Tacos From France

This is both the story of how I learned to cook, and a catalog of my favorite recipes. Developing this hobby has helped to keep my shit together through various weird life situations, and if you don’t have something similar in your life, you should think about that.

Let’s say it’s around 2010. I don’t have any kids, I’m recently divorced, and we’re all getting used to our iPhones. I have, let’s just say, a lot of time on my hands after work.

I’ve read Kitchen Confidential, probably after seeing Bourdain on Letterman, and now my TiVo is full of whichever of his shows was on at the time, I’m guessing No Reservations.

I’m also a big Achewood fan. The first recipe I ever fully tried my hand at was A Meditation on Home Fries from the original Achewood Cookbook: Recipes For a Lady or a Man, (currently selling for $7 on the Achewood Patreon store.)

I got a signed copy at a long-gone comic book store on Smith street called Rocketship. When I checked it out on the way home I found that Onstad had graciously drawn a portrait of Roast Beef, the depressed cat (my favorite character):

I can’t find a legal link to A Meditation on Home Fries for you, but that may be for the best. This is more a technique than a recipe, hard to teach or to learn, and a bit of a Hellraiser puzzle-box: the closer you get to the solution, the farther you sink into madness. Eventually you’re treating each six-sided morsel like a cubed T-bone: searing, flipping, listening and smelling, watching the telltale browning creeping up the sides on all 120 faces of twenty edible dice. And all that at what is hopefully the right temperature to achieve a pleasing softness in the center of each home fry.

My success rate was mixed, but I came to enjoy being in the kitchen and spazzing out over potatoes, especially on Sundays, with sports in the background, when I didn’t want to leave the house anyway. If you’re indoors for a whole day off people tend to notice your sloth, but they complain about it less if they’ve had a good breakfast.

My home fry mania has subsided over the years, and also no one thinks it’s cute when I fuck up breakfast now, so I’m doing less scalpel surgery on my potatoes. Instead, I microwave them for a few minutes after cutting, because if you start with pre-softened innards your odds of success go way up. Even better: just buy some of those little mixed thumb-sized potatoes you can find in a one pound bag at pretty much any grocery store, often even pre-washed. Cut those in half along their equators, apply olive oil and salt, and roast them on a sheet pan for half an hour at 425 while you’re scrambling eggs. Throw in some rosemary if that’s what you’re feeling that day.

The next recipe I went nuts on was Alex Balk’s Bolognese. I still make it a lot, with minor additions and subtractions. Below, my millionth Bolognese, made this weekend for a pal’s birthday and stacked up with store-bought Ronzonis, bechamel, basil leaves, and the pretty good fresh supermarket mozz that we can get in town:

I’m more likely these days to reach for the classic Hazan recipe that Balk (or his Nonna) must have started with. It’s almost the same, and sadly, typing “Balk Bolognese” into Google casts you into some AI spam ranch which even Chrome desperately warns you against opening. Cautiously find that link here.

The recipe is basically bulletproof, but there’s one part of the otherwise deadhead cooking process that always confounded me, described by Balk here:

“Get a cup of dry white wine (if you don’t have any, a cup of dry vermouth will do. Hell, I’ve used a cup of red wine before and the difference has not been particularly notable.) and pour it in. Stir occasionally, but let the meat “drink” the wine so that it kind of evaporates into the mix. Figure a couple of minutes on this one. Next you’re gonna take a cup of milk and do the same thing... When the milk is gone (it’ll take longer than the wine did) add another cup of wine, same deal as before.”

I’ve never actually caused the meat to drink the milk or wine. The liquid in the pot accumulates (and smells great) along with the fat from the meat and the the juice from the veg. I’ve let it go a long time and a short time, at high and low heat, and I always eventually get worried about overcooking everything, give up, and toss the tomatoes in.

If anyone has tips for me, lemme know below!

But Bolognese is not some technique-based struggle session. Make the sauce, put it on broad noodles, people will thank you when they eat it.

By the time Superstorm Sandy rolled around I was well into a healthy pastime. I graduated to Julia Child’s Bourguignon, setting off a lifelong love of breaking down tough cuts in slow, vinous preparations that don’t require a lot of hands on work. There’s a soft ban on red-wine short ribs at my house anymore, and everyone is pretty sick of my version of Mark Bittman’s adobo, meant for chicken legs but also very good on pork ribs with coconut rice. This non-traditional version of carnitas still comes out quite a bit. I eventually got a little bit into baking too, especially no-knead breads from Bittman and Jim Lahey, and then eventually from Ken Forkish. But Maya’s the superior baker in our house, so I mostly abstain out of respect.

Fast forward several years. I was assuming that I would lose my job to a budget cut during lockdown, and I had a covid-fever dream of an idea: a popup food project called Tacos From France.

I even drew up a little logo in my mind’s eye:

I pictured myself making one pot of Bourguignon, one of Coq au Vin, and one of ratatouille, for the vegetarians. I would set up three Dutch ovens over sternos on a card table in a friend’s bar, and serve your braise of choice wrapped in flour tortillas, or maybe in crêpes, so they would become portable hand-food, for let’s say five bucks each. Maybe garnish the whole deal with herbs and pearl onions.

Fortunately, I never lost that job. Me sitting in a bar every night would probably not end well, and eventually the IRS would have me executed if I were paid mostly in cash.

Also it seems like cooking is one of those things that is a lot less fun when you do it for a living. Same thing, shiver, with writing. Your mileage may vary on it as a hobby too, depending on factors like the number of kids you need to feed every night.

Some Stray Links

Slate Memorializes Pitchfork

Do you have what it takes to battle Slate’s broken-ass ad server for the time it takes to get through the epic Pitchfork: The oral history of the music magazine everyone loved to hate? If not, some spoilers: they cribbed the house style from Mark Leyner, just like I cribbed mine from Bourdain, Balk, and Roast Beef the depressed cat. Also there were too many white dudes on staff, and it turns out they never should have sold out to Condé Nast.

You should at least enjoy the link to Ryan Schreiber’s 8.5 review of Coltrane’s Live at the Village Vanguard: The Master Takes from 1998. Also, please, don’t look up anything I put on the internet in 1998. It’s considered rude.

'Illinoise' musical headed to Broadway

I assume that when that happens the show will be called Sufjan! 

Rob Harvilla reviews The Three Body Problem for The Ringer

We saw the first episode, it was pretty good!

There apparently is a real thing called a French Taco

This Wikipedia page is not safe for the faint of heart.