Running O-Gauge Trains

by Don on March 3, 2012

Last year, I set up my old Lionel train set on the dining room table. I had the locomotive cleaned and oiled and the transformer checked out. I ran a smaller version of the layout I used to set up in my bedroom in Queens. The kids liked it, Soren got really enthusiastic, and I fell in love again with the detail and modeling. So around my birthday in February, I bought a set of modern RailKing trains, O gauge like my Lionel, and started planning a better layout than the dining room. O-gauge means I can mix my old Lionel trains with the CSX diesel I bought last month.

Now that my trains are up and running, I’ve been thinking about the layout. I’ve got buildings for a town, a yard, and a farm from my old set. I’ve got some new buildings Soren and I bought. I’ve been reading some magazines and took Soren to the train show at the Big E to see what the hobbyists do. Their attention to detail is spectacular—fully realized towns, canyons, industrial sidings. Many of them construct stories for their layouts. Some pick a time and place. Others, freelancers, simply go for a look. To me, it’s like writing a novel, a chance to invent a familiar world.

I’m thinking you’ve got to have vignettes on a small layout like mine, shade one scene into another, even if the farm is 20 miles out of town. It’s like one of the Japanese paintings where the edges of one scene blur into white and blur back into another scene. I’m just starting out. I’m laying out the pieces, not gluing anything down or caring much about scale and verisimilitude until I work out what I want. Building scale mountains, with realistic stone outcroppings and meandering streams is somewhat in the future. For now, I’m using cardboard to lay out the streets and sidewalks of “town.”

The town is called Kimball. Kimball, North America, the kind of place you could ride through in a ’47 Hudson or stumble on in a late 60’s road trip or even on modern trip with your family. There’s a school, Valentin Hall, like P.S. 82 in Jamaica, and an apartment building. There’s going to be a diner behind the town, tying the railroad yard to the town. It’ll be a 24-hour diner, the kind of place where the railroad guys eat, where kids buy a bag of potato chips and a coke and eat their bag lunch at the counter, slipping half the chips into the moist tuna fish sandwich for crunch and gourmandaise, where couples go for dinner after work or a movie, and single guys go late at night for a cup of coffee to listen to conversations. I’d love to add a small industrial building, like the laboratory on 90th Avenue around the corner from my apartment building, a low two story brick building with black marble blocks and glass brick front windows, making something like dental molds, taking in and sending out work in small packages.

There’s a rail yard, with a switch tower I built 50 years ago and an overhead trestle from the same era. “We like to build yards,” Dennis, the owner of Hobby World, told me. I figure it’s because it’s interesting to switch cars, it’s a lot of train in a relatively small space, and it’s a place to show your collection. So I’ve got a small yard in the works. I’ve got the switch tower and the crosswalk and the new set comes with some shipping containers that will stack nicely off to one side.

And then there’s the country. The barn is from my old set, with the farm animals, a farm girl, a farm hand, and two tractors. Like Kimball, it could be anywhere—upstate New York, the mythic Midwest, the Berkshires. Ultimately, that’s where the tunnel or the plateau goes, but for now, I’m adding some graduated trestles that drop off coming into the yard.

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The Rendezvous Revisited, Turners Falls

by Don on January 21, 2012

It’s been a while since I was last at the Voo. A couple of friends and I traveled there shortly after it had reopened under its present management. A former dive, they were upgrading the food and the atmosphere and turning The Rendezvous into a 21st century dive. I liked it, but it was clearly hadn’t gotten where it was headed yet. A Yelp review called it a “hipster kind of place” and while saying that makes me feel decidedly unhipsterish, it is an apt description.

My wife and I and some old friends had dinner there last week and the Voo has arrived. The menu was more interesting, there were a half dozen good brews on tap, and the place had a good feel. It’s the kind of place you want in your neighborhood so you can become a regular.

The menu is good: Standard and unusual appetizers (pretzel and two mustards, nachos, crostini, etc.), burgers and Panini on the lunch/quick end, some entrees for a real dinner and interesting sides like Asian Slaw and Curried Carrot Kickshaw (in Jamaican Aioli). We shared the crostini for an app and there were enough small squares to go around yet not so many to ruin an appetite. And good, too.

Sarah ordered the roasted half chicken, which turned out to be a boneless breast and a thigh/drumstick combo, smaller than the half a bird I’d envisioned, but good. (Of course the menu completely warned me it was boned, so the expectations were definitely my own.) For some reason, I wanted Mac n Cheese (perhaps the proximity to Holy Smokes BBQ and Deli, also in Turners and maker of incredible spicy mac n cheese had something to do with it), which was a large portion of good cheese and macaroni, not as soupy as I’ve come to like it, but neither dry nor overcooked. Sided with a nice mixed green salad, it made a fine course, especially when I traded some for some of Sarah’s chicken.

Our friends had a seared tuna steak and meatloaf. I didn’t get to taste Carl’s tuna, but it vanished in pretty short order. My friend Joan sent her meatloaf back for reheating. The flavor was good and the smashed potatoes under it were fine, but not the kind of hot both she and I like. We’re both hot food hot eaters—I want my pizza with the cheese melted and runny not merely warmed up—and I agreed that the meatloaf needed some more temp. Still, it was a good meal all around.

For dessert, most of the Rendezvous desserts involve chocolate. The ladies shared a flourless chocolate cake, which was deep and chocolately, but a little freezer burned. I got a slice of cherry cheesecake, with the cherries swirled into the cake rather than the usual florescent red goo atop of the cake. It was a good cheesecake, a touch creamier than a New York style, but it had heft and taste and the cherries were a good addition to the basic mix. In my opinion, when you fork off a piece of cheesecake, it should look like the side of a brick or a block of cut clay, which this one did.

They were setting up for bingo night as we left, and the place was filing up. On other nights, they have music or other entertainment. There’s a good feel to the place. Besides, the bathrooms are large and clean, which removes it from the category of dive bar, but I doubt anyone will be complaining. If you find yourself in Turners or you feel like getting out, it’s a good place to wind up.

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Lumberyard Restaurant – Amherst Mass

by Don on January 13, 2012

In New England, no one gives directions to where something is, only to what used to be there. At the Lumber Yard Restaurant in Amherst, you don’t see Fenton’s, the sporting goods store that used to be there. Instead, you see a well-appointed and very calm restaurant that you’d never guess opened barely a month ago.

I’d read one review and heard some good things, but mostly people were asking each other if they’d eaten there. I did hear they had a good wine list, so while her husband and my wife were together at a UMass basketball game, I met my former business partner Kitty for dinner. Kitty appreciates wine and is one of the people most likely to understand the wine list.

Without reservations, we waited for a short 15 minutes on a comfortable couch beside the bar. The Lumberyard is not a college hangout; the couples and foursomes were generally older, with some experience, some money to spend, and nary a single baseball cap kept on inside the restaurant. I had a glass of Prosecco and Kitty had a glass of white, while we waited.

You can eat in one of two ways at the Lumber Yard, from the smaller bar menu with appetizers and smaller entrees or you can opt for the full dinner. The entrees are in the low $20s and wines by the glass are around $8, so if you go the entrée route, two things happen: you know you’re going to spend a little money and your expectations are raised. Kitty selected an Australian Shiraz and a California Rhone, both good choices.

The menu is on-line—entrees of salmon, lamb, a burger, a pan-roasted chicken breast, bolognaise sauce, and a pork chop. There was a New York Strip special, so we decided on the chicken breast and the steak, and ordered the steak “slightly past rare.” We split white bean crostini and some braised fennel as an appetizer. The white beans were smooth and creamy, but needed more seasoning, salt and definitely a little more garlic. They came with three rolled white anchovies which provided the salt, but we still wanted more garlic. A lemony salad—frisee I think—was a nice counterpoint. The fennel came topped with bread crumbs which added a nice texture to the fennel, which had a good licorice undertone.

The steak arrived on a bed of spinach, sided with some duck fat roasted fingerlings and topped with sautéed tomato chunks. A steakhouse on a plate. The steak was flavorful and cooked as ordered, and we both enjoyed it tremendously. I didn’t get much duck fat from the potatoes, but they were also well-cooked with a nice crust. The chicken was an airplane breast, the frenched first wing bone sticking straight up out of a salt-crusted and juicy breast. One continual battle between my wife and I is that my wife likes her chicken much more well cooked than I do. I don’t know what she would have thought of this one, but I thought it was juicy, flavorful, with not a touch of pink. Since I avoid chicken breasts like pork chops because they are both usually dry no matter how much brining they undergo, this was a surprise. The chicken came with feathery light gnocchi, which I am not sure were the right side, but were very well executed.

For dessert, I had a yoghurt panna cotta, topped with some pistachios and sided with some ripe berries and a really flavorful flowery honey. Someone in the kitchen really likes textures because each dish had a noticeable play of smooth and crisp.

I haven’t eaten at the new Chez Albert yet, but I’d say this is the best restaurant in Amherst. Make a reservation. Even in January.

383 Main Street | Amherst | (413) 253-4200. Open for dinner and closed on Mondays. Plenty of parking in the lot behind the restaurant.

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Crab Cakes, Eggplant, and Unexpected Surprises

by Don on December 31, 2011

So what do you say when you don’t cook much anymore? When you find yourself falling back on the now tired recipes that you’ve lovingly developed over the years, that ones that reflect your style and how you want your food to taste, but that now seem as boring as the roads you’ve driven on for the last 30 years?

When cookbooks all seem like product and the magic of discovery in magazine recipes just looks like the business of content and successful pitches?

When all of the local restaurants serve standard variations on the same common ingredients and if you get a side of broccoli one more time, you’re going to scream? When the places you eat at out of town serve pale reflections of the latest trends?

When none of your ideas seem to generate much passion and your agent’s only comment is that she can’t sell 30,000 copies and try again?

When you are in love with words and the thought of not writing something of value is as unthinkable as is the thought of having no words to polish.

I suppose you write about what’s in front of you. The crab cakes you cooked the other night, using jumbo lump crabmeat and a recipe from the Annapolis Junior League, that came out crisp and filled with pieces of crab with no taste of breading, sided with a remoulade/cocktail sauce combination. They were the kind of crab cakes that you always want to get when the server tells you the kitchen makes the best crabcakes she’s ever had and you know that you know better, but hope springs eternal and no matter how filled with shreds of crab they are, they arrive tasting only of breading.

You think about the shrimp that you shallow poached in a thick soup of Old Bay and lemon juice, omitting the hot peppers in the faint hope that small children might be tempted to try them, that came out cooked a point and tasting equally strongly of Old Bay and shrimp. You slide by the less successful, the albodigas that had too much coriander for your taste and give another wry smile at the crudites you served with a roasted onion dip from Whole Foods that was an organic version of French Onion soup dip.

Or, you think about the scallop appetizer that you ate in at The Evening Star a couple of nights ago. One bite of the smooth, confident, gently-pickled eggplant that the scallop was sitting on and suddenly you were tasting shulutah again, the eggplant, carrot, celery, and garlic pickle that your Romanian grandmother simmered in half white vinegar and half water, keeping a quart mayonnaise jar in her refrigerator at all times. Talking with the service manager at the restaurant, she said the chef had based it on a version of chow chow that had originally come from France (chou chou?) and from Eastern Europe before that. It’s not that I have become someone who rails about the present and wants only what he used to have—it was just that it was so good, so familiar and so unexpected. And so tasty.

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Smoked Salmon and Corn Chowder – The Leftover Chronicles Continue

by Don on August 10, 2011

Lately, I’ve been enjoying using up leftovers. Granted, good leftovers require some good dinners as starting points, but that is OK, too. It’s just that after a week of Hannah and her girls and Sarah’s sister Anne, we have a lot of leftovers in the fridge I want to use up.

The rules are simple: use whatever is in the fridge without buying anything beyond some incidentals. Today, on my way home from the office and thinking about what we had, I started combining. Three ears of corn leftover from last night—still sweet and tasty. Some leftover Nova lox from my foraging session with Lisa Ekus, Virginia Willis, and Bob Dees. A couple of potatoes Sarah bought as Idaho that cook up mealy no matter what we do to them. And some common crackers Sarah and Anne bought at the Vermont Country store. You can see where I’m going with this: corn chowder.

Smoked Salmon and Corn Chowder

1 onion
2 TBS butter
2 potatoes
3 ears corn
1 cup milk, half and half, etc.
1 bay leaf
Sprig of thyme
Salt and pepper to taste
¼ tsp paprika
A small piece of red or green bell pepper
A small piece of hot pepper
Chives and dill for garnish
Several pieces of Nova lox

I cut up an onion and sautéed it in 2 TBS butter while I diced the potatoes small. I added the potatoes to the butter and tossed them around for a bit, then covered them in water and brought them to a simmer. I sliced the corn off the cob—pretty easy anyway, but I cut the cobs in half, which makes it easier. I added the cobs to the simmering potatoes.

After 15 minutes, the potatoes were done. I took out the corn cobs then mashed the potatoes against the side of the pot, though you might want to leave them whole if your potatoes have a better texture than mine. I added the corn, the milk, some salt and a touch of paprika. We have a bay leaf tree in a pot that sits outside during the summer and comes in during the winter. I can’t believe how different fresh bay leaves are, with curry-like flavor notes. I highly recommend it. It’s like fresh basil compared with dried. We also have a lot of thyme in the herb garden, so I added a sprig. In earlier days, the milk would have been half and half or a mix of light cream and whole milk. These days, it’s 2% milk. I keep overruling Attila the Dietician’s request for 1% (she knows she’ll never get skim). Do what you like. I won’t mind.

We had a quarter of a green bell pepper which I peeled, then diced. I peeled it because I was going to add it at the very end and I wanted it to cook quickly without getting all olive drab and overcooked. I diced it really small. Ditto for the hot pepper—we have some long green peppers whose name I don’t know, but which are hot enough.

I simmered the corn and milk for 15 minutes, then added the green peppers and called Sarah for dinner. I sliced the Nova in small strips and garnished my bowl of chowder with it (Sarah is not a lox fancier). I snipped some chives in both bowls and snipped some dill onto mine and served them with the common crackers.

Not bad. Not bad at all. If I used better potatoes and some half and half, it could even be a real meal and not leftovers. And, even without the Nova, I’d go with the snipped dill.

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Cooking with Charlotte-Macaroni and Cheese

by Don on July 15, 2011

Given the number of children and grandchildren in my life, you’d think at least one would be interested in cooking. But no. Each one has a passing interest that quickly fades. Perhaps it’s my teaching style. Hopefully not. Anyway, when Rachel’s daughter Charlotte came to stay with us for this past week part of the plan was Culinary Boot Camp. Rachel is not very interested in cooking and she has had too many knife accidents for me to skip knife skills.

So, in thinking about what to teach her, knife skills ranked really at the top. Charlotte is a soccer player (counseloring at the UMass soccer camp as well this past week). She likes meat, but has a training diet that apparently includes Cheese-Its but no bread. Anyway, when I asked her what she liked to eat, Mac n Cheese was top of the list.

On the first night, we made a cucumber salad—sliced local pickling cucumbers cut thin, sprinkled with salt and sugar and left to wilt for an hour or two. Charlotte loved them and I am proud to say picked up the “tuck your fingertips while slicing” bit of chef’s knifery really quickly, perhaps because she is used to being coached, perhaps not. Anyway, the basic recipe—five pickling or one regular cucumber, one scant tsp salt and sugar each, should be doubled since she popped a few in her mouth each time she went by the colander. In addition, I taught her cucumbers “Aunt Hannah-style” (scoop out the seeds with a teaspoon, as Hannah prefers) and to put the colander on a plate to catch the liquid that gets thrown off. I usually add some rice wine vinegar, cilantro, and, if I have them, some chopped peanuts to the salad, but these were fine as is. We also rinsed the cucumbers if they tasted a little too salty.

Anyway, on to the Mac n Cheese. Sarah and I each have our own style. No surprise there. But the surprise is that we both agree on the winner. Holy Smokes, the late lamented BBQ in a church, used to serve a spicy version of this. You can still get the cheese sauce in their deli in Turner’s Falls, Holy Smokes BBQ Delicatessen. The key was that the sauce is really goopy. I dislike the bound bricks o’ macaroni you too often get as mac n cheese. It takes real skill to bake a standard mac n cheese for an hour and keep it moist.

So, when we tasted Holy Smokes’ mac n cheese, we were all over it. First, they added some sambal oelek for heat, which was/is fantastic. Second, the dish was really goopy with sauce. I think they made theirs as a four cheese sauce since it was a little more complex than just cheddar cheese. Sarah spent some time quizzing Lou Ekus about it and came away with the technique of cooking the macaroni and making the sauce separately, but combining them in a small baking dish, adding the sambal if the customer wanted it spicy, and baking it only long enough to get a crust. Voila. That’s how we’ve been making it ever since.

Charlotte, like most of the kids I know, isn’t really a fan of spice, so this version was going to be plain. But, I figured it would teach her a white sauce that could be turned into mac n cheese, or, with pepperjack cheese and the addition canned chilis, turned into a chile con queso, another favorite of hers.

She grated the cheese, made the sauce, helped to determine when the macaroni (actually campanelle because we both liked the shape, which holds a lot of sauce) was al dente and not underdone. The result was excellent. Everyone ate it up and we discussed how to make it again.

And she learned a key rule of cooking: the cook cleans up to the moment when she serves. After that, appreciative diners should clear the table and wash the dishes.

Charlotte’s Mac n Cheese

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Charlotte’s Macaroni and Cheese

by Don on July 15, 2011

Charlotte’s Macaroni and Cheese

1 lb pasta – elbow macaroni, campanelle, cellentani, or other interesting shape that will hold sauce
1 lb extra sharp cheddar cheese
3 TBS flour (that’s tablespoon. Teaspoons are abbreviated tsp, but you knew that, right?)
3 TBS butter3 cups milk
Salt and pepper
1/4 tsp nutmeg
(See options below for additional spicing)

Bring pasta water to a boil in a large pot. Add a TBS salt to the water. Grate the cheese. Preheat the oven on Broil and set the rack 3 inches below the burner. Find a baking dish large enough to hold the mac n cheese and spray it with a little Pam.

Make the sauce: melt the butter in a large saucepan over medium heat. When it is melted and bubbling, add the flour and stir with a heatproof spatula until it is mixed in and lump-free. Smell it as it cooks and when the smell goes from raw flour to a bread-y smell, it is ready. It should be a little golden, but not brown. Add about a half-cup of the milk and stir it in quickly to mix it. Add some more milk, stirring to keep lumps from forming. If they do, mash them against the side of the pot. Add the rest of the milk and stir it in. Let the sauce just start to bubble, then turn it down and let it cook for 10 minutes or so. Stire it often and scrape the bottom of the pot with the spatula to keep it from sticking. Add the nutmeg and salt to taste. Start with a 1/4 tsp of salt and add it in bits until it tastes right.

Drain the pasta in a colander, but don’t rinse it off. Put about a quarter of it back in the big pot.

Pick up the cheese in pinches and add it to the sauce, stirring to mix in each pinch before you add more. When it is all melted and smooth, add it to the pasta in the big pot, using the spatula to scrape the sauce out of the pot.

Add some of the cooked pasta and mix it in. Keep adding pasta and mixing until the dish is as goopy as you like. You may not use all the pasta. On the other hand, if you’ve been nibbling on the cooked pasta as you go, you may wish you had a little more. No matter. Pour it carefully into the baking dish.

Smooth the top and put the baking dish under the broiler for 15 minutes until the top is nice and crusty. Take it out of the oven, let it sit for five or ten minutes, scoop and serve.

OPTIONS:

For a spicier cheese sauce, you can add 1/4 to 1 tsp powdered mustard and/or a few shakes of hot sauce while you are making the white sauce. If you like spicy food, add a tsp or more of sambal olek, Sriracha, or even hot pepper.

White pepper looks better than black pepper since it disappears into the sauce.

You can top the mac n cheese with Parmesan cheese, breadcrumbs or wheat germ (Sarah’s trick for making it healthier) before you put it under the broiler to give it a little crust.

You can add different cheeses to the sauce: Parmesan, asiago, pepperjack, etc. for a different flavor. Taste the cheese first to see whether you like it or not.

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