Beer-Glazed Sausages with Charred Onions and Polenta

A few weeks ago, Emily's friends from Vienna were in town, visiting New York. They spent the week walking around the city, shopping and dining, clubbing and drinking. Whenever they were around the apartment, I naturally inquired about Viennese cuisine -- its pastries, its savories, its sweets. As the week progressed, I began craving German food, though I had rarely -- if ever -- had during my life. I proposed that on their last night I make everyone dinner to satisfy my craving, which had manifested itself in a craving for sausage.

I came up with this recipe for a sausage meal, which I think seems to be a marriage of German food (with the sausages and beer) and Mediterranean cuisine (with the polenta and roasted tomato. In keeping with this Austro-Mediterranean theme, we served the meal with a rich Catena Malbec wine instead of beer, which paired rather well with the buttery sausage and the charred onions. But to top off our meal, the Austrians pulled out some strong vodka, which we served with a Sour Cherry Tart from Silver Moon Bakery, and a lesson in key German phrases.

Somehow, the beer "sauce" that I originally intended to make came out as more of a glaze, perhaps because of the high yeast content of the beer I used. The result was deliciously thick, salty, and a bit sweet: a perfect last meal with new friends to say auf wiedersehen, a bittersweet goodbye.

BEER-GLAZED SAUSAGES WITH CHARRED ONIONS AND POLENTA

Serves 4-6

Six uncooked sausages, bought from butcher
1 small yellow Onion, cut into quarter-circle slices
½ cup Dark German Ale
2-3 vine tomatoes, cut in half
Fresh thyme
Olive oil

1 cup Polenta corn meal
2 cups water
½ cup grated Parmesan Cheese
Pinch of salt and pepper

Turn on broiler to high.

Cut tomatoes in half along their width. On a small dish, pour a circle of olive oil, add a sprinkling of salt, pepper, and fresh thyme leaves. Rub tomatoes, on the cut side down, in olive oil and herb mixture (these will be the tops of the tomatoes that face up in the broiler). Sprinkle a bit of Parmesan cheese on top of oiled tomatoes. Arrange tomatoes in a broiler pan, and put under broiler. Cook all the way through, until soft. Remove from oven and let cool.

While tomatoes are under broiler, heat a large sauté pan on high. Add oil to pan, turn down to medium heat, and add sausages. Begin cooking sausages by browning on all sides. Add onions and fresh thyme leaves to sausages. Turn sausages occasionally to cook through on all sides. When onions begin to brown, cut sausages in half length-wise and then in half across, keeping links in pan to continue cooking. Sauté sausages, cut side down, adding ale. Turn town heat to let mixture simmer, cover, and cook sausages all the way through, allowing onions to char.

In a medium-sized pot, bring two cups water to a low boil. Add polenta in a thin stream, stirring mixture with the other hand. Turn down heat to a simmer and stir polenta slowly. As the mixture begins to thicken, add parmesan cheese, salt, and pepper. Turn off heat, stir occasionally.

Keep an eye on the sausages to be sure that the meat cooks all the way through. When onions turn black and begin to char and the beer turns to a thick glaze, the dish should be ready.

Spoon a helping of polenta on a plate, arranging sausages and onion on top. Set one half of a roasted tomato on the side. Garnish with a sprinkling of fresh thyme leaves.

Guten appetit!

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.