High-Style Hostess
August 29, 2008
By Karen Nitkin
Photography By Bryan Burris
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Ada Brown stands amid the crowded aisles at Trinacria, the 100-year-old Italian deli on Baltimore’s Paca Street, and consults her shopping list. She’s buying food for a dinner party and relies on the paper to jog her memory. “Sometimes I get distracted,” she says. She also has a lot to buy.
At Trinacria, Brown hopes to stock up on goat cheese, olive oil, puff pastry and port wine. “The wine here is cheap and it’s really good,” she says. Brown should know. One of her hobbies is exploring the grocery stores and ethnic markets that dot Baltimore and its surrounding suburbs. “You have to know where to get the good stuff,” she says. “You spend a lot of time in the car, but it’s worth it.”
Shopping at these small stores gets her creative juices flowing, says Brown, 41, who grew up in Montgomery County, the daughter of a diplomat from Cameroon. Brown used to spend summers in the West African nation, where her parents now live, and she still travels as often as she can. For her, visiting the small, character-packed grocery stores of Baltimore is a form of armchair exploration.
Brown buys her oil from Trinacria Deli and her Rice vinegar from Han Au Reum grocery store.
It’s also the way she learned about Baltimore. When she moved here 14 years ago, Brown began poking around right away, getting to know the area through its small, locally owned markets. Her curiosity hasn’t waned: “Every time I see a grocery store or a market, I go in.”
Meanwhile, she attended and graduated from the culinary school at Baltimore International College and became a pastry chef at a local restaurant. She left the job because the long hours didn’t mesh well with family life. For eight years, she stayed home with her children, now 6 and 9. In 2003, Brown and her family moved to Owings Mills and began extensive renovations of their 1970s-era house, knocking down walls to create an open, sunlit main floor.
Now that her children are older, Brown has returned to work. She is the director of the public National Academy Foundation High School in Federal Hill, which provides intense college and career preparation for its 300 students.
But she is still a hostess with the mostess, unleashing her culinary and entertaining prowess on a regular basis for her lucky friends and family.
For a recent Saturday-night get-together for about 15 people, Brown prepared grilled asparagus and lamb, accompanied by puff-pastry tarts with a mushroom and goat cheese filling; a salad of mixed greens and smoked salmon; couscous with chick peas, preserved Meyer lemon and harissa; and a flourless chocolate cake with hazelnut ice cream and a fruit salad.
In the days before the party, Brown made the rounds of her favorite stores. At Trinacria, she waits her turn at the counter, where other patrons are ordering fat deli sandwiches and steaming cups of coffee, and then buys the cheese and olive oil. Change of plans: The store is out of puff pastry and port wine. Brown will need to find those items elsewhere.
Then it’s on to Han Au Reum, the Korean grocery on Rolling Road in Catonsville, where Brown purchases four kinds of mushrooms, parsley, cilantro and other produce. She considers dandelion greens, then decides against them. She picks up a bag of spinach, examines it, then puts it down again. She looks for couscous and can’t find it.
Shopping the Brown way takes much more time than going to a supermarket and buying whatever’s on the shelf. But the hunt for just the right ingredient is part of the fun. “You have to know how to shop,” Brown says, paper in hand.
List or no list, Brown gets distracted at Han Au Reum, buying Key limes and guavas that weren’t part of her plan but which look too inviting to resist.
Once she buys something, she has to use it, Brown says, so on the day of the party she purées the fruit, adds copious sugar and freezes it to create a granita that she will serve alongside a salad of pineapple, mango and papaya chunks. (Sorry, we can’t pass along the recipe. It involved so much tasting and tinkering that Brown is unable to reproduce it.)
On party day, guests are expected at 5:30 p.m. At 4, Brown is still in her jeans and sneakers, calm as can be in her new and thoroughly modern kitchen, with its open floor plan, stainless appliances and plentiful counter space.
She crumbles some mint into the guava and Key lime sauce, tastes it, then adds ginger and tastes again. Her friend Joe Bellew is helping out, polishing silver to start. Her husband, Joe, is washing dishes.
“Oh, we’ve got time,” she says without a hint of stress in her voice. She has been shopping for days and she knows she has everything she needs.
The table is already set. Since finding a cloth for her large table can be difficult (and expensive), Brown simply uses a canvas drop cloth purchased for $19.99 at Home Depot. Eight vases, each containing just a few orchids and day lilies, are artfully arranged in the middle of the table with blue and white beads scattered between them. Brown picked up the vases and beads at a dollar store.
On the kitchen counter, a bowl of asparagus, already blanched, is marinating in olive oil, salt and pepper, ready for the grill. Six pounds of lamb, bought at Sam’s Club, are in the refrigerator, soaking up the flavors of garlic and rosemary. Though she generally patronizes small stores, Brown praises Sam’s Club, which she particularly appreciates when she’s buying large amounts of food for a party.
As Brown prepares the puff pastry appetizer, Bellew gets to work on the couscous.
Puff pastry stuffed with mushroom and goat cheese.
He has already combined about five ounces of harissa, a Tunisian spice paste, with a quart of Greek yogurt purchased from Eddie’s of Roland Park. He adds five ounces of preserved Meyer lemon in olive oil to the yogurt mix. (Both the harissa and the lemon were bought online from specialty stores.) He prepares three cups of couscous according to package directions, then adds a 16-ounce can of chickpeas.
He transfers the couscous to a serving bowl, stirs in about a third of the yogurt mix, and tops the whole thing with minced cilantro and thinly sliced lemons. The remaining yogurt will be served as an accompaniment to the lamb.
Per Brown’s instructions, Bellew next reduces a bottle of port wine, simmering the rich red liquid on the stovetop. Brown will drizzle the thickened sauce on the serving platter holding the mushroom-goat cheese tarts.
Meanwhile, Brown adds smoked salmon to a lush green salad of spinach, arugula, parsley, scallions and cilantro.
By 5 p.m., the salad, couscous and mushroom tarts are ready and Brown is cutting her chocolate cake — one less thing to do during the party, she says. Her husband lights the grill and, in a final flurry of activity, everyone wipes down counters and puts the remaining pots and pans away.
Then Brown disappears to get dressed. She returns just as the first guests arrive, freshly made up and wearing a tomato-colored dress. Bottles of wine are opened, drinks are poured. Kara Cohen, the neighbor from across the street, is the first to arrive. Then comes Sonya Greenberg, carrying fixings for pomegranate margaritas. Brown looks relaxed and happy, not like someone who has been cooking since 2 in the afternoon.
Thanks to careful shopping and planning, she can enjoy the evening. And that’s exactly what she does.
To see a list of some of Ada’s favorite stores click on the next page.
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