Rich Mintz

Last night’s dinner (and this night’s too): an asparagus risotto that’s SO EASY that even you can make it.  Lots of people have a terror of risotto, but it is very difficult to screw up, and beginning to end, it takes only about 40 minutes.  Adapted from Mark Bittman.

What to do:

• Wash about half a bunch of asparagus, break off the woody ends, chop into roughly 3/4-inch pieces, and nuke them in the microwave in a covered bowl for about 2 minutes.
• Take an ordinary saucepan, pour in a quart (32 ounces) of stock (I used a Tetra-Pak of chicken stock), and turn the heat on low.  You want it to be hot, but not boiling.
• Chop a medium onion — minced if you’re a good chopper, or just rough small pieces, it doesn’t really matter.
• Put a second (heavy, if you have it) saucepan on the stove.  Melt about 2 tablespoons of butter over medium heat, and when it’s sizzling, drop in the onion.  Cook for a few minutes until the onion has started to get soft (but not brown).
• Measure about 1 1/2 cups of Arborio rice, pour it into the buttery onion, and stir it around.
• Add some salt and pepper.
• Pour about 1/2 cup of white wine (whatever you have handy) into the rice-onion mixture, and stir it over medium heat for a few minutes until most of the liquid bubbles away.
• Add about half a cup of stock to the rice mixture.  (I just dip a mug into one pot and pour it into the other.)  Keep the heat medium-high on the rice mixture and stir/scrape intermittently with a wide spatula, to make sure it doesn’t stick to the bottom or sides.
• As the stock bubbles away from the rice mixture, add another half-cup of stock and stir.  As it cooks, the mixture should be neither soupy nor dried out.
• Keep repeating this.  It will take between 20 and 30 minutes for all the stock to be absorbed into the rice.  Stop adding stock when the rice tastes cooked but still a little chewy.  You may have a little stock left over, which you can feed to the cat.
• In between dealing with the rice, grate about 1/2 cup of good Parmesan and set it aside.
• When the rice is done, fold in the grated Parmesan and adjust the seasonings.  Then fold in the asparagus you cooked in the microwave.  Then serve with a crusty bread.

… and am reminded that, as delicious as they are, they are also fragrant, and my hallway neighbors are probably wondering “what died in the compactor room?” right about now.

Are there any tips that minimize the stench of boiling cabbage and cabbage-like substances that actually work? A beloved member of my family (now deceased), who will remain nameless to protect her reputation, once said that if you put a piece of dry bread in the steamer, it soaks up the fragrance, but to be honest that always sounded like voodoo to me. (Plus, this woman once tried the fad of cooking fish in the dishwasher, but didn’t seal the packets very well — or maybe she added too much detergent, I forget — and ended up with a big mess. So I’m inclined to discount her advice by 40 percent right off the top).

Well, not imaginable. But it was pretty good.

At Fairway recently I came across the label below, which promised, in part, “Unsurpassed! The best domestic cheddar you will ever taste.”

“Pish tosh!” I replied, in my head. “Yet another example of marketing language getting out of hand.” But I bought.

Boy, was I wrong.

I think I can safely say not only that this Grafton Village is the best domestic cheddar I’ve ever tasted — it’s the best cheddar I’ve ever tasted, period. And it’s not just the cheese itself — it’s the milk underneath, which has a quality to it that my city-trained palate has trouble describing. “Roundness” is what comes to mind. Never mind comparing this to Kraft — very few of the expensive cheddars I’ve ever tried is anything like this. It’s so intense that I can only eat a limited amount at a time, not because it’s “rich” (i.e., full of fat) but because the flavor is so sensually intense.

The only cheddar I can think of that impacted me this way is an aged English extra-super-sharp cheddar that was brought back to me (probably illegally) on a plane as a gift several years ago, but that one was appealing in a very different way — it was semi-dry, crumbly, almost crystalline in parts, more like a Parmigiano-Reggiano. This Grafton Village, in contrast, tastes of bright fresh ripeness — you can tell, if you’ll pardon the expression, that it came out of a cow who was in the blush of good health when she gave us our gift of milk, surrounded by loved ones, probably in some sort of dell or vale with the sound of a fresh bubbling brook blowing into the barn on a spring breeze.

This sort of ripeness is a kind of taste that has basically been selected out of American industrial food production — things are vastly better in America, foodwise, than they were twenty years ago, but industrial dairy still sucks. My mother used to say that dairy products were better, fresher, brighter when she was a child, and I think this may be what she meant.

Grafon Village is the perfect centerpiece of a light summer lunch, which you can see at right. Seltzer courtesy of Sodastream. The only thing that would make this lunch better is a whole scallion (I forgot to buy them), and perhaps a dill pickle so gently pickled that it tastes like a cucumber you dipped in the sea and then set down for a few moments in the same room as a garlic clove. And, of course, home-baked bread, but I’m out.

Right on the heels of this post about the Toddy coffee system comes this WSJ article reviewing all sorts of cold-brewing methods.

I’ve had the Keurig for about a month, and I’ve been quite happy with it, now that I’ve learned its quirks. Best 99 dollars I’ve spent in a long while.

Two downsides, easily solved. One downside is that the coffee, once adulterated with milk, isn’t always quite hot enough (solution: hot milk). Another downside is that it only makes about 7 ounces at a time (solution: have more cups).

At first I thought the coffee was also too weak, but that turned out to be easily solved: grind finer, and pack more coffee into the filter cup. I fill the thing all the way to the rim, and tamp it down slightly.

The quality of the beans makes a big difference, too — as big or bigger than when brewing via the conventional drip method. Obviously Gorilla makes an excellent cup, but I’m not in Park Slope every week.

I’ve tried a lot of the beans that are easy to get hold of in my neighborhood (including Peet’s and Porto Rico). And I’m a little surprised to say that as a staple coffee, I’ve found that the Whole Foods “365″ everyday-value French Roast whole bean is the one I like best. It makes an exceptionally good cup in this thing, good enough that I’ve made a special trip there to get some more.

Homemade Pop Tarts, brought to my attention by the Wandering Foodie, are either brilliant, or the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of. I’m right on the line, and not about to try to make something whose recipe is full of warnings about having to “rotate the dough in and out of the freezer.” Nuh-uh. But I still think it’s kind of cool that someone did, and that the results were (for her, anyway), more than acceptable.

After being handed a cup of what sure looked like commercial iced coffee this morning at a Tribeca deli, poured out of a gallon jug with the label still on, I noticed this post promoting the virtues of a cold-brewing coffee device called the Toddy. I’d previously seen Matt Yglesias touting the virtues of cold-brewed iced coffee, but it seemed like a lot of work (the same way I felt about the “sun tea” fanatics I knew when I lived in the South). But the raves about the Toddy (like this one) are so emphatic, I’m reconsidering.

The thing is only 30 bucks — I’m thinking maybe I should just get one and try it. I’m attracted to the idea of “coffee concentrate” — I can think of a lot of interesting things I could do in the kitchen with that. I love my coffee, but I’m one of the people who’s bothered by both the acid and (at times) the caffeine, so this seems like an alternative worth exploring.

Buy yours from Amazon at this link and I’ll get a little something out of the deal… and you can also read, like, 200 reviews, most of which look pretty positive.

I ended up with a bunch of blueberries in the fridge that were a bit too far gone to eat fresh — so, in about 40 minutes, most of which I spent doing other things, I just made blueberry muffins that taste more delicious and less artificial than anything you buy in the store, and that (based on knowing what I put into them) are quite a bit healthier, too. I haven’t made muffins in ages, but they turned out quite well. I used this recipe, because I know Alton Brown’s a straight shooter, but I amped up the blueberry content significantly. (In my opinion, as you know, the best use of a muffin is as an efficient delivery system for blueberries in volume.) I also used a heavy commercial-grade muffin pan, which is how you get the thick brown crust on the bottoms.

Hint: 1 cup of flour weighs about 4 ounces, according to the Internet. (And if you’re one of those people who panics if the proportions are off by 5 percent, buy a scale.)

Because it was that kind of week, last night was a stay-home-and-cook night, accompanied by a Casey Kasem American Top 40 countdown from the summer of 1975 on Sirius XM. (The number-one song: title track from this album.) On the menu: linguini and meatballs, roasted squash, and fresh bread.

I’m particularly proud of yesterday’s bread. With practice, and some tinkering with the proportions and the rise times, the bread is looking classier and classier, as you see below.

This was made off the standard recipe, except that (1) for the first time in ages, I used only King Arthur white bread flour, with no other flours or grains added; and (2) it got a seven-hour first rise and a two-hour second rise.

I think I prefer having some other grains in the mix, and I think it needs a longer second rise (and a shorter first rise), but this is still exceptionally good bread (as good in its way as any artisan bread you can buy at the store, or better) — and I made it with my own hands.

The two orange squash in last week’s photo turned into the side dish you see above, with a bonus serving of toasted squash seeds, which those of you who lived through the 1970s in a yogurt-and-macramé household, as I did, will recall as one of nature’s treats. The squash were a little immature, so the flesh wasn’t quite as sweet as it might be, but on the other hand it was richer and subtler than what you get in the store.

And, finally, the meatballs. We use a freestyle adaptation of Mark Bittman’s spaghetti-and-meatballs recipe from this book, which has gradually become the first cookbook I reach for. This being the 10th batch of meatballs or so, I don’t even look at the recipe anymore, but from memory here it is more or less. Like almost everything I cook regularly, the recipe is really forgiving (otherwise it’s not worth building a habit around). For the chopping, I use the chopper attachment to my hand mixer, which leads to slightly chunky meatball innards; the results would be more even and consistent with a real food processor.

Get out a big bowl and dump into it:
1 pound ground sirloin plus 1/2 pound ground pork, broken up with your hands into small chunks to aid in combining
1 large carrot, chopped fine
2 shallots OR 1 medium onion, chopped fine
2-3 large garlic cloves, chopped fine
1 cup stale breadcrumbs OR 1 cup virtually any leftover cooked grain from the fridge, e.g., cooked rice
About 1/2 cup chopped fresh parsley, if you have it
About 1/2 cup grated good or good-ish parmesan, romano, or other dry or dry-ish cheese (don’t use crap, but it doesn’t have to be the gold-medal stuff)
2 raw eggs
A spoonful of Asian chili garlic sauce, some dried chopped jalapenos from the spice rack, cumin, and quite a bit more salt than you think you need

Mush all this up with your hands until you have a big lump of raw meatball substance. Form into meatballs of your preferred size, and cook in a large, deep skillet in hot olive oil, turning very frequently, until browned all over. Remove meatballs from pan.

Pour off most of the oil, then pour a jar of high-quality marinara sauce into the drippings. (It’s worth not skimping on the sauce; don’t ruin perfect meatballs with a jar of Ragu!) Warm the sauce, then add the meatballs back in and coat all over. Serve over the pasta of your choice.

I’m at Fairway Cafe stuffing an egg salad sandwich on whole grain bread into my maw with the hunger of a just-unfrozen caveman after 10,000 years in a block of ice. And I’m reflecting on how lucky we all are that the owners’ plans to close it have apparently been shelved for now, thanks in part to a successful neighborhood grassroots effort. Just goes to show you: you can mess with the subway, you can mess with the streetscape, you can mess with legendary institutions — but don’t mess with our food. Or something.