So many leftovers, so little time...

Thanksgiving: a gourmand's fantasy and a gourmet's nightmare. After a day of feasting, followed by a day of turkey-and-stuffing sandwiches, the last thing anyone wants to do is open the refrigerator again to find more leftovers, quickly becoming stale and begging to be eaten yet again.

But one can only have so many turkey sandwiches after Thanksgiving before going into a tryptophan-Turkey-induced coma and forsaking turkey entirely for another year. Thanksgiving seems to be the holiday that creates the most waste; so much food is made, so much food is eaten, but still so much food is thrown away. Instead of throwing away our leftovers, my mother and I got creative this morning and decided to make a batch of Sweet Potato "Pumpkin" Muffins using the leftover sweet potatoes that no one wanted to eat. These muffins are the perfect antidote to an over-indulgent Thanksgiving meal: they are moist, sweet, and seemingly indulgent, but they're actually very healthy and full of fiber to help digest the weekend's food frenzy. We call them "pumpkin" muffins to deceive our cousins who were wary of the idea of a vegetable in a muffin. We modified the recipe from the book "Smart Muffins" by Jane Kinderlehrer (New Market Press, 1987).




SWEET POTATO "PUMPKIN" MUFFINS

2 Eggs
3/4 cup mashed Sweet Potato
2 Tbsp canola oil
2/3 cup Apple Cider
2 Tbsp honey
1 Tbsp molasses
1 cup Whole Wheat Pastry Flour
1/4 Soy Flour
1 Tbsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soad
1 tsp cinnamon
1 Tbsp grated orange rind
1/2 tsp ginger
1/4 ground cloves
1/8 tsp freshly grated nutmeg
1/2 currants
Pumpkin seeds and cane sugar for garnish


Preheat oven to 400* Fahrenheit. Prepare 12 regular-sized muffin cups with baking muffin cups.

In a food processor, blend together eggs, sweet potato, oil, cider, honey and molasses so that the batter becomes light and fluffy.

In another bowl, mix together the flours, baking powder, baking soda, spices, and currants. Fold sweet potato mixture to dry ingredients a little at a time until mixture is completely incorporated. Do not overmix.

Spoon mixture into muffin tins. Sprinkle tops of muffins with pumpkin seeds and sugar crystals. Bake for 25-30 mins, until a toothpick comes out clean. The interior of the muffins will remain moist and soufflé-like.

Enjoy with a cup of tea or coffee after Thanksgiving company is has left.

Bon appétit!

The Clock on the Stove

When I was in fourth grade, some weasel of a boy told me the following joke:

Why don't women need to wear watches? Because there's a clock on the stove.

I remember that what mortified me was not the blatant sexism of the joke told by this twelve-year-old-twit, but rather that I didn't get it. In my world, stoves didn't have clocks. My mother's stove was a gas range, and gas ranges don't have clocks because the heat from the fire burners is far too strong for electronics.

Kind of like a woman in the kitchen.

New York Magazine recently ran a feature called "A Woman's Place" about the difficulties of being a professional woman chef in New York City. It was in the form of a group-style interview with seven of the city's most prominent female chefs: "April Bloomfield (The Spotted Pig), Rebecca Charles (Pearl Oyster Bar), Alex Guarnaschelli (Butter), Sara Jenkins (formerly of 50 Carmine), Anita Lo (Annisa), Jody Williams (Morandi), and Patricia Yeo (formerly of Monkey Bar and Sapa)."

I've had the pleasure of tasting the savory warmth of gnudi at Spotted Pig melt on my tongue and of indulging in the buttery toastiness of the Lobster roll at Pearl... So brava, ladies, brava.

Like the article says, historically women have been the rulers of kitchen in the domestic sphere. And then -- like any good export of the the sexism capital of the Western world -- France showed that great chefs, male, were fit to cook for the king.

Female chefs in recent history tend to carry the weight of domesticity: Julia Child, Martha Stewart, TV chefs like Giada DeLaurentiis and Ina Garten, even Alice Walker might be considered more of a domestic than, say, Ferrán Adria (who is certainly more of a chemist than anything else...test tubes... really...). The sex appeal of these women is that they make food that reminds you of home, that somehow appeals to Oedipal mother-love. Giada and Nigella Lawson are babes, and (or because?) they cook and look great doing it. "How to be a Domestic Goddess," anyone?

I find these women brave, and I truly admire the less conspicuous chefs who command the hot strips of New York's most competitive kitchens. Perhaps the professional restaurant kitchen is one of the last openly sexist places of work, where testosterone-laden competition makes it difficult -- if not impossible -- for a woman to truly succeed in the restaurant world.

This is ironic, considering that the role reverses in the domestic sphere. If ever my father tried to cross my mother in Her Kitchen, it was tantamount offense to a Yankee crossing the Mason-Dixon line. It just wasn't done, and the consequences were dire. I witnessed explosions throughout my years at home when we crossed the line to assist with a meal. Timing was everything, and if we ever challenged the "rate-limiting factor" of a dish, we were toast, broiled, boiled over and put back on the spit for another go-around in the fire. I'd like to see Gordon Ramsay take my mother on, because I know that my mother commands Her Kitchen so well that even Ramsay would shy away, muttering defeated curses under his hushed and humiliated breath.

So for a woman to succeed in a kitchen, she's got to be a fireball. Sexy, powerful, unafraid of getting burned or cut or splattered by fat frying in a pan. And then she must also be able to fight the other fires of competition with the ultimate Alpha Male: He Who Cooks and is Still a Man's Man. The male chef has the ultimate sex-appeal. So no matter how you slice it, men once again get the one up on women... or do they?

I have daily dreams of abandoning all of my financial responsibilities and becoming a sous-chef to sweat it out under the guidance of an older, wiser Chef de Cuisine. I do the private, at-home-chef thing for the Nanny Family, and that's a cakewalk. I've done dinner parties, wine tastings, Italian family holidays, cooking one-on-one for my father when my mother was away. This doesn't really constitute a resume, but let's look at the details a moment:

Thanksgiving, 2005. Paris. First Thanksgiving on my own. Galley kitchen, 4ft by 6ft with a narrow walking space. 1.5ft by 2ft working space. The menu: Turkey roulade with wild mushrooms, pinenuts herbs and cheese (I can't remember what kind of cheese), peppers and zucchini stuffed with roasted winter vegetables and homemade breadcrumbs, honey-glazed carrots with mint, more vegetables I can't remember, plus amuse bouches galore and roasted peaches for dessert. Served for 21 people, prepared from scratch, in seven-straight hours of sweaty, back-breaking work (see photo above). I wanted fresh ingredients from the market, so in my ambition, I prepared the meal in one, single day. By the end of that night (3am), I was more possessed than Lady Macbeth -- and I couldn't eat a damn thing I made. I lost my appetite completely. But everyone said it was great.

Yet that was at home, in my domestic little French kitchen. I wasn't on the line, I wasn't handling multiple requests for multiple diners with multiplicitous tastes. It was my menu for my guests and they were having the menu that I created myself. So perhaps my first Thanksgiving wasn't that impressive after all -- perhaps it doesn't qualify me for a job in a professional kitchen.

So what's the alternative for women who aspire to cook professionally? A pastry chef? Ovens are hot (I've a scars to prove it), but they cook slowly. It's not like a gas, full-range stove with all six burners going at once and pans flying everywhere. Go to Casa Mono and sit at the bar while you have your tapas and Rioja -- you'll see what I mean. Fire is sexy. So ladies, keep cooking with fire. And move. Quickly.

Eggplant Stacks with Wild Boar Ragú

My father was one of five children -- two girls, three hungry boys. Like every good Italian family, meals were served at table from large plates that were passed from person to person. I assume there must have been some sort of passing hierarchy, because my father always tells stories of anxiously waiting for the plate to reach him -- the second-to-last child -- at which point the good parts of the dish had been taken. Because the men in the family had such great appetites, there was always a sense of immediacy to the meal: eat quickly, or be left hungry.

I am sure that the threat of not having enough dinner was part of what made my father love food so much. It wasn't that food was scarce for his family, but rather that my father's voracious, teenage appetite couldn't easily be sated around a table of a family of seven, plus guests. Fortunately, he and my mother bore two girls, which means that my father always gets the lion's share of the meal.

For my father's birthday last month, my mother and I gave him the gift of a culinary weekend: three magnificent dinners and a delicious brunch. The following recipe, Eggplant Stacks with Wild Boar Ragú, is one of the dishes my mother and I prepared for him. My mother has a knack for finding all sorts of wild game meat to put into her dishes. She buys the D'Artagnan brand boar products. My father, ever the wine connoisseur, recommends this dish with a sturdy Barolo.


EGGPLANT STACKS WITH WILD BOAR RAGU

Serves 4

1 large Vidalia onion, chopped
5 cloves garlic, crushed
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 pound boneless wild boar meat, cut into medium-sized cubes
1 pound chopped tomatoes
3 bay leaves
Fresh or dried oregano
Fresh basil
1 cup red wine
1 large eggplant, cut into1/4-inch slices
Fontina cheese (or another similar cheese that melts well, like Istara)
Fettucine pasta, or another spaghetti-like variety
Salt and pepper, to taste


In a large cast-iron pot, sauté the onion in olive oil until translucent. Add garlic. Add the boar meat and cook until seared and brown.

De-glaze the pan with a splash of wine, letting the boar absorb some of the wine, about thirty seconds. Add the tomatoes and the bay leaves and oregano. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Let ragù simmer on low on the stovetop. leaving the lid of the pot slightly ajar. Keep stirring occasionally for at least two hours. The longer the ragù is left to simmer, the more tender the meat will become.

Brush the eggplant rounds with olive oil, sprinkling with salt and pepper. Grill both sides of the eggplant until cooked. Remove from grill, and set aside on a dish for assembly.

Boil a large pot of water for pasta. Add salt once water has begun to boil. Add pasta, cook until al dente, and strain water thoroughly.

The ragù iwill be ready to eat when the meat falls apart from the cubes and has absorbed most of the liquid.

To assemble eggplant stacks, begin first layer on plate with eggplant. Add a layer of fontina cheese, a spoonful of ragù, followed by a full basil leaf. Repeat until desired height is reached, about three layers. Top with a generous spoonful of ragù, cheese, and chiffonade pieces of basil. In another corner of the dish, twist pasta into a nest, spooning ragù into the center. Sprinkle with cheese, and enjoy with a glass of Barolo.

Buon apetito!