tom hudgens

Food is an expression of the place where you are. Bearing that in mind, last week my long-time friend and Deep Springs classmate Kevin West and I headed to the Eastern Sierra (Deep Springs country) to cook several memorable meals in the iconic town of Lone Pine, in Inyo County’s southern Owens Valley, for a visionary group of creative folks called The Metabolic Studio (“at the intersection of art and philanthropy”). These dynamic Angelenos, well aware of the upcoming 2013 centenary of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s diversion of water from the Owens River via the Los Angeles Aqueduct (remember the movie Chinatown?), are taking a keen, artistic-philanthropic interest in the Owens Valley region and its promising agricultural and culinary future, as the valley’s water is gradually restored. Today, a visitor to the Owens Valley sees mostly desert and a few cattle ranches among towering mountainscapes, but with a little poking around, he or she might find an apple farm, a sprawling vegetable garden in someone’s backyard, wild watercress growing in a pond, nettles near a stream, herds of elk, or piñons in the lower mountain elevations.
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I love old-fashioned recipes. Dishes that “nobody makes anymore.” Fads long faded. Passé recipes. Somebody has to pore through old cookbooks to find and resurrect these forgotten treasures, and I’m happy to do it. Take crepes, for instance. One weekend, many years ago at Deep Springs, a student mixed up a great vat of crepe batter and spent the afternoon making stacks and stacks of crepes. Then he sautéed some mushrooms and onions and spinach, chopped some ham, grated some Swiss cheese, and whipped up some béchamel sauce. He stacked the crepes into 4 or 5 "cakes" with the various fillings and cheese, covered the stacks with béchamel and more cheese, and stuck them in the oven for half an hour, until the cheese and the béchamel browned a bit. Et voila, there, along with a green salad, was a simple, but nourishing and wonderfully satisfying dinner, equally magnifique for its frugality and economy as for its richness and flavor.
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Should I have suspected that a recipe with “three” in its name would take three attempts to get right? A few weeks ago, the remains of a large, bakery-made Tres Leches cake appeared in the staff kitchen of the office where I work. I cut myself a small piece: plain, pale-colored, and completely saturated with a sweet, rich mixture of three milks (that’s what tres leches means); its wetly luscious, milk-soaked quality sets it apart from all other cakes. A relative newcomer to the world dessert scene, Pastel de Tres Leches has been a favorite in Mexico and Central America for perhaps twenty years, and its stardom has risen steadily in the United States over the past decade or so. Tres Leches is now available in the in-store bakery of every supermarket I know, but in our local Latin-American market, there is a giant price board exclusively devoted to Tres Leches—multiple sizes, and multiple options for fruit topping. In searching for information about this cake, I discovered it has become quite popular in Albania, of all places, and the Albanians call it by its Spanish name like we do. Tres Leches is serious stuff, so I decided to explore it in my own kitchen—I wanted to discover the essence of this wildly popular cake. (more…)