Cooking
Now’s the time for dinners that are simple and delicious and just for you.
Good morning. There was a Cooper’s hawk sitting on top of a road sign off the Long Island Expressway the other afternoon, in the wake of Thanksgiving. My daughter spotted it and was able to point it out to me because the traffic was crawling and thick. The bird looked under the weather, as I was at the time, and was staring vacantly out toward the Pine Barrens, as I had been staring vacantly at the sea of red brake lights before me.
The holiday season can be draining, on birds as on humans. According to the guidebooks, Coop should maybe have been in the Carolinas by now, as I should probably have been in bed in Brooklyn. But there are plenty of backyard chickens to eat on Long Island these days, and maybe he was contemplating the ratios of risk and reward in flying further or just hanging out and making do out there in suburbia — his own private Long Island Compromise.
We’re headed into the season of the office party, the office parties, the client dinners, the neighborhood gatherings, into Christmas and Hanukkah and Kwanzaa and New Year’s Eve. It’s important to take care of yourself as these festivities ring out, to make sure to balance all the delicious cookies and holiday roasts with meals that are simple and delicious and just for you.
For me this weekend, that’s going to be one of the recipes that Florence Fabricant adapted while reporting on how restaurant chefs are serving mushrooms as main courses: specifically the maitake au poivre (above) that Derek Boccagno serves at Cafe Chelsea in Manhattan. (She also writes about the crisp and lemony portobello Milanese that Marissa Lo cooks at Boat House in Tiverton, R.I.)
For the maitakes, Boccagno uses larger pieces not so much to imitate steak as to create a larger canvas of crispiness to absorb the sauce, and soy sauce to amplify the umami in the mushrooms. Each element builds on the other, and the dish picks up a golden sweetness from the flaming Cognac used at the end. Add a thatch of watercress to the plate and serve to someone you love. They’ll feel better for eating it, and fly high the following day. Who needs steak?
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