Mom’s Chicken Soup with Matzah Balls

Last Sunday, I made matzah ball soup with my mom and the experience made me wonder why oh why do I only eat matzah ball soup at Passover? Perhaps that should be the fifth question posed at the Passover table.

It was a cozy little scene, punctuated by the trills and meows of Eleanor the Cat. The soup was for my buddy, also Cat, who was laid up after knee surgery. She had put in a request for the soup and dumplings, which Mom and I agreed could facilitate the healing of Cat’s meniscus.

Mom took quick action in my apartment, donning a blue bandana doo-rag. She assembled the key components while I ran out for turnips (and food for Eleanor, of course). Earlier in the day we bought several large Amish chicken drumsticks from Zabar’s because the venerable Upper West Side food purveyor didn’t seem to have anything in the way of affordable whole birds. Odd indeed. At any rate, the recipe here has been modified to include a whole chicken instead of the ad hoc parts we tossed in. But, of course, chicken soup is anything but precise, so throw in what you have on hand.

Now, for the controversy: Mom added a packet of bullion. Purists will balk, but you can’t always know how much flavor the ingredients are going to yield, so she hedged. Look, you can add it at the end or not at all, but there’s no reason to shy away from doctoring where appropriate. There is no shame in bullion.

Mom also leaves the skin on the onions. She said it contributes to a nice brown hue in the broth. I believe her. This particular soup includes carrot and celery in the final product, which you wouldn’t traditionally include during Passover, when most people serve the plainest of plain broths. But we wanted to make a whole meal out of it, so add the veggies we did! We also included egg noodles, but it’s just as good without.

Finally, I had some frozen kale, which we crumpled up and added at the end with the chopped up carrots and celery.

I produced the matzah balls, based on a Joan Nathan recipe. Nathan, late of Colicchio-Heimlich notoriety, knows her matzah. The only change I made was to substitute seltzer for water. I think it makes them a touch lighter, but not too light! You can also just follow the recipe on the matzah meal container.

I used kosher chicken fat, which I buy at Fairway, but you can also skin the fat from the top of the soup, as Nathan instructs, or render the fat from a roast chicken. Oh lord, that’s even better! People say oil is just fine, but I stand firmly behind the inclusion of fat, which adds a subtle but important richness to the dumpling. You can make a good matzah ball without fat, but a great one? Nyet.

Dill is the aromatic backbone of this recipe. Hear this: You can never add too much. My father always said dill was his favorite herb. He had fond memories of his own mother’s soup, which likely included heaping portions of dill. To get the most of your dill, do like my Aunt Susan does: Put a whole bunch of it in some cheesecloth and tie up the ends. When you remove it from the finished broth, let it cool and squeeze the bejeezus out of it right into the soup. Nectar of the gods.

Mom’s Chicken and Vegetable Soup

2 thick or 4 small carrots, ends removed and chopped in half, plus 2 more chopped in about ¼ inch pieces
2 celery stalks, cut in half, plus
1 large onion (or 2 small) quartered with skins on or off
2 small or 1 big turnip, tops removed and halved
1 whole chicken, cleaned with innards removed
Bunch of dill in cheesecloth, plus 2 tablespoons chopped for garnish
1 bullion packet or cube (optional)
¼ cup dry white wine
1 tsp salt, plus more to taste
Pepper to taste
Cold water

1.    Into a large heavy-bottomed pot, place the carrot and celery halves, turnips, onion, salt, pepper and chicken. Add the wine and bullion, if desired. Fill pot with water to a couple of inches below the bird. More than that will make a thin broth. Bring to a boil.

2.    As grey scum forms, skim it off with a large spoon or paper towel. You’ll have to do this several time, over a 15 or 20-minute period. Reduce heat to low and put the pot lid on most of the way, leaving a crack. Let simmer for an hour to an hour and a quarter.

3.    Remove chicken, vegetables and dill with tongs and set aside. Pour soup through fine mesh strainer. Return broth to pot. Place cooked vegetables in strainer. With the back of a cooking spoon, press down on the veggies to squeeze out remaining liquid. Optional: remove chicken meat from bones and return bones to soup for final steps.

4.    Add chopped carrots and celery to pot. Simmer for about 10 more minutes. When dill is cool, squeeze remaining liquid into pot. Remove bones. Season to taste.

To serve, add chopped dill for garnish and, if desired, egg noodles, cooked under separate cover.

Matzah Balls
Adapted from Jewish Holiday Cookbook, by Joan Nathan

4 eggs, slightly beaten
2 tablespoons checken fat, skimmed from the top of the soup
1 cup matzah meal
2 teaspoons salt
2 tablespoons chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
6 tablespoons chicken soup or water

1.    In a medium bowl, beat the egs and the fat together. Stir in the matzah meal, salt and parsley. Add the chicken soup or water. Refrigerate 1 hour or more, to permit the meal to absorb the liquids.
2.    In a 6-quart pot with a lid, bring 4 quarts of salted water to a boil. Reduce the water to a simmer and drop n balls of the matzah mixture about 11/2 inches in diameter. Cover the pot and cook just at a simmer for 20-40 minutes. The longer you cook them, the softer the matzah balls will be. When they are ready, they may be placed in chicken soup to serve.

Yield: Makes about 20 balls

Cheese please!

In April I attended the fun and inspiring GEL conference organized by my good friend Mark Hurst. On the first day (aka Day 1), a small group of conference goers headed out to Valley Shepherd Creamery in the wilds of New Jersey, in Long Valley to be specific. I had never been to a creamery and so naturally peppered our hosts from Saxelby Cheesemongers with a gazillion questions about the cheese making process.

That day I learned how hard it is to keep a population of sheep in fighting, or milking, trim. They can be very delicate and the wrong kind of bacteria could wipe out half the farm’s population in a matter of days! Valley Shepherd raises sheep and goats in wide open spaces with lots of good stuff to eat.

Um, how cute is she?

The cheese shop at the farm is a dream. You can choose from dozens of cheese types, which is unusual for a single creamery. Can you believe how gorgeous these are? And they taste incredible. If you see them at a green market in the New York, New Jersey or Connecticut, snap some up. It’s worth it!

Now you’re about to see the only rotating goat milker on the continent.

They only make these wackadoo machines in Europe but the rather eccentric owner of Valley Shepherd, Eran Wojswol, made sure to have one on the premises. The goats don’t seem to mind it. They chow down as the machine yanks their udders.

All of this dairy cheer inspired me to make my own cheese with the help of the fabulous How To Cook Everything Vegetarian, by Mark Bittman.

The recipe is so easy it’s almost a joke. Actually, the joke is that despite how easy it is, I still managed to screw up the order because I pulled my usual stunt of not reading the recipe through before I started. But it actually didn’t matter because the it’s completely idiot proof. I won’t even say what I did wrong because I don’t want anyone to get source amnesia and think that the dumb way I did it is correct.

The recipe calls for milk, buttermilk and salt. Yep, that’s it. And you can add all sorts of goodies, like peppers and herbs, which I’m going to do next time.

Next time I’ll use more salt than the recipe calls for, but I’ll tell you, this is a revelation. You can make your own queso fresco and it’s super healthy, assuming dairy doesn’t make you sick. I crumbled some over my morning toast, in a salad and on this roasted zucchini. How pretty is that, even with my lame-o camera skillz?

Queen for a Day

February 28th has come and gone, which means that at long last I have dined at Rao’s. I booked a table back in November when the reservation man took pity on me and a friend.

Readers, here is my dilemma: I have officially gone from being a nobody-outsider to—and I’ll be straight here—a celebrity insider. My position as objective food critic has thus been compromised and with this I struggle. Do I post a glowing review to stay in the good graces of Frankie and his crew, or do I forge ahead as the steely journalist I am and call it like I saw it? There is no easy answer, but I will do my best to stay true to my editorial scruples.

At 9:20pm last Thursday, three friends and I arrived at Rao’s, a few minutes before our reservation. The corner spot was packed and festive. The large round tables were stuffed with men, mostly burly and/or of a certain age. It’s a throwback, to be sure, and feels like a movie set. There was a convivial mood and the whole place was aglow.

As we waited to be seated, owner Frank Pellegrino greeted our group as if he cared about our comfort. It’s sad, really, how rumpled one usually feels dining out in New York. You drop hundreds of dollars only to be sneered at or made to feel like they’re doing you a favor. But not at Rao’s. From start to finish we received smiles, generosity and even a scant amount of admiration, as if we were, well, Denzel Washington, who also happened to be dining at Rao’s that night. But Denzel and his companion, who Victor spotted, was seated at the worst seat in the house—the deuce by the door. By contrast, we were seated at one of the half dozen booths that line the main dining area. We actually received better treatment than Denzel, something I pointed out to the polo-shirted maître d’. “You got it,” he said.

It turns out Denzel had just shown up without a reservation and Rao’s doesn’t accommodate stars simply because they are stars. It honors its reservations and doesn’t appear to kowtow to celebs, or so it seemed on Thursday. (Other bold-faced names in the house that night: actor Vince Curatola, who played the venerable Johnny “Sack” Sacramoni on the Sopranos and the actor who played Fiori (what’s his name??), Tony Soprano’s Sicilian heavy, neither of whom had a table.)

The nice gentleman who keeps the reservation book also recited the night’s verbal menu. We started with fried mozzarella and roasted red peppers. The bricks of breaded and fried cheese sat on a thin layer of red sauce. They were tasty, but not particularly flavorful. I would have welcomed a squirt of lemon or some salt. It felt a little Bennigan’s but who doesn’t love melty crispy fried cheese? The peppers, tossed with pine nuts and raisins, were wonderfully sweet.

For the pasta course (it’s all family style chez Rao), we chose the orechiette with broccoli rabe and sausage and the pasta puttanesca. The little ears were divine in garlic and oil and the sausage, which comes from Queens, was a little spicy and totally succulent. Instead of the puttanesca, however, we were served a rigatoni in what I think was an Amatriciana sauce, but with ham, not bacon. And I almost forgot about the two tremendous meatballs in red sauce.

Ok, so you’re probably thinking, god how boring! But I assure you, we were not bored. What makes Rao’s food so good and the food in Italy so fabulous: the quality and freshness of the few ingredients on the plate. The red sauce with the rigatoni had the perfect balance of sweetness, acidity and salt. There’s a healthy amount of superb olive oil and a ton of garlic added to the San Marzano tomatoes. That’s it. Done! The meatballs were tasty and light but I’ve never been able to get behind hunks of meat that size. Why not smaller and a little more manageable?

(Oh, in case you were worried about Denzel and his crappyjack table, he and his companion eventually secured a booth in the main dining room shortly after we sat down. From my vantage point I could spy the dome of his head.)

I was completely distracted by everything—the tables of would-be power brokers, the small- and big-screen stars and the shockingly friendly service we received. I barely participated in the table conversation but was a team player when it came to food consumption.

For entrees, it was the signature lemon chicken and steak. The chicken: eah. Not great. The skin tasted of bitter burnt garlic and the seasoning was off. A few bites were enough for me. The steak, on the other hand, was delectable. So tender you could cut it with a butter knife and fatty in all the right ways. The spicy seasoning wasn’t overpowering and it was cooked to rare perfection.

Our waiter said he couldn’t believe how much we ate. He said the last people to eat all their pasta were a group of very large men. I’m still not sure if he was teasing us, as we were three not terribly large women and one average-size (but not at all average!) man.

I stepped into the ladies room and overheard two women talking about the cleanse they were planning for the next week, but not before they had dessert. Hmmn.

We were far too stuffed for dessert, but happily sipped (and cleansed with) complimentary digestives (two, in my case). We chatted with the bartender, who’s been slinging liquor there for 33 years. I harassed the lord of reservations to book another table and he said I had to come back in November. Harrumph!

Anna Maria insisted on speaking to Denzel and getting his autograph. We thought that would be better than asking to take his picture (the only other choice she gave us) but in the sobering light, both activities seem deeply regrettable. The whole idea of Rao’s is that every guest is treated like, well, Denzel. Being a fine actor or a hot model doesn’t mean as much or, in some cases, anything at Rao’s. Stars go there to be treated like the masses and the masses go there to be treated like the stars. It’s a cozy arrangement that results, I speculate, in someone like Denzel Washington being equally as excited as we were to have scored a table at Rao’s. I’ll be sure to ask him the next time we hang.
(Anna Maria ended up taking this picture as D tried to slink out. I wouldn’t say he was exactly pleased…)

Bursting and over-stimulated, we stumbled out of the restaurant past 11:30, the last ones to go. It’s hard to peel yourself away from a place that makes you feel like an honest-to-goodness insider.

Japanese bread and hunks of foreign cheese

Japan is the land of cotton-candy bread. From corner stores to high-end bakeries, bright white bread reigns supreme. It’s a sandwich staple from Hokkaido to Okinawa and found in every Japanese household I entered during the year I lived in Kyushu. Sometimes it’s thick, sometimes thin and you occasionally see a version with non-bleached flour and therefore slightly off-white. It is utterly soft and completely benign. The texture is so consistent, sans holes or irregularities, that I can only imagine the modern-day version of Lucille Ball’s chocolate-factory gal yanking out the slices that aren’t completely perfect. Imagine a Pullman bread with no yeasty taste and a soft crust and you pretty much have it.

The first couple of times I visited Japan, in college, that bread tasted delicious to me. Toasted with butter, it was scrumptious. But the best of its kind came after a long wait in the food hall of one of Tokyo’s fancy department stores at Fauchon bakery. My friend Miho and I queued up with dozens of other women—young workers and older matronly types—to buy a loaf of hot fresh white bread. I believe each customer could only purchae a single loaf, so Miho and I paid for two and hightailed it to a bench, somewhere just outside the store. We devoured at least three-quarters of one of the loaves in about five minutes. Nothing, I repeat nothing, is better than fresh warm bread.

Once I moved to Nagasaki prefecture to teach English, I soon realized that my trips to Tokyo to visit Miho’s family (we met at college in the States) were not at all representative of what I would find in Nagasaki. Indeed, the Japan I knew was one where the locals didn’t sneer at foreigners or bother if a single woman ate dinner by herself in a restaurant. Most of those findings are for another post (or blog), but the other thing I realized is that I wasn’t so fond of that darn white bread known as pan, after the French word for bread, pain.

I had been raised on a steady diet of bagels, bialys and rye bread for most of my life, products so dense that when over-toasted, a great deal of butter-knife force was often needed to spread the goods. These are tough breads that could crack a tooth under the right conditions. My guess is that I was attracted to the Japanese white bread as “other.” It was oddly different, exotic.

About three months into my time in Imabuku, a little fishing village on the Sea of Japan, my Kiwi friend Pip and I joined a food cooperative called the Foreign Buyers Club. We joined the club expressly to buy cheese, as the dairy situation in Japan was dire. The only hard or strong cheese to be found in Nagasaki was imported and came in tiny quantities at exorbitant prices. Pip and I ordered kilo-size blocks of cheddar and Swiss that we split in half. It was a lot of cheese, but Pip usually blew through hers in a couple of weeks. I rationed my portion so it would last at least six weeks. I used a sharp knife or vegetable peeler to shave the hunk and carefully wrapped the brick it in plastic so that it was only exposed to air for a few seconds at a time.

The morning ritual was my favorite. Two or three days a week, I would toast that white bread once and then carefully butter it. It was easy to rip the bread, especially if the butter was cold, so I often removed the butter from my little fridge before I showered so it had time to get close to room temperature. I would then take a few slivers from the cheese hunk, place them on the toast and then put it back in the toaster over for another round, until it was all bubbly and brown and melty.

But that white bread, after a time, just wasn’t satisfying. I wanted something that needed to be chewed with incisors, not gummed and swallowed. I would have paid a lot of yen for a hardy wheat, pumpernickel or crusty baguette.

I would have paid a lot of yen for this almost no-knead bread from the December ’07 issue of Cook’s Illustrated. Yeasty with a touch of tang, it knocked my socks off. The Cook’s staff made a few modifications to Mark Bittman’s now-famous no-knead bread recipe that appeared in the Times last year which. That bread, it turns out, has a bit too much water in it. I’m no baker and tend to be intimidated by yeast, but this recipe is so easy and so delicious, you truly won’t believe it.

If I had known how to make this bread in Japan, it’s very possible it would have saved me and all my friends from the achy-breaky Kyushu blues, from which we all suffered mightily.

Budva on the half shell

It’s a cold and sleeting night in New York and I keep asking myself, why am I here and not barefoot on one of Montenegro’s divine natural coves, facing west into the sun and the Adriatic’s riotous blue?

Why am I not in the little town of Pržno in walking distance to four small beaches and the fairytale-like Sveti Stefan? The stretch of Montenegrin coast South of the ancient city of Budva is known as the Budva Riviera. While it may not compare to its French counterpart in scale or chic-ness or mind-blowing bling, it is largely undiscovered by Americans and to my mind a far less pretentious and expensive terroir, but no less enjoyable.

The small towns of this region are locked in a perpetual movie-scape with the cerulean sea in front of them and the black mountains for which Montenegro is named jutting up from behind. But save for the smattering of large and homely casino hotels and the luxury yachts moored in their harbors, there is nothing in these towns that says, “look at me.” (Except perhaps for the Russians who have overtaken the region and don’t much suffer from modesty.)

Cat and Charlotte and I landed in Montenegro in September. It was the last leg of our Serbia-Croatia-Montenegro extravaganza and we were pooped. We rented a car at the Tivat airport and made our way south about 20 kilometers to Przno via Budva, a medieval walled city on the Adriatic.

We parked and made our way to the town center by passing through a ragtag flea market along the shore. It’s a slightly grim setup with an outdated/communist bent, but it’s where real Montenegrins and tourists collide, along with Nutella crepes, bad CDs and cheap-ass clothing. It’s also where I saw a little Roma girl nearly get run over by an angry local.

Our lunch in Budva was a little ways from the walled city past the marina at a spot called Jadran. We sat a few feet from the narrow beach and ate a sublime meal, only half of which could be attributed to the food. The breezy Adriatic, the goofy waiter, the feeling of being so far away in such an unfamiliar but utterly pleasant spot – all of that constituted the other half.

We ate a salad, a ton of yeasty bread and a heaping bowl of grilled shellfish, including clams, two kinds of mussels, langoustines and the only shrimp I’ve ever seen with roe in it. If I found out that those fresh, salty and garlicky mollusks were to be my last supper, I would have been deeply satisfied.

I’ll get to Pržno proper in my next post.