Life in Cowtown

Anyone who knows me, knows that I’m a summer person through and through. I love long days that don’t seem to end, I love seeking shade from the hot sun in the sky, I love how easy it is to get dressed in the mornings what with the not looking for stray mittens, hats, scarves and debating whether a face mask is going too far or not. I love slipping into sandals and not worrying about socks, boots, and cracking your head open on residential roads that never see a plow. I love summer food – the bounty, the abundance, the freshness, the perfect ripeness of a sun warmed strawberry or a tomato.

But I live in a northern land, three thousand feet above sea level, at the foothills of majestic mountains and surrounded by wide prairies. Winter is a fact of life here, and it’s often harsh. Temperatures plunge deeply and without warning, snowfalls bury the city making roads impassable, and winter often lasts beyond all rhyme and reason. This is not a winter from an LL Bean catalogue where families frolic in the sunny meadow building a snowman and sipping hot chocolate. You just know the weather in those photos is hovering just below zero, while you contemplate the arctic parka from Canada Goose while there’s a blizzard outside.  And while always welcome in the winter, Chinooks unleash their own mayhem raising temperatures by thirty degrees in hours turning roads into deep slush piles and melting everything in sight.  In fact, I’ve recently cultivated an appreciation for skiing, to my own surprise, just so that there’s something else to do besides hibernate by the fireplace.

So around here we need the fall, bittersweet that it is, to ease the transition between the summer fun and the bitter short days of winter. We need to feel the shock of that first night below zero and to begin acclimatizing so that in January we can wear a t-shirt on a sunny + 10 day with impunity.  We need to watch the leaves change colors, and bunnies replace their brown summer coats with snow white down. We need to start making stews, chilies and roasts because the oven is just another convenient way to warm the house. It’s like a fireplace only tastier.

Because all too soon we’ll be surprised to see this on our doorstep (only twenty days after our summer high of 32 C), which is nature’s way to dispense with slow acclimatization and just employ some shock therapy on our hides. Just to keep us from getting complacent and all.

 Photos  by my talented friend Warren Sable who actually knows how to use his camera.

Our October weather went to pot, and I got bit by a cooking bug. It’s something I take advantage of when it strikes, since it does not strike that often. But something about the first chill in the air, the first snowflakes on the ground and yard chore avoidance collided in a perfect symphony of cooking up a storm. Some recipes I made were old favorites, like the aromatic and garlicky adobo from the Philippines, and others required no recipe, like a basic steak. But variety is the spice of life, so every so often I take down one of the many cookbooks littering my shelves and browse for inspiration. Like many cooks I keep a running list in my head of recipes I’d like to actually make, not just read about.  A good third of them are Jeffrey Steingarten’s. I browse through both of his books regularly and even though many recipes involve heroic shopping efforts and epic cooking sessions, something about his writing style implies success before you even begin.

Much of his recipe seduction comes from meticulous instructions. The details of each step are so well explained that one feels like he’s hovering over your shoulder, pre-empting any shortcuts you may attempt and explaining how he’d really like things done.  There is no ambiguity in the explanations of each step, which is very nice given that many recipes he provides are so time consuming that you would cry if they met with failure. But not every recipe he published has been a culinary Everest (like the home made Turducken, or boudin noir), and there are a few that are not only feasible to try at home, but actually look simple. One of them was potatoes au gratin.

After a wonderful discourse on the merits of potatoes au gratin and the plebeian tendencies of many recipes to smother the potatoes with cheese, he goes on to provide his own recipe which he accidentally stumbled upon all by himself. The recipe requires few ingredients, namely butter, milk, potatoes and cream, and does not take much more than a mandoline and an oven, so I bravely ventured forth to try it out. What appealed to me in the recipe is the lack of cheese. I live with a guy ready to smother breakfast cereal with cheese, while I like to use a smaller amount of sharp cheese, and find a large melting blanket of cheese oily and gross.

I heated the milk with garlic, salt, pepper and nutmeg:

I sliced the potatoes without killing myself:

I poured cream on the potatoes, dotted with butter (forgive me treadmill), and baked the gratin:

And the result – utterly delicious. The cream cooks down into a rich clotty sauce, faintly scented with garlic  and nutmeg, (next time I’m tripling the garlic), and they were universally proclaimed by the cheese eater and his father an excellent recipe. So if you’re willing to take the caloric hit, but have a stellar side dish, then embrace the fall and make these potatoes. And contrary to Jeffrey’s instructions, they taste fantastic lukewarm out of the pan an hour after dinner. Not that I would know anything about that.

Recipe here.