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October 3rd, 2009
07:34 pm - in which kate is completely insane
I'm about to do two insane things. One, I'm going to yammer on about the menu for my Christmas party, and it is barely October. Two, I'm going to post a recipe that I made up and have not cooked yet.
But it's going to be fucking amazing. Hear me out.
The theme for this year's Christmas menu is Creole/Cajun. This is because we are really poor (running a restaurant has a way of nickel-and-diming one to the grave) and Southern food is festive and terrible for you while necessarily being light on the pocketbook. So we are having crawfish remoulade in toast cups (toast cups are a wonderful trick: cut the crusts off packaged white bread, squish the slices flat with a rolling pin, cram into mini-muffin tins, brush with butter, bake until toasty), celeriac remoulade also in toast cups, Coca-Cola wings, pimento cheese, shrimp paste, faux dirty rice stuffing with cranberries and apples in endive "bowls" for the vegans, black-eyed pea fritters with hot-pepper sauce also for the goddamn vegans, blah blah.
And we are having oysters. Quality Seafood will sell one a hundred oysters for $35, which sounds like a fabulous deal until you consider that the oysters are uncleaned, unshucked, covered with seaweed and barnacles, and come in a gritty, stinky burlap sack that must be toted out of Quality Seafood on a hand cart. I adore raw oysters to such an extent that I am more than happy to contend with this, or, more accurately, blackmail the men in my life into contending with this. We did the raw-oyster thing for my birthday this year, and once every six months sounds about right.
I really wanted to do oysters Rockefeller for my Christmas party. However, even given my unfortunate tendency to do amazingly stupid things in the name of cuisine, I knew that producing oysters Rockefeller for 30+ guests is a terrible, terrible idea. BUT THEY ARE SO DELICIOUS. So I pondered: how to accomplish the Rockefeller effect without actually having to fuck around with rock salt and touch-and-go timing and the like? It took me some days of pondering before I had the germ of an idea: how about having the oysters part and the Rockefeller part be separate?
I was also in need of another vegetarian nibble. I was planning on making classic gougeres, because they are easy and fun as hell to produce. But then my little noggin started a-tickin' and I had this giant, wonderful inspiration.
( frankenrecipe ahoy! )
I believe that this will be so incredible that nobody will notice I didn't make pig candy.
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June 2nd, 2009
06:16 pm - soup for F
I was out at the bar with a couple of handsome young men last night, and the discussion was serious -- knife fighting, the relative merits of Kanye West, how everyone at the gym is doing their deadlifts wrong, the imminent zombie invasion, and, finally, how F is really seriously worried about money these days and doesn't know how he's going to make it through the next couple of months without ending up in hock.
( Dialogue ahoy )
Black bean soup IS really good. It's really good and it's super-cheap, because the ingredients are cheap to begin with and because, unlike most soups, the less stuff you put in it the better it is. It keeps very well, improves as it sits and gets along well with all manner of starches, from tortillas to rice, though I like it with polenta (recipe follows.) It's also good for you.
So here you go, F.
Take a big onion and as much garlic as you like (I recommend abusing your garlic privileges), chop the onion and mince the garlic, and sweat both over medium heat in a couple tablespoons of oil in the bottom of a partially-covered soup pot for about 5 minutes or as long as it takes the onion to go limp and translucent. To this you add one 12-or-14-ounce can of crushed tomatoes with juice, 6 cups of water or broth (made with Better than Bouillon or plain old bouillon cubes), and 3 cans of black beans with their liquid. (You can also use a pound of dry beans for this, and it will be cheaper and probably tastier, but will have to cook for much longer -- like two hours.) Set the heat on low and simmer, stirring when it occurs to you, for about half an hour or until everything is starting to look the same in there. Then taste it, add salt if necessary (it probably will be) and pepper, and allow to cool. You'll want to puree this, and the best tool for the job is an immersion blender, though you can use the regular old blender (just be careful). Add more liquid if it gets too stiff, and you're done.
Nice things to add with the water or broth are a couple tablespoons of tomato paste, a big canned chipotle chile minced up, a bay leaf, some thyme, and/or (my personal favorite) a teaspoon of anise seeds. But they are not necessary.
Now for the polenta: forget everything you've heard about polenta. It is time-consuming but not difficult or labor-intensive, and if you want to nest tasks you can get it started before the soup. Put 8 cups of heavily-salted water on to boil in a large saucepan, and once the water is good and boiling slowly sprinkle in 2 cups of regular cornmeal, stirring all the while. The sprinkling must be done carefully and the stirring must be constant, or the polenta will be lumpy, but who really gives a shit about a lump here and there, right? Once all the cornmeal is in the pot, drop the heat to the lowest possible setting and let the polenta simmer for 45 minutes. By "simmer" I mean "allow to blurp ominously about once every thirty seconds"; any hotter and it'll burn. Stir once in awhile but don't disturb the crust on the bottom. The polenta will be an edible consistency long before 45 minutes are up, but the long simmer is necessary to make it taste like anything. Add pepper before you eat it.
So you have your soup and your polenta and that's all you need, but you can also put yogurt or sour cream on there, and chopped cilantro. This will cost you about seven dollars for six or eight servings, and when you're sick of black bean soup there is lentil soup, with or without pumpkin, and minestrone, and and and...
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December 29th, 2008
01:51 pm - Christmas: pig candy
Bacon was the zeitgeist this year, and recipes for pig candy were all over the place, and I kept hearing people talking about it as if it were the Second Coming, and this made sense because hello, it's candied bacon. But for some reason I was not totally convinced that pig candy was all that. A small part of me suspected that it was some kind of fairground-style gimmick, like deep-fried Snickers, tasty but notable mostly for its novelty.
How very, very wrong I was.
Guys. Pig candy.
Pig. Candy.
Pig candy is sex. It is sex with love. It is the kind of sex that takes hours and hours and sets off the smoke alarm. It is sweet and meaty and spicy and smoky and funky. It does strange things to one's perception of reality, and when it's fresh it drips.
Making pig candy is a lot of work, and it's really a job for two cooks working in shifts. It is easy to screw up, and is impossible to ignore or walk away from. (Is the above metaphor continuing of its own volition? Hm.) Basically, what you do is this: buy some good-quality thin-sliced bacon -- a party of 30 made short work of two full pounds of pig candy, and we were doling it out very sparingly, so plan on making way too much. You take this bacon, and you take some dark brown sugar and some cayenne pepper mixed together, and you pack the sugar on the bacon really good. Do not dredge: pack. Then you lay the slices of bacon out on a cookie rack which fits inside a rimmed baking sheet, put this in a cold oven, and turn it on to 350. After the oven gets up to temperature, you will need to turn the bacon every four minutes. You REALLY don't want it to burn, so take it out before it looks quite done; the melted sugar is like unto napalm and will finish the cooking off the heat. Then you let the oven cool down. Then you do it all again. One batch takes about half an hour. Your house will smell like the most ritzy, expensive private club in hell, and it will smell that way for days. You might as well just throw out the baking sheet; that shit is never getting clean again.
So what do you do with pig candy when it's done?
I'll tell you what you do: you throw a party to which you invite an uber-sexy creature for whom you kind of have the hots, and when they show up you haul them into the kitchen and prop them against the counter and tell them to close their eyes, and then you feed them a slice of pig candy, and you watch their face become suffused with ecstatic wonder and listen to them whimper helplessly, and feel very smug indeed.
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September 28th, 2008
11:46 pm - jingle bells
Today I was thinking about what I'm going to serve at our Christmas Eve party. (YES, I KNOW THIS IS RIDICULOUS BECAUSE IT IS NOT EVEN OCTOBER YET. JEEZ.) We've been throwing a Christmas Eve party for three years, and it is always an occasion for advanced debauchery and festiveness, with food. It turns out that if you get Ceej drunk enough he will play a very Ray Charles-esque version of "The Little Drummer Boy" on his guitar, and even the Jews cry.
The food issue as it pertains to the party is a bit of an ongoing problem, despite my three years of practice. I always screw it up. Last year I took on way too much last-minute work, and at 9:15 PM I was half in the bag, stuffing mushrooms while wearing a ridiculous dress, and most of the planned food ended up not happening. The year before we were loaded up with sweets but had nothing substantial to offer beyond a slab of expensive smoked salmon which vanished before I even got any. Also, I always end up spending too much money.
The evolved Christmas party food criteria are as follows: most of the work must be doable well ahead of time. One dish made to order is OK, provided someone else is cooking it. Cheap is good. Anything that requires utensils to eat is right out. The menu must be at least a little weird and exotic; I have always believed that one of the great joys of Christmas is the opportunity to eat peculiar food. Nothing that drips is allowed, and since many of our friends are vegetarian, meat must be sparse and isolated.
I think I have defeated the beast this year, though. This year there will be A Theme. The theme is Christmas Breakfast. The menu will consist of clever plays on traditional diner breakfast food, and traditional chichi brunch food. And it will be even more appallingly bad for you than breakfast food usually is. (What the hell, it's Christmas!) Here is what I have so far.
Panettone French toast. I invented this last year, and I consider it my single greatest achievement, in cooking and perhaps in general. Panettone is a traditional Italian egg bread, like a lighter challah or a denser brioche. It features delicious bits embedded in it -- candied peel soaked in anisette, golden raisins (IMO the only acceptable application for those foul creatures), and so forth. It is amazing on its own, but it also turns into the most transcendent French toast in the whole world. I will make dainty triangles of this, and serve them with a mixture of drawn butter and maple syrup for dipping.
Pig candy. AKA candied bacon, but pig candy sounds infinitely more disgusting. You make it by coating bacon in dark brown sugar and baking it until it is crispy. I don't think it's possible to make enough pig candy.
Possibly also some little cocktail sausages.
Latkes, as an homage to the Maccabees and also to hash browns. I'm going to force my friend Avi to make these; he has his technique down, and since he's an excellent show cook he will not mind presiding over the stove for awhile. With applesauce and sour cream, natch.
Quiches. One crab and artichoke, one spinach and mushroom. Cut in very, very small slices.
Jacques Pepin's chocolate-chestnut "cake", which is made by mixing melted chocolate, canned chestnut puree and whipping cream and refrigerating it all in a loaf pan overnight. Note to self: remind guests to make sure their cardiologists are on call.
My mother's Caribbean fruitcake. If you have never had a fruitcake from the Caribbean, you are seriously missing out. They do that shit right down there. Eating a slice is like taking a shot.
Oranges, olives, nuts, etc
Hot spiked cider and mimosas
This is all guaranteed to make attendees feel leaden and bilious at family Christmas the next day. But while I have them in my clutches, I think they will be happy.
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July 27th, 2008
09:47 pm - red curry salmon
Every home cook has one dinner that they can make in their sleep, out of ingredients they always have, and count on getting a result that will warm them up and make them smile, no matter how awful the day was, how many dirty dishes teeter in the sink, no matter how querulously the wide world whines at their doorstep.
This dinner is usually cheap to make, and in recent years I suspect that cooks' default dinners have become more "exotic" in focus, as we discover the delicious, inexpensive, easy, headswimmingly spicy and invigorating dishes of the hotter climes. Mine is no exception. If you don't cook a lot of southeast Asian-inflected food it won't be a staple meal so much as an event meal, one that requires a dedicated shopping trip. The good news is that it is impressive, and delicious, and rather beautiful, and extremely easy; it would make a great date-night dinner. It is also Ceej's favorite thing that I cook; he'd eat it four times a week if he could, and I think I would too, except for its being a bit of a calorie bomb. No dish is perfect.
I tweaked this from a recipe on Epicurious; the original recipe was very much For Party. My version is For Hangover and/or For After Double Shift and/or For Scarfing Down In Front Of "Law and Order: Criminal Intent". (Oh, that Vincent D'Onofrio!) I just call it red curry salmon, and here is how I do it for two people.
Step 1: Get the rice cooker cranking. Any kind of long-grain rice is fine, though jasmine is ideal and basmati sounds a bit reckless. Defrost a couple of frozen salmon fillets from Costco. (This would also work with shrimp or chicken if you don't like salmon.)
When the salmon is thawed, marinate it in some soy sauce for not very long -- fifteen minutes or so.
You will also want a green vegetable of some kind. Green beans are very nice, bok choy is lovely, spinach is just fine and plain old frozen peas will do the trick in a pinch. If the veg is frozen and needs thawing, do that now too.
Step 2: Heat up a nonstick skillet and sear the salmon in it, over very high heat for about three minutes a side. This will result in rare fish, but it will have some time to sit around and cook further on its own. Set fish aside and tent it with foil.
Step 3: In the same skillet, heat a tablespoon of neutral oil over medium heat. Add the zest of a lime and a tablespoon or so of Thai red curry paste. This will do for two people who like their food fairly hot; adjust accordingly per your tastes and the strength of your paste. Stir-fry zest and curry paste gently for three or so minutes. It's OK if the paste browns a bit. If it looks too dry, add some more oil (not too much).
The curry paste makes this meal, so do try to track down the good stuff; failing that, though, Thai Kitchen is totally decent in this application.
Step 4: To the pan, add half a can of coconut milk, the juice of the lime lately zested (two limes if yours is a dry little golf ball), a tablespoon of brown sugar (light or dark, it doesn't matter) and a tablespoon of Thai fish sauce. Whisk this until the curry paste is all incorporated, and leave it to simmer over low heat, stirring occasionally, until it becomes a thickish sauce. How long this will take depends on your coconut milk; some start out fairly thick and some are watery. Either way, the sauce is done when it looks like sauce to you. Taste and adjust as necessary; it might need more fish sauce.
Step 5. While the sauce is composing itself, cook the vegetable of your choice, however you like to do it.
Step 6. Serve fish and vegetable over rice, with sauce, garnished with chopped cilantro, or scallions, or both, or nothing.
Without this recipe we'd probably starve.
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June 30th, 2008
07:30 pm - crevettes aux lait de coco et maguier, beans and rice
Poulet au Lait de Coco
West Indian Rice and Beans
I've had a craving for tropical food recently. Actually I always have a craving for tropical food; this climate seems to inform it, as does my general affinity for all things island. If it comes with palm fronds, steel drums and cocktails with plastic monkeys, I'm all over it like a rash.
My experimentation with Caribbean cooking has been hit-or-miss (hit -- last year's Easter dinner; miss -- Run Down, which has an excellent name but languished uneaten in the refrigerator until I had to throw it away with a heavy heart, thinking of the starving babies in Haiti.)
This dinner was both a resounding hit and a near-miss. It was a hit because both of these recipes are absolutely delicious, a miss because they don't go together at all. There's a lot of ingredient redundancy -- all those green onions, all that thyme -- and also textural redundancy; I had no idea that genuine Caribbean beans and rice are basically a soup, or a really loose risotto, not at all what you want with a curry. When you make these things, which you should, have the curry with plain white rice and a dish of beans on the side, and the beans and rice with some jerk chicken or even just a nice pork chop.
ANYWAY, I really wanted to post this because of this site, which I StumbledUpon and have become obsessed with. It is not for the beginning cook; the recipes are really terse and the techniques are sketchy. It's basically a shorthand archive of a great many recipes from a great many precious, out-of-print cookbooks that I can't afford, and I love it for that. Actually I would love it just for the recipe for Poulet au Lait de Coco, which hails from Martinique (palm fronds! plastic monkeys!), and is the kind of recipe, beloved by me, that is ridiculously easy to put together and still makes people want to have the cook's babies. I tinkered with it a little bit; I threw the onions and garlic in the blender to make a paste per my usual curry method, and stir-fried the paste with the thyme and curry powder. Don't waste your precious saffron here; it will be totally lost. I also did not have poulet, so I subbed shrimp, and when the liquid looked like it was overwhelming the protein I threw in a large chopped mango. This took about fifteen minutes and was extremely tasty and unusual.
The beans and rice were an exercise in Weird, for me. I grew up with the edict that you do not stir rice ever, ever, ever, so executing the recipe was a lesson in adaptability and trust. Also, have you ever noticed that the flavor elements in Caribbean cooking are really peculiar? Thyme and allspice in rice? Both scallions and parsley in the curry? What? But all doubts are banished when the aroma starts to rise; this is true fusion cuisine, and it smells like God. I added some minced fresh ginger to the rice, and sauteed onions instead of scallions, and it turned out just fine. Runny, but fine.
Now all I need is a mojito. Or at least a Red Stripe.
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June 24th, 2008
08:17 pm - how it's gonna be: potato salad
This is the fifth summer that I have sought the perfect potato salad, and finally, after dozens of veryveryclose but not QUITE there moments in its pursuit, I have finally landed the beast. It has been pwned. Its head is now mounted on a plaque above my stove. I have eaten many pounds of potato salad in my day, it being one of my very favorite things to eat and all, and I can safely say that mine is now the best I have ever had.
I am speaking of potato salad with a mayonnaise dressing here. I have already developed an extremely good potato salad, largely aped from a recipe my high school boyfriend's aunt made up, which involves red potatoes, lightly steamed green beans, Kalamata olives, and red peppers in a garlicky balsamic vinaigrette, but it is less versatile than the American beauty mayo variety. It is not what people think of when they want potato salad. It is very good, though, and I thought about posting the recipe until I realized that I just did. That's basically it; you throw those things together and dress them. It should also have parsley and basil. People love it and it's easy to pretend it's healthy, too.
Mayo-based potato salad, of course, has no such pretensions. It's terrible for you and everybody knows it. It is also usually very tasty; Laurie Colwin and I are of a mind that there is no such thing as truly bad potato salad, provided nobody monkeys around and puts nasty shit like ketchup in it. The basic boiled potato-mayo-onion combination is always at least OK, and it's malleable; you can try putting hard-boiled eggs in there (meh, to my mind) or capers (but they always sink straight to the bottom), or celery (but it's kind of depressing), and so forth, and you will probably end up with something that the people at the barbecue will scarf down like pigs at the trough.
I, however, was after transcendence, and there are a number of things that can go wrong with potato salad, rendering it only OK, not delicious. For instance, different kinds of potatoes -- and even different specimens of the same kind of potato at different seasons or phases of the moon or whatever -- absorb radically different amounts of dressing. Sometimes the dressing slips off as if the potato has been shellacked, and sits in a sullen pool at the bottom of the bowl. Sometimes the potatoes go the opposite direction and suck up so much mayonnaise that they become stodgy and you can feel your arteries hardening while you eat them. Stodginess is the major enemy of potato salad, to my mind. Then there's the issue of the onion element; I find that the kind of onion is less important than how it is sliced. Too fine and it will all end up as sad onion confetti stuck to the bottom of the bowl with the capers; too coarse and it will make everyone's eyes water. Also, there is the debate about chunky vs. smooth. I have had potato salad consisting of intransigent chunks of potato the size of my fist, with poor dressing permeation; I have also eaten potato salad that was basically mashed potatoes with mayo in, which is vaguely disgusting. Some people get around this by lightly mashing the potatoes before dressing them, leaving some mushy and some chunky, but this causes the potatoes to leak free starch, which makes them sticky. Sticky potato salad is to be avoided at all costs.
I have defeated all these obstacles. You can too. Here is how it is done.
( To spare friends lists everywhere... )
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June 22nd, 2008
10:54 pm - First in a series: bar snacks I would serve if I ever own a gastropub...
... if the economy does not tank to the point that "Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome" is no longer a fanciful '80s cinematic misfire, but cold reality; also if I ever inherit a million billion dollars and can run my gastropub as a vanity project.
Deep-fried tiny fish spines
Last September Ceej and I ate dinner at Alinea, which I am still trying to find the words to adequately describe. After a long struggle, I realized that I can only do Alinea justice by using it as the setting for a longish piece of science fiction with dashes of romance, Vodoun, and politics; watch for it here, once I finish exorcising the demons.
ANYWAY, at one point during the four-hour BDSM routine that is dinner at Grant Achatz' crown jewel, we were served a thing like a napoleon, except instead of pastry it had watermelon -- immaculate organic watermelon that had been fed the blood of virgins, no doubt -- and instead of Bavarian cream it had a slice of nearly-raw fish that was totally unfamiliar to me. I couldn't even find the fucker on Wikipedia. I think Alinea may have a crack team of oceanographers on the payroll, who routinely explore the depths of Lake Michigan to discover new and exciting species of delicious, delicious fish and render them extinct before the French Laundry has a crack at them. I think there was some basil oil involved, and some obscure peppery microgreen.
So this thing was presented to us, and it was so awe-inspiringly brilliant that it almost made me cry -- the kind of thing Bach would have come up with if he were a chef. But the best thing was the garnish: a minute, deep-fried fish spine, aligned in such a way that it looked like it was diving headfirst into the watermelon part. I think this spine used to belong to an anchovy, or something similar that flits around in great silvery schools until the dolphins eat giant wads of them, and it's sad, on the nature special.
It was not sad when I polished off my napoleon and said (too loudly, fueled by a great deal of the finest Barolo known to humanity), "YUM. TIME FOR TINY FISH SPINE." I excavated my neglected fish spine from the microgreens and ate its wonderful, shattering, spiky, oceanic self, and experienced a major HOLY SHIT rush. It tasted like the very essence of ocean: the faint odor of rotting, and the strong odor of fresh bright ozone, and the possibility of being eaten by something, or eating something. Waving weeds, blowing froth, pointy things under your feet, coming to the surface with a ribbon of blood unspooling from your heel...
It also tasted like DELICIOUS FISHY FRITOS. And removed from their exalted homeland, fancy deep-fried fish spines would be so comforting piled in a basket to be crunched by the handful alongside a Stella Artois or three, with the game on TV and the faint memory of the last time you were on a boat... the spray and the creak of the ropes and leaning over the rail to watch the fish, the little silvery fish...
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June 15th, 2008
07:03 pm - tomato panic: cold tomato soup with bread and herbs
The salmonella outbreak done pissed me off some, because I was on a serious tear making this soup every other day or so, and I had almost -- almost -- perfected it when the maters disappeared.
However, today I went over to Bill and Louisa's house to discover them, their four girls, two friends and the dog up to their ears -- almost literally -- in tomatoes. I shit you not, there were five giant Rubbermaid crates full of tomatoes, and most of the refrigerator full as well. It turned out that Bill's friend Mike does some work for an organic farm, and the farmer got a bumper crop of tomatoes; so many tomatoes, in fact, that he could afford to enhance his brand by only sending the really good-looking ones to the market. The rest -- the lumpy ones, the funny-colored ones, the ones with mushy spots where they lay on the ground -- Mike took home with him.
So there we were, and there was this embarrassment of tomatoes; we all spent the afternoon putting them up in jars, which was a nice companionable thing to do, and we were all very jolly despite being hot and sweaty and covered with tomato seeds and bits of skin. And I went home with a big box full of quart jars -- the apocalypse will have spaghetti sauce, by God -- and a smaller box full of fresh, almost-perfect organic tomatoes with which to make cold tomato soup.
I am not officially calling this soup gazpacho, because "real" gazpacho is one of those things about which people regularly come to blows, and mine is not orthodox. For instance, I cook my tomatoes, and I understand that Real Gazpacho is never cooked. But raw-tomato gazpacho can taste pallid and salsa-like unless the tomatoes are immaculate, and they rarely are these days -- cooking concentrates the flavor a bit, which seems like a good idea. I also add tomato paste, which is anathema. But my soup is tomato, and it is cold, and it has bits of cucumber and onion and soaked bread in it, and if you wanted to call it gazpacho I sure wouldn't object.
This is the perfect thing to eat on a sweltering-hot day. I like mine with a dab of yogurt in it, which must horrify the Gazpacho Gods still further, but it is just fine plain. Here is how it is done.
Get a couple of pounds of tomatoes. Since they will be cooked, it's OK if they're not awesome, but they should be pretty good. Wash them and cut them in half, or in quarters if they're really huge, and seed them - you do this by holding the tomato over a bowl and squeezing it so the seeds pop out, and then you chase the strays out with your fingers. Reserve the seeds and tomato water in the bowl.
Heat kind of a lot of good olive oil over medium-low heat in a large, deep skillet or pot with a lid, and throw in a chopped garlic clove or two -- go easy, you are not making marinara. Gently cook until garlic is fragrant and translucent; do not allow it to brown. Then add the tomatoes just as they are, stir them around a bit and cover the pot. If you are adding herbs -- I like tarragon in this application -- that need some cooking, add them now too.
While the tomatoes are sweating, strain the seedy tomato water in a fine mesh sieve into a small bowl. Reserve tomato water; throw the seeds away, or feed them to the chickens, or take them somewhere and germinate them, whatever. Into the tomato water put a medium-sized piece of the middle of a loaf of firm white bread, French or Italian or sourdough or whatever, with no crusts. Stir around and leave to disintegrate.
The tomatoes are done when they are squishy and their peels slip off easily. Do not cook them further unless you want to try drinking a glass of sticky red sauce. When they are done, let them cool until they can be easily handled, and pull off the peels. Then put the whole shebang -- tomatoes, bread and tomato water -- along with a couple teaspoons of tomato paste in the blender and whizz till smooth. If you want parsley, add it towards the end of the whizzing. Taste for salt and pepper; it will need a fair bit of both. If it seems impossibly bland, try adding some vegetable bouillon -- I am hopelessly addicted to Better Than Bouillon brand concentrate. If it is too thick, add some water. Set it aside.
You can start chilling it now, or you can do like I do and put in some finely chopped cucumber, red onion and/or red pepper first. Either way, put it in the fridge and do not touch it until it has chilled at least overnight. The flavors need time to bloom and meld. Taste again for salt before serving. It might need more pepper too, or a dash of sherry vinegar, and it isn't a bad idea to stir in a drop or two of really excellent olive oil to finish.
This is extremely good for you and will make you feel virtuous as hell. Since we don't know how long tomatoes will be offlimits in the stores, I do recommend acquiring friends who are farmers.
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June 14th, 2008
04:27 pm - the critic: fogo de chao
My personal standard for restaurants has evolved over the years, but these days it's pretty consistent, and, I think, reasonable. I like restaurants that are at the very top of their game (Gourmet's top 100 is a reasonable barometer); I like restaurants that specialize in food that I will never, ever cook myself (barbecue, pho, damn good burgers, migas); and I like restaurants with freakish gimmicks that are impossible to duplicate at home, provided the food is good.
Fogo de Chao, the Bahia-based churrascaria, falls in the latter two categories. The Austin branch of this mighty chain opened recently, and we went there last night to celebrate my recent promotion (from shit pay and no responsibilities to only crap pay and lots of responsibilities). It was my understanding that Fogo deals in something like dim sum, except Brazilian and with hunks of meat instead of shumai and chicken feet, and I was correct; however, it is much more than that. The Fogo Experience is the ultimate in gluttony and gourmandism; it's deeply weird and yet comfortingly familiar; and it's faintly ridiculous in the best possible way.
Here's how it works: you show up and are ushered to your table by one of the approximately one thousand wait staff with whom you will interact in some fashion during your stay. This person suggestively sells you a couple of jaw-droppingly expensive capirinhas (a shame about the price tag; the capirinha may be my favorite cocktail in the world, and I've met a few), and gives you The Drill.
The drill is that on your table, next to each place setting, is a little doohickey that looks like a coaster, green on one side and red on the other. Green means "go"; red means "whoa". This doohickey is the cue for the roving masses of stern Latino men brandishing swords laden with giant hunks of charred meat to avoid you or descend with alarming rapidity. There is also a small set of tongs at each place. The tongs are there so you can catch the meat as it falls off the swords, and spare the tablecloth (rather a futile enterprise, but a cute conceit).
That meat. The meat is good. The meat is very good. It isn't USDA Prime or anything, but it is beautifully done -- rotated over a hot fire until it reaches a perfect balance of caramelized crunchiness and translucent bloodiness. There are fifteen kinds of meat, of which our favorite, by a landslide, was the top sirloin roast. The ribeye, oozing cholesterol, was also very good, as were the lamb chops. The house special garlic beef is still knocking over anyone who speaks to us today. The chicken, pork sausage, and filet mignon were forgettable, and we were crying "uncle" long before the ribs showed up. I was extremely impressed with how deft the servers were at accommodating our preferred level of doneness just with their knifework, hewing close to the surface of the meat for well-done and deeper for rare. I think I may have ordered more meat than was sensible, just to watch them do this. It was like a floorshow for anyone who likes meat.
With the meat come a selection of faintly peculiar side dishes, which you don't know you want until you are eating them. There are little squares of deep-friend polenta that taste like the avatar of Fried. Actually, they taste like that heavenly frying smell you encounter on fairgrounds and run all over the place stuffing unsatisfactory things in your face trying to capture. There are fried bananas, superfluous garlic mashed potatoes with cheese, and some divine but deadly little greasy popover-esque buns, also with cheese. (I have added them to my internal catalogue of snacks I will serve if I ever own a gastropub -- a lengthy list by now, and one unlikely to ever see the light of day except maybe in a blog entry sometime). Fortunately there are not a whole lot of these things; if Fogo served them in conventional American-sized portions there would probably be lawsuits.
So what do you do when your arteries are screaming for mercy and your eyes are tearing from this onslaught? You turn up the red side of your coaster and hit the salad bar. Fogo's may be the best salad bar I have yet encountered. There are not a great many items; this isn't some epic casino-style smorgasbord. But the selections are all startlingly good, a little weird, and just the thing to combat the meat. There are beautiful butter lettuce and glorious pickles, prosciutto and smoked salmon (somewhere between hot-smoked and lox, dry but easy to slice) and salami and smoked cheese and Swiss cheese; there are fresh hearts of palm and artichoke hearts, free of stringiness, that have never seen the inside of a can, and really good potato salad and really good shiitake mushrooms in a garlicky marinade, and olives, and a transcendent cucumber salad, and, glory of glories, a big basket of rough-hewn chunks of real Parmesan cheese. I have never been tempted to steal from an all-you-can-eat buffet before I saw that Parmesan; I have a bad habit of eating it in chunks at home, and it's so expensive that I always feel guilty. Apparently Fogo has a salad-bar-only price point, and I am tempted to go down there on the regular to take advantage of it.
If you survive all this, there is dessert. Our creme brulee was lousy. The prix fixe, $45 a head for the meat option, does not cover dessert or drinks, and it sounds reasonable until you learn that the lousy creme brulee costs $14. I'd say skip it, and roll your sorry ass on home for Haagen-Dazs instead. You can and should beat the system.
It is difficult to describe how awful I feel today. Churrascaria is terrible for you, and my very bones are informing me of this fact. But once in awhile, eating a whole cow in charmingly theatrical circumstances -- with the world's best pickles on the side -- is just the ticket.
8/10
Go again? Once a year, please.
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May 3rd, 2008
09:54 pm - who'd'a thunk it?
Tonight I discovered that if you put Better Than Bouillon brand lobster base in the béchamel for tuna casserole, it just takes the shit to the next level altogether.
(x-posted to my food blog and ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) trashy_eats)
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March 20th, 2008
11:50 pm - this was an email i sent my dad
You know how you've been trying to find the perfect
peanut soup recipe?
I have discovered the secret to achieving perfect
peanut soup. I'm amazed this even happened at all; it
was a total whim, spawned by desperation and the fact
that we've been making a lot of hummus lately.
You make a decent, minimalist peanut soup from a
recipe like this one:
http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/233786
And then you add about a quarter cup of tahini paste.
For some reason you won't taste the tahini at all, but
it will make the peanut element taste much peanuttier
without tasting like peanut butter.
I was really amazed. Also, if you're making that soup
you should probably puree it, return it to the pot,
bring it to a simmer and then add about a cup each of
cubed sweet potatoes, cleaned okra slices and cooked
chickpeas. Simmer till veg are done, natch.
It will be incredibly delicious.
Anyway, I always feel compelled to share scientific
breakthroughs.
cheers
k8
ps, not originally sent: I love my dad. He and I are a huge pain in the ass in exactly the same way.
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March 17th, 2008
08:17 pm - the wine issue
I been thinking about box wine lately. My cousin, who is now on his way to becoming a doctor, once performed some revolutionary calculations which revealed a surprising truth: box wine, specifically Franzia box wine, is the most cost-effective drunk in the world. It turns out to be true; you can't really beat sixteen bucks (fourteen on sale) for five liters of a substance that actually tastes pretty good -- MD 2020 it ain't -- and will get you fucked up with a quickness. When Ceej and I first moved here and were shiftless and dead broke, we went through an unfortunate Franzia Table White phase, which resulted in the worst -- and I mean the worst; I know what I'm talking about -- hangovers in recorded history. The kind of hangovers where, and I'm stealing this but it's apt, your significant other creeps into your bedroom and asks if there's anything they can get you, and all you can say is "Gun".
Which brings me to the following, which first appeared here; it remains the funniest example of wine writing (after a fashion) that I know of. I still laugh and laugh every time I read it. I know, you see; in Franzia veritas.
Box of wine fair-weather friend, says Chuck
That's right. Box of wine screwed me. Oh, it sounded like a good idea when my buddy calls up at 1:30 a.m. saying "Hey, I wanna go out again, but everything's closed." We decide to go to the grocery store (and fast, because they stop selling beer and wine at 2 a.m. here), and grab a little something for domestic consumption.
Since they don't sell liquor, I was going to get some wine and he was going to have some beer. Until we stumbled there 'pon the grail. "Box of wine," I said. "Box of wine," he repeated. I hoisted the 5 liter spigoted-bag-in-a-box to the self-checkout and we were on our way. And I felt like I was 18 again. I thought back to the time that 5 of us in a movie theater - for the second Matrix movie, I believe - smuggled in a 5l bag on someone's chest, and each kept his own 20 oz soda bottle, for clandestine refills whenever necessary.
Now, some people will say that 5 liters of wine, at 12% alcohol, is a lot for two people to drink. Those people are absolutely right. I don't know how long it took or what, but we got really, really hammered. Totally blitzed. It was great.
In the still of the night it loves and cradles you in its warm, baggy embrace with a spigot at one corner. It is your companion of gentle spirit and élan, urging you to jump that fence, go for that swim dammit, if that's what you want! It said unto me "I am box of wine, and upon this rock shall thee do precisely what you please, and no laws of man shall prevail against it."
But box of wine has a dark side. It does nothing to help you in the morning as you lie there, unwilling or unable to move from some demonly compound ere consumed. It does not rub healing salve and ointment into your mysterious bruises, nor does it soothe your mysteriously aching knee. It just sits there, in its cardboard mansion, mocking you, its small red-buttoned tongue occasionally drooling a drop, heretofore inaccessible due to the engineering constraints of a plastic bag. Who knew that a 5 liter bag of wine in a cardboard box, purchased as the awesome price of $13.99, could be so obstinate?
In closing, I find that one must not only appreciate, but embrace the duality of the box of wine. It is sweet and tasty and alcoholic, but it is also a cruel cruel master.
Right now I am drinking Black Box Chardonnay, which is much more upscale owing to being $21.99 for three liters instead of $13.99 for five, and also not tasting like pineapple Kool-Aid that has been left in the sun and then enhanced with one thousand pounds of added sugar. I don't think I'll be asking Ceej where the twelve-gauge is come morning, but I wouldn't make any bets.
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March 15th, 2008
04:35 pm - good idea/bad idea
I was at work, flipping through Martha Stewart Living (like you do), and came across a pornographic image of a bowl of buckwheat noodle soup with shredded duck in it, and a poached egg on top, and some scallions. I think there was probably some microgreen or other in there too. I was immediately entranced by this, because it reminded me so extremely of one of the truly great meals of my life. It was a late lunch, taken at Momofuku in New York, on a sweltering, stinky, gritty day which had already involved a long airplane ride and my total inability to get in touch with Will, with whom I was ostensibly in the city to visit. There was nothing to do but go to this wonderful chic, dim, icy noodle bar, and sit at the long communal dining table next to a nice lawyer from DC who was noshing on BBQ pig's tail (delicious), and drink an overpriced Stella and eat a divine, slithery little bowl of cold soba with shredded pork and a poached egg on top, and probably also some microgreens.
That meal was a jewel, a clean, shining example of the power of food to Soothe and Fortify, and I emerged with my coping skills much enhanced. So Martha's soup, though not identical -- there was the different protein for one, and also Martha's was hot, not cold -- just seemed like a really good idea.
Until I read the recipe. The recipe was stupid in a number of ways that contrived to make me kind of irritated at the usually peerless Ms. Stewart. Like how she wants us to make this soup "for party". At least I assume as much, because the recipe is supposed to feed 8-10 as an appetizer. Read that again: slithery, splattery, slurpy noodle soup. At a dinner party. Martha! You are supposed to be the mistress of Entertaining! Do you actually hate your guests so much that you enjoy watching them dribble duck stock all over their Jil Sander? Trying to converse at the same time? I ask you! Noodles like this are street food. They are late-afternoon food at least, and breakfast/brunch food at best. They are meant to be eaten in silence with strangers, or maybe one select fellow-traveler, not a bunch of people who want to talk about real estate and Geraldine Ferraro and how well the daffodils are doing.
Also, I was confronted by a bit of moral queasiness, rare in my usually cheerfully omnivorous life, about the fact that the recipe called for two ducks. You are supposed to buy these ducks and roast them, then tear their flesh off and turn the carcasses into stock. Two waddling, quacking little lives, sacrificed for something that is a Bad Idea in the first place. "For party", you must honor the duck; you must harness its ultimate ducky self, the quiddity of duckness, and lay it to rest with mindfulness and reverence. I think roasted simply with some dried cherries stuffed into it, and a little port sauce, and potatoes done in the duck fat, and a simple salad involving oranges afterwards. That's what people really want to eat at your party, not duck as placeholder protein; besides, the soup would probably be fine with no meat at all.
But that soup sounds good, doesn't it? So here's what I'm going to do. Next time I am at the meat counter, I will buy a couple of little duck breasts, and I'll beg some duck bones and other random parts off the meat guys for my stock. I will get home, and I will not go through that whole roasting/scratch stock/blah blah blah rigamarole; I'll simmer the scavenged parts with some plain old regular chicken stock, while I am getting that night's dinner together (probably burritos, we've been having them a lot lately). Also a couple coins of ginger and some garlic, nothing fancy. When the stock is sufficiently duckified, I'll strain it and set it to chill, and forget about it until I want my soup.
It'll have to be a hot, fetid afternoon. I'll get home, and I'll start the noodles so they have a chance to cool off after they're finished. I'll panfry the duck breasts slowly, skin side down, so all the fat renders out and the skin gets golden and crispy. I will then allow the duck to get lukewarm on the counter, and the noodles to get cold in the fridge. Then I'll take out the stock and distribute it in bowls, with scallions and a handful of enoki mushrooms, and probably some microgreens... and a splash of sake, maybe, and the noodles and duck slices. Then I'll poach the eggs and perch them on top, and that will be a wordless late lunch, for just Ceej and me. And it will be so, so good.
Suck it, Martha.
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March 13th, 2008
12:58 am - dinner party
So the other night, Ceej and I were going to have Provençal Cornish game hens for dinner. It would have been chicken from the get-go, but my oven tends to make whole roasted chicken into a horrible, bloody, dry-on-top, raw-on-the-bottom mess. Cornish game hens are more our speed. So I called Ceej and told him to pick up the following, which you will also need for your impromptu dinner party:
Poultry (details in a minute)
A pound of plum tomatoes; it's OK if they're pink and sad, because they will be roasted, and roasting tends to bring out the best in all tomatoes, pink or not
Leeks, a couple
Herbes de Provence (a blend of dried rosemary, marjoram, basil, bay leaf, thyme, and sometimes lavender; available in bulk at your local gourmet grocery)
Olives -- I told Ceej that Niçoise olives were preferable, but Kalamatas were cheaper. He bought the Niçoise anyway. I love that guy.)
Bread, preferably a rustic French loaf
White wine
We already had, as should you:
Garlic
Canned tomatoes
Olive oil
Parsley
Salt and pepper
Anyway, that afternoon my friend Christian was supposed to come over to hang out and ponder the imponderables, preferably with beer. Shortly after I got off the phone with Ceej, Christian called and asked if he could bring his friend Callie, who I like a lot. They showed up with two six-packs of Blue Moon Belgian white. I wasn't too stressed about dinner yet, thinking that they'd just be around long enough for a beer and a jaw. But the afternoon wore on, my guests were looking hungry, and I began worrying about having enough food for everyone -- Cornish hens, the previously-specified poultry, are kind of meager.
Afternoon bled into evening. Much beer was consumed. Callie called her boyfriend Jason, and we accidentally left a message on Jason's iPhone, featuring all of us talking about how awesome Jason is, and what a sexy beast he is (and it's true), and how Callie is very lucky because Jason was only supposed to be a rebound. It isn't often that I get to witness a moment in someone's life that they will spontaneously remember forty years from now and want to sink straight through the floor, but I did then, let me tell you. We wondered what the fuck we should do, and the idea that Jason should be invited to dinner to make up for the excruciating accidental message was floated.
I said fine, of course; after all it was I who was clearly audible on the message, drunkenly shouting "AND TO THINK, HE WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A REBOUND! HA HA!" But now I was REALLY stressing out about having enough food for everyone, because not only did we suddenly have five for dinner instead of two, but three of the pertinent parties were giant, strapping men who like to eat Brazil.
THANK GOD Ceej called right then. The grocery store only had sad, watery, hormone-y Tyson Cornish hens. I said "Oh good. Look. Scrap the Cornish hens. Go to the meat counter and buy the biggest organic bird they've got. Have the guy at the butcher counter French it into eight pieces. We've never tried to roast a cut-up chicken in our oven before, but there's a first time for everything."
Ceej said OK.
"And we need more wine," I said.
Ceej came home, bearing groceries. I started a prophylactic batch of brown rice, poured Chardonnay all around, and made the marinade, as follows:
Microscopically mince a clove of garlic and mix with a tablespoon of herbes de Provence, some S&P and a healthy amount of extra-virgin
Allow to macerate for as long as it takes you to get through another beer and several ribald anecdotes about all the parties present
Smear marinade all over cut-up bird and let sit until Jason shows up
Upon Jason's arrival, we had many pairs of hands at the ready. We all sprang into action, a well-oiled (and well-lubricated) machine, and here's how you and your guests would do it:
Preheat oven to 425
Core, seed and slice the tomatoes
Supplement them with some canned tomatoes, squooshed up
Chop up the white and light green parts of the leeks, and rinse them very well in a bowl of water (a good task for the entertainingly loquacious but not culinarily inclined)
Bash the pits out of the olives
Peel and slice about four, five more cloves of garlic
Toss all of the above together with some more olive oil and S&P
Spread mixture in a roasting pan; if your roasting pan is not big enough to accommodate both veg and chicken (likely) distribute veg between two pans
Douse mixture with a couple glugs of white wine
Arrange marinated chicken pieces on top
Put in oven
Pray that this will turn out OK, because what you have on your hands is a genuine Dinner Party, and you never make anything for Dinner Parties except food you can crank out under general anesthesia, and this chicken is a total, total experiment.
I drowned my anxiety in more wine. My starving guests (and husband) did the same. We talked about pretty much everything: Christian's crisis of spirit that came with turning thirty, Callie and Jason's plans to move in together and whether that was a good idea, Ceej's and my marriage and how it seems to be working out for us, the emotionally wrenching nature of the race for the Democratic Party nomination, and oh yeah, our fire-breathing armadillo art car project. And presently the most heavenly aroma began to waft from the kitchen -- chicken fat and olives, lavender and thyme. It smelled like summertime in Nice in there. I began to think that it would be OK after all.
You:
Roast chicken until internal temperature reaches 160 on an instant-read thermometer. In our oven this took exactly 45 minutes.
Have someone cut up the bread.
Have someone else plate the food: emergency brown rice on the bottom, roasted vegetable goosh on top, chicken pieces on top of that (the eight-piece French cut you had the meat-counter guy do means that everyone gets light or dark, whatever they like).
Strew everything with chopped parsley.
We ate this in near-total silence, punctuated only with occasional slurping of wine and faint moaning. All the vegetable goosh disappeared, as did the rice, as did the delicious artisan levain Ceej bought, as did the chicken, with the exception of one sad, bristly wing joint which we gave to the grateful cats. Then we all sat around, grinning to ourselves and basking in the joy of Unexpected Dinner Party, and discreetly wiping our greasy fingers on the sofa. Then Ceej played guitar and sang some songs, to thunderous applause, and everyone reluctantly dispersed, a little wobbly but none the worse for wear, warm with friends and Chardonnay and good old-fashioned schmaltz.
It would probably be delicious with some fennel too.
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March 2nd, 2008
06:08 pm - it's called "pesto" for a reason
I've never had real pesto before tonight. I make it in the food processor all the time, and I buy ready-made pesto (doubtless made in a giant version of a food processor) sometimes, but I'd never had it the way it's supposed to be done before. "Pesto" means "item made with a pestle". After many years of living pestle-bereft, I finally own one; it's black marble, purchased at Ikea for a pittance. And tonight I made real pesto -- walnut pesto, to go on top of whole-wheat pasta with wilted red radicchio and grilled mushrooms -- for the first time.
Actually Ceej and I collaborated on it. We took turns pounding away while sitting in front of the television, taking in the thrillingly squeakeriffic Lakers/Mavericks game and about a billion and a half political ads (hello, Hillary? Girl, I love you, but your shit is weak), and feeding basil to the mortar leaf by leaf, and walnuts when the mixture needed more grist, and olive oil drop by drop or else it splatters, for a long, percussive, strangely satisfying time.
Pestled pesto is alive, somehow. Its springy, claylike consistently is something else entirely, and it tastes warmly, strongly, but softly of basil -- sometimes I think basil is my favorite olfactory experience in the world. The whole house smells like basil now, and our alive, but dormant pesto will surely spring to life when mixed with warm pasta and warmer Mostly Plants. Totally, totally worth the effort.
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February 21st, 2008
07:17 pm - mostly plants: vegetable goddess salad, fishcake
I have been feeling very very VERY smug about Michael Pollan's new book, particularly the part where it tells us -- in so many words, on the cover even -- to "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants".
By "eat food", Mr. Pollan means that we should not eat anything that our great-grandparents would not recognize as something edible. (Even the peanut butter and bacon sandwich passes this test!) "Not too much", well, I don't like to think about that one too often. But "mostly plants"? I have "mostly plants" DOWN. I love the hell out of some plants. Off the top of my head, I can think of only two edible plants that I do not like: Swiss chard, a shame because it's so beautiful, and guavas, to which I think I have some kind of weird olfactory sensitivity. Other than that? Me and plants, we're like this. I like to eat them, and I feel much better when I've been eating lots of them.
Lately I've been on a bit of a gross starch-and-salt bender -- all that pasta, all that bacon -- and last night, plagued with insomnia, I decided that I should do something about that "mostly plants" thing. A vision sprang to mind: a really enormous pile of spinach and red pepper and green beans. Yum. Casting about for a protein source to go with this, I remembered that I've been reading a lot of that darling Nigel Slater's books, and that he is a fan of fishcakes, and since I was about to go broke buying haricots verts in February I could appreciate the economy of a nice fishcake.
How to tie these things together, I wondered. Then I remembered that I had a giant bunch each of dill, mint and parsley in the fridge, and that green goddess dressing was therefore within my grasp. My version is atypical; green goddess is supposed to contain just parsley and tarragon, but tarragon is not my favorite herb, largely because its strength tends to vary more from bunch to bunch than anything else I can think of except maybe chili peppers. Sometimes it's pleasantly anise-esque and antique-tasting, sometimes it's like getting kicked in the teeth by a donkey wearing licorice booties. So no tarragon for me. But it turns out that if you whiz any old soft-leafed herb or combination of herbs in the processor with a half-and-half mixture of mayo and plain lowfat yogurt (sour cream in the original -- no thanks), and a small shallot and a clove of garlic and a tablespoon of white wine vinegar and some anchovy paste and pepper, you will have a runny celadon substance that is not only absolutely delicious but rivetingly beautiful. Ranch dressing only wishes. And you can use a lot of herbs, which have great nutrient density: more plants.
The fishcake was just a fishcake. One can of tuna, one slice of bread turned into breadcrumbs, and an egg white is enough for two cakes, and two cakes is enough for two people for this purpose. I added some capers and a minced sun-dried tomato, which I was worried would confuse the issue, but it turned out to be very good. I would have added finely chopped celery if there had been any around. Anyway, if you're making this you split whatever mixture you have in two and form it into cakes, which you then carefully dredge in cornmeal and fry in a little oil over medium heat until they are lightly browned. Don't move them around too much or they will break. You could use salmon "for party" if you wanted.
The body of the salad consisted of raw spinach, those haricots (the store turned out to have some nice organic frozen ones, thank Jeebus), red pepper, and a couple of tiny fingerling potatoes, boiled and sliced up. There were also olives, which I will skip when I make this again; they weren't bad at all, but they were superfluous. I threw in a few whole sprigs of the dressing herbs, so they could stand in solitary splendor as well as all mooshed together.
Producing this meal requires some juggling, but nothing too taxing: whiz the breadcrumbs, put the potatoes on to boil, defrost the beans, chop the herbs, assemble the fishcakes, all very regimented. This is the kind of thing that would have left me crumpled in a heap and crying for my mommy before I learned to cook good.
The final trick is the mode of serving. One does not set it up with the fishcake on one side of the plate and the salad on the other. This makes the fishcake look inadequate, because we're used to seeing our plates configured around a giant hunk of protein, with those all-important plants dancing attendance. No, what you do is this: get a big, deep bowl and pile it high with vegetables. Perch your fishcake on top, and dribble that heavenly dressing (not too much) over all. As you eat, the fishcake will slowly let down and disintegrate, and give itself up to enhance the plants. Which is as it should be, and you will fell well-fed and extremely virtuous -- at least until you find yourself in front of the fridge in the dead of night, contemplating eating the rest of the dressing straight up.
This was a good dinner.
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February 20th, 2008
03:53 pm - peanut butter and bacon sandwich
I kept hearing that peanut butter and bacon sandwiches are startlingly delicious. First from my friend Lauren, whose opinions on food tend to cleave very closely to mine except for her loathing of bell peppers, which I do not understand one bit; second from a coworker, who is the pickiest eater I've ever met. (Not the same guy as in the last entry. Now that I think about it, my place of employment seems to attract people with weird food issues; we also have two supertasters and a vegetarian with a phobia of both eggs and eggplant.)
Peanut butter and bacon sandwiches being thus recommended by representatives of both ends of the eating spectrum, I decided that I'd have to try one sometime. The time came yesterday, when I was feeling low-energy and in need of something to eat that was unapologetically trashy, but that still had some genuine food value. The peanut butter and bacon sandwich came through for me. Et comment. It's perfect drunk food and perfect survival food, and I salute the brave soul who first concocted it. The downside is that now I have peanut butter and bacon sandwiches installed in my sense memory, poised to startle me with very intense and specific cravings at intervals.
I know I'm never going to convince everybody that this is a good idea, but having made this sandwich twice now (I also made one for Ceej after we got back from drinking a lot of beer at his coworkers' house last night) I think I have a handle on how to pull it off. The following tips are presented strictly in the interest of facilitating informed decisions.
1. I used a really burly sprouted-wheat bread, lightly toasted, and I think I'm going to stick with it. You need something with significant tensile strength to stand up to the filling. A PBB on white bread would be nauseating, I'm pretty sure. Whole-wheat bread might be OK, but I'd toast it more than lightly.
2. Ordinarily I would never advise microwaving bacon; the results just aren't reliable. However, for the PBB nuked bacon seems to work just fine, and since you're probably going to be making this when you're compromised in some way, you won't want to mess with the potential for grease fires. You also don't want to spend very long thinking about what you're about to do, and you can get the job done about 75% faster in the microwave. Zap the bacon on high, two minutes at a shot until it is mostly done but not dry, and blot well.
3. I used "natural" hippie peanut butter, but I may actually buy a small jar of real, evil, trans fat-laden Jif and keep it around for PBB purposes. The hippie peanut butter isn't quite sweet enough and is a tad too sticky. One wants unctuousness here.
4. You only need a couple of strips of bacon, cut in half so they fit, and two tablespoons of peanut butter, to make a good sandwich. Any more bacon and it chafes against itself, sliding out of the sandwich in unappetizing chunks; any more peanut butter and you'll feel like Mr. Ed. A little of this sandwich goes a long, long way. And you won't be hungry again for days.
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February 17th, 2008
10:31 pm - redundant pasta salad
I have a coworker who doesn't eat food. Well, I guess he must, but he really, really doesn't care about it. He's one of those guys who would tote around an IV drip of glucose and essential nutrients for the rest of his life, just so he doesn't have to waste his time eating. He has had a peanut-butter sandwich and a small bag of baby carrots for lunch every day for the last ten years.
I like to taunt him about this, though I don't know why I bother; it never really takes. He is a vegan (of course), so lately I have taken to describing delicious vegan foods in mouthwatering detail, in the hopes of provoking some kind of a response. Today I spent about ten minutes of compromised productivity describing what happens when you roast cauliflower at a gazillion degrees for longer than you think you should. In a nutshell, it becomes delicious. This sounds really dumb, but it attains an almost meatlike state of caramelization and mineral goodness. I outdid myself with the description; my coworker said "Huh," in a slightly-less-bored-than-usual way.
I got to thinking about what I would do with this cauliflower (which you can make yourself, and you should: cut up a head of cauli, toss with some olive oil and salt, spread on one layer on a cookie sheet, and roast at 450 for about half an hour, stirring a couple of times) if I had some. And I was already on the vegan thing, from taunting my coworker, so I thought about that, and about how I sometimes make a pasta salad with kidney beans and that it is good, but would be delicious with the addition of roasted cauliflower. And parsley -- lots -- and mint, and shallot in the dressing. And after awhile I got to craving this pasta salad so extremely that I went to the store on my lunch break and bought a can of beans and a cauli, and I went home and threw it all together and it was good -- SO GOOD -- but something was bothering me about it.
Finally I realized: this is essentially the same thing as I made last night. Singed crucifers and whole-wheat pasta and a protein source. Go me; I guess I must have a deficiency of some sort.
I'm saving some for my coworker. I hope he appreciates everything I do for him.
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February 16th, 2008
06:26 pm - brussels sprout and pine nut pasta (and bacon)
Cold. Cold and hungover and exhausted. It's a heinously dreary day; yellowish-gray with intermittent squalls of sharp, pounding, sideways rain, a couple of degrees off from sleet. The spouse is working a double shift; he won't be home tonight. It is a night for both self-indulgence and virtue.
So: this. Except with the crucifers browned in bacon grease, and with the bacon crumbled in at the end. If the spouse were home, there would be a hunk of plain salmon on the side, and no bacon, but he is not. There will be lots and lots of sprouts, though; almost more sprouts than pasta, and the pasta is whole wheat.
This is a deliberate process. The bacon renders slowly; if it scorches at all it'll ruin everything. Figure the sprouts will need exactly as long as it takes to boil the water and cook the pasta, to achieve the proper pan-catching, savory brownness. Toast the pine nuts in a dry pan, not in the toaster oven, to facilitate keeping an eye on the whole dance on the stovetop -- and that smell.
It all goes together, slithery and crispy and faintly sulfurous. It's the one thing that went right today. Let the rain blow.
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