One Bonfire Leads to Another

The other day a great dish was born out one of those long staredowns with a campfire. What did a fellow cook once call that? Oh yeah. TV for hippies.

Ha, 'tis. My hippie tendencies didn't die when we drew the powerline all the way back here, but this time the dancing flames took me to an unlikely place, to an old idea that sprung from a French-trained, New York City chef. For some reason, David Bouley (of Bouley and Brushstroke in Tribeca, and formerly of Danube on the same block) doesn't have the press following that Daniel Boulud or Jean-Georges Vongerichten have, but I would guess that more great chefs of my generation have come from his kitchens than any other in New York. He's a truly brilliant, improvisational, inspired cook.

I worked for him for about three years--with a summer taken off to come back here to roost. (It wasn't exactly an honorable discharge, but he took me back.) In all that time listening to him talk about food--and he talks a lot, and nearly always about food--he kept circling back to a few key experiences: working for Roger Verge in Provence, the precision of Joel Robuchon's kitchen, and his French-born grandmother's cooking at their farm in rural Connecticut. Among other things he talked about how in the fall his grandparents would rake all the leftover garden roots together and bury them in the ashes of a large brushfire. Late in the day when the fire died down they'd uncover the vegetables, peel them, and disgorge their soft, pudding-like insides onto his grandmother's good country bread.

No doubt that Bouley's cuisine was influenced by his time with Roger Verge, a pioneer in the '70's and '80's in leading French food away from its heavy, reduced meat sauces to lighter, fresher sauces based on vegetable pulps and juices. But there's no doubt that his own personal cooking style was enriched by his epiphany with the ash-baked pulps. So many of the sauces and Bouley and Danube (his Austrian restaurant and locus of my first serious restaurant job, R.I.P.) were based on so many dabs of different vegetable purees, which we made by baking vegetables overnight in their skins--not under a head of ashes, but to softness nonetheless. I remember the Ocean Herbal sauce, for example, an amazing bright green sauce that we served with seared scallops (scored deeply before sauteeing so that they looked like browned, waving anenomes) and squirrelly little squid bodies, so young they needed just a split-second against the hot metal to curl. The sauce required a spoonful of onion puree, a dab of gray-green fennel puree, a squirt of each chive, basil and dill oils, just a spoonspit of garlic puree and a ladleful of fresh clam water.

We also made beet puree, often used to thicken a red wine reduction, which became a sauce for the lobster dish. There was caviar on that one, of course.

At the thought of caviar I broke my reverie and got up to fetch the foil. I wrapped the beets I'd dug the day before, in bundles of two and three depending on size. Before going to sleep I pushed them down into the deep bed of coals and raked a thick coverlet of ash over them.

I woke up fretting that the coals had been too hot and that the beets had surely incinerated to black balls of coal, but I unwrapped the foil packs to find these beauties--soft, yes, but not charred to smithereens by any means.

 

They were incredibly soft--much more so than my usual baked beets. This one gooshed out with a squeeze. Beet lotion.

They peeled easily, though, and in the end I had a bowl of rough-looking egg-shaped beet roots, some with circle-shaped char sores--the most delicious, smoky parts. I started to dice them roughly, as I usually cut beets, but then I changed my course and started ripping them into chunks. It felt more right. I then spotted the bowl of cherries at my elbow and started ripping a few of those in half, shoving the pits to the side. In the grip of a total Austrian daydream now, I fired a small pan on the stove and added a little oil and a handful of beetle-shelled green pumpkin seeds. As they popped I flipped them in waves, threw salt at them, and remembered fondly that olive green oil that leaks from them as they heat and turn crisp. I poured them onto the beets, gave a good stir and tipped the entire bowl onto a small platter. With a shake of balsamic vinegar (thumb on the hole) and a few scrapings from a block of parmesan, I had it. In combination the salad was smoky, sweet, tangy and crunchy, but the beets were just out of line, way better than roasted beets and leagues superior to boiled. They tasted earthy. Just as they should.

Fire-roasted Beets with Cherries and Pumpkin Seeds

2 pounds red beets (about 8)
2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
juice of 1/2 lemon
4 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 cup sweet cherries, pitted and torn in half
1/3 cup pumpkin seeds
shaved parmesan cheese for garnish
salt and pepper

Wrap the beets in three foil packs, doubling the foil and pinching the edges to close up any holes. Bury the packages in the hot coals of a campfire and leave until morning.
Unwrap the packages and peel the beets. Tear the beets into bite-sized pieces.
To toast the pumpkin seeds, heat a saute pan over medium heat. Add 1 tablespoon of olive oil, and the pumpkin seeds. When they begin to pop, flip the seeds to cook them evenly. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and toss until most of the seeds have popped and crisped. Transfer to a plate.
Mix together the beets and cherries. Season with salt and freshly ground black pepper, the balsamic vinegar, lemon juice and remaining 3 tablespoons olive oil. Slide onto a platter and garnish with the pumpkin seeds and shavings of parmesan (or pecorino) cheese.

Making a cookbook

Last week I wrapped the recipe photo shoot for my upcoming Midwestern cookbook. Every shot of every dish was taken here at my house, some outside in the grass, others on things as diverse as our 1902 piano, a bookcase inside the woodshed, the dining room floor and one of my husband's abstract wood carvings. It's funny, but the photo shoot made this project--which I've been carrying around with me for so long that it seemed like my secret, or my secret hobby--much more public and concrete, and alive.

The shoot fulfilled all my wishes for it (and then some) but I'd like to share a little about what a cookbook photo shoot entails, because before the process began the photo shoot was a locus of confusion for many of my friends and family. This is understandable; cookbook photo shoots are a little foreign in these parts. I even remember being confused once about assisting for a photoshoot for a new Manhattan restaurant I cooked in. At the end of the day in the locker room I confessed to my friend Jason: "he said photoshoot, so I wore mascara today." To this day I cringe about that.

Photos for cookbooks are trained pretty closely on the food itself. The prop stylist assembles an appropriate palette and dishware for each shot. The food stylist cooks from the recipes with a mind on the visuals, making everything look just a bit more luscious. The photographer shoots it from its most appealing angle and monitors the whole process.  It is my job to make sure that the food looks just like it will when you make it at home and to put the dish in a setting appropriate to the story about the recipe.

I chose a veteran food photographer for this. Jennifer May, who in addition to her magazine and newspaper editorial work has photographed a number of cookbooks, some for my publisher Clarkson Potter, flew in on the New York-to-Fargo indirect. Kendra McKnight, a French-born food stylist, came in from Montreal. The prop stylist was Alison Hoekstra, who brought a car stocked with the best props from thrift shops across the state. She and our three fabulous assistants drove up the four hours from Minneapolis. Then we got to work, shooting between 7 and 9 recipe shots each day, averaging about 11 hours to do it. A few photos of our process follow.

Here we are, Jen, Alison and I looking at a shot in the middle of my prop-strewn dining room.

That's me cooking butter-basted walleye, shot through the porch screen.

Here I am cooking in a nice, very pale shirt. Not my usual duds.

We're laughing here at the bravado of a quite-pregnant Kendra wielding a blowtorch, the "fatboy" as it was called.

Jen didn't hesitate to rig up a bug-defying headdress--fashionable even in the deep woods--to get the shot.

This one cracks me up. We shot a piece of pie in my very clean bathroom because--I'm sorry--the light flowing through that window was amazing. The paper here holds a place for the eventual pale froth of whipped cream.

Here we have craft services, otherwise known as my mom Karen and my aunt Renee. Renee threatened to dig deep into the area's semi-sweet salad history and make a spicy cucumber jello that wobbled under the weight of its miracle whip, but they caved to their innate good taste and instead brought delicious things like this tomato tart. You'd think that with cooking eight recipes a day we would have had enough food leftover to feed a village, but at lunchtime their delivery was always welcome. They bit back their impulse to add bacon to all of the vegetables (because of Alison's vegetarian affliction) and compromised with a daily bowl of chopped cooked bacon on the side, a fillip that pretty much sums up my childhood. By day two they had adopted the name "The Worker Bees" and will soon be working on their own project, The Worker Bee Cookbook.

Throughout all of this, my husband was working behind the scenes, shimming tables, making wood fires in the grill and generally being there for all of us.

Each member of this crew was dynamite, but many thanks go to the talented Kendra McKnight for making my food look drop-dead delicious. (She is pictured below with her custom-K water glass.) And thanks to Jen May for her singular vision. Her photos proved to me that this area isn't just stunning to me alone, but universally stunning, and oddly epic, too. In eight days she captured so many of the soaring emotions I've had since moving back home, all of them rendered in that particularly hard-to-pin-down, flatly dramatic Midwestern way, and for that I am grateful to her. And lucky.

At the end the interns, Angelina and Nick, along with our assistant Luisa, dried their dishpan hands and came outside to ring in the last recipe shot. Fittingly for a Midwestern cookbook, we shot it on a stack of firewood. In truth, I had intended to lug that lovely, worn tabletop all the way to the porch but had to re-grip halfway so I set it down on the woodpile.  I squinted at it and thought to myself, "End-of-shoot fatigue or strike of inspiration? You know what? I think it works."

Here's Luisa Fernanda Garcia-Gomez, taking her first break in days.

Ditto for Angelina and Nick, my excellent interns from Macalester College.

We wrapped with a swim in the incredibly clear Bad Medicine Lake, and then a bonfire with our friends, both of which we sunk into, wholly appreciative.

Jen May wrote an entry on the shoot as well, here, and of course she accompanied hers with amazing snapshots.

How a Four-Year Old Makes Lemonade