Brik by brik...

The Divine Miss M came to town recently. No, I don't mean Bette Midler, I am speaking of the other divine one, culinary diva extraordinaire, Marlena Spieler.

If you live in the SF Bay Area and you're likely familiar with Marlena from her regular column in the Chronicle's food section, The Roving Feast. If you live elsewhere you may have a copy of at least one of the almost seventy - that's right, seventy - cookbooks she has penned over the years. Not near SF nor a cookbook owner? Then maybe you've read her über-ebullient Facebook posts on the joys of cooking, making, and/or eating kippers, cheeses, kimchee, pasta, pumpernickel, and more.

I was introduced to Marlena's work in 1995 by Annaliese, who was opening a restaurant in Santa Cruz and asked me to help get it up and running. At our first meeting I asked her what her vision for the restaurant was and she gushed "Sun-drenched cuisine!" referring to a book of "lusty foods and robust recipes" by Marlena Spieler.

Flash forward to November 2009 in Happy Valley. My foodie pal Sonia Bañuelos introduced me to Marlena over dinner and by the next day we were, the three of us, in cahoots and "in production," in my kitchen making a little video of Marlena preparing brik a l'oeuf. "It's so easy, it just takes a minute or two.", sez Marlena. "Phyllo, a minute or two?" thinks me.

In my years of catering I flag-folded hundreds of phyllo-wrapped appetizers every week, and "easy" is not a word I had ever used to describe working with it, more like "fiddly" and "fussy." But there was Marlena in my kitchen with her handbag full of flavorful goodies y voila! in a minute or two she had a brik in the pan, few minutes more and we were savoring its crispy, unctuous, spicy goodness.Since that day I've been spreading the Word of Marlena and cooking brik a l'oeuf for friends on both coasts, telling all who'll listen that working with phyllo can, in fact, be easy. An not brushing each sheet of pastry with butter means this really is super quick - and much lighter than the butter-soaked phyllo dishes I'd made before. Here is the recipe, such as it is (more of a suggestion, really), for each brik:

1 sheet of phyllo pastry
finely chopped onion
minced garlic
preserved lemons, chopped
harissa sauce
chopped fresh herbs - parsley, dill, mint, cilantro
1 egg
Oil for cooking

Preheat oven to 400. Heat oil in saute pan over medium high heat. Place phyllo on flat surface. Place all ingredients on pastry and quickly fold up like a flag to enclose all. Place in saute pan and brown on both sides. Place in 400 oven cook for 5 minutes; whites should be set and yolk should still be runny. Marlena mixed up a quick 'salsa" of the filling components - herbs, lemons, harissa, onion, and garlic - and served that alongside the brik, which I loved; it made each bite flavor saturated.

My tips: It works to place the herbs, lemon, harissa, etc. evenly across the pastry so that when you cut into it you'll get a little bit of everything in each bite. Put the egg in last, otherwise the pastry starts to get soggy and that makes it harder to handle. Also, doing this means you can put the egg in the center of everything and have a chance of it saying there. (I said a chance, it is still a raw egg with a mind of its own, after all.) Somewhere online I saw someone assemble their brik in a shallow bowl, I tried that and it does help keep things in place.

What I learned from watching Marlena: Loosen up around phyllo dough! The pastry doesn't have to be perfectly folded, nor does it matter if it cracks, it will all brown up nicely in the pan. I've even grabbed a second sheet at the last minute and used it to rescue a bursting brik. And I've completely given up the flag-fold in favor of free-form.

The part of the recipe that I am still working on perfecting is the cooking of the egg. Five minutes in a 400 oven is a good place to start, but the amount of time it takes to fry the pastry to golden brown depends on many things, obviously, and, once the egg is inside the crispy pastry I'm still a little lost as to how to tell how done it is. Hmmm, pobrecita mia, I might have to make a few more brik this week to see if I can figure that one out.
Take a look at these two other great blog posts about brik: Cooking Shmooking and Just the Two of Us.

Scones for Marlena

This morning I was proclaimed "The Best Scone Maker in Existence" by Her High Holiness of the Roving Feast, Marlena Spieler. I couldn't be prouder. I feel like I've been knighted by the queen herself (which would be appropriate, given that Queen Liz II was coronated at the Stone of Scone in 1953.) After all, Marlena, author of about 70 cookbooks, world traveler, and superb food writer, lives in London and knows her scones.

I, however, having been raised in 1950s suburban Connecticut, know my way around a glazed doughnut, a cruller, and even a bran muffin...but a scone? They weren't even in my orbit, much less my repertoire (remember, I'm a cook, not a baker), until fairly recently.

From pastry bumpkin to scone maven; how is that possible, you ask? Two words: Sunset Magazine. In the early 90s my neighbor and friend Diane made a batch of scones that knocked my socks off. I asked for her secret recipe, she handed me a Sunset Magazine cookbook. I baked, I ate, I was hooked.

The original recipe calls for the basics: butter cut into flour, sugar, and leavening, liquid added, and a simple combination of currants and lemon peel in there for flavor. Scones made from this recipe are delicious, will allow you to win friends and influence people, and make you very welcome at pot luck parties, especially high teas and brunches.

But I'm a rule breaker, I bore easily, and I like to cook with what's on hand, so by my third batch I was using a Cuisinart to work in the butter. The currants were left in the dust as I mixed in chocolate, dried fruit, nuts and seeds, cheeses, sun-dried tomatoes, herbs - really, whatever hit my fancy and was in the house. (Not all at once, of course...but you knew that.)

Since that first fateful batch I have baked literally thousands of scones, most of them during my years managing La Casa de Espiritus Alegres Bed & Breakfast in Guanajuato, where we served a freshly baked basketful to appreciative guests every morning. House favorite: chunks of Mexican chocolate, almonds, and candied orange peel.) We also used this recipe at the much-missed Emmanuelle's Restaurant in Santa Cruz, where loyal scone hounds lined up daily to see what delicious flavor combination would come out of the oven each morning. They have been written about in newspapers, guide books, magazines, and online. Traditional? I don't know, but delicious? Absolutely.

Buttermilk Scones

3 cups all purpose Flour
⅓ cup Sugar
2 ½ teaspoons Baking Powder
½ teaspoon Baking Soda
½ teaspoon Salt (omit if you're using salted butter)
6 oz. cold unsalted Butter, cut in pieces
¾ cup Currants & 1 tablespoon grated Lemon Zest OR 1 cup Mix-In of your choice
1 cup Buttermilk

1. Put flour, sugar, baking powder, soda, and salt together in Cuisinart and pulse until thoroughly blended. Add butter and pulse until it resembles coarse cornmeal.
2. To the dry mix add the currants and lemon peel or other "mix-in" and pulse just a couple of times to combine evenly. Add buttermilk and pulse until dough begins to form a ball and cleans the sides of the bowl. Turn out onto a lightly floured surface and form into two discs. Cut each disc into 6 wedges and place wedges on a greased cookie sheet. Brush tops with buttermilk or cream and for sweet scones sprinkle with cinnamon sugar. Refrigerate scones at least ten minutes, or even overnight.
3. Place cold scones in a 425 oven. Bake for for 18-20 minutes or until tops are golden brown, turning once mid-bake.
4. Serve hot from the oven. Clotted cream, butter, and jams are all lovely with them, but they are about perfect just as they are.
   

*Some wonderful ideas for Mix-Ins, but only the beginning: Candied Ginger and Dried Apricots...Bacon, Cheese, and Chives...Dried Pineapple, Toasted Coconut, and Slivered Almonds...Sundried Tomatoes, Feta, Pine Nuts, and Fresh Herbs...Chocolate Chips and Candied Ginger...you get the idea.

Notes:

1. You're allowed to use the Cuisinart only if you promise you will not overmix. You're looking for the same texture you'd get if you used two knives or a pastry blender to cut the butter into the flour, a coarse meal. This allows the rising to happen, resulting in flaky moist scones.
   
2. On the same note, once you've added the buttermilk, stop pulsing as soon as the dough begins to come together. Better to turn it into a bowl or out on the board at that point and finish the mixing by hand than to overmix and risk melting the butter.
3. If you have buttermilk around that's great, if you don't, just substitute regular milk (and yes, you can stir in lemon juice and create instant buttermilk.) I've also used yogurt (plain or flavored) and a combination of all of the above with success.
4. The second secret to successful rising is cold scones and a hot stove. Chill the dough or chill the scones on the pan, but be sure they are cold when they go in the oven. Also, a 425 degree oven is not very forgiving, so don't walk away at the 15-minute mark. If you find that your oven is consistently browning too quickly, start out at 425 to get the rise you want and drop to 350 after 10 minutes.
   

So what flavor scones did I make for my special guests - the Divine Miss M, Sonia "Spielberg" Bañuelos & Little Sprout, and the lovely Vanessa?

• Sweet scones loaded with chunks of good quality Bittersweet Chocolate, coarsely chopped Roasted Almonds, and Dried Montmorency Cherries (Left)
  
• Savory scones with cubes of sharp Cheddar Cheese, minced Fresh Herbs from the garden (fennel fronds, parsley, sage), and a sprinkle of Pungo Creek Indian Corn Meal for toothsome texture, dusted with the tiniest bit of smoked paprika. (Center)
  
• Reefer Madness scones inspired by the ingredients for brik a l'ouef that ended up in my refrigerator after Marlena and Sonia visited the other day: a bit of Preserved Lemons, chopped, precooked Broccoli Rabe, and crumbled Feta Cheese, brushed with a bit of yogurt and finely ground parmesan. I baked them free-form to leave the greens intact. They were exotic, fragrant, and fabulous. (Right)
  

The Divine Miss M with the scone platter.

By the way, I tried to find the original Sunset scone recipe online today. Following threads like In Search of the Perfect Scone and Lost Scone Recipe led me to Lemon Buttermilk Scones from Sunset Magazine. I bet they're delicious, but it's not the same recipe. I know this because - non-baker that I am - I never would have had the nerve to leave out an egg or change the amount of flour by even a tablespoon, much less raise the oven temperature by 75 degrees.

El Tiempo Teine Alas (Time Flies)

The last time I posted here it was June and I was in Guanajuato, Mexico. I was drinking a cinnamon-scented licuado de platano, attempting to stay cool in the before-the-rains dry heat of the central highlands of Mexico and fretting over the terrible state of tourism in Mexico due to the latest news attack (er...I mean report) from north of the border. It's now November in Santa Cruz, we've had or first big storm of the season, and the leaves are falling from the big oak tree outside my door in Happy Valley. Yes, it's been a long time since I've blogged.

It's not like there isn't plenty to write about. During my time in Guanajuato there were visits by dear friends from both California and Mexico, wonderful meals and celebrations cooked and shared, even a day of horseback riding. In the final days the flurry of oh-my-gosh-I'm really-leaving activity produced enough blog fodder for many a meaty post: learning about my neighbors in Marfil, watching Lulu make the most amazing gorditas ever; hangin' with Cuchis, the dueña of the little tiendita at which I spent many an afternoon over a cold beer learning the stories of Marfil while watching the world go by - in cars and buses, on foot, horses, and burros.

And I finally tracked down the answers to all but one of my questions about the Sounds of the 'Hood, meeting (and videoing) the guy screaming Arrozzzz!! outside my window each day, even climbing the bell tower and photographing the amazing timepiece (as well as the little muchachos) responsible for the church bells that perplexed me every fifteen minutes all day and night - every day and night - during my two-month stay.

Then there was the breathtaking birthday meal at The Most Unexpected Restaurant, Ik Etsnab in Santa Rosa, a little village in the hills above Guanajuato. Picture a sleepy village on a mountain road and then tuck an über-modern glass box into the trees, staff it with a young and talented Mexican couple, and celebrate with dishes like From the Sea, complete with toasted parmesan "sand" and salty "sea foam" topped with flowery flotsam and jetsam and you'll understand the "unexpected" part.

And the mad 4-day drive home deserves a post entitled Down to the Last Drop (due to the state of both my gas tank and wallet - over and over!) that produced a photo series I call 70 MPH, all shot driving down the highway staring straight ahead with my right arm stretched toward the open passenger-side window while I raced home in time for a yearly catering gig.

Yes, it's not like there hasn't been plenty to write about: The grim fog that settled in over me once I got home and unpacked and realized that tourism to Mexico had all but stopped. My ire at the media and the ache of sympathy I felt for my friends in Mexico that followed the realization. Days and days of through-the-eyes-of-a-child adventures with my darling 5-year-old housemate, and then while he summered with grandma and grandpa the month of cooking and entertaining that ensued in a child-free home, along with all the joy (and new recipes and friends) that brought me.

A couple of exciting My Mexico Tours events here in the Bay Area. The opening of Bonny Doon Winery's Cellar Door Cafe, the brightest star in Santa Cruz's restaurant sky since India Joze and Emmanuelle's closed, to which new friend Sonia (thank you, Facebook!) introduced me. An article in the local newspaper in which I participated that had the unexpected and delightful side effect of bringing me together with my food guru Jozseph...and the alchemy that continues to develop between us since then.

Yep, there've been plenty of adventures, opinions, tastes, and ideas to share; my iPhoto library bursting at the seams; all friends warned that everyone and everything in my BIG life is now fair game as blog fodder, yet the blog block continued.

And then my dear ol' dad got sick. On August 28 he was told it was fast moving small cell lung cancer and 39 days later he died. I spent 36 of those days with him 24/7.

And that, you see, opens the floodgates, trumps all the other stories, urges me to write again. About dad, and family, and loss, but most of all about the miraculous magical mystery tour we went on for those 36 days.

The title is clear: Way To Go, Dad. Coming soon, to a blog near you.

Robert A. McNair, surrounded by Paul, Mark, and Yers Truly
Lazarus Road Trip, Eastern Shore of Virginia, September 28, 2009