Summer Savory

1. The gas company came, they inspected, they left. My gas line is free and clear and there's nothing to worry about. They couldn't explain the boom and popping cabinet, but said maybe a spider got stuck in the gas line and that's what obstructed it? Okay, sure, whatever. As long as I can keep cooking.

2. Henry Chang's Drunken Chicken, aside from being the most charming recipe name I ever did hear, is quite delicious. Unfortunately, I have no photographic evidence for you because precisely around dinnertime last night, I realized I had misplaced my camera battery charger and with my camera's battery completely out, I couldn't take photos. Fortunately, the chicken was so completely unattractive that it's just as well. (I found the charger ten minutes after dinner. Right in the spot where it should have been in the old apartment, but that I figured was no place for checking since this is a new apartment and you know, new apartment, new rules.) Unattractive, yes, but it was also delicious and furthermore, totally delicate and subtle. As you pop each piece of cold chicken in your mouth and chew, you realize that the wine-broth-ginger-scallion marinade, while certainly imbuing the chicken with some flavor, has more than anything concentrated the real chicken flavor, so that each bite you take becomes an explosion of the most chicken-y chicken flavor you've ever had in your mouth. Quite remarkable, really.

3. Is anyone else as fascinated with Chinese food as I am? I'm not talking American chop suey or even Moo Shu Chicken. I'm talking the real thing. When I read Nicole Mones's The Last Chinese Chef I had to restrain myself from chewing the pages. The descriptions, not just of the food, but of the legend and lore behind each dish were enough to make my mouth water in real time. It is a minor tragedy to me that Ben is one of those people in Nicole's article who knows only one kind of Chinese food, the stuff apparently called "meiguorende kouwei". He finds it oily, over-salted and over-sauced. He doesn't believe me when I tell him that Chinese food, the stuff that Chinese people eat, "zhongguorende kouwei", can be artful and light and bursting with flavor. Now that we live here, closer to Flushing's Chinatown, I'm on a mission. So tell me, readers, are there any places in particular I should take him to? Tell me your favorite dishes, too.

4. My books are back! After two weeks in boxes, I finally unpacked my books last night. Here are my cookbooks in all their glory. I thought a kitchen made a home, but it turns out that books do, too.

5. One of the secrets of my kitchen arsenal is a little jar filled with dried summer savory. In German, summer savory is called Bohnenkraut. Because the Germans know - this stuff on green beans? Delicious delicious delicious. But it's good on so much more, too, like this salad I made on Sunday night. I'll admit, I was stumped by the only vegetables in my fridge that night: beets and cabbage (from my CSA). But after I sliced them up fine, sprinkled them with savory and dressed them with a sharp vinegar dressing and some flaky salt, the salad was gobbled up in no time.

Beet and Cabbage Salad
Serves 4

2 beets, boiled and cooled
1 1/2 heads of Early Jersey Wakefield Cabbage (or 1/2 head of regular green cabbage)
1 teaspoon dried summer savory
olive oil
white wine vinegar
flaky salt

1. Quarter the beets, then slice them. Quarter the cabbage, then slice it finely. Combine the two in a bowl with the summer savory. Pour in 2 parts of olive oil to 1 part vinegar, sprinkle in a judicious amount of salt. Toss and taste, adjusting the savory, salt and vinegar as you go.

Comments

[Hillary]

Wow - nice collection of books you have there! Something about all those books together sure does look just as nice as the glorious food they provide. :) Happy the move went well and everything is ok with the gas line!

[Jessika]

I just started on my fourth shelf in a Billy bookcase from Ikea for cook books. SOon enough i'll require a full book-case for cook books alone.

A spider in the gas line? I don't know if I find that thought reassuring or slightly iffy...

Anyway, happy for you that you are making yourselves at homes more and more.

[Sharon]

I reccomend Joes Shanghai in Flushing. The soup dumplings are amazing, and the prices are rediculously low.

[Carmen]

It could indeed have been a spider, especially if the tenants before you didn't cook much... glad that's settled and that you had it checked. You can now cook away! Nice cookbooks! I notice a strong dessert/bread tendency. Do you use Nancy Silverton's books a lot?

[Mary]

Your books look so happy on their white shelves. I'm glad you tried and approve of the drunken chicken, I've got that one earmarked. I'm also obsessed with Chinese food and still trying to figure out how to get wok hai at home. If anyone has any tips, I'd be happy to listen.

[Luisa]

Hillary - thank you. After I finished last night, I just sat on the couch and stared at them happily for a while.

Jessika - if I brought the rest of my cookbooks that live at the office home with me, well, then I think I'd be near to filling my Billy up entirely. Yikes.

Sharon - Joe's dumplings sure are legendary! I've had them in Chinatown, yum.

Carmen - to be honest, no. But as for a strong dessert/bread tendency, are you sure? I've counted only about 15 or 16 titles in that realm. That being said, I do love to bake...;)

Mary - they DO look happy, don't they? Furthermore, they make ME happy. Wok hai? Tell me more.

[Carmen]

Luisa, maybe it's my perspective; 15 or 16 titles based on baking is,to me, a "strong tendency"....hey, nothing wrong with that! The reason I was asking about the Nancy Silverton books is that I, too, have them and am seriously thinking of dropping them off to my local library for their sale table. Maybe it's just me...

[Anne]

Your books look so pretty! And I'll bet you'll have Ben loving Chinese in no time.

(Confession: I love sweet and sour chicken. I know, gross.)

[Kevin]

I'm going to comment on #5. I have a bunch too, that I bought in provence. I bought copious volumes of it, because none of the french folks there knew how to translate 'sariette'. I thought it was some regional unique thing. Oops. So now I use it to make herbes de provence - the rest of the herbs from my garden. So there you go. Some useless information for you!

[Mercedes]

1. Totally jealous of the cookbook library.
2. For Chinese food, I always take people for dim sum. Who doesn't like a steamed pork bun? Plus, it's a whole different arsenal of Chinese dishes, it's almost like a separate cuisine.
3. I think I have summer savory growing in a pot somewhere, with the other herbs, in which case it will finally have a culinary use!

[j]

hi! i admit i even think this is weird of me: its kinda exciting to me to know about non-asians appreciating chinese cuisine the way you seem to. there is amazing chinese cooking out there and i just hope that the people catching on to and appreciating the other asian trends- japanese, vietnamese, korean etc- are realizing chinese food is more than all the lucy ho's stuff that has given it a bad reputation. i lived in the what i call the non-touristy chinatown in san francisco for a while and the food made it my fave neighborhood kinda instantly. i worked in the same area too and would regularly run to the quick stop dim sum shops on my breaks. so i recommend experimenting with those places. good times.

[Lydia]

Hmmmm, I recognize many of the spines of your cookbooks. Maybe on my own bookshelves.... I've only used summer savory with beans; it's the same kind of affinity that black beans and epazote have for one another. Nice to see this herb used in a different recipe.

[Luisa]

Carmen - there is something about those books that keeps me from using them, but mostly I just blame it on the fact that a lot of my cookbooks go unused due to the fact that I'm always cooking from the newspapers. Still, whenever I do a cookbook purge, those two manage to slip through, so who knows.

Anne - thank you! Here's the thing, though, I don't think there's anything wrong with loving sweet & sour chicken. I'm just petulant about the fact that Ben doesn't dig that stuff and then writes off all Chinese food as a result.

Kevin - sariette! So much prettier than Bohnenkraut ;) Not useless information at all: what other herbs do you put in your herbes de Provence?

Mercedes - 1. thank you. There are more at the office. I am controlled by my love for cookbooks. 2. Ben, that's who! He's a total nut. I agree: who couldn't love a pork bun (I had one for a snack yesterday, more on that another time)? The few times I suggest dim sum, I think I practically see his lip curl. Sob! 3. Fresh summer savory! Now that's even more delicious. Enjoy.

J - funny, right, how other Asian foods have become so trendy while Chinese seems to sort of languish despite its ubiquity? I don't really understand it.

Lydia - isn't it funny seeing "your" books on someone else's shelves? That always makes me smile.

[Kevin]

This year will actually be my first batch of herbes de provence. I'm running out of my stock purchased in provence, AND I got my first yield of lavender from my garden big enough to make my own batch! How exciting! [a link to my proud little crop picked and dried a couple weeks ago. http://kevinkossowan.blogspot.com/2007/07/photo-stew.html] But to actually answer your question: lavender, thyme, oregano, rosemary, and sage.

[Julie]

1. Good!
2. I looked at that recipe and decided against it for reasons of chicken skin. Unbrowned chicken skin is unappealing to me. Although I suppose you could just remove it when you cut up the chicken.
3. Flushing's Chinatown is on my list of places to visit. Looking forward to hearing about your explorations.
4. It's interesting to see someone else's cookbooks, isn't it? Quite a few of those books I recognize from my own bookshelves (or the stack on my bedside table or the pile on the kitchen table).
5. Summer savory, who knew?

[Bobbie]

I'm impressed that you can weed your cookbooks -- I have trouble getting rid of any books, but especially cookbooks. Even though, as I've gotten older, I've finally gotten confident enough to cook without recipes sometimes; like you, I cook out of the newspapers (and blogs like yours) more often than out of books, these days; and when I use books, it's usually the same 4 or 5.

Here's a question for you: how to you store your newspaper recipes? I have an old 4x6 card file that's jammed full by now, and growing stacks of messy looking cutouts from newspapers and printouts from the internet. It's getting out of control! But if I file them away neatly in a notebook, I never see them, so I forget to use them....

[Andrea]

Impressive cookbook collection. Thinking of loaning some out? :) Or a trade? I've been getting cookbooks at the library to look over and then deciding if they are worthy of being bought to curb my habit of walking out of Barnes and Noble with stacks of cookbooks. Not that there's anything wrong with that but it is hard on the wallet.

[ann]

Where did you find dried summer savory? My mom swears by it on beans too, but she grows her own, so that's easy for her to say ;-)

what a nice collection of books! I really ought to get mine a nice new bookshelf...

[Luisa]

Kevin - there is nothing "little" about that crop! Amazing, that pile you've got.

Julie - I removed that chicken skin before serving it. It had gotten all flabby and gray and absolutely awful, so yes, I'd recommend doing that. ;)

Bobbie - my filing system is totally strange. I have about 60 recipes saved on my computer (those are the most recent ones). Then, in that photo above, you'll see three plastic binders? Those are ALL FILLED WITH NEWSPAPER RECIPES. Yes, they make me want to poke my eyes out. The little ringed notebook next to them on the right? That was my first newspaper clipping notebook and still my favorite - I clipped and rubber cemented recipes in there starting in 2001. In addition to all of these hiding places, I've also just got a bunch of looseleaf newspaper recipes floating around my apartment, slowly killing the joy in my obsessive-compulsive soul. Aren't you glad you asked? :)

Andrea - that is the fastest way to rid yourself of cash, I agree. I stick to the Internet and the Strand and have also quite a few titles from the Good Cook book club, which helps a bit with saving money. Though I have more recently been checking out cookbooks from the library and loving that too.

Ann - Penzey's sells the stuff!

[Zarah Maria]

Aha! Now I know what to do with the fresh summer savory from the balcony - thank you Luisa!

And yup, envious of your cookbook collection, too. I still remember all the ones from your office that I never got to browse through - darn purse-snatchers!

[sue]

hi luisa,
i'm so jealous you live close to flushing! i come from a shanghai-nese family and am always jonesing for some "real" chinese food when i'm in school. manhattan's china town is way more cantonese/foochow-entric and panders more to the touristy/american palate in my opinion, but there's alot more variety and authenticity in the flushing chinatown.

my fave place for shanghai-nese food called shanghai tang (i think that's the english trans...but the place has red checkered tableclothes a la little italy so it's somewhat hard to miss, lol) but there's actually a GREAT food court in the flushing mall. they have a hand pulled noodle and hand cut noodle place which is great, and fried stinky tofu that's cheaper and better than most restaurants! enjoy your trip, and i think this diatribe is long enough already!
-sue z.

[Lynn D.]

I'm making this chicken right now. I'm not sure what to do about the skin either. Any suggestions? Thanks

[Luisa]

Sue - thank you so much for those two tips, they're on my list of places to go to.

Lynn - oh, remove the skin! Absolutely.

[Susan in Amherst, NH]

I'm not altogether sure how I got here (for me, typical), especially so late; yet, I sincerely love your "booknook!" It makes me feel all the less eccentric knowing someone else collects them like squirrels do acorns. I have weeded-out my collection to include just one large bookcase packed to the gills, and a few scattered in hidy-nooks around the house (where I stowe those I think I might be tempted to throw out but also think I would be happy to rediscover again one day). Comfortingly, many of the cookbooks I give to my town's recycle center Bookswap find a way back into the family: The last two books I abandoned on the Bookswap's shelves were found and taken home by my sister-in-law, who's almost as freakishly into cookbooks as I am. And, of course: She baked something scrumptious out of one, and the pangs of regret for having given it away set in almost immediately...sigh. I stand before thee and pronounce myself a cookbook-hoarder. There are worse vices, aren't there?