Book Report: Market Cooking & David Tanis

In My Market Basket

There are simple tasks in cooking that I mess up frequently.  I will look at a video on  how to remove pomegranate seeds easily and then forget about it.  Ditto flawlessly cooked rice or the perfect hard boiled egg. The latter two are dealt with succinctly in this book, and by now I have looked at those two pages often enough that the techniques, along with some others,  are embedded in my head. I started with this Tanis title and ended with all four of his books. This later volume now has a permanent place in the back seat of my car, always at hand when we go see what’s up in outdoor markets. I seem to wander from one book to another in no particular sequence or season.  But since I have been evangelizing about organic crops and farmers market cooking over several posts, this one is a good place to start. In non-virus times, we go in person to several markets – fewer in winter, but as April has arrived, it’s time to grab your basket and bags, and check out what’s available. Many markets have websites that allow you to know ahead what has just been pulled out of the earth, and many vendors allow you to preorder for pickup while so many markets are shuttered.  I have relied on some of the farmers who have cleverly turned to online pre-ordering with either a city-government-allowed pick-up point or delivery. David Tanis’s cookbook will help to forestall your inner compulsive buyer and perhaps ease you into produce you are unfamiliar with. Market Cooking absolutely shines in your produce box  or basket.

 

David Tanis was a chef at Chez Panisse, lived in Paris and somehow had a supper club in his third floor walk up. Recipes and techniques from his stint in restaurants in New Mexico also appear throughout his books.  He has written the most appealing columns  for the New York Times Food Section.  He teaches workshops for the Maria Tasca Lanza Cooking School in Sicily, which one day I would love to attend (when we are not traipsing through the astounding remains of over 4000 years of history). And he is a quietly engaging writer.  

Quick To Read & Easy To Do

Besides setting me straight on perfect boiled eggs and fluffy rice (Risotto is not a problem for me, but plain fluffy rice has had its ups and downs on my stove), his back-of-the-book Kitchen Essentials section is one you should read first.This hidden  little gem  is not a long treatise on making pantry items, but just a few unintimidating skills that you might not think of on your own. One example is making your own mayonnaise, and another is making small-batch stocks.   We have had an ongoing standoff in our marriage about mayonnaise. After several decades of purchasing  different bottles, both domestic and imported, the other person involved has agreed with David Tanis that homemade is sooooo much better. And it is done in less than 5 minutes. We use more grapeseed or sunflower oil to olive oil, but you can trust the author on this one. Then, a little stock (not gallons of it) can be made with trimmings from your produce box or basket, as well as discards from your cache of poultry, meat or fish, which I started to do when I read this part of the book. A quick soup, an almost instant risotto or a much more flavorful gravy for your roast has just been vastly improved. The equally short chapter in the front of the book sings the praises of  all alliums – garlic, shallots, scallions, leeks and onions. Don’t overlook it, even if you think you know your way around a head of garlic.  I now make his version of  skordalia, a Greek cousin to the French Aioli, and his Velvety Green Leek Soup. 

Conquering The Unknown

Do you  stare blankly in the produce section when looking at kohlrabi, celery root, or bok choy?  Market Cooking by David Tanis comes to the rescue with not a ton of recipes, but rather just a few well chosen ones that will make your scary new vegetable exploration a success. In my case,  it was bok choy. I had grilled them once, and it was kind of a shoulder-shrugging moment for me, but I noticed that my husband had tried to hide his behind a mound of protein. Try the recipe below, as it is good at room temperature as well as just out of the frypan or wok.  Tanis even presents new recipes for  familiar-to-me produce like zucchini blossoms, which I deep fry or add to a risotto or pasta. When you see them this summer, try his method for steaming them. Market Cooking also introduced me to miso, both red and white. It now graces eggplant and fall squashes thanks to the recipes found in this lovely  book. 

If you make a small batch stock, use it to make a celery root soup, by dicing  and sautéing it with aromatics. Then puree it with the stock and season to taste. Or make Tanis’s version of Céleri Rave Rémoulade. It is one of our winter staples, and you can garnish it with ham and microgreens.  This knobby croquet ball survives remarkably well in your crisper drawer. I found a forgotten one several weeks after I bought it and it still made a good salad. Allowing the shavings of celery root to marinate for a at least a few hours as directed in his recipe is important, so don’t skip it. Leftover Céleri -Rave Rémoulade behaves nicely in the fridge too and makes a tasty addition to a beef sandwich. 

The meat of Market Cooking by David Tanis is obviously mostly vegetables even the ones that get short shrift in the US. That would be cardoons.  The chef owner of La Fromagerie once gave me a huge stash and I raced home to prepare them. This was an all-day project and in the end, my enthusiasm for cardoons was not shared by the other member of this household.  Not so with fennel. We have it raw, sliced thinly with oranges and black olives as a winter salad and have been fixated on the braised fennel with garlic from the first River Cafe cookbook.

If you have been wavering about fennel, you must try Tanis’s Fennel Al Forno, which can be a vegetarian main course too. Save some fennel fronds for your bag of frozen vegetable trimmings for stock and some to garnish the top of this gratin. As David Tanis says, “Expect raves”.