Leverett author finds culinary passion like a trip around the world.
T. Susan Chang, of Leverett, spends her days testing cookbook recipes. A Harvard grad with a culinary education, she is author of ";A Spoonful of Promises: Stories and Recipes from a Well-Tempered Table"; Her food commentaries can by hear on New England Public Radio as well as National Public Radio. Nationally-known food writer and commentator T. Susan Chang, of Leverett, has her spacious kitchen set up so that testing recipes from the many dozens of cookbooks she reviews each year is a simple process.
The room is also set up so that she can work off the calories from those dishes.
In a corner, Chang has a treadmill next to a shelf lined with her newest cookbook acquisitions. Above the controls for the treadmill is a makeshift desk with a keyboard and monitor. Chang walks and writes her columns at the same time, walking backwards to clear her mind when she’s suffering from writer’s block.
She is nothing if not efficient. She has to be with all the various projects she juggles.
Chang recently published her first book, “A Spoonful of Promises: Stories and Recipes from a Well-Tempered Table,” a collection of essays on her memories of food with recipes included.
She also writes cookbook reviews and a year-end cookbook round-up for the Boston Globe; does occasional food commentary on New England Public Radio; contributes to the Kitchen Window series for National Public Radio; does a year-end cookbook round-up for NPR; blogs weekly for the cookbook indexing website “Eat Your Books” and maintains her own blog, “Cookbooks for Dinner,” at www.tsusanchang.com.
Hungry yet?
Chang grew up in Dobbs Ferry, a New York suburb, and earned a bachelor’s in ancient Greek with a minor in English from Harvard University. She lived in New York City from 1990 to 2000, working for university presses, transitioning after food became a major distraction.
“It was all about the food, really,” the 42-year-old Chang said. “At 4 p.m., I would be planning dinner instead of working.”
Her husband, Randy te Velde, and she both quit their jobs after they were married to follow their passions. He did some investing and is now a teacher; she went to a cooking school now known as the Institute of Culinary Education in Manhattan.
She did externships — short term informational set-ups — in restaurants in Hell’s Kitchen, an area in Manhattan filled with inviting restaurants from about 34th to 59th streets west of Eighth Avenue, and she and te Velde toyed with opening a restaurant. Instead, in 2000, they bought their home in Leverett. The stock market crashed, Chang got pregnant, and “we realized we were going to have to go back to work.”
Chang was cooking a lot then — using only a toaster oven and a Costco-brand rotisserie. To try to break into the food writing scene, she interviewed the owner of Amherst Chinese Food and wrote a piece about the farm he also runs.
She sent it out to 25 newspapers, piquing the interest of the Globe. That was in 2001; Chang continued writing for the Globe about local farms, dairies and small cheese, ice cream and coffee producers.
The other facets of her work grew from there.
Chang tests recipes from all the cookbooks she reviews, which means that 80 percent of the time, she is testing one recipe or another. “Whatever I test is dinner,” she said, noting that her 5- and 11-year-old children must eat whatever she cooks. “It doesn’t matter if they don’t like it.”
In April, Chang was testing from “Pioneer Woman Cooks: Food from My Frontier” by Ree Drummond; this means her family was eating such things as Whiskey Mustard Meatballs and Chipotle Steak Salad.
Her children generally like most things they try; but they don’t like legumes.
“We had brown lentil salad with beets and goat cheese and orange recently, and most of it went in the compost,” she said. “Sometimes it doesn’t work out. On those nights, they eat a lot of fruit.”
Two rooms in the upstairs of Chang’s home hold the 700 or so cookbook titles she has collected over the years on a series of bookshelves. A closet downstairs holds her 50 favorite books. They are all arranged by subject — region, drinks, desserts, special diets, single subject, famous author.
Chang’s own book, published in November 2011, grew out of a project for NPR. From 2004 to 2006, she completed a Food in Society Policy Fellowship for the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, focusing on food sustainability across the country and how to localize efforts to affect positive change in the food system.
She began writing about healthy foods for children for NPR’s Kitchen Window as part of the fellowship, and about a dozen of the book’s chapters came from that project.
While Chang is an expert on food, her book is far from pretentious. The essays offer a wry sense of humor. (In the first one, she unapologetically confesses to stealing expensive chanterelle mushrooms while living on a budget in New York.)
In the three sections of the book, she writes about food she ate as a child, food she eats today and once-in-a-lifetime food that “we aspire to.”
Recipes range from New Year’s Dumplings to Idle-Weekday Tamarind Marinade for Pork to Basic-but-Beautiful Beef Chili.
Chang loves that her work helps people to choose the best cookbooks, and she loves being able to travel through different cultures in a sense, last year writing about foods from Morocco, Spain, China, Brazil, Japan and the Middle East, for instance.
“It’s just a way of literally getting a taste of other cultures,” she said.
Here are some of her easy-to-do recipes she selected to share with readers of The Republican and MassLive.Com.
The following recipe is the most ridiculously easy marinade ever. The idea is this: If something as simple as salad dressing makes an effective marinade for chicken (and it does, by the way), why can’t you make a four-ingredient soy dressing and use that? Well, you can.
This recipe arose when we were making margaritas one afternoon, which meant we had extra lime juice and little motivation to cook. You be the judge.
I-slaved-for-hours chicken
Serves 4 to 6; Makes 1 recipe’s worth of marinade (can be doubled, tripled, etc.)
1/2 cup soy sauce
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 tablespoons honey
Zest and juice of 1 lime
2 teaspoons garlic powder
8 bone-in, skin-on chicken thighs
1. Whisk together the first 5 ingredients and divide between 2 gallon-size Ziploc freezer bags. Freeze one of the bags for future use. Drop the chicken thighs in the other bag and zip it shut, squeezing out as much air as possible. Massage the bag briefly to distribute the marinade evenly over the meat. Marinate for 90 minutes or up to 2 days in the refrigerator.
2. Preheat the grill until very hot. If using gas, heat only one side of the burners. If using charcoal, place the charcoals all to one side.
3. When the grill is hot, lift the thighs out of the marinade and place them skin-side down on the unheated side. Baste with half of the leftover marinade. Close the grill cover, but leave the vents wide open.
4. After 15 minutes, flip the chicken over so the skin side is up and rebaste. Continue cooking, covered, another 10 to 20 minutes until nearly done. Remove the lid. If the skin doesn’t have a rich, golden color, sear the thighs skin-sidedown over the hot side of the grill for several seconds. If the flames flare up, move the meat immediately so they don’t blacken the skin.
5. Serve hot or at room temperature.
My friends Pat and Denny have adopted the following recipe as a standard, but they put the cilantro on the side, and so can you if your family is polarized on the cilantro front.
Pat and Denny also use low-sodium soy sauce, which is a great idea if you tend to have it around and handy. Even better is tamari sauce, which leaves the nuts sticky and shiny but not crusted to the pan (draw back of soy); also, it’s gluten-free.
My friend Zarmik had this to say about the nuts: “Soy-glazed almonds were a revelation. I suspect I would think the same of soy-glazed cardboard. In fact, for the next few days, if it does not move, it stands a good chance of getting soy-glazed.”
Cold green bean salad with soy-glazed almonds
For the beans:
1 pound slender green beans
Salt
Ice
For the almonds:
1 cup whole almonds
1 teaspoon vegetable oil (any kind except olive oil)
1/4 cup soy or tamari sauce
11/2 tablespoons sugar
For the dressing:
1 3/4-inch chunk ginger, peeled and minced
1 large garlic clove, peeled and minced
1 tablespoon corn or canola oil
2 tablespoons rice vinegar
1 teaspoon soy sauce
3 small or 2 medium scallions, finely sliced on the diagonal (use both white and green parts)
1/2 cup chopped cilantro
1. Prepare the beans: Trim the stem ends of the green beans(you can leave the pointed tips). Halve the longer ones if you wish. Bring a large pot of generously salted water to a boil. While the water’s heating, fill a large bowl with ice water (using at least a dozen cubes of ice).
2. Once the water boils, add the beans and cook briefly: 1 or 2 minutes for tiny haricots, 4 or 5 for bigger beans. Don’t walk away. Drain the beans quickly. Then shock them by dumping them in the ice water, agitating them briefly until they are quite cool (about a minute).
Drain again and set aside. They can be refrigerated in a tightly sealed plastic bag for several hours with no loss of color or texture. If you do refrigerate, first dry them extra-thoroughly on a dish towel.
3. Prepare the almonds: Heat a small, heavy skillet over a high flame. Reduce to medium heat and add the almonds. Toast briefly—no more than 5 minutes—until the nuts take on a little color and begin to release their aroma. Transfer to a plate to cool.
4. Add the oil, soy sauce, and sugar to the same small skillet and bring to a boil. Reduce until syrupy, about 3 minutes. Add the almonds and stir to coat thoroughly until they’re sticky and completely glazed. Transfer to a chopping board to cool. They’ll stick together, but that’s fine. Chop roughly.
5. Prepare the dressing: Mince the ginger and garlic together as finely as you can, and press hard with the side of your broadest chef’s knife until you get something like a paste, or at any rate something cohesive.
If you prefer, you can whiz them in a blender with the rice vinegar. Or—and this is the easiest alternative of all—you can just measure out 2 tablespoons of ginger-garlic paste from a jar, if you live near an Asian grocery that stocks Indian condiments.
6. Transfer the ginger-garlic paste to a large bowl and whisk in the oil, vinegar, soy sauce, and scallions. (You can hold the dressing in the refrigerator at this point for up to a day.)
7. Toss the blanched beans and the cilantro in the bowl with the dressing, scatter in the nuts, and serve at room temperature.
I originally adapted this recipe from Dotty Pascoe’s. But over the years, many people have contacted me and said they found recipes very similar from various sources. None of them seem to match up, but they all seem to have originated in the 1970s. Its mongrel provenance aside, everyone loves this cake — and even a new baker will find it easy to throw together.
If this recipe seems somehow familiar when you make it, it might be because the recipe is just like a quick bread — zucchini bread, or banana bread, or pumpkin bread, say — right down to the oil instead of butter. It’s easy like a quick bread, too. But you would never call it “apple bread,” because that would just be strange.
Apple cake
Serves 8 generously
3 cups flour
1 cup white sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 1/4 cups vegetable oil
3 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
4 cups peeled and sliced or chopped apples
1 cup chopped pecans (I like to break them up with my
fingers)
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. In a large bowl, whisk together the dry ingredients (flour, sugars, cinnamon, salt, and baking soda) until thoroughly combined.
2. Whisk together the wet ingredients (oil, eggs, and vanilla)and stir into the dry ingredients; stir to just combine. Fold in apples and pecans. The batter will be quite stiff; you can add 1/4 cup water if desired.
3. Spread the batter into an ungreased tube pan or ungreased 9 x 11 x 2-inch baking dish. Bake 60 to 65 minutes, until a skewer inserted in the center comes out clean.