Does This Taste Funny? A Half-Baked Look at Food and Foodies (22 page)

“
Let
it cook until the onions are soft, uncover it and let it brow
n
. S
tir
occasionally, a little salt and pepper, if you have some allspice (or) dried
basil
that
goes in.

Dice
the potato and put it in, add some canned tomato to that, add some wine and
enough water to cover just about everything
. Y
ou’re
gonna let that sim
mer, and when everything’s nice and
soft, you can season it more
.

Now
what you’re gonna do is a really classy Euro touch. You’re gon
na
take your stale bread, heat it
over a burner
until it gets toasty
.
.
.

You’re
gonna
rub it with a little butter, and a half a clove
of garlic. Break up pieces of that in the bottom of two soup bowls, and ladle
that hot soup over
it.
T
hat
is
a big bowl of love!”

I thought I could throw
her a curve, but she nailed it. The questions would need to be more challenging
.

Since she does her show
from Minnesota, and she’s also known for Tuscan cooking
,
I wanted see
if she could come up with a fusion of Northern Italy and Minnesota. What might
be called . . .
Tuscanavian
cuisine. I suggested she use walleye . . .

“First
of all, it’s a fresh-water fish, so it’s really, really simple. In most of
Italy, fish is done SO simply. It might be done with a few sage leaves, in a
pan, with olive oil or butter
—
in
Minnesota, you’d probably use
butter
—

Anyway,
you do a slow sauté
e
of
it, and literally just salt, pepper and maybe some slivers of garlic
.
You’d
slow-cook it so you can be really careful of not overcooking, and you’d serve
that with a few wedges of lemon and THAT IS IT.”

Alright, she got that
one, too. Unfazed and unrattled. There
had
to be a side of her that the
listening audience never hears. I think deep down, we all want to imagine a
cursing, angry Lynne Rosetto Kasper . . .

 
“Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
.
. .
there’s a very
colorful vocabulary that lurks just beneath the surface.
There are things that aggravate me
.

F
or
instance that lovely pot of braising, slow-cooking loveline
ss?
And you go to pull out the
rack when the rack wasn’t
seated properly to begin with?
”

“
I
love
doing stock. I d
o
it every three or four months. M
ake a big
quantity, and stick it in the freezer. I’ve got this down to an art. I leave it
to sit overnight on the stove, very slow bubble
.

It’s
utterly delicious, it’s like money in
the bank
. I
t’s
very
easy to do.

Right
now, I have a bad knee, so I’m in pain when I’m moving around the kitchen. So,
I got this together, it was
done, the pot was really
heavy . . .

It
was too big to fit in the fridge, and I wanted it cooled down really fast, and
it was very
cold outside, so I thought I’d put it on
the back porch.

“
I
was trying to get the screen door open, and I slipped with this pot, and the
grea
se was still hot from the stove,
and
this stuff sloshed over the threshold, onto the cement steps
.
. .

N
ow
there
’s
freezing fat
on the porch,
I’m
ice-skating on this fat
.
I
t’s
midnight and I’m
chiseling
the porch
. . .
you
have NO idea
”

While I tried to get
the image of this lovely woman ice-skating on chicken fat out of my head, I
learned some random things about LRK as a chef:

Do you listen to music
when you’re cooking?

“Generally
it’s
just me and my food.”

If you could only use
one spice or herb for the rest of your life, what would it be?

“The
thing I turn to most often
. . .
it’s
a tossup between basil and
some member of the chili
family, leaning toward basil because it’s a blending herb
.

Then
there are ‘umami’ ingredients like soy sauce and fish sauce that
‘lift’
other flavors—y
ou keep those babies around the house and a little bit goes
a long way to make
food taste good.
”

While she wouldn’t say
she
hates
any
particular foods, but she did say,

“
Okra
has yet to engage me.”

Ms. Kasper
also mentioned that she no longer eats grains, and as much as she loves raw
seafood, she avoids it

“Because
of problems
I’m aware of. I
t’s
very disturbing that I have to, with what
’s
happening to our food supply . . . D
on’
t
get me started.
I know too much.”

As intriguing as the
phrase ‘I know too much’ is, I chose to move past the fact that apparently our
entire food supply is full of ‘disturbing’ problems.

For a bonus question, I
like to ask chefs where and when in history they would like to time-travel.
Lynne gave me this answer, in the form of a history lesson:

“I
would like to be in the early 1500s, in the palace of the
Dukes of Ferrara, in the Emilia-Romagna region of Northern
Italy, during the height of their power
.

Lucretia
Borgia had married into the family, and it was one of the great ruling houses
of the Renaissance
. . .

To
be the fly on the wall, to be both
at
those secret tables
and
observe what was going on in those kitchens
. Y
ou
would also be a first-hand observer of how poisons are prepared, all of the
intrigue
. . .”

Of course, to
understand someone who cooks, you need to know (you guessed it) what their favorite
utensil is:

“It
is my flat-bottomed wooden spatula, slightly curved at the bottom. Every time I
see someone try to stir with a wooden spoon
,
it’s like
trying
to move around food in a pot with the edge of a dime
.

W
ith
my spatula you can sweep
across the bottom of your
pan quickly when something’s threatening
to
burn.

I
keep four or five of these at all times. When they look like they’re gonna
crack I get another one, because they’re like
four
bucks.

There
are (two
additional
)
things that, with
out
changing
anything else you do, automatically make you a better cook. O
ne
is an oven thermometer. E
very oven in the world is
off.
When you think you have failed
—
‘I
can’t roast!’
—
it’s
because your
oven
is messed up, not you!

T
he
other is
,
you
get an
instant-reading thermometer
. T
hat’s
gonna tell you, if  your steak is really medium-rare, it’s 130 degrees
before
you pull it off the heat to give it a rest
. Y
ou’re
always in control.”