Category: Reviews

Möeca: A wonderful new restaurant for Cambridge

Leave a comment

Möeca at 1 Shepard Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts is a classic example of a Boston-area restaurant that offers wonderful flavors in new and compelling dishes. It is presented by the folks who gave us Giulia, so expectations were high.

The dish of the evening was the green crab custard with black truffles and leeks. Our (warm, friendly, knowledgeable) waitress explained that the idea behind the dish is to make an appealing dish out of an invasive and destructive species—green crabs are bad for oysters in particular.

The savory, creamy result was a big hit. A very creative and delicious solution to a problem.

The big dishes were equally well done. The cassoulet was a big hit among a party that has spent a good deal of time in France and paid attention to the food while there. The butter beans in that dish, always a key element, were delicious.

Dessert offered, among a list of compelling items, a lemon bombe that was out-of-the-park good. I don’t know when I’ve had a better lemon curd. Intense without the harsh edge that sometimes accrues. Even one spoonful made a memorable conclusion to a wonderful meal in a memorably charming restaurant.

Learn more about Möeca on their website: https://www.moecarestaurant.com/

The Cookie Bible

Leave a comment

If you have any interest in baking, you know Rose Levy Beranbaum, acclaimed for her must-have tome The Cake Bible. She offers both creative excellence and technical mastery. Her advice is compelling and masterful, and she provides a treasury of technical information as well as peerless judgment. This work is every bit as valuable as The Cake Bible and every bit as wide-ranging geographically. Have you ever made kourambiethes? Chocolate puff pastry? Pepparkakors – a stunning recipe with lots of black pepper from Norway?

If you have children, start with her recipe for Lion’s Paws, adorable-looking cookies complete with claws. This is one she invented as part of a magazine article. Look for the hidden chocolate chips. Brilliant!

Altogether, this is a master’s program in cookie making. You will find both techniques to improve your cooking and many wildly delicious recipes. Here is one:

Rose’s Crescents

Ingredients:

  • 113 grams of unsalted butter
  • 33 grams of sugar (ideally superfine)
  • 28 grams of blanched, sliced almonds
  • 118 grams of bleached, all-purpose flour
  • A pinch of sea salt

An hour before you begin, cut the butter into tablespoon-sized pieces and set them aside to soften.

Process the almonds with the sugar until the nuts are finely ground. Add the butter one piece at a time, and scrape down the sides of the bowl. Add the flour and the salt and pulse until they are incorporated. Scrape the sticky dough onto a sheet of plastic wrap. Press into a thick disc. Wrap and refrigerate for 1 to 2 hours, until the dough is firm.

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees for 20 minutes at least, with a rack in the middle of the oven.

Topping

Make a topping with 50 grams of superfine sugar and a quarter teaspoon of cinnamon.

Shaping the Dough

Divide the dough into four equal pieces. Refrigerate three and allow the fourth piece to sit for 10 minutes, then knead it until it is malleable. Pinch off half-tablespoons of dough, roll into cylinders, bend them into crescent shapes, and place them an inch apart on a cookie sheet. Cover with plastic wrap and continue until the sheet is full.

Bake for eight minutes, rotate the sheet, and bake for six to eight minutes more (don’t let the cookies brown). Use a skinny offset metal spatula to put each cookie into a bowl with the topping. Store them at room temperature in an airtight container.

A Global Survey: Cookish Review

2 Comments

A great cookbook offers wonderful recipes worth repeating with rules simple enough for a beginner. Christopher Kimball, the deeply seasoned creator of Cook’s Illustrated magazine and more recently of Milk Street offers up a cookbook brilliant in its simplicity.

Cookish brings flavors from all over the world to your kitchen in fail-safe recipes that deliver delicious meals quickly without compromise. Grouped by main ingredients (vegetables, beans & grains, pasta, seafood, chicken, pork, and so on) they sound intriguing and make a special dinner possible every night of the week. I haven’t tried every recipe, but I have made recipes from every section because this quickly became my go-to source for ideas.

Not one dud in the bunch!

Equally valuable as a solution for tonight and an opportunity to sample food strategies from Africa, China, and the Middle East, Cookish offers familiar ingredients reconsidered in new combinations.

Curried Shrimp Cakes

Ingredients

  • 1 cup panko breadcrumbs
  • 1 ½ pounds large shrimp, peeled and deveined
  • 2 tablespoons mayonnaise
  • ¼ cup chopped cilantro
  • 1 tablespoon sriracha sauce
  • 2 teaspoons curry powder
  • ¼ cup neutral oil

Directions

Reduce the panko to fine crumbs in a food processor. Place on a large plate. Place one-half of the shrimp in the processor and chop finely. Add the mayonnaise and the remaining shrimp and chop coarsely. Transfer to a medium bowl and stir in the cilantro, sriracha, and curry powder. Form into four patties and coat with the panko crumbs. Heat the oil in a non-stick skillet over medium heat and add the patties until golden on both sides. Serve with cilantro and ore sriracha.

These can be served in a salad, alone, or in a pita sandwich.

The Joy of Cooking

Leave a comment

In a library of wonderful cookbooks, one is truly foundational: Joy of Cooking.

A new version is now available, by John Becker and Megan Scott (Becker is a great-grandson of Irma S. Rombauer who created it in 1931). Whatever innovative recipe books you have in the kitchen, this is a requirement. The new version is a genuinely refreshed classic—not just scrubbed and tweaked but reimagined in very useful and appealing ways.

Quick add-ons address ways to butcher and prepare fish and fowl for cooking that are both intensely practical and easy to understand. This book is a cooking school between covers.

It has two defining qualities:

1: it is trustworthy. Recipes that require some flair or familiarity, such as risotto, are presented in a way that can be confidently executed.

2: it is comprehensive. Spatchcock a chicken, make socca like you used to love it in Nice, or roll your own sushi with Joy.