounce crème de cacao
1 ounce cream
Fresh nutmeg
Candy-colored maraschino cherry, optional
Combine the Cognac, crème de cacao, and cream in a shaker, add ice, and shake hard until well-chilled. Double-strain into a frosty coupe. Garnish with a few gratings of nutmeg.
What We’re Reading …
I was lucky enough to receive a copy of Alton Brown’s new book, Food For Thought, from Pamela Cannon, its editor, asking for a blurb. The book is a collection of essays that outlines Brown’s life and career and allows the comic wizard to hold forth on his greatest food obsessions. It’s fabulous. But it won’t be out till spring (sorry—pre-order available)—do look for it then.
And, as ever, our Promiscous Reader,
, discusses her endorsements:Everyone knows I was a judge for the Mark Twain American Voice Award. Thirty-five books! And I’m happy to let you know that the winner is Alice McDermott’s lovely novel, Absolution. The novel follows two wives with ambitious husbands living in Saigon in 1963 and gives a unique, intimate look into the women’s lives and marriages. Sixty years later, one of the women’s daughter contacts her mother’s old friend and together they examine the events of that long ago year.
I am happily immersed in the enchanting novel This is Happiness by Niall Williams. It takes place in a small town in western Ireland where it has been raining for so long, no one can even remember when it began. The day it finally stops however, everything changes for seventeen year old Noel as he stands outside his grandparents’ house and encounters Christy for the first time. Every sentence is simply gorgeous.
I have been spending a lot of time in my car these days and actually looking forward to it! Why? Because I am listening to Al Pacino read his memoir Sonny Boy. From his childhood in the Bronx to his beginning days as an actor and beyond, his voice feels like I’m in conversation with an old friend. If you are at all interested in this story, I highly recommended the audio version. Delightful!
Thank you, Ann!
What we’re watching …
Plays! We’ve been gone so long we’ve missed the theater and have over the past couple weeks seen We Live In Cairo by the Lazours, a musical about the Arab uprising. Brilliant, but too long by exactly one act.
We saw Shit. Meet. Fan. at MCC theater, a hilarious comedy by Robert O’Hara about our darker, racist, bigoted, homophobic selves. Six people in a posh apartment decide to leave their phones on the table and read all their texts aloud and take all calls on speaker throughout the evening. Surprises and infidelities abound. Neal Patrick Harris stars. Recommended.
And we saw Adam Driver in Hold On To Me Darling, by Kenneth Lonergan (we loved his Lobby Hero). Driver plays a country music star who moves back to his small town. It’s not a good play—enough said. But, then, it’s Adam Driver right there on stage.
And for weekly viewing we’re working through Slow Horses (Apple+), about failed M15 agents sent to pasture at Slough House, with the truly extraordinary Gary Oldman. Highly recommend.
Links we’ve loved …
We’re just back from Spain, and Ann was happy to find this story in Hello Magazine on Richard Gere’s decision to move with his wife and kids to Madrid, a city we adore.
A few weeks ago, in the newsletter titled “Saturdays!,” I mentioned a writer I didn’t know, James Collins, and quoted from a brilliant essay he wrote. A loyal reader of this newsletter, my friend Bruce Handy, a New Yorker Vanity Fair NYTimes contributor, editor, writer, and childrens'-book author, noted in comments that he was an old colleague of Collins’s in their Spy Magazine days. Spy Magazine (1986-1998) skewered Manhattan media and celebrities. Deeply funny, snarky, bitter, merciless, it was a must-read back then. I’m sorry it’s gone. Bruce (who is not snarky or bitter or merciless in any way) posted a link to his favorite piece by Collins for Spy: a pitch-perfect story about what friendship meant in cutthroat Manhattan in the 80s and 90s ( … and today still?—I’ll have to ask Bruce).
Shareable links from the NYTimes: Dan Barry pens an ode to liverwurst. Former—former!—Times restaurant critic writes about the wetting of the dry martini, a trend I’m a fan of as we now have a range of great vermouths to add to our icy cold dry London gin. And Ann sent me this link to the weirdest houses ever, from T Magazine.
When Ann and I are home for the evening, I will, at 6 p.m., stir a Manhattan for her and a 5:1 martini for myself. We’ll watch Wolf Blitzer and David Muir, play a game of cribbage, and have a snack: usually Pepperidge Farm Goldfish. They were a favorite of Julia Child’s, but most adults, most parents I should say, only think of digging crumbled goldfish out of their toddler’s car seat. Well, Pepperidge Farm is changing the name … to Chilean Sea Bass. Mainly, it seems, to encourage adults to think of them as worthy adult snacks. Which we assure you they are. (Food & Wine)
And in our travels through Spain, we saw not a single wild boar. Damn. According to the The Guardian, they’re everywhere.
And finally …
The Browns are off to a characteristic start (2-5), but President Noah loves his own charter so much he made a 20 minute film about it. The below is a 90-second version. But for you truly demented Browns fans, watch the longer version. And, of course, watch (again) this classic viral video, The Factory of Sadness. We love the Browns, ultimately, I think, because Browns fandom is a pure expression of the human condition: hope, sadness, pain, and (sometimes) joy.
Thanks for reading (and enduring my Browns love). See you back here in two weeks. Hearts and comments always welcome.
—Michael
(With apologies to Mary Norris for the problematic apostrophe difficulties the name the Browns present. I choose not to use an apostrophe with any usage of the Browns.)
Hang in there, Browns's fans! Humiliation is the factory where humility is made. And none but the humble can REALLY appreciate the beauty of a Super Bowl ring. As a Phillies fan, (10,000 losses and counting) I know what I'm talking about. What is it about Philly teams and the number 8? Phillies 1980 & 2008. Sixers 1983, Eagles 2018.
Thanks for resisting temptation by avoiding politics in this week’s newsletter. I needed an island of repose…