From packaged to delicious…

I can cook, but there are times when I need to do other things, times when I just can’t peel and chop, saute and bake, puree and reduce — and wash all of the dishes dirtied during the preparation of a delicious meal.

Of course, lots of restaurants are happy to help me out — but last week I grabbed the opportunity to become a 30-minute chef, courtesy Cook! SF, a San Francisco company that shops, preps, packages and delivers every last ingredient I need to make a restaurant-quality meal in 30 minutes or less.

Being such a speedy chef is a bit pricey — it costs $24 to $30 per meal — but for someone who spends two or more hours in the kitchen night after night, it’s worth every cent.

This is why. It was 3 p.m. on a Friday and I was starved. I had a busy evening planned, and a headache on the back burner from not eating all day. I checked my watch and decided that if the promises on the Cook! SF paperwork were true, I had just enough time to serve up a gourmet meal.

I zipped open the cooler sack and pulled out a pair of boxes. Inside was a tub of sweet potato soup, an apple cake with fresh whipped cream to garnish, and bags containing perfectly prepped and pre-cooked asparagus, and large fillets of salmon.

Within 10 minutes I had read the instructions, put the asparagus in the oven and a salmon fillet in a hot pan. The soup went into a second pan for reheating. Ten minutes later, I scooped the food onto a plate for photos before diving in with a fork.

The fish was some of the best I have ever tasted. The fresh dill sauce was salty to taste, a perfect garnish for my barely salted fish and asparagus. The soup, made with sweet potato celery and onion, was lively and perfectly balanced.

Worth $25-$30? You bet. Later that evening I was surrounded by colleagues who had headaches from working too hard and missing dinner altogether. I felt great. I had not only had dinner, but a luscious, memorable, nutritious dinner that I cooked — with barely any effort at all.

A day later, I tackled a second sample, a dinner of Steak with Pomegranate Reduction and Mashed Parsnips served with an arugula-walnut salad.

Because the sauce required a few more steps than the salmon dish, preparing this dinner took about 20 minutes — not exactly a big investment of time. On the fork, I enjoyed this meal, except for the liver-flavor of the beef itself. Every other aspect of the meal was great. I especially enjoyed the fresh arugula and the potato-parsnip mash, an idea I want to duplicate soon.

Those who are interested in trying out the service will be happy to know that the instructions are ultra-clear, printed up with a color image of what the dish should look like. On the back side of the instruction card is detailed nutrition data for each recipe - essential for those on special diets.

Cook! SF is designed as a subscription service, where clients order one meal per week, delivered on Wednesdays. Every week there are two meal options. Entrees are $13.95, appetizers such as the salad and the soup are $2.65 (a bargain) and desserts are $2.95. Those who order more than two meals can add a third entree for $9.95. Delivery is $9.95.

For more information, go to www.cook-sf.com.

– Jolene Thym

Braised Shortribs with Ridgeline Cabernet Sauvignon — Photo by Mike Lucia, MediaNews Staff

The next time someone starts complaining about how calorie-illiterate people are, about how they don’t know or care how much fat, salt and fiber they put into their mouths, don’t believe it.

Sure, some of us carry a little extra weight. Some of us have a hard time saying no to foods that we know are not good for us. But last week, I got a pretty clear message that people DO care about calories when I ran a recipe for braised shortribs in my weekly Happy Together column.

The recipe, unbeknownst to me, delivered a whopping 1,400 calories per person, according to a computer program that calculates nutrition on all of the recipes we run in the newspaper.

The first email questioning the calorie counts made me laugh. I reasoned with the reader, suggesting that unless she sucked down every ounce of fat in the dish and then licked the plate, she didn’t have to claim all those calories. But when e-mails No. 2 and No. 3 came, I decided I needed answers. It turns out that our nutrition calculator gives ranges of calories — for example, 4 pounds of ribs might be 1,173 calories. Or it might be more like 650 calories. It depends, of course, on how lean the ribs happen to be.

It also turns out that the chef who wrote this particular recipe failed to instruct people to defat the drippings and remove the excess fat from the sauce before serving. Had the chef added this simple, easy step to his recipe, the calorie count per serving in that dish would have been reduced drastically - a full 100 calories for every 1 tablespoon of fat rendered and removed from the dish.

It is my observation that most chefs care about things like aroma, mouthfeel, freshness, complexity and flavor. Rarely does a chef talk about calorie counts. In my opinion, those of us who want to eat well AND be healthy can and should run recipes through our own fat-detectors, then cut fat wherever we can.

– Jolene Thym

It’s the kind of dinner you start craving the day after just before lunch: Sunset Magazine’s turkey pot pie with apples. It’s the perfect cold winter supper.

I definitely cursed the thing a bit during the extended making, and that was even cutting corners using a store-bought crust.

But nevermind. It was worth it in the end. You combine cooked ground turkey with onions, caraway seed and dried sage and simmer, then adding two (crosswise) sliced golden delicious apples and two onions. I forgot to buy the 1.5 pounds of yams, but it didn’t hurt a bit. I made it last year with other apples, but I think this is a case where golden delicious make a difference.

(How many of you are chronic grocery store forgetters? You read or think you read a recipe through, make your list, go to the store and come home to cook, only to discover you didn’t get some key herb or something. I blame my sometimes-sloppy handwriting, or maybe my children for distracting me. But that’s what husbands are for. To be sent back to the store for random items.)

Back to the pie. Once your concoction of apples, onions, meat and spices simmers covered for 10 minutes (apples soft, onions browned), you add about 1 1/3 cups of apple juice or sherry mixed with a couple tablespoons of cornstarch and bring to a boil for a few minutes, stirring of course. You’re left with a wonderful, thick filling that you could serve atop biscuits if you’re really lazy.

It’s supposed to cool for 30-40 minutes, making this a pain to do the night of eating. (You can make a night ahead if you want.) I toughed it out, sipping my $2 Trader Joe’s Chuck, dealing with the kids and snacking on a couple spoonfuls of Annie’s Mac leftover from their dinner.

Then I dumped the filling into a 10-inch pie pan, topped it with the store-bought crust and cooked it at 375 until bubbly and browned.

I had only 10 minutes to eat until I had to be somewhere else, but oh they were a lovely 10 minutes. I can’t wait for leftovers tonight.

Since I work through lunch most days, I jumped when Oakland entrepreur Kim Cole offered to come make a pizza for lunch a few weeks ago. The idea of talking to someone in person instead of over the phone or via e-mail is a treat in itself. But add a slice of pizza and it’s an over-the-top offer.

Cole arrived shortly before noon, pizza ingredients in hand, and a story to tell. Cole is a young, energetic, super-organized, pizza-loving mom who believes that every family deserves to eat pizza made the right way; at home with fresh, organic dough and fresh ingredients.

The idea to make and sell pizza dough, she says, came while she was on maternity leave, and trying to make a perfect pizza.

“For some reason I became obsessed with making perfect pizza dough,” she says. At first, her pizzas turned out too thick, too thin, too chewy, too dry. But after months of dough-tweaking, Cole hit on perfection. Her moist, double-rise dough turned out pizza crusts that were chewy and crispy, light and substantial, just the right canvas for a handful of toppings.

“I kept playing with it and playing with it,” she says, admitting that for a long while the family ate pizza at least three nights a week. She consulted books by Peter Reinhardt, the guru of pizza, and by Pamela Sheldon Johns. She practiced and experimented.

Cole made so much dough that she started giving away the excess.
“When you make pizza, you make two or three balls of dough. That’s just too much for our family, so I gave it away. People loved it.”

Before long, people started requesting dough. Cole obliged, but she also realized that the world’s appetite for pizza dough just might be a great home business that would allow her to stay home with her daughter.

“I did a lot of research before I started the business,” she says.
She wrote a business plan that included details such as the cost for a business license and projected taxes. She did a profit and loss statement. She also fine-tuned plans to make and store the dough.

Her research done, she decided to invest $10,000 in the project. That was more than three years ago, but she still remembers the day she launched her dough at the Montclair Farmer’s Market.

“I had bought an ice cream cart to keep the dough frozen. That seemed like the best idea for selling at farmer’s markets,” she says. “I packed the cart full of 600 pounds of dough. Then I realized that I couldn’t move it.

“I forgot how heavy it would be.” She got help moving the cart that first day, but decided that ice chests were a much more portable option.

The market went well. Cole’s dough sold out then, just as it does now nearly every time she makes a delivery.

As Cole dumped a ball of dough onto the counter and effortlessly pressed it into a circle in order to make a simple fontina cheese and roasted pepper pizza, she shared some of the challenges of putting her dough on the market.

Before she could sell the dough at Berkeley Bowl, she had to design a label, select packaging, and pay lots of fees; $850 for a bar code to sell in a retail store, $400 for a state wholesale license, $400 to for a county retail license.

Even more frustrating, if she sells more than $5,000 in dough, she will have to pay an additional fee if she wants to state on her label that her dough is made from organic ingredients.

More recently, she decided to expand her business, which meant finding a commercial kitchen to rent - a very expensive proposition, since anytime operations of the business change locations she must pay additional fees.

Cole, who has no desire to grow her business so large that she needs employees, says she has yet to realize her investment — she expects it will be a long time before she makes a profit.

“That will happen. People like the dough and they are buying it. But I’m not really worried about profit right now. My goal is to make this a business that reflects my values and helps people.”

A bag of frozen Mom’s Pizza Dough, enough to make one sumptuous, family pleasing, organic pizza, costs about $5. The dough is sold at Berkeley Bowl, The Pasta Shop in Berkeley and Encinal Market in Alameda. It’s also sold through the home produce delivery company, Planet Organics.

– Jolene Thym

An entire dinner built around mushrooms sounds a little redundant; perhaps even boring to any one who has not attended the Annual Wild Mushroom, Truffle & Pinot Noir Dinner at Parcel 104 in Santa Clara.

But such a thought is banished when eyes and nose meet a basket of the mushrooms headed for the kitchen; a colorful assortment of yellow, white, black and cream colored wild mushrooms, then come to rest on a pair of fresh-from-the-ground truffles — one black, one white.

In the kitchen, executive chef Bart Hosmer and his team turn those mushrooms into menu superstars, making them into soup, sauces, conserves, salads and some of the most heavenly potatoes on the face of the earth. Even pastry chef Carlos Sanchez joins the fun, turning porcini and chanterelle mushrooms into appetizer muffins, then using red candy cap mushrooms to make the most heavenly ice cream — the candy caps have a sweetness that tastes a lot like maple.

What makes a dinner like this, the 4th Annual Mushroom, Truffle and Pinot Noir Dinner, so much fun to attend is knowing that for this meal, the chefs are turned loose in terms of creativity.

Their assignment is simply to come up with something wonderful and delicious using some of the most rare and delicious foods on earth.

“You will taste a variety of mushrooms tonight that are very rare,” Randy Bertao, the restaurant’s master sommelier, explains to the dinner guests. “The candy cap mushrooms are available in late November only… it’s a bright red mushroom that tastes like maple syrup.”

That the chefs enjoy such creative freedom is apparent with each dish that emerges from the kitchen. Sweet bits of smoked trout are tossed with frisee and chanterelles for a salad course. Tender, silky slices of buttermilk poached chicken are laid on top of truffle cream, then topped with the most delicate slivers of crunchy beauregard yam and leek.

Perhaps the most aromatic dish of the evening were slices of veal topped with melting slivers of white truffle.

Spotlighting the food are a selection of pinot noirs, each with a personality unique to the vineyard. From the Sonoma Valley was a $70-per-bottle pinot from Iron Horse Thomas Road Vineyard that was just bright enough and acidic enough to complement the somewhat rich porcini pasta dish. Other pinots hailed from Carneros; the Santa Lucia Highlands, east of Monterey; and Arroyo Grande, near Santa Barbara.

For many, the biggest surprise came at the end, in the form of a luscious mushroom dessert. After appetizers that included mushroom flatbread and a goat milk-truffle “cappucino,” followed by four courses, diners were not exactly hungry.

But not a single guest at our table could resist dessert.

The oval-shaped plates included a crepe filled with apple-chanterelle conserve, a spoonful of the sweet candy cap mushroom ice cream described above and a shard of a crisp, salty, porcini-flavored bark. The dessert was sweet, salty, textural and aromatic — a great finish to a meal that will not soon be forgotten.

Post Script: One of the things I love about going to Parcel 104 is the service, which is perfectly choreographed. Servers arrive at each table in unison, delivering plates to the entire table at once, removing plates on cue, and catering to every need of every guest.

As courses unfold, servers scan the room, not hovering, but noticing details. They keep wine glasses filled at just the right level for each guest — they seem to know who likes a little more, who likes a little less.

The servers even manage smiles and great service under pressure: Last week’s dinner guests included a table of 14 guests from Dublin, neighbors who decided the $150-per-person dinner was the perfect opportunity to celebrate anniversaries and birthdays.

Keeping glasses full for the onslaught of toasts offered throughout the evening was no small task — especially when a nearby table joined in the fun, at one point performing a celebratory “wave” at the table.

Response from the wait staff? They politely worked around it, Miss Manners-style, as if it never happened. Seamless.

– Jolene Thym

Most often, my inbox is packed either with ready-made products or sauces, foods that someone else has prepared for me, or cookbooks filled with recipes that invite me to do everything from scratch.

I love both of these kinds of mail, but I was especially pleased a few weeks ago when I received what one might call a two-for-one. It was a recipe for authentic Spanish paella — and nearly every ingredient I would need to make and serve the dish.

This ultra-creative invitation to cook had arrived courtesy of Gloria Ferrer’s Cuvee Club, who apparently put together the $60 kit in order to promote Rene Barbier Petillant, a $6 effervescent rose wine from Spain. This deduction is an educated guess based on the information packet — it was printed on Rene Barbier stationery.

Even though the suggestion was to take my kit to a park or to the beach for an outdoor picnic, I just couldn’t make myself wait for that particular outdoor leisure opportunity. I plunked it in the middle of my kitchen table, unpacked the wares and got to work. An hour and a half later, I pulled my very first effort at making paella out of the oven and called the troops to dinner.

I have no idea if my paella was authentic tasting or not, but it was a lively dish, thanks to the smoked La Chinata paprika, the saffron, and the perfect beads of Peregrino Calasparra rice. The best part is that even though I would never select a pink wine for dinner (or lunch or brunch), this inexpensive Petillant wine was a perfect companion for the spicy richness of the dish. Alone, it tastes slightly sweet and sour on my tongue. But with the paella, it turned clean and refreshing.

If you, like me, know nothing about Spanish ingredients and even less about making paella, visit www.LaTienda.com or call (888) 472-1022. The company sells a variety of kits — all with recipes.

– Jolene Thym