SHAHI HYDERABADI BIRIYANI

Ingredients:

Mutton - 1 kg
Onions – 5 to 6 chopped onions
Garlic - 1 cups
Ginger - 3/4 cup
Green Chillies - about 10
Mint Leaves - 1 bunch
Coriander Leaves - 1 bunch
Cloves - 10 to 15
Cinnamon - Three 5” pieces
Nutmeg or Jaiphal - Less than ¼ piece
Mace or Javitri - 1 piece
Small Cardamoms - 10
Black Cardamoms - 1
Tomatoes - Approx. 3
Yogurt - 3 to 4 tbsp
Lemon Juice - About ½ lemon’s juice
Red food colour
Salt to taste

For Rice:
Rice - 6 cups
Cloves - 2
Cinnamon – 1” stick
Small Cardamoms - 2
Mint Leaves - a handful
Coriander Leaves - a handful
Lemon juice - Juice of 1 lemon
Water - 12 cups
Salt to taste

Method:
1. Grind cloves, cardamoms, mace, nutmeg, cinnamon to a fine powder. To this add garlic, ginger, coriander leaves, mint leaves, green chillies and salt and grind to a smooth paste. Add water if necessary.
2. Marinate mutton with this paste for atleast 15 minutes.
3. Heat 2 tbsp oil and 2 tbsp ghee. Fry onions till light brown. Keep aside some onions for garnishing.
4. Add marinated mutton and cook for a while. Add tomatoes, yogurt, lemon juice and little water and cook till mutton is tender.
(Take care not to make too much gravy)
5. Meanwhile, keep 12 cups of water to boil. Add cloves, cinnamon, small cardamoms, mint leaves and coriander leaves, lemon juice, salt and let it boil. Add rice and let it cook.
6.When rice is 3/4th done, strain & transfer over mutton.
7. Do not mix. With big spoon, make slits for air. Add ghee & red colour. Cover first with wet cloth, then with lid, and keep a weight over the lid. Simmer for about 15 minutes.
Garnish with fried onions and cashewnuts.
Serve with raita.
Raita:
Beat 1 cup yogurt. Add 1/4 cup water, finely sliced green chillies, finely chopped onions, tomatoes, coriander leaves and 1/2 tsp salt. Beat well and serve with biryani.

Too many fancy events

March 17

“GET A DOO-WOG!” said this truly horrible woman with a heavy New York accent to a blind man at the James Beard House last Wednesday. She was one of those people who thinks it’s actually okay to tell other people, unbidden, how to live their lives, as if a blind man carrying a white cane and being escorted by his companion (maybe his wife, but one mustn’t assume) hasn’t examined his options and chosen to live his life as he sees fit.
“You get a dog,” he said, which of course was a mistake because then she kept talking (excuse me, too-wahking) about her own stupid cur. And I was not in the mood for it last week.
“I’m having existential ennui,” I later told my friend Jonathan Ray, who teaches history at Georgetown. I’m a New York City food writer, so I’m allowed to use pompous words to express melancholy. It’s what we do.
“That’s because you go to too many fancy shmancy events,” he said.
Jonathan’s one of my favorite people in the world.
That was on Friday. He’d called me the day before just as I was tying my matte silver tie for my tuxedo.
It was a long tie, which it seems to me is more in vogue than bow ties for tuxedos these days, although I think the pendulum is swinging back. We’ll see what people are wearing at the Beard Awards in June.
The material on this particular tie is pretty thick, so a full Windsor knot would have looked bulky. I settled on a half Windsor as I chatted with Jonathan.
“You’re busy. I’ll let you go. We’ll talk soon,” he said.
Too many fancy shmancy events can lead to existential ennui, because if you think life is about fancy events and you go to a lot of them, you realize that they don’t contribute to your emotional well-being. That comes from inside.
I don’t think that was what was irritating me last week. Sometimes you just feel annoyed.
The week started with a fundraising dinner for the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, which might have been the only fundraising dinner in the history of the world to have no chicken or steak, but escargots, bone marrow, sweetbreads and rabbit. They raised $650,000.
As a member of the media, I was seated at a table with seats to spare, where I could be easily slotted in. My particular table had mostly been bought by Washington Mutual, and so I asked one of their financial analysts to apportion blame for the sub-prime mortgage crisis while we assessed the makeup of the emcee, food-TV personality Ted Allen.
The honoree of the evening was Urvashi Vaid, executive director of The Arcus Foundation.
“Revolution is Fun,” she said, which is my quotation of the week.
I did also have an amusing but brief exchange at the bar with a tall gentleman who was ordering a bourbon to soothe his throat, coughed raw by an illness from which he was recovering.
“Tuberculosis,” he said, to no one in particular.
“Hey, it beats lung cancer,” I said, not that I have lung cancer or anything — I just wanted him to look on the bright side.
“I’m working on that. Do you have a cigarette?”
Tuesday at lunchtime found me downtown at a somewhat New Zealand-themed place called Nelson Blue. I was having lunch with Jay Louisson of New Zealand Trade & Enterprise, the people who took me down under recently (and I’ve finally finished updating my blog about it. Click here for the final installment). I debriefed her on the trip while I ate a lamb curry pie. The restaurant choice was mine; it seemed appropriate.
That night I went to an absinthe tasting, at which Lance Winters of St. George Spirits spoke about the stuff. I was late and feeling harried, and the event was in a dimly lit room in the bar named Little Branch, and so I reintroduced myself to Kate Goldstein-Breyer, with whom I had just been dining a few days before at The Monday Room. So that was awkward and I decided to bury my embarrassment under Thai food. I walked to my new favorite downtown Thai restaurant, Rhong-Tiam, and ate Thai comfort food. I had khai-jiew woon-sen, which is a sort of deep-fried omelet, and a bowl of guay-tiew tom yam, which is a type of noodle dish from Sukhothai that we used to eat in Bangkok, walking from our offices on Phra-Arthit road across a little canal, past a small ice plant to a little noodle shop.
At Rhong-Tiam a scene that could have been in Bangkok unfolded for me. A middle aged white man came in (it occurs to me that I, too, am middle aged, but that’s all right) and spoke in fairly decent Thai to the waitresses as he asked them what food they recommended. He took a particular shine to one waitress who was clearly a tenor. She didn’t have a low voice, but it certainly was a masculine one, and she was obviously a man (why, then, am I referring to him as a she? Well, I think you should refer to someone as he or she would like to be addressed).
Transvestites are really quite common in Thailand, and so it was refreshing to see one in a Thai restaurant, and amusing to see the customer fall for her, going as far as complimenting her voice and comparing it to Marlena Dietrich’s.
So that was fun, and yet on Wednesday I was grumpy anyway and not in any mood to hear a loud mouth tell a blind man how to live his life.
He (the blind man) told the idiot that the problem with dogs is they don’t actually know where things are.
“You tell them, ‘go to the bank!’ They don’t know where the bank is. You still have to find your own way.”
Blind men were, in fact, the topic of conversation last week as New York’s lying hypocrite of a governor, Eliot Spitzer, was about to be replaced by New York’s first legally blind African-American governor, David Paterson.
One person said she wasn’t concerned about his being black (as of course that would be racist and therefore inappropriate to say), but it seemed wrong for him to be blind (a fair indicator of what prejudices remain socially acceptable).
Someone else wondered if all of our sighted governors were so great, implying that perhaps it was time to give the blind people a crack at it.
Apart from the dog-loving idiot, also at the Beard House on Wednesday was a simpleton who had, on a previous night, gone from table to table soliciting recommendations for restaurants in Barcelona. I recommended Rincón de Aragon for its roasted goat leg and she shuttered and acted like I was ridiculous for recommending such a thing. What’s wrong with goat leg, especially if you’re the sort of person who frequents the Beard House?
Believe it or not, that same simpleton was at the European Wine Council’s gala dinner at Le Cirque on Thursday as the escort of a truly unpleasant man I’d met at the gala about five years before.
He has a new food network. Actually, at the moment it’s a web site.
“It’s a network. I’m very sensitive about that,” he said, bristling at the word “web site.”
Oh, brother.
My date was Yishane Lee. I think I’ve gone to three European Wine Council gala dinners and Yishane has been my date at all three of them. Also at our table was Michael Aaron, chairman of Sherry-Lehman Wine & Spirits, whom I had met at that same gala some years before, when it was at Le Cirque 2000. I remembered him because of the bejeweled tuxedo studs he was wearing. They are family heirlooms.
Seated between us on Thursday was his wife Christine, a former interior designer who carries her own peppermill with her everywhere she goes. It contains a blend of five different peppers. I got a whiff of nutmeg in there, so I suspect that one of those five is Szechwan peppercorns, but Christine wasn't sure. She passed it around the table for people to use, and I said that if one were to have an eccentric affectation, carrying around ones own peppermill was a charming one.
The wine gala is an A-list event. So Food & Wine founders Michael and Ariane Batterbury were there. So was Nation’s Restaurant News (and New York Times) columnist Florence Fabricant, and Leonard Lopate and Rose Levy Beranbaum and many other people.
At one point some years ago, Rose Levy Beranbaum had the eccentric affectation of carrying around a tiny wooden box filled with fleur de sel.
If I were to have such an affectation, it would be to carry a mother-of-pearl caviar spoon with me at all times, so that if caviar were on hand I’d have the right utensil.
You don’t want to be caught off-guard on such occasions.
Michael Aaron performed an amazing feat at dinner. One of the gentlemen at our table was wearing a tuxedo, but with an open collar. Michael asked if that were some new sort of style from Los Angeles and the gentleman said that his bow tie had simply been too tight to fasten. He held it up for us to see and Michael expressed disappointment that it was one of those wrap-around ties.
Then, to show how simple tying a bow tie was, he untied his at the table and retied it again perfectly.
Let me repeat that: He untied his bow tie at the table and retied it again, perfectly. Without a mirror.
Better yet, he said he was taught to do that by Jonas Salk’s wife, Françoise, a former mistress of Picasso’s.
I suppose it wouldn’t be ennui if there were a reason for it.
But what, you wonder, did I eat at these events?

At the Gay Men’s Health Crisis event at Skyline Studios:
Escargots Saint Honoré with marrow and sweetbread cervelas (by Orsay executive chef Jason Hicks)
Slowly simmered rabbit raviolo in white burgundy with winter vegetables (by Aureole executive chef Tony Aiazzi)
Braised short ribs with butternut squash risotto (by Galen Zamarra of Mas — and it actually was risotto, not butternut squash cooked like risotto, which people were doing a few years ago, causing me to wonder why they called it risotto)
Chocolate meringue roches, Lillet gelée, nougat glacé with lavender honey (by Water Club executive pastry chef Victoria Love)

At the Beard House, by chef Jean Paul Desmaison of La Cofradia Restaurant in Coral Cables, Fla.:

Passed Hors d’Oeuvres:
Peruvian corn anticucho with huancaina sauce (a somewhat spicy cheese sauce)
Scallop Bloody Mary
Slow braised pork and grapes with pisco
Gosset Brut Excellence NV Champagne (France, obviously)

Lemon sole, octopus and shrimp ceviche
S.A. Prüm, Wehlener Sonnenuhr, Riesling Kabinett, 2003 (Mosel-Saar-Ruwer, Germany)

Piquillo peppers stuffed with beef, pork, peanuts and raisins, with a creamy rosemary Parmesan sauce
Marchesi di Barolo, “Ruvei” 2005, Barbera d'Alba (Piedmont, Italy)

Peruvian yellow chile risotto with sautéed Florida lobster tail and coral crème sauce
Jean Luc Colombo “La Bell de Mai” 2004, Saint Peray (Rhone, France)

Duck Confit with spinach and sweet corn couscous and black currant gastrique

Goat cheese ice cream with satuéed berries in port-balsamic reduction
Cellers Fuentes, Finca el Puig 2002, Priorat (Spain)

At the European Wine Council gala at Le Cirque:

Hors d’oeuvre:
Ratatouille tart with poached quail egg
Branzino tartare
Asian tuna roll with dipping sauce
Crab cakes with Béarnaise
Pierre Sparr mèthode Traditionnelle d'Alsace Brud Réserve
Don Olegario Albariño, Rías Baixas, 2006
Pfeffinger Riesling Kabinett Halbtrocken Pfalz 2006
Ayios Andronicos, Monte Royia Winery
Proseco Aneri

Shrimp with Asian mixed vegetables and cocnut jus
Schloss Schonborn Riesling Rudesheimer Berg Roseneck “Erstes Gewachs” Rheingau, 2004

Foie gras ravioli with green cabbage marmalade and black truffle emulsion (Yishane’s favorite; Christine’s, too)
Château des Capitan Julienas 2006

Roasted loin of veal with haricots verts en persillad and morel cream sauce
Malleolus de Sancho Martin 2005, Ribera del Duero
Vamvakada red wine, 2004

Gorgonzola, Parmesan and Brie de Nangis with honey and assorted breads
Bolla Amarone DOC 2004

Dessert buffet of milk chocolate mille-feuille, pear tart, mini crème brûlée, crokenbush, tiramisu tart and petits fours
Commandaria Saint John, Keo Winery
JJ Prum Riesling Wehlener Sonnenuhr Auslese, Mosel 1994
J. Vidal-Fleury Muscat de Beaumes de Venise (Yishane’s favorite)
González Byass Matusalem, DO Jerez
Arèle Vin Santo

“Miracles Beyond Reason or... Living With Noisy Stones”

March 16th Sermon
Luke 19:28-40

You know, there are some events in life that are just so remarkable and so joyous and so needed, that no matter what reality might say to the contrary, they are going to happen.


Take the story of eleven year-old Angela, as told by Hanoch McCarty:

“Angela was stricken with a debilitating disease involving her nervous system. She was unable to walk and her movement was restricted in other ways as well. The doctors did not hold out much hope of her ever recovering from this illness. They predicted she’d spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. They said that few, if any, were able to come back to normal after contracting this disease. The little girl was undaunted. There, lying in her hospital bed, she would vow to anyone who’d listen that she was definitely going to be walking again someday.

She was transferred to a specialized rehabilitation hospital in the San Francisco Bay area. Whatever therapies could be applied to her case were used. The therapists were charmed by her undefeatable spirit. They taught her about imaging - about seeing herself walking. If it would do nothing else, it would at least give her hope and something positive to do in the long waking hours in her bed. Angela would work as hard as possible in physical therapy, in whirlpools and in exercise sessions. But she worked just as hard lying there, faithfully doing her imaging, visualizing herself moving... moving... moving!

One day, as she was straining with all her might to imagine her legs moving again, it seemed as though a miracle happened: The bed moved! It began to move around the room! She screamed out, “Look what I’m doing! Look! Look! I can do it! I moved, I moved!”

Of course, at this very moment everyone else in the hospital was screaming, too, and running for cover. People were screaming, equipment was falling and glass was breaking. You see, it was the San Francisco earthquake that occurred a few years back. But don’t tell that to Angela. She’s convinced that she did it. And now only a few years later, she’s back in school. On her own two legs. No crutches, no wheelchair. You see, anyone who can shake the earth between San Francisco and Oakland can conquer a piddling little disease, can’t they?”

Beyond reason Angela was able to walk again. It was a remarkable, joyous, irrational event that needed to happen. It was a miracle beyond reason.

And isn’t that what we celebrate today. Hear us shout! Because of a remarkable, joyous, irrational event that occurred thousands of years ago we can be victorious in life today. A king with no apparent power, riding a donkey into the most powerful city of the time, set the stage for the most transformational and controversial event of eternity.

Without a doubt this was the moment that the people Israel had been waiting for. The messiah had arrived. Gathered outside the city on the Mount of Olives, the celebration began. As the procession wound down the mountain the crowd increased in number and in anticipation. Then, entering the gates, the frenzy of adulation became overwhelming. The triumphant entry of Jesus into Jerusalem could not be stopped.

The joy of the people, anticipating all that surely was going to happen with their new king could not be silenced. Now the Romans would get what was coming to them. Control this crowd? No way. Jesus told the Pharisees that they were crazy!

No one can stop the joy that comes when a person feels the release of one’s soul. No one can put down the elation felt when those imprisoned by the circumstances of life are offered even the slightest sense of hope. And the hope that was offered by Jesus to a people who were at the point of losing all hope caused such a joyous response, that if there was an attempt to stifle the words and actions of the people, it would seep out from even the lifeless rocks and stones. The very rocks and stones themselves would ooze joy and would start to sing! Hosanna! Hosanna!

In the movie, The Shawshank Redemption, Freeman Morgan is serving a life sentence for murder. He utters a line that speaks volumes to Tim Burton who is also serving a sentence for murder and is relatively new to the prison: (Show clip)

“Hope is dangerous for a prisoner.” A reference to the fact that for the “lifer,” hope would only cause insanity. Cause you ain’t getting out! For some, this world is a prison. A prison every bit as harsh and as filled with hopelessness as Shawshank Prison. When you see your circumstance as a prison... hope IS dangerous. When you live your life as a prisoner... hope IS dangerous.

But we are not prisoners, as Christians we know better. We are not prisoners....We are not “lifers...” We are “livers.” We have been given hope. We can live to the fullest because God’s presence through Jesus Christ has transformed us. Filled with the Holy Spirit we can wave our palm branches today even more fervently than those early believers because we know the entire story. While they could only celebrate an earthly king, we can celebrate the inspiration of hope given to us by a heavenly king.

Try as we might to be somber during this time of lent; try as hard as we can to grieve the one who died on the cross; try, with all humility, to bow our heads in sorrow as the stone is rolled across the tomb; we just can’t be made silent. We are the noisy rocks. The joy in our lives can’t be stopped from being expressed. Jesus is king. Hosanna! The Messiah is here. Hosanna! “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!” Hosanna! “Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!” Hosanna!

The message that God loves us... is very much a part of us, gives us hope... can never be quieted. I know. I tried to quiet that message in my own life. In high school I felt called by God to somehow share the good news that Christ offers us. I was going to be a minister. A short way into my first year of college I tried to squelch that feeling. For thirteen years after that I hid the palm branches behind my back. For thirteen years I denied that Jesus was my king and had a use for me. But even in the lifeless stone that I had become, the noise and the joy had to come out.

There’s no way God will let us remain silent. There’s no way God will let us stagnant. There’s no way God will allow you... or me... or anyone else... to stop celebrating “The Life” in our lives. And at the point someone tries to tell us otherwise... why... even the very stones God created, will be pulled into the act of celebration.

That is why we exist as a church. We are called to shout the joy of Jesus Christ. We are called to become a church that is so remarkable, so irrational, so joyous, and so involved in sharing the good news that people can’t help but be transformed. Beyond all reason we exist and are here waving our palm branches. Hosanna.

We are in the midst of a miracle... Let me rephrase that. We are in the midst of miracles... remarkable, irrational, transforming, noisy rock miracles. The miracle of living, the miracle of relationship, the miracle of salvation in Jesus Christ, and today... gathering together as believers in the ministry of Jesus Christ, we are participating in the miracle of hope.
We are here to shout out the ways that God has blessed us through the presence of Jesus Christ... here to shout out the ways we have been blessed in the power of the Holy Spirit. We are here to give tangible evidence of the blessings of God. We are the noisy rocks and stones singing out the hosannas.

Holy smoke, duck!

I really enjoy cooking with duck. Granted it is not the most versatile of meats, certainly not as pliable or easy to match with flavours as chicken, but what it lacks in versatility it makes up for in sheer tasty indulgence. I think it is something to do with the richness of the meat, the deep purple colour and the thick layering of cream coloured fat which serves to add a mouth-watering taste as well as a delicious moisture. It isn’t a cheap meat and I doubt it is a luxury I will be able to afford for much longer but before I go crashing head first into the real world next week I felt it right to have a final dalliance with decadence.

I usually serve duck fillets with the skin on, crisped up in a hot pan and most of the fat rendered out of it, with a rich sauce made from reduced stock and wine or port and sweetened with whatever berries or fruits are suitable: blackberries, red currants and cherries have all featured with duck on more than one occasion. I’ve also made Thai duck curries and once a quite delicious Asian style broth made with stock flavoured with vanilla, made hearty and filling with the addition of noodles and a selection of seasonal vegetables. It comes highly recommended. But with my brain firing ideas at me from all sides and a desire to start really pushing the boundaries I decided to get out the trusty wok and wood chips and smoke it.

I’ve had smoked duck a number of times and always found it delicious. It might sound like a slightly strange flavour marriage but if you think about the smoky notes in a Chinese duck and pancakes dish then it should make more sense. Also, foods with a high fat content tend to smoke particularly well – oily fish (such as kippers, eel and salmon), pork (bacon, ham) and even cheese all smoke terrifically and create some of the most delicious morsels I can think of. I’ve theorised about why smoked food tastes so good before so won’t run into too much detail but my personal view is that it returns us, albeit briefly, to our deep ancestry, to an earlier time when all food eaten had the taste of the primordial fire. The same holds true for barbecues, by the way.

After scoring the fat of the duck and seasoning with a generous amount of salt and a turn of pepper I laid the duck breasts onto a roasting rack in the wok. Beneath was a sheet of foil to catch the fat and prevent it from dripping onto the wood dust and green tea in a neat foil packet nestled in the base of the wok. The whole lot was sealed with more foil to keep in the smoke and then placed onto the heat. As this is a hot smoke, the duck needs little more than half an hour on the heat and then a further half hour to rest in the residual smoke, taking on the delicate flavours and allowing the juices to settle.

I was unsure what to expect when I tore open the foil but the smell was incredible. Sweet but with a deep, outdoor bonfire finish. There was still a significant layer of fat on the duck so I seared the breasts skin down in a hot pan to render some of it out. They were cooked pink, were mouth-wateringly juicy and sliced thinly lengthways before being arranged on the plate. Served with a leek puree and leek spaghetti with a reduced port and balsamic glaze, the final dish was more of a warm salad but was wonderfully tasty and satisfying in that way that only food cooked in such a primitive way can be.

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