The Kitchen Counter Cooking School (21 page)

Add the rice to the vegetables and cook, stirring, for a couple of minutes, until gently toasted. Add the strained stock, saffron, several cranks of black pepper, and 3 pinches of salt. Stir as the mixture comes back to a boil.

Return the chicken and chorizo to the pan. Cover loosely with aluminum foil and keep at a bubbling simmer for about 25 minutes, until the rice is tender. If excess liquid remains, remove the foil and cook until it is absorbed. Scatter the artichokes, peas, and pimentos on top of the rice, then press the shrimp and mussels into the hot rice. Cover again until the seafood cooks through, about 8 to 10 minutes. Remove the pan from the heat and let it stand, covered, for a few minutes before serving. Discard any mussels that are not open after cooking. Remove the bay leaves before serving. Serve with the lemon wedges and strips of raw green pepper.

—M. F. K. Fisher

—Julia Child

CHAPTER 7

 

On the farm, my parents made bread twice a week. In one of my earliest memories I perched atop a wooden chair in the hot farmhouse kitchen on a snowy winter's day. I drew hearts on the steamy window, my small fingers cold against the pane of glass as my father shaped and patted loaves of dough into four pans.

Dad moved a chair over to the table. “Time for sugar!” he said. I leaped up on the chair and pressed my tiny right hand on top of each petal-soft loaf and he drew an outline of my hand with a butter knife. My tiny handprint, Dad said, replaced any need for sweeteners. I helped him fold laundry warm from the dryer while the yeasty sour fragrance grew fierce as the bread finished baking. Dad turned the pans upside down and shook the still-warm loaves from them with a thump. He smeared half a stick of butter across the top of each one, the butter creeping into my handprint, distorted by the heat, like a melting clock from a Salvador Dalí painting.

By lunchtime at school, such pleasant memories faded fast. Taking sandwiches with thick slabs of homemade bread to school made kids of my era look both poor
and
distinctly uncool. By first grade, I longed so desperately for soft white store-bought bread that I saved up for a month to buy a loaf with my allowance, assuming it would taste like candy. Compared to our bread, it had the flavor of what Julia Child once described as Kleenex. The bread did offer remarkable sculpting qualities when softened with water, so it wasn't a total loss. I molded tiny statues rather than eat it.

When I was in first grade we moved from the farm into the town of Davison, a suburb of Flint, Michigan. An early sign of our improved social standing: store-bought bread. When Mom discovered a series of barely touched PB and J's in my Scooby-Doo lunchbox, she assumed I'd developed a sudden dislike of the entire concept of sandwiches. It wasn't that; I missed my parents' homemade bread. But they seemed too busy to make it anymore, and I didn't want to hurt her feelings. She abruptly started to shove quarters in my hand every morning for hot lunches. I would sit with my hard plastic tray eating soggy Tater Tots and stare at the kids in the bagged-lunch ghetto unwrapping their thickly sliced sandwiches. As they sometimes had to risk dislocating their jaws to open their mouths wide enough to take a bite, I turned away, distressed by the depth of my envy.

Despite my inherent love for homemade bread, I never mastered it. Single life in a series of tiny kitchens, with a deficit in counter space, and dodgy ovens did not inspire many forays into bread making. The curriculum at Le Cordon Bleu merely glanced at the subject. In France,
boulangerie
equates to both a high art and a culinary science that warrants its own focused study, like butchery or patisserie. My personal reference to homemade bread made the whole thing feel so intimidating—until I came across no-knead artisan bread.

Most people became aware of the no-knead bread phenomenon thanks to Jim Lahey of the Sullivan St Bakery in New York when food writer Mark Bittman documented his method in a 2006 story for
The New York Times
. As Bittman noted, breakthroughs are rare in something as fundamental as bread making, so developing a strategy to transform freshly made bread into almost a convenience food counted as a groundbreaking achievement. I tried Lahey's version, and later versions from various books on the subject. The result: a crusty, artisan-style loaf for about sixty cents. Mike loved the stuff, and he adopted the role of primary baker for our small household.

For the next class, we'd focus on pasta (since I'd just been in Italy) and no-knead bread. “You sure? It's going to be crazy hot in there with burners and that oven going full blast,” Lisa said over the phone. I could hear her starting to sweat at the thought. “Also, something's up with Maggie. I don't know if she's going to be able to help out for a while.”

During my absence abroad, the ongoing cupcake battle consumed Maggie's schedule. “You won't even believe what I'm going through,” she said on the phone, pained. The company was on the brink of opening its third store in two weeks and had scheduled three events back to back that involved handing out thousands of samples. I had heard that a major film being shot in Seattle might feature cupcakes. Maggie said nothing, but if this was true, I imagined pursuit of cupcake placement in a film held the possibility of bloody intrigues worthy of film noir. “I've got to go back to the samples now,” she said with a weary voice. I felt bad for Maggie. The idea of a business consultant having to help frost thousands of mini-cupcakes struck me as one of Dante's circles of Hell.

I hung up and wandered downstairs to find Jeff. In an odd confluence of events, my former upstairs neighbor in London arrived in Seattle ready to relocate, but in the brutal job market of 2008 had yet to find work. Mike and I live in a 1902 Dutch Colonial that had been rebuilt into a duplex thirty years ago by an architect and his son. We live upstairs and rent out the larger main level. Mike was in the middle of an extensive remodel of the kitchen in the downstairs unit. Jeff arrived as our renters moved out, so Mike set him up in the place for free but warned him that he would be without a kitchen for at least a couple months. That didn't bother Jeff.

“Sure, I'll help out with your project. You know, you should teach risotto. I made it in a hotpot in the bathroom last night,” he told me as he ironed his trousers. “It came out pretty well.” He seemed genuinely pleased with his ingenuity. “I think you should write a whole book about cooking in the bathroom with a hotpot. I bet
that's
never been done before. Oh, hey, I've got pinot gris chilling in a bucket in the bathtub. Want some?”

By lunchtime on the day of the bread-making class, the air refused to budge outside. It was even hotter inside the kitchen; the catering crew had the ovens and commercial stove at full blast for most of the day. When we arrived, the kitchen's thermometer registered 101°F. After we set up most of the gear, we needed a break. Mike and I headed for the walk-in cooler. Jeff followed with a cold bottle of sauvignon blanc and three glasses. We perched on produce boxes and sipped wine to cool down. “This is really nice,” Jeff said, sitting with his legs crossed atop a crate of cabbage. “Maybe we can do the whole class in here.”

The door flew open. “What, there's a party in the walk-in, and nobody told me?” exclaimed Lisa, who looked wilted from a hot, horrible commute. We got her a glass before the four of us returned to the hot vat of a kitchen.

Shannon and Cheryl were the first to arrive, the latter without baby Liam. “I'm liberated!” she said. “I'm ready to get near the big stove, and of course it's too hot outside to want cook anything.”

Without a word, the early arrivals put on their aprons, grabbed a diaper, and headed to the hand-washing area. Then they found a spot at the table to start chopping. As each person arrived she joined in, like a bystander jumping into a moving parade. “Hey, are there any more vegetables?” Terri asked. After her initial struggles, she seemed to finally get the hang of it and made quick work of a few zucchini. “We've run out of things to chop.”

I scoured the table. “Nope, that's it. Today we're going to make pasta and sauces as promised, and we're also going to make bread.” Half fanned themselves limply with copies of the recipes we'd handed out at the start of class. As I said the word
bread,
most instinctively looked at the commercial ovens. I could almost hear what they were thinking.
Bread? In this heat? You've got to be kidding.

Traditional bread has just four ingredients: flour, salt, yeast, water. I started the class by revealing a plastic sleeve from a loaf of supermarket bread. I read the ingredients out loud:

I stumbled through the polysyllabic words. I was familiar with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), the heavily processed sweetener made from starch-rich corn. HFCS is common in baked goods, as it helps stave off spoilage and keep breads soft. Recent studies have linked high intake of HFCS to childhood obesity and diabetes. But in research that I conducted for the class, I was surprised to learn that soybean oil is so ubiquitous, a leading researcher has stated that some nutritionists believe it makes up as much as 20 percent of all calories consumed in the United States. Diglycerides are simply fancy names for fatty, often hydrogenated oils or trans fats.