Austin Found

It's early fall, and we're visiting our favorite city, Austin, Texas. The Austin City Limits music festival is at the end of the week. This will be our third visit to ACL, and this time we decided to tack on an extra week to soak up the place (and maybe scope out neighborhoods...) And although our hotel is an extended stay place with a little kitchenette, I'm taking a break from the stove for the week. But that doesn't mean we need to stop talking about the things they ate. But where to begin? There had been a steady parade of breakfast tacos, migas, queso (the one palatable use for Velveeta), of course. The delightful food at the Kerbey Lane Cafe needs a mention. We dropped in to the Alamo Draft House for a screening of the Brazilian film Estomago, which the theater pairs with a five-course meal that was suggested by foods appearing on screen. One of the course, a tasty sort of quail croquette was actually garnished with enormous fried ants, which tasted oddly of honey. But all of these are just warm up for the primary reason we like to come eat in Austin: barbecue. I'm very catholic when it comes to Q. Time spent debating the relative merits of barbecue locales is time wasted, time that could be better spent bellied up the the table gnawing on a bone. A Thin Line Between Down-Home Q and the Olive Garden What can be said about The County Line, other than, "Yawn." There are a few of these places in the Austin area, and they're safe, predictable, fun for groups--and more effective than Seconal if you really just don't want to experience much. The sign is cool, though.









County Line is known for their terrific, homemade bread! You even have to pay extra for it. Who new that it was possible to duplicate Butterkrust or Wonder at home! If you like spongy, cotton candy bread served with margarine and "honey" spread (that's corn syrup and imitation honey flavor), you go. My recent love affair with hearth breads, though, makes this seem like pretty weak soup.



And the barbecue "looks" good. But you can tell when meat has spent too much time in an industrial warmer. Blah. County Line does have a decent lineup of sides. The garlic, red-skin mashers were really very good. And that corn you seen in the background? Not nearly as bad as you might imagine, pretty far from KFC, really. The sauce? Eh. No worse than any national bottle brands.








I include the following dessert photo only under duress. If you have room for dessert, you didn't eat enough meat. But I did taste this cobbler, and it was more than fair.

Go West, Young Man!

To Llano, Texas, home of Cooper's Old Time Barbecue Pit.

I Come to Make a Caesar, Not to Praise It

When I was doing my time in the restaurant business in Portland, OR, in the 1990s, the "in" restaurant at the time was called Zefiro. This place followed the "little black dining room" model to success: a minimal space accented with oversized black-and-white art, giant fishbowl windows so that anyone and everyone could see that where and what you were eating, and serious food that I remember as being inspired and consistent.

Since I was earning about $5 an hour at the time, I didn't get to eat at Zefiro very often. But, once I left the line and start schlepping fish, I did have the good fortune of taking on Zefiro as a customer and getting to know the talented chefs who would see that kitchen gently into it's good night (for Zefiro did what few restaurants do: it close gracefully when it was at the top of its game instead of fizzling into mediocrity.) One of my favorite industry memories recalls some crazy efforts I made to get fresh razor clams to Zefiro for a risotto that the chef at the time wanted to offer to Julia Child, who was in town for an International Association of Culinary Professionals conference. I got the chef her clams, and she integrated the risotto onto a menu of far-reaching imagination and complexity. I took a table for lunch that day, hoping to get a glimpse of the living legend. Child came in, a giant of a woman even with her chin touching her chest from osteoporosis, and took a seat. She gave the menu a quick glance, and then ordered a dozen oysters on the half shell, a Caesar salad, a cheese burger, and a whole bottle of Merlot to wash it down. To tell the truth, I was having the cheese burger myself, much as I love razor clams.

Zefiro was really committed to the Caesar salad, and this, rather than my addled restaurant recollections, is the subject of this post.

So, what is it with this salad? I conservatively put the number of Caesars I have eaten in the tens of millions, that I have made in the hundreds of thousands. You'll find the thing, in various guises, on menus from Fuddruckers to the French Laundry. Dolled up with rubber chicken, it's a staple of appalling boxed lunches at conventions, yet it is quite at home amidst fine china and white linen. And, for many of us, it ranks as a comfort food along with mac 'n cheese and chocolate-chip cookies.

Supposedly, the thing was invented in Tijuana by one Caesar Cardini sometime in the thirties. The original recipe arguably included only Parmigiano-Reggiano and plain croutons, oil, lemons, eggs, garlic, and worcestershire sauce. And the eggs were supposed to be coddled. (Don't know what that is? Good. It's a silly thing to do to an egg, which produces little effect, apart from making the egg, well, clumpy.) Some people like to get hot under the collar about the "purity" of the original recipe. In fact, Julia Child herself, in From Julia's Kitchen, rails against the inclusion of anchovies in the dressing. But the caesar salad is like the language, a living thing. It moves, breathes, and changes. People screw with it, add things, take them away.

Here's my stance on the caesar:

Have fun with the goddamned thing. It's a salad, not the bar exam. There are no right answers.

I like to start with cut romaine. I prefer it to torn because I think that cutting leaves the leaves (snicker) crisper and less bruised. And it's faster. If you have the time, it is fun to leave the leaves (snicker again) whole, dressing only the tips so they can be picked up and eaten with the fingers. I will tend to trim the romaine drastically; I like to seem mostly pale, yellow-green leaves in the salad bowl.

I prefer a mayonaise-style dressing. Yes, this is a departure from Cardini's coddled egg-and-oil melange. But I think it makes a better dressing. It serves to bring the various flavors in the dressing together into a smoother, more homogenous mass that coats the leaves evenly and flavors each bite of the salad. I use the traditional oil, lemon, garlic, and cheese (although I'm not a Parmigiano-Reggiano purist). Worcestershire sauce, as far as I can tell, has the weird power of making any and everything it touches taste exactly the same--like Worcestershire sauce. I imagine, being an English invention, this was the idea. So I leave the Worcestershire untouched in it's little paper-wrapped bottle in the cupboard, where it has remained, untouch, for at least fifteen years.

I like the zing that strong Dijon mustard provides, and it helps with emulsification. Use a good, strong brand. I've used Edmud Fallot ever since I found out that this is what Thomas Keller puts on the table at Bouchon in Yountville, CA (and, I presume, Las Vegas, but I haven't eaten there.) This was more than just hero worship (worthy though the Great One is of a little genuflection). It was because I was stunned when I first smeared some of that golden goo on the perfect fries during my first visit to Bouchon. Fallot really is amazing stuff, and well worth hunting down (it is actually cheaper than Grey Poupon, and certainly not much more expensive than other brands.) But you can do well with Beaufor, Maille, or even the mysterious stuff from Roland, which is pretty damned good.

I also love (L-O-V-E) the taste of anchovies, so these make the cut in my recipe.

Let's linger on the anchovies for a moment. Here is a food with an undeserved bad rap. Anchovies are the best freaking things you can eat, as long as you get good ones, and you handle them correctly. When I first started cooking, I was a great fan of anchovy paste, assuming that it would add flavor while blending innocuously into whatever it was that I was cooking. After a while, though, I came to the conclusion that it was just glorified, stinky salt. Then I switched to cheap fillets in those little cans. Still stinky, still salty, these were just the chunky equivalent of paste. Enter good quality anchovies packed in oil. Here's were you start getting some bang for your buck. The fillets are small and hard to work with because they are slick with oil, but the add a nice, almost nutty flavor to your food. If you can find them, you can get oil-packed anchovies in little jars, packed with capers, chili flakes, or even truffles. All of these can add astonishing depth to a whole range of food, not the least of which is caesar dressing.

But if you're ready to commit to a serious anchovy habit, spring the $15 for a tin of salted Sicilian anchovies. When you open the can, you'll find a lattice of headed and gutted (barely) fish, packed in coarse salt. Drain away the mysterious fluid that you'll find in the tin and scrape off the top layer of salt to revel the first layer of fish. Take out as many as you need and rinse them under cold water. You can split the fillets with your thumbnail and then remove the spine. (Coleman Andrews has a recipe in his immortal Catalan Cuisine for deep fried anchovy spines, which I have no doubt is the best cocktail snack in creation. Too bad I can't eat that many caesars at one time, and the prospect of freezing spines in anticipation of having enough is too ridiculous to contemplate.) Once you get these fillets apart, you can use these as you would the canned variety, only they will take far better and give your dishes significantly more color.

Acid? Lemons are traditional. Regular lemons are good. Ones from your yard are better. Meyers add a fruity sweetness that can be welcome sometimes. I've used limes to advantage when the rest of the meal was leaning Asian or Mexican. Red wine or Champagne vinegar can work, too, and is sometimes nicer when you want a more austere dressing.

Oil? I invariably use Turkish or Spanish extra virgin, the kind from the enormous vat that I buy when it's cheap. Yes, you can use your favorite, screamin' expensive boutique oil--it would be a fine way to enjoy the stuff. XVO will definately come through in the flavor profile of the dressing, so you should make sure to use an oil with an agreeable savor. You can also use a more neutral oil, if you like. I've made the dressing with sunflower or grapeseed oils, especially when I've needed to use the food processor, which can make extra virgin olive oil taste bitter. Now that you can get the stuff for next to nothing, you might even try whipping up a batch with the cut-rate white truffle oil you can get at Trader Joe's. It's actually pretty niffty stuff. I wouldn't recommend it to some someone who had never really MACKED on white truffle--I mean rolled in the stuff, smeared it all over his or her body and let the cats lick it off. I think you need to really get to really know real truffles before you flirt with truffle-ish things like cheap truffle oil. Otherwise you risk forming an opinion about this most-acquired of tastes before it has had a chance to work its magic. But if you know what the real deal tastes and smells like (in the case of whites, a soul-stirring admixture of diesel fuel and--eh, there's no better way to say it--pussy), the remembrance of truffles past that the mass-market oil evokes can make for a memorable salad.

Like I mentioned a bit ago, I'm not a Parmigiano-Reggiano purist, although it is probably my favorite cheese on a caesar. You can try the Grana Padano or the Argentine copy of Regianno, which are both a little less expensive and a lot less exciting. Dry jack is a possibility, as is asiago. I've made do with Pecorino Romano, but it packs quite a wallup. No matter what you choose, you'll do yourself better by grating it fresh from a block. Why waste the money on pregrated cheese when the garden center can provide you with shredded bark at only a fraction of the cost?

One more thing: Make more than you think you'll need. Not that you can save leftovers; the mixture will turn to goo in an hour or less. But people really get into this stuff. Make less of whatever else, and let them go crazy on this most revered of the salad tribe.

Awrk! Polly Want Some Ragu?

I have mixed feelings about Marcella Hazan. Does that make me bad?

One the one hand, I feel tremendously grateful toward her. She has, through her books, taught me a great deal about food--particularly about how to pull ever-greater degrees of flavor from a basic palate of ingredients through patient and careful cooking. I also admire her crotchety, no-bullshit personality. Anyone who insists on whiskey and Marlboros while the effete foodie pretenders around her are swirling their Barolos and nibbling on grisini--well, she's okay in my book. Add to that the fact that she's Venetian, or a least lived in Venice for a long time (which is, despite all of its eccentricities and shortcomings, is the best city in the world), and the fact that she still apparently makes fresh pasta even with one of her hands gnarled into a claw, and you have someone who I would very much like to get drunk with.

So what's not to love? Weirdly, my ambivalence for Mrs. Hazan all began with a conversation I had about, oh, ten years ago with an acquaintance who cooked professionally. I had read Hazan's Marcella Cucina not to long before this conversation. This must have been about 1997 or 98, when every restaurant in creation was abandoning butter with the bread service and switching to olive oil. At some point in the book, Hazan goes on a diatribe against the practice of both eating bread before a meal and dipping it in olive oil. I forget, now, what her exact criticism of the practice was, although I'm pretty sure that it had to do with the Italian custom of serving bread mainly with meat dishes (to sop up juices) and with her sense that using bread to sponge up as much olive oil as possible was a little mental. Eitherway, this fellow was running a restaurant (badly) at the time, and he followed la mode by putting out cruets of cheap, grean XVO with his plates of baguette.

Being something of a contrarian (read: asshole) by constitution, I said to him, "Nah, nah, nah. Marcella Hazan says it's stupid to serve olive oil with bread!"

To which he retorted (for he had a flair for rhetoric): "Marcella Hazan is a fat parrot!"

Frankly, I was stunned.

I don't think I had ever heard someone called a fat parrot before. It created a strange and lingering image in my mind. Prior to this moment, Hazan had had her own special cloud in my personal culinary heaven. She was up there with James Beard and Julia Child, with Alain Senderens and Pierre Franey. She would have been up there with Jeff Smith, too, I suppose, but in my vision of gastronomic Shangrila, Smith is always off somewhere, raping a boy. Ouch! Okay, okay. That was never established in a court of law, perhaps because the best-selling cookbook author of all time had more than enough scratch to keep people quiet. Anyway, I frankly find it very easy to separate whatever may have been his personal, uh, eccentricities from the indisputable fact that he as a damned fine culinary teacher...

...although that calls for a digression. When PBS was airing the TV episodes related to The Frugal Gourmet Cooks Three Ancient Cuisines, Smith went on location to Hong Kong, where he had a discussion with someone who was, I suppose, an authority on Chinese cooking. The two of them got to talking about the whole chopsticks-fork thing. The Chinese guy observed that his native cuisine was "more sophisticated" that the barbarian food of the West because all of his culture's cooking was done in the kitchen, leaving the diner to do minimal work at the table, allowing the diner, in fact, the luxury of being able to eat with a couple of sticks rather than a miniature version of a hay-baling tool. Now this is all fine and well. I have no personal devotion to the knife and fork, and I enjoy eating with chopstick very much. I just happen to be something of a fan of Western civilization, and I would like to think that the fact that we can appreciate a nice roast doesn't make us knuckle-dragging gibbons.

I'm rather proud to report that my recipe for ragu is pretty darned close to Hazan's.



A Meat Sauce in the Style of Bologna (Ragu)

1 bottle cheap-ass red wine
2 T. extra virgin olive oil (or any other oil you have lying around)
2 medium yellow onions, chopped
4 small carrots, peeled and chopped (I really think organic carrots are worth the money)
2 ribs celery, chopped
1 head garlic, peeled, smashed and chopped (about 15 cloves)
3 lbs. grass-fed beef chuck or rump roast, diced
2 28oz. cans diced tomatoes (I used Muir Glen)
1 T. dried Mediterranean oregano (make sure it's not Mexican, which is WAY different)
1 T. dried thyme
1 T. sweet paprika
1/2 T. red chili flake
a decent grating of nutmeg (you should be working from whole nutmegs)
water
1/2 pint heavy cream
salt and pepper

Empty the entire contents of the wine bottle into a small saucepan. Set over high heat and boil vigorously for at least ten minutes. This is a critical step, and one which I now follow whenever I'm cooking with wine. I'm damned if I can remember where I read or heard this (I'm thinking it was either Alton Brown or Thomas Keller), but I makes a huge difference to the finished flavor, eliminating the harsh alcoholic notes that never seem to cook off. You'll note this in braised beef and steamed mussels immediately. The harshness of the wine might be less noticeable in a complex dish like this one, but you can still tell.

Heat the oil in a convenient pan. Cook the onion, carrots, celery, and garlic until everything is soft, but don't let the mixture take on any color. When it's done, remove from the pan and set aside.

Turn heat up to high. Put a touch more oil into the pan, and then add the beef a little at a time (to avoid overcrowding and, thus, steaming rather than browning the beef--which is your goal here. Why brown the beef and not the aromatic vegetables? There's a good deal more, well, substance to the meat. It takes well to browning, whereas the vegetables just seem to break down into bitter goo if you let them color. (Even French onion soup needs to be brown very slowly if it's to taste rich and sweet.) If you start with a big enough pan, you should be able to just push the first few installments of beef to one side to accomodate the remainder of your meat. If not, you can pull it from the pan to make more room.

When the beef has a decent color, add back the aromatic vegetables and all of the other ingredients except the heavy cream. You your judgment on the water. You my need a little or a lot, depending on how far you reduced your wine and how much water was in your can of tomatoes. The consistency should be like, what? Chowder? The goal is to keep everything fluid during the simmer yet still end up with something the consistency of sauce rather than soup. The mixture will thicken as it cooks through evaporation. You need a little finesse here to get it right.

That's pretty much it. Let it cook for as much time as you have. Three hours is probably the dead minimum; twelve would certainly not be too much. Ideally, the meat will fall apart and be assumed into the body of the sauce. Ahh! That's ragu! About twenty minutes before you serve, stir in the heavy cream. This gilds the lily, making something already rich and unctuous richer and unctuouser. Correct the seasoning, and you're good to go.

Oh, and it really taste a lot better if you let it cool completely overnight and then reheat it the next day. You'll need to correct the seasonings, of course.

Ragu is a real multipurpose material. On the first night (if you can't wait for the ideal second-night first serving) is terrific over fresh pasta (medium-wide noodles, like tagliatelle.) Grace the dish with some grated Pecorino or Parmesan and a few dried chille flakes. The next night, the congealed leftovers can be tucked into balls of cold risotto and fried as arancini. You can thin the stuff into a passable soup or use it full strength as a bruschetta topping, kind of an Emilia-Romagna sloppy joe.

From Rio to Rhode Island: A Crazy, Mixed Up Meal

Brazilian Cobb Salad (a la Whole Foods)

I lifted the better part of this recipes from the Whole Foods website (the original recipe is here.) My version is more or less the same, except that I didn't bother to write anything down before I went to the market, so I forgot that they include corn (which would have been good) and green pepper (which I was happy to do without.) I also couldn't for the life of me remember what they dressed the salad with, so instead of their weird, acid-less mechanical emulsion I used a very toothsome green goddess (my wife's favorite dressing, and a vehicle for the herb that James Beard said would allow him to eat human flesh--tarragon).

I really don't like to use mesclun as the base for composed salads, preferring a more uniform canvas of greens. Hence, the butter lettuce.

Finally, the Berkeley Bowl has ridiculously expensive fresh, fair trade Costa Rican hearts of palm that I used. Survey says: XXX. Don't do it. Go with the canned. The pasteurization of the canned product seems to tame some of the wildness of the fresh article. I ate a lot of palm hearts when I was in Argentina, although I can't be certain whether they came from a can. The texture of the fresh was crunchy and vibrant, more enjoyable than the squeeky, rubbery tooth-feel of the canned. But the $10 per pound sticker shock and the over-the-top fungal flavor of the fresh left me with a can-do attitude.

For the green goddess dressing:
3 cloves garlic, smashed and hacked into random pieces
1/4 C. fresh tarragon, picked clean of stems, packed
1 bunch fresh chives
1/2 C. sour cream
1/2 C. mayonnaise (make it from scratch, you lazy ass!)
1 to 1 1/2 limes, juiced and strained of seeds
salt and pepper to taste

In a food processor, pulse the garlic and herbs until they are chopped fine. Add the sour cream and mayonnaise and pulse to combine. Add the lime juice a little at a time, tasting for sharpness and pourable, dressing-y consistency. The finished product should have a fair amount of tang (especially on butter lettuce, which is very mild and smooth.) Add more juice if needs be. If you have enough acid but need a looser dressing, add a teaspoon or so of water. Correct the dressing's seasoning with salt and pepper. Refrigerate until ready to use.

Note: You are to be praised if you make this dressing by hand, but I am old and lazy, and I have people to wash the food processor. Note, though, that not all dressings agree with mechanization: Anything that contains extra virgin olive oil should be mixed only by hand, and then gently, lest the oil taste bitter. But for this one, the processor is fine--though a knife works as well. Chop and chop and chop the garlic and herbs together until nothing is recognizable. Mix the rest by hand with a spoon.

For the salad:
2 head butter lettuce, well washed and dried, torn in to bite-sized pieces
1/2 large sweet red onion, chopped
1 small can black beans, drained and well rinsed
1 large avocado, diced
1 medium red bell pepper, stemmed, seeded and chopped
2 ribs celery, chopped
1 can (or package of fresh, God Help you) hearts of palm, cut into coins
Roasted, salted cashews (as many as you can manage to not eat before serving)

Wash lettuce well in a couple change of cool water and dry thoroughly in a salad spinner. (No, there is no substitute for a salad spinner. It is an absolutely essentially kitchen tool. If you lose your salad spinner in a nuclear attack or other holocaust, you can put your washed lettuce in a pillow case, stand in the middle of the street, and spin the sack around your head like a maniac until you fall down. It doesn't work as well, but it's better than nothing.)

Toss the lettuce generously with the dressing. Mound in bowls. Arrange the remaining ingredients (apart from the cashews and limes) in neat, discrete radials atop the greens. Sprinkle cashews around. Throw on some lime sections.

Everybody samba! Feels like Carnaval, no? Well, I mean, without the giant pantomime heads, anonymous sex, and tremendous risk to life and limb. Afterwards you can give something up for Lent and listen to "The Girl from Ipanema."



Cherrystones Gratinéed with Bacon

1 dozen cherrystone clams, rinsed in cool water just before preparation
1 pint chopped surf clams (optional: see below)
4 rashers of good-quality bacon (I used the applewood-smoked product from Hobbs), blanched and chopped into 1/4" dice
3 garlic cloves, minced fine
1/2 yellow onion, minced fine
1 rib celery, minced fine
1/4 C. heavy cream
salt and pepper
1 box of coarse rock salt (If you want to do things right)
Fresh bread crumbs
Italian parsley, chopped
Lemon wedges

Preheat the oven to 500º F.

Note the direction to blanch your bacon. This is important. If you fry the back without dunking it into boiling water, the smoke flavor in the finished dish will be very, very strong. The boiling takes it down a notch. As an alternative, you can use pancetta, which is unsmoked, or salt pork, which needs to be blanched as well but adds no smoke whatsoever to the dish. To blanch the bacon, just dip the whole rashers in boiling water for a few moments and rinse. Allow to cool and then dice as normal.

Just before you steam open the clams, rise them well under cold water. You can scrub them with a brush if you need to to remove sand. Don't do this much in advance, though. The fresh water will hasten the bivalves' demise, but it won't hasten it faster than a bath of boiling water. Rinsing just before steaming is ideal. Place you clams in a skillet or sautée pan with just a few tablespoons of water: enough to get the steam going but not enough to make the clam juice weak and diluted. Cover the pan and place over high heat. Depending on the tenacity with which your clams cling to life, it may take five or ten minuted for them to give up the ghost and loll open. When this happens, remove from the heat. Remove the clams from the pan to a clean colander and allow to cool. Return the clam juice to the heat and reduce by half (you should end up with about 1/4 to 1/2 cup). Set juice aside.

When the clam are cool to the touch, pull the meat from the shells. It should still be undercooked. Chop coarsely. Now comes a tough decision:

Cherrystones (a name that refers to a size of quahog or hard shell clam (Mercenaria mercenaria)) are 1.) not especially popular on the West Coast, 2.) as heavy as rocks, and 3.) pretty poor in meat-shell-ratio. Add these three things together, and this dish is pretty pricey if you use only live clams to prepare it. The live clams that are farmed on the West coast, the manila clam (Venerupis japonica), are so small that they turn this dish into a horrifying and tedious chore unless you find some REALLY big specimens. But raw, frozen chopped clam meat (coming from quahogs similar to the ones you've bought fresh, though a bit bigger, from a size grade called "chowders") that can meander out here in freezer truck is much cheaper way of getting the most for your hard-earned clams (ha, ha, ha!)

If you want combine fresh and frozen clams, separate the shell and reserve both halves. Then, add a pint of raw, chopped East Coast surf clams to the meat you steamed out of the shell. Once you prepare your bacon-y. creamy aromatic and mix them with the clams, you'll have enough mixture to fall both halves of the shells. If you use only live clams, reserve only one half of each shell.

In a small pan, cook your diced bacon over medium-low heat until it is thoroughly rendered and crisp. Drain away some of the bacon dripping and add the garlic, onion, and celery. Cook until the onion softens and turns translucent. Keep the heat low and keep things moving; you don't want to burn the garlic. Add the reserved clam juice and cream. Increase heat and reduce until thick. Taste the mixture. It will probably need no seasoning; the bacon and clam juice should provide ample savor. But correct the seasoning if you need to. Fold the clam meat into this mixture.

Rock salt? Well, yes, it's an idiotic expense just for a baking substrate. If you bake clams and oysters a lot, you can save and reuse your rock salt a number of times, which makes it less silly to use. Or you can save it and use it to deice your driveway, if you live somewhere cold. If you're clever, you can come up with something else that might work: The beans or pie weights you use to bake pie shells blind come to mind, and pennies might do the job if you have a lot of them laying around. Rice? The one thing that you'll probably regret is just laying the clams on a cookie sheet and hoping for the best. Salt, in the end, looks right. And it's just $4 a box, you cheapskate! Place a generous layer of the rock salt in a charismatic baking dish (I'm hot for the terra cotta ware you can pick up from The Spanish Table, but anything big enough will work.)

Arrange your clams in the salt (no, don't let the salt fall into the clam shells.) Carefully spoon the clam, bacon, and cream mixture into each shell. Use it all up if you can. Devour what you can't, sloppily and with your fingers, when no one is looking. Top each clam with a pinch of bread crumbs. Set into a hot oven until the cream mixture is bubbling and the bread crumbs are brown. (Your mileage may vary. This is a screaming-hot over, after all, and your margin of error between tasty clams and mollusan charcoal will be slim. Keep an eye on your clams, and be sure to pull the things if there is any sign of burning.)

Sprinkle the clams with the parsley. Serve right in the baking dish (remind your guests of the dangerous heat if you like them at all.) Pass lemon wedges (we actually used limes because they were already out--we were drinking mojitos!)

After the Fried Rice, a Farce

The leftover bamboo rice from Tuesday's beef salad was destined to be fried and served with dry-cooked long beans with shitake mushrooms and black bean sauce. A simple supper, as things go, and one that avoided a trip to the grocery store.

I don't cook Chinese-inspired food at home much. One reason is that there is an abundance of good, cheap Chinese restaurants in the Bay Area, most of which can turn out dishes as good or better than I could cook them for less than I would pay for the ingredients at the market. Okay, I can buy organic long beans and bean sprouts and pork that wasn't raised and exterminated at some piggy Dachau in Iowa. But somehow Legendary Palace in downtown Oakland can serve up a decent-sized Dungeness crab in black bean sauce at one o'clock in the morning for $10 when the same creature, still very much in need of boiling, would set me back as much from the tanks out at 99 Ranch. Maybe they start with dead crabs, but I haven't died from eating them--at least not yet--so who can complain? Another reason is that the dishes that I like from the Chinese culinary idiom, for the most part, need enormous amounts of heat and thin steel woks to turn out right. Hence, the Chinese wok range:

My first real restaurant job was at a long-defunct place in Portland, OR, called Earl Restaurant.
I was all of maybe twenty years old, and I had been working at a strange little tea room in Northwest Portland (the British Tea House, as if anyone remembers it) as a kind of cook-and-bottle washer, mixing up shepherd's pie and jam tarts for the two or three dowagers who would come in for lunch. The proprietress, a deranged Welshwoman, and I didn't really see eye to eye. So, after a new guy she hired, a recently repatriated American expat from Paris named Bwuce (for the Welshwoman had an terrible lisp)...wait, wait! This is getting out of hand! And what does it have to do with the Chinese wok range? I'll leave Bwuce aside for the moment

(I'll tell the story some other time. As a teaser, you just need to picture a man in his mid-forties who looks something like a low-rent Jim Morrison, stripped to the waist, digging rocks in the restaurant's back yard and preening his flowing tresses with a hair pick. Then imagine this same fellow, wearing a shirt and apron this time, diving at me in a fit of rage through a kitchen pass-through no bigger than a television set whilst I hack at his head with a butcher knife. Picture his flailing person smashing a half dozen Royal Doulton teapots as the deranged Welshwoman shrieks, "Sthop it! Sthop it, bohf of you!" Oh, the calamity!)

Anyway, suffice it to say that the gig at the tea house was not the best. When my good friend Paul, who waited tables at the tea house, took a job at Earl, he got me signed on in the kitchen. Earl was an interesting place to work for about a year--which is also another story. But the building it occupied (which is still, I think, a restaurant called Cozze, which sits at the corner of SE 12th and Morrison) had at one time been a Chinese restaurant. And it still had the wok ranges on the line.

Woo hoo! If you've never had the chance to cook over a wok range, you haven't lived. Now, I have a really powerful stove at home. My DCS has six burners, each capable of throwing out 17,500 btu's of pure fire. By contrast, most good-quality gas ranges made for home use have burners with maximum heat outputs between 5,000 and 12,000 btu's. So the DCS runs hot, and this makes sauteeing on the thing a real treat. But the standard output on a wok range is an infernal 110,000 btu's! Three concentric rings of open burners ignite with the pull of a huge steel valve lever, and a column of blue flame erupts from the steel collar that serves as a stand for the wok. A half-wok of water will boil in a minute. Oil in the pan will burn before you can say, "A 14, a 7, and 9 with lychees." Yet the wok range is also amazingly responsive, capable of being reduced to the barest simmer. Like a memorable lover, the wok range can coo and scream and do everything in between.

Add to this the fact that the woks used on wok ranges are thin steel affairs that heat very quickly and are light enough to make tossing food in the pan the best option for keeping things moving. You can poke at the food with a paddle or chopsticks, but throwing the food into the air with a gentle, rocking motion make the most sense--and it keeps you from mashing delicate ingredients with utensils.

Trying to get the same results on a flat range with a five-pound All-Clad chef's pan is a HUGE pain in the ass. So that, in a most round-about way, is why I don't often cook Chinese food at home. But tonight was a different story, as we shall see.



Fried Bamboo Rice with Shrimp and Chinese Sausage

4 C. day-old rice, very dry, preferably left uncovered in the fridge
2 eggs
2 T. dark soy sauce
1/2 t. sunflower oil
3 cloves garlic, chopped fine
1/2 white onion, chopped fine
2 T. grated fresh ginger
1 or more fresh serrano chillies, sliced thin in rings
2 carrots, peeled and cut in brunoise
1/2 C. fresh English peas (or frozen petit pois, rinsed to thaw)
1/2 C. small shrimp, peeled, deveined, and tailed; whole if really small or chopped coarse
1 Chinese sausage, cut into small rounds.
2 T. sunflower oil
1/4 C. sunflower oil

Start by breaking up clumps of rice by rubbing them between your fingers. The grains need to be free like beautiful wild horses. If your rice is very damp, you can spread it on a baking sheet and allow to dry--or even force the issue in a warm oven, although that seems like a lot of effort to go to for fried rice. I used that groovy bamboo-scented rice that I wrote about last night. The bamboo flavor persisted. Otherwise, it was the same as any other leftover rice.

Beat the eggs in a small bowl with soy sauce. In a small pan, heat 1/2 t. sunflower oil and scramble eggs until they are firm. You can do this however you're used to scrambling eggs, of course. I didn't as a matter of fact, use sunflower oil, since I scramble eggs in an 8" nonstick pan. I just use a shot of canola-oil pan spray. It's scrambling eggs, for Christ's sake. Do what works.

Heat your wok-like device (I use a chef's pan, which is wok-shaped with a flat bottom. A skillet will work, as would a sautée pan. I would think twice about doing this in a saucepan, though.) Heat 2 T. of oil over high heat until it begins to shimmer. Toss in garlic, onion, ginger, chilli, and carrots and toss vigorously. (You can leave out the chillies if you don't want the spice.) Keep everything moving, lest the garlic and ginger burn. When the mixture is fragrant and the onion starts to look clear, throw in the peas, shrimp, and sausage. (Cubes of fried or smoked tofu would be good here, too, as might leftover meat like chicken or pork. Throw in some hamburger if you long to get back to your double-wide roots.) Toss for a few minutes more, and then add the soy. Toss for a few more moments and then taste a carrot. If it's soft enough, turn the lot out into a bowl and set aside. If your carrots are still too firm, add a splash of water and cover for a minute or two. This will have some adverse affect on the rest of the ingredients, but you're really playing to the carrots here. If they're too firm, your rice will be most unpleasant in the mouth. Of course, you can dispense with this by blanching your carrots or leaving them out entirely.

CLEAN YOUR PAN! Take it to the sink and wash out anything that is stuck to the bottom. You need to fry your rice in an absolutely clean and dry pan. Heat 1/4 C. of oil until it shimmers:

A word about oil: This shimmering business--learn to recognize it. Most of the time, your frying and sauteeing will fail because you didn't let the oil get hot enough to caramelize your food when it hits the pan. But, of course, black and scorched oil taste foul, will ruin a dish, and purportedly causes cancer. Finding the sweet spot where oil is very hot yet not burnt is the trick to frying and sauteeing well. Shimmering oil looks a little like heat rising off hot asphalt, wavy and psychedelic. The shimmer is a more reliable indicator than the first curls of smoke, which appear when the oil is a little too hot for my liking and which vary significantly by oil (the higher the smoke point, the longer it takes for the haze to appear.) All cooking oils seem to shimmer at about the same temperature.

When your oil is hot, sift in your rice. Don't overcrowd the pan. Ideally, each grain will have a little oil bath that will cook the starch on the outside, heating through the rice and keeping the grains free-flowing. Toss the pan vigorously, and keep things moving.

When the rice is heated through and had taken on a little color, remove from the heat and toss in the scrambled egg, Check the stir fry to make sure it's not swimming in liquid. If you did things right, it shouldn't be--but if it is, pour off the liquid before adding the melange to the rice pot. Toss well tocombine. Taste your creation. If it's bland, you can add more soy or salt. (I read that soy sauce isn't traditionally added to fried rice, but I like it--so there.)

Turn out the mix into a serving dish and scatter with scallions.

Dry-Cooked Long Beans with Shitake Mushrooms and Black Bean Sauce

1/3 C. sunflower oil
1 lb. long beans
1/2 lb. fresh shitake mushrooms, stemmed and sliced
1 1/2 white onions, cut into chunks the size of a postage stamp
2 cloves garlic, chopped fine
1 T. fresh ginger, grated
1 serrano chilli, sliced thin in rings
2 T. soy sauce
2 T. black bean paste or whole fermented black beans

Heat oil until it shimmers--or even a little longer, which goes against what I just wrote but which works better with mushrooms. Add mushrooms gradually, making sure that they fry vigorously and start taking on color right away. If you add mushrooms to oil that isn't hot enough, they turn into unpleasant little grease sponges, adding senseless calories to you're already unpleasant dinner. Note that you want your mushrooms to be Atacama-dry when they hit the pan--or as close to dry as nature allows. This is easy with cultivate mushrooms, which are always fairly dry unless your local market has those goddamned misters pointed at the mushrooms. (This is normally not the case, since decent markets with good produce turnover don't need misters, and even the ones that have them generally have good sense to keep the mushroom on the other side of the room. But maybe you ate a baby in a past life and, perforce, must shop for "food" at a Safeway or Lucky, where the produce is maintained by non-union mental defectives. For God's sake! Move already!) If you're cooking wild mushrooms (and you are to be commended for doing so), do what you can to dry them off and keep them that way. It goes without saying that you should never wash a mushroom. If you need to clean them, dab at them with a dry towel.

When your mushrooms have colored, toss in the long beans. Toss--what's that word? Yes! Vigorously. Chinese cooking will keep your arms toned and shapely. When the beans start to look blistered and wrinkly, add the onion, garlic, ginger and chilli. Toss, toss, toss.

Did I mention that this is a lot nicer, both for you and for those with whom you cohabit if you have good ventilation? If you rent, you get what you pay for. Best of luck to you. But if you own and you actually cook with any regularity, go out and get a massive exhaust fan that vents to the outside. Rebuild your walls if you have to. You won't believe the difference it makes. 1200 cfm suction and direct outdoor venting will change your life, I promise.

You're ready to sauce it up when your onions are toothsome. Eat one. It should be sweet and without sting, but still have a little kick and crunch. This preparation treats onions like a table vegetable, so proceed accordingly.

When the onions are to your liking, make a little well in the center of the pan. Dump in the soy and black bean paste and stir to smooth out the black bean. If you need to, add a splash of water. When the sauce becomes free-flowing, toss with the rest to combine. Serve instanter! (With the aforementioned fried rice, of course.)

So, what about the farce? Well, I really didn't want to turn this thing into a political vehicle, but what can you do? I read the idiotic tale of the kangaroo court that tried and convicted Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a poor fool with a fourth-grade education who had the misfortune of taking a job driving Osama bin Laden around the back roads of Afghanistan sometime in the distant past and who has languished in the US's own little Cuban concentration camp for five or so years, waiting for his day in court. I'm not actually prepared here to launch a well-reasoned attack against the whole Gitmo thing. Of course it's an outrage, and I have not the slightest doubt that history will brand George Bush the Younger for it's invention and perpetuation, one of his countless crimes against God and man. But in flipping through the AP slide show about the sham trial, landed on two photos of interest to a food blog.

One depicts Hamdan at what appears to be a celebration, a wedding or some such. He's in a white top, sitting on some pillows in Arabian Nights splendor, with some sort of cake in front of him. He has that dumb, satisfied look on his face that any of us might wear at a party. "Mmm, cake," he seems to say. Now, this, I'm sure, will be another post at some point, but what the fuck is up with cake? I've confessed to not having a sweet tooth, but it seems to me that the very existence of cake flies in the face of what we know about life--namely, that it's brutal, ugly, and short. Who in the hell are we kidding by confecting a thing that is icky sweet, angelic white, soft and fluffy like a cloud? We eat it to mark happy time as if to say, "Look how happy I am? Everything in life is sunshine and puppy dogs." I think we should take shots of Campari to celebrate happy events, or even down the hideous Fernet Branca--I mean, even the kids. Let 'em drink. The more bitter the better. That way, we could affirm, "Today I might be happy, but life leave a bitter taste in my mouth, no as always. You won't fool me, life!"

The other photo that got my dander up depicts--wait for it!--the McDonald's at Guantanamo. That's right, along with maintaining a military base on the island that we, as a country, have been strangling for more than forty years, we've imported the most despicable of the fast foods there and ornamented it with the faggy effigy of Ronald McDonald. You can see for yourself; just Google it. The fiberglass clown is right there, waving at the senselessly detained "unlawful combatants" who languish in the hot sun behind chain link and razor wire. He raises his gloved fist, welcoming our service people to enjoy cardboard patties of mysterious, organy meat between vapid, sugary buns. Or perhaps it's a diabetes-provoking tun of the newly promoted Sweet Tea.

Either way, a farce. And with that, I'll finish up.

The Dangers of Beef Salad

It's no accident that the first two entries on this blog are Southeast-Asian inspired.

I came to good food late in life, all things considered. I was in college before I tasted my first Pad Thai, negi-hama maki, chana masala, tsebhi dorho...hell, just about anything more thrilling than carne asada burritos and the six-taquito special. (Not to put a bad spin on either, both of which can be transcendent. In fact, I defy any foodstuff to taste better at three o'clock in the morning, while a quarter bottle of Wild Turkey and some kind of pink pill are vying for control of your central nervous system, than half a pound of grilled steak, pico, guac, pinto beans, and Mexican rice wrapped in a warm flour tortilla and soused with salsa picante. All right, all right. There is probably one thing: golden sterlet caviar eaten from the naked thigh of a swimsuit model, chased with straight shavings of white Umbrian truffle and high-grade Columbian flake, washed down with Krug Clos du Mensil Blanc de Blancs drunk from a plastic sippy cup. But I can't say for certain, as I've only done that once. And, as I recall, the carne asada burrito was a close second.)

Anyway, since I didn't have a whole childhood to ease into good food, I took to the subject with a vengeance, trying to make up for lost time. What I ended up with was a very catholic, very uninhibited palate. To this day, I don't need more than a single hand to count the things that I don't like to eat. Artichokes come to mind, as does eggplant, although carciofi alla giudua and baba ghanoush give this the lie. And to tell the truth, I don't love to eat a great big steak, but this is more a reluctance to eat a whole meal of any one thing in particular than an aversion to good beef. And few meals can compare to the parilla at La Cabrera in the Palermo Viejo barrio of Buenos Aires, where the bife de chorizo comes to the table, spitting hot, bejeweled with coarse salt, and weeping oily tears on its wood plank, flanked with the most succulent mollejas (veal sweetbreads), likewise seared on the parilla, mayonnaise of quail eggs, cherry tomatoes in vinaigrette...But I digress. Back to the subject at hand:

If you push it further, I suppose, I probably don't need more than a single finger to count the foods that I don't care for (real food, I mean, which expressly excludes splendid performance-art creations like the Mango-Lentil-Chow Mein Enchilada and Blue-Cheese Meyer-Lemon-Chicken Bokwurst Spring Roll Appetizer OktoberFiesta Platter at Applebee's.) But back to the discussion at hand...

The consequence of this liberality of taste is that I have something of a jaded palate. I have eaten and enjoyed so many gastronomical extremes, that means, be they ever so golden, tend to bore me into a stupor. Give me searing spice, puckering sours, hair-raising bitters. Pack me in salt until I look like Lot's wife. The only things I don't love in excess are sweets, which even in small doses are not my favorite. Yes, this includes chocolate, which I can take or leave. In fact, I'm continually perplexed with most of your obsessions with the stuff--but that is for another post.

Don't get me wrong: I totally regard my impatience with simple, subtle food as a personal failing, a weakness of character. Some nights I pray that I might, like MFK Fisher, swoon over the segments of a tangerine, preciously dried on a Parisian radiator on a lonely winter afternoon. Or that, like Thich Nhat Han or Jon Kabat-Zinn, I could languish over a single nectarine or raisin for hours, mindfully soaking up its essential suchness. I dearly love to be transported by broccoli rapini, hours from the field and steamed to perfection or chicken skin that explodes like a Pringle on my tongue. And I am, often. But only for a few bites. Then I'm off to the kitchen for the Tabasco or the chilli flakes, the fish sauce or vinegar.

In my defense, James Beard, the doyen of Real American gastronomy (that's Real with a capital R) was so afflicted. Remember his injunction to cook with "acres of garlic" at a time when most American recipes, if they included that holy bulb at all, called for it to be rubbed unbruised against the walls of the salad bowl and then discarded?

To make a short story brief, I have a serious yen for "vivid" food, avalanches of flavor. And no one does vivid like the good people of Thailand, Vietnam, and Korea (and Mexico, but that's another episode.) These three cuisines balance cooked and raw (vive Levi-Strauss!), the hot and unctuous, the sour and bitter like no other. Sadly, after a decade or so of screaming, loud and proud Ring-of-Fire specialties, even the most sublimely balanced cassoulet or blanquette de veau, well, leaves me yawning. (Incidentally, my lack of a sweet tooth is no liability in any of these three cuisines, any any dessert freak at a Thai, Vietnamese, or Korean restaurant will lament to you: mugwort cake, anyone?)

So when I'm standing in the market, trying to figure out what to put on the table on a Tuesday evening, what comes to mind? To my lovely wife's distress (a woman with a fine and subtly tuned palatte who would eat fettucini a la carbonara and lightly dressed mesclun each night of the week if I weren't in the picture), my mind jumped to Thai beef salad. This, of course, just makes it all the harder for me to return to Western flavor temperance the next day--but that's just how it goes.




Yam Neua (Thai Beef Salad)

This is a rip off of the stellar beef salad at Soi 4 in Oakland, a very nice little place that dishes up some progressive Thai dishes in a hip and comfortable atmosphere. One nice touch they add, which you'll find below, is the addition of roasted rice powder to the salad. This adds an unmistakable and very pleasant crunch to the finished product.

For the best seasoning in the world:
fresh green and red Thai chillis
fish sauce

Slice the peppers thinly and float in fish sauce. Don't touch any woman (you care about) in an...intimate way for literally days after you make this condiment. And don't kiss any woman (you care about) in an...intimate way for, well, ever again after eating this condiment. It may seem like a lot to give up at first---but seriously, you need to taste this stuff.

For the dressing:
4 limes, juiced
1/3 C. fish sauce
1/3 C. sunflower seed oil
1 T. toasted seame oil
1 T. brown or palm sugar
3 cloves garlic, crushed to a paste
a decent piece of fresh ginger, grated, with juice

Combine in a small bowl and set aside. Mix a couple of times while preparing the rest of the dish to ensure that the sugar is disolved.

For the beef:

1/2 C. white rice (jasmine, basmati, or something else that smells nice)
1 pound grass-fed skirt steak (or hanger, butcher, or flank)
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
a decent piece of garlic, grated, with juice
1 T. fish sauce
2 T. toasted sesame oil
1 T. dark soy sauce
1 T. five-spice powder

Put the raw white rice into a small pan or skillet. Toss of high heat until the grains turn gold and have a nutty fragrance. Be careful not to overcook or burn. Turn rice out into a bowl and cool. Then grid fine in using a coffee grinder or a mortar and pestle. Set rice powder aside.

Cut the beef into managable pieces. If you use a thicker cut, butterfly the beef so that it will cook quickly. Toss together marinade ingredients to combine. Add beef and mix to coat well. Set aside for as long as practical: moments to days. Get your grill as hot as possible. When you're ready to grill your beef, slap it on the hot grill and leave it be until it takes on a lot of color. Flip once. You're shooting for good char at about medium rare. Let the meet stand after it comes off the grill, and then slice it thin against the grain. Toss in rice powder.

For the salad:

2 shallots, sliced thin
sunflower oil for frying
1/2 small head white cabbage
2 small heads butter lettuce
1 bunch cilantro
1 bunch mint
1 sweet red onion, slice thinly
1 C. mixed cherry tomatoes
1 C. mung bean sprouts
2 scallions, sliced thinly on an extreme bias

Fry the shallots in oil until crisp and crunchy. This takes time. Be patient. When you're done, save the oil. It's wicked good, especially in vinaigrettes.

Cut the cabbage into eights, leaving a little stem intact so that the wedges will stay together. Set aside. Wash and dry lettuce, cilantro, and mint. Combine with other vegetables.

To assemble the dish:

Dip the cabbage wedges in the dressing and arrange, compass rose-esque, in a serving bowl. Toss the remaining dressing with the vegetables. Arrange the vegetable melage among the cabbage wedges. Top with the rice-powder spiked beef. Top this with the crispy shallots. Serve with the love-limiting Thai-chilli condiment. Eat until you ache.

A note: I served with with a grain that I have only recently discovered: white rice tinged with bamboo juice. It's very good and very unusul, with a lovely color and an aroma reminiscent of--oh, I don't know. Bamboo? That's pobably too easy, but it's accurate. If you'e ever chewed up a toothpick from a Chinese restaurant (which seem, universally, to abjure the softwood toothpicks that feature at every Western restaurant in creation), you know what this tastes like. Pretty damned good, in my opinion.

A Lazy Saturday Supper

Bun with Grilled Pompano and Nước Chấm

For nước chấm:
1/2 c. water
1/2 c. lime juice or rice vinegar
1/3 c. nước mắm (fish sauce)
3 cloves garlic, chopped fine
1 t. red chilli flake
1 T. brown sugar (okay, I used palm sugar, but I a shameless geek. Use brown sugar).

Ninety-nine recipes out of a hundred will tell you to heat the liquid part of this recipe in order to disolve the sugar—and you can. Or you can just stir it a bunch like I did. It worked by and by, and I never needed to cool the mixture. I read at least one recipe that claimed that the boiling stage would allow you to keep the sauce longer. I wonder about that. The acid in the vinegar or lime juice and the salt in the fish sauce would work to preserve the stuff, but not enough to make it shelf-stable. With the garlic in there, you'd still need to refrigerate it and eat it sooner rather than later. Frankly, I never have any left over at the end of a meal, anyway. Oh, yes: set this aside until you're ready to eat.


For bún:
bún (Some. I don't know. A package? Two? It costs practically nothing.)
2 carrots, peeled and julienned (I use a Benriner, and a mandolin would work nicely)
1/2 bunch cilantro, torn whimsically
1/2 bunch fresh mint, handled similarly to the cilantro
1/2 head iceburg lettuce, chiffonade (or use a couple of head of butter lettuce)
cucumber, peel on, julienned
peanuts, chopped
Sriracha and hoisin sauces (for the table)

Follow the package directions to prepare the bún. This seems to always involve soaking the stuff in hot water. I tend to boil water for this purpose. If I don't, the noodles seem too wirey to my teeth. If you like yours softer, you might throw them into a boiling pot, but be careful to keep them at least passably al dente. Prepare all of the vegetables, taking care not to fuss over how they turn out. If you don't have a slicer, chop them by hand, as finely as you can manage. To prepare the bowl, put the lettuce and cucumber in the bottom of the bowl, topped with the noodles, topped with the herbs, carrots, and peanuts. (or some other order that suits you. It is totally irrelevant.) Set aside.

For grilled pompano:
(for about three pounds of whole fish)
3 T. fresh ginger, peeled and grated
6 cloves garlic, crushed and chopped fine
1/2 bunch cilantro, chopped
3 T. nước mắm (fish sauce—I used Three Crabs brand)
pompano or other small fish, about a pound of whole-fish weight per person (using pompano, this amounts to about three fish per serving)
coarse salt
lime wedges (for the platter)

Combine ginger, garlic, cilantro, and fish sauce in a bowl. Set aside.

Scale and clean fish if necessary. When working with the small, farm-raised pompano, I found kitchen shears worked best for removing the dorsal and pectoral fins and gills. Rinse fish clean and pat dry with kitchen towels. Using a sharp knife, make three sharp incisions in each side of the fish, cutting through the fillet to the spine but not through it. These cuts will let the marinade penetrate the fish. Toss the fish in the marinade, taking care to rub the mixture well into the cuts. Leave fish in bowl with marinade. Cover tightly with plastic wrap and refrigerate for as much time as you can manage, at least an hour or two.

Preheat your grill. I used an old, filthy, run-down propane Weber that suits me fine. If you have the time and patience to fire up charcoal or, saints preserve us, hardwood, more power to you. I prefer to eat an hour sooner, and while I can tell the difference, I can't say it seems worth the bother. Pull fish from marinade and wipe dry. Brush with oil or, better yet, spritz with a high-quality cooking spray (I use expeller-pressed sunflower oil from Spectrum. It works like Pam without the low-culture stigma.) The aerosol makes it easy to get a thin, even coat. Above all, make sure the fish isn't dripping oil, which will lead to sooty flare-ups, especially if you're being hardcore and using solid fuel under our grill. Salt the fish generously, remembering that much of it will fall off on the grill. The heat at grill time will vary with the size of your fish. Using tiny pompano, I ran the grill at the highest heat and left the burners on directly under the fish. Each side took about five minutes, which cooked the fish just through and nicely crisped the skin. If you use a bigger fish, you will want to use lower heat and leave the fish on the grill longer. If the fish is monstrous, you might want to cook the fish indirectly, but I would still leave the other burners on high.

To bring it all together, set out the grilled fish on a platter with some lime wedges. Give each diner a noodle bowl and a side of nước chấm. MY pompano were very bony, so my people needed plates for the fish, someplace to pick through the bones. If you had a fleshier fish, your people might be able to pull chunks of grilled fish from the carcass directly to their bowls. Splash the whole affair with lime juice and, if you care to, with Sriracha and/or hoisin sauces.

Here's the thing: I have a sad yet profound infatuation with Sriracha sauce. I think it goes back to a bar I used to drink at in Portland, OR, that used the stuff in lieu of ketchup with its fries. That got me hooked, and my jaded palatte now often doesn't register that I'd been fed unless I swallow down a half bottle of the stuff. Don't get me wrong: I doubt very much if this dish needs the added spice. I certainly don't think that the subtletly of the fish is embellished by the salty, searing condiment. But what can you do? I'm gonna eat it no matter what.