mariobatalivoice

Plate of Blini Bedtime Snack

2012-02-12T05:12:00.004-06:00

As a byproduct both of being profoundly lazy and having a small apartment, Heather and I do a lot of our eating in bed, right before going to sleep. It's probably bad for us in some health type way but we've been doing it so long it seems totally normal. I'll knock something together at midnight and we'll polish it off while talking about how our jobs are annoying or our friends or ancestry.com or whoever that was just now on TV or how it's snowing to suck four dicks right now or that one dude needs to not take so many pills or cancer, boy cancer sure sucks, or what was the name of that one band, you know they had the girl in the outfit? Had that one song? Went "na na na na" making a little ukulele gesture because you can't do full air guitar in bed don't be ridiculous.

Tonight's snack was a plate of blini, little potato pancakes you can garnish with all manner of things. I made a batter in the food processor of raw potato, fresh corn cut from a cob, sour cream, egg, salt, pepper and a little flour. I added baking powder to lighten the batter, but just a dab because when the batter is really wet like this it can overdo the fizz and make the final pancake bitter. I cooked them on the cast-iron griddle, of which I don't get nearly enough use. Cast iron is a fantastic cooking surface, but I never think to pre-heat it while I'm preparing the food, otherwise I'd use it all the time. Tonight it occurred to me, so the griddle was ready when the batter was.

Normal pancakes get semi-solid prior to flipping, but the heat transfers much more gradually in blini batter, so you have to flip them while the tops are still quite liquid. If you wait until the top is covered with pinholes like a conventional pancake, you will have scorched the first side. Blini retain heat off the griddle, so it's important to let them rest before garnishing, both to avoid the garnish liquefying and so the interior can complete its cooking. I stack mine on a plate in a kind of overlapping spiral. I am sometimes tempted to try to make a tower of blini, but not enough to do it. Tower of blini. Ridiculous.

When I had a plate of the little guys I poked around in the fridge for garnish, having neglected to acquire a bunch of caviar. Caviar, man that's a whole thing we could talk about. Like most ostentatious trappings of wealth -- Hummers, speculative investment capitalism, collagen injections -- it is both disgusting and unsustainable. Caviar brought an ancient species of fish to the brink of extinction. For snacks.

Anyhow, we had some nicely sustainable Greek yogurt, so I blopped a spoon of that on a couple. We had some spinach dip from a plastic tub. I don't go for that, but Heather dips chips in it when I'm not around to make little potato-corn pancakes for her. What the hell, I put some of that on a couple. Heather hates Marmite, but I adore it for things like this, so I spread a molecule-thin layer of Marmite on a couple. I drizzled some olive oil on the whole plate and grated parmigiano over everything. The yogurt ones looked a little sad and monochromatic, so I sprinkled some paprika on them and they instantly became quite festive. I finally found a use for paprika.(v)

Aged Short Ribs with Fennel on Saffron Potato Puree

2012-02-09T19:24:00.004-06:00

Short ribs are delicious. They are on the working part of the animal so the muscles get a lot of use and are constantly being stressed and recovering, which means there is a lot of biological activity, and that creates strong flavors. Rule of thumb, the more biological activity, the more complex the flavors. Ripe fruit is more tasty than immature fruit. Bread is tastier than flour. Cheese, yogurt and creme fraiche are all tastier than milk. Cheese with veins of blue is tastier yet. Wine is tastier than grape juice, vinegar is tastier than wine. The same holds for meat. Loin muscle hardly does anything, so it has the least flavor. Rump, shoulder and shank are working most of the time so they are tastier. Short ribs are the muscles that control the body cavity, keeping the animal's body in line and contracting for things like taking a dump and ruminating. Inside the body cavity, skirt steak and hanger steak muscles do the most work, contracting the diaphragm all day so the animal can breathe, so they are more tasty yet. Same goes for the heart. Super tasty. Deeper in the animal are the guts, each of which has a specific biological function and hence specific flavor. In short, for flavor, go to where things happen.

Short ribs also have some marbling of fat, and the connective tissue web that holds the ribcage together has a lot of collagen and other structural molecules that break down when braised and add the unctuous richness specific to braised beef. Why doesn't spellcheck recognize "ribcage?" Holy shit, just checked with Scrabble and it won't allow RIBCAGE either. I'll bet a hundred bucks I've played RIBCAGE as a bingo word at one point or another. I guess it's "rib cage," or "rib-cage" like a goddamn Englishman. Rib-cage. Pfft. At least Scrabble recognizes "PFFT."

Short ribs are also cooked on their bones, so the bone and marrow enrich the cooking liquid, making the sauce and braised vegetables more delicious, and serving short ribs without them as compliment would be unthinkable.

I started work on these ribs immediately after buying them, about a week before cooking. I rubbed them all over with a modified Midyett rub (espresso, sumac, salt and sichuan pepper) and let them rest in the refrigerator to encourage a little more of that biological activity I've been crowing about. The secondary biology of beef in repose could be described as decay, but that sounds so indelicate I prefer the more culinary term "age." I let the short ribs age for a week. Sounds better than "I let them rot for a week."

When the ribs were old and weird looking, indicating sufficient ~~decay~~ age, I trimmed their more ~~rotten~~ aged extremities and prepared to cook them in the dutch oven by rendering some thick bacon planks in a little olive oil. I seared all sides of the short ribs in the olive oil and bacon fat, then removed them and added the vegetables, fennel wedges, carrot and onion, salting them so they'd give up their liquid a little and start to caramelize. When they had a little color, I nestled the short ribs in among the vegetables and glugged about a half bottle of red wine in there. As noted previously I know nothing about wine, but this was an Italian variety from California with an understated label, so it got the nod. I never buy wines with irreverent names like Peace Feet, Fish Guts or Shitty Wine, for no other reason than I hate things being made cute and I want these wineries to fail. I know, they'll fail anyway, but my point is I hate them. I would rather have one of Spiegel's celebrity wines. Call me a small man, but I prefer bad to stupid, and would rather suffer the indignity of cooking with wine made by Drew Bledsoe or the dude from Tool than something called Zin Your Face.

After the pot came up to a boil, I turned it down to a wee simmer and let it go for a couple of hours. Maybe three. When I looked at them next the ribs were beautiful, blackened by the searing and Maillard reaction and falling apart from the slow braise. The carrot and onion were at the stage of near-collapse I find perfect for sauce, while the fennel had a nice gentle consistency that retained some texture. What a great vegetable fennel is. I wonder if there are some assholes out there who don't like fennel.

Continuing my recent minor (extreme) saffron indulgence, I decided to puree some saffron-infused potatoes to serve under the meat. I boiled the potatoes as described one post below but didn't shock them. Instead I quickly made a stiff puree with the hand mixer, enriching them with some greek yogurt. This makes the potatoes quite firm, almost gluey, which would be bad for a lot of uses, but under a substantial and stinky piece of meat like this, the starchiness gives the puree enough body not to seem trivial. I could have used polenta or a risotto instead, but potato puree was the first thing to come to mind.

I plated the potato, then sorted the ribs out, spooned some of the fennel and sauce on the dish and scattered chopped chives over it. The bright color of the saffron potato and chives kept the plate from looking too stodgy, which is a real problem with braised meats. I made more than we could eat, which is fine, because that gives me stuff to make food out of later. After removing the remaining meat from the dutch oven for future ravioli or spring rolls, I whizzed the vegetables and jus into a puddle, which I intend to use as a pasta sauce.

If there are fennel-haters out there, they and the brussels sprouts guys should start an asshole club. Call it England. Or the ~~aged~~ rotten asshole haters of the delicious club.

Saffron Potato Cashew Pancakes

2012-02-05T14:25:00.004-06:00

Potato pancakes are great. I like the little flat French ones made with raw potato, but for an entree I sometimes make a thicker, more cylindrical patty out of boiled and crushed (not really mashed) potato. I'll often spice-up the flavor of potato by boiling it in stock with saffron. This only works if you peel and dice them so the stock can penetrate the flesh. Saffron adds a sharp, mineral tang to anything you cook with it, and it's perfect for making something starchy feel like a more complete food.

These little guys began life that way, as saffron-boiled potatoes. I learned a potato boiling technique from Jacques Pepin, where you just barely cover the potatoes with water or stock, and once they're up to speed, remove the lid from the pot and let the water boil off. When done, there is only a dab of liquid to drain off and the potatoes are less saturated, so when mashed or crushed have more body and don't become slushy. They also seldom require additional seasoning. I do this basically all the time now.

One of these days I'm going to try something I've been thinking about for a while.* What I like about the saffron gimmick is that it makes the flavor of the potatoes evolve as you eat them into more than a single-note bland matter. Adding a curry powder, chili pepper or garlic puree does something nice as well, but the saffron has a flavor outside the normal spectrum of vegetables that makes it especially good. I sometimes brine pork in coca cola, which adds both a complex spicy richness and a similarly sharp alien tang, probably due to its phosphoric acid. I've wondered if boiling potatoes in a brine made with coca cola would be similarly tasty.

Now there's a thing. Phosphoric acid is horrible stuff. It leaches calcium, so dentists use it to dissolve tooth matter and etch enamel. If you submerge a bone in it you end up with a slurry. Its principle industrial use is as a rust remover, yet we drink it regularly in coca cola, which is delicious.

I've also taken to boiling mustard seeds with potatoes. They swell but retain their constitution and add a nice element of surprise to a potato thing. Surprise, that's why we do this.**

So I boiled the potatoes in stock with saffron and mustard seeds, then drained them and mushed them with the back of a slotted spoon because I still don't have a potato ricer.*** The saffron tinted them a lovely canary yellow. I chopped up a bunch of cashews really fine and added them to the hot smashed potato, along with a couple of cloves of garlic, which I ran through a fine microplane for a smooth puree. Microplanes are great for that and are much easier to deal with than either a garlic press or mortar and pestle.

I added some finely minced scallions and formed the potato into patties. It's important to get this part done efficiently so you don't knead the starch out of the potato and make the patties gummy. You can bind the potato with egg or egg white, but I don't. If you don't manhandle them they keep their shape fine without. If you're concerned about it, you can let them rest and wait for the starch to congeal in the refrigerator for an hour or so, but I don't because I like them to have a soft, open texture rather than a sturdy one.

Once formed, I dusted the patties with rice flour and browned them on both sides in a skillet with a little olive oil. You have to be careful when turning them not to separate the seared crust from the patty itself. I use a thin metal spatula. When they were done I arranged them on a plate and seasoned them with some fresh black pepper and grated Asiago. Potato pancakes are often served with sour cream or creme fraiche, but I prefer Greek yogurt, which is more substantial and tangier. I could have dressed it up with some chopped cucumbers and lemon juice for a kind of faux-tzatziki but I didn't feel like it or have any cucumbers or something. (vg) (v without garnish)

*That's what she promised herself.
**That's what she missed most.
***Birthday reminder, July 22.

I Used to Make Gnocchi All the Time

2012-01-28T21:32:00.001-06:00

I used to make gnocchi all the time. Like twice a week. I don't know why, but I fell out of the habit. Feeling a twinge of nostalgia, when H-bomb needed dinner and we had nothing prepared, I made a batch. Gnocchi are an under-appreciated pasta, probably because when they're made badly they're heavy and tough

I've been adding apples to things recently, mostly because I'll see an apple sitting there while I'm making something and think, whatever, maybe that would be good with apple. When I decided to make gnocchi, I noticed an apple sitting there, and nature took its course.

Conventionally, potato gnocchi are made from cold cooked potato, flour and eggs. This requires the foresight to have cooked and cooled a potato in advance, something I do not have. I typically peel and dice the potatoes, boil them and shock them in cold water to make the temperature manageable. If the potato hits the flour and egg while the starch is still hot, the whole mass becomes elastic and gluey and no fun to work with or eat. For this batch, I diced the apple and added it to the potato prior to boiling. On a whim, instead of water I decided to boil the potato and apple in vegetable stock with a pinch of saffron. I love the way saffron brightens otherwise starchy foods and thought it might make the gnocchi a little more interesting on their own.

When the potato was ready, I mushed it up with a whisk since I don't have a ricer,* then added the egg and flour and kneaded it briefly. I don't use the whisk in a beating motion, but like a more conventional potato masher, up-and-down. It's important not to handle the dough too much or the gluten in the flour binds with the starch of the potato and the pasta gets tough and gluey. With a conventional pasta you need to work the dough so the gluten develops, which helps the texture of the finished noodle, not so with gnocchi.

Another difference is that once the gnocchi pasta is formed, I like to cut it quickly and get the gnocchi into boiling water immediately so the gluten in the flour doesn't have time to get rubbery. With a conventional pasta, I'd rest the pasta before rolling to make the dough sturdier. Gnocchi are relatively big on the fork and in the mouth, so they need to be tender and light or they're a drag. I try to get through the process quickly, without using my hands too much**

I rolled the gnocchi pasta into little logs and cut it into lumps, then grooved them with a fork and plopped them in the water. They cook fairly quickly, but not as quick as cut pasta. Once they float, they need about another minute on the boil and they're done. Normally I just dump the pasta pot through a colander to collect the cooked pasta, but gnocchi are fragile enough (when made well) that I usually scoop them out with a wire basket. This also drains them well enough that I can toss them straight into the skillet for finishing.

After boiling, I like to toast gnocchi a little in olive oil or butter. They can be served like that with some herbs, parmigiano, black pepper and salt, or dressed with a sauce. We didn't have much to make a sauce with, but we had some V8 juice, which is pretty tasty, so I thought I'd give that a shot. I've used V8 instead of vegetable stock in other applications and it has proven versatile enough to make me take occasional excursions into the unknown like this.

Once the gnocchi were browned a little, I splashed a glug of V8 into the skillet and tossed the gnocchi, and in no time at all the V8 combined with the olive oil to make a nice thick emulsion that glazed the gnocchi as it intensified. I crushed some dried herbs on them before a final toss, then plated them and grated some Asiago on top. The saffron was a great idea, it made the gnocchi a bright yellow color and gave the body of the gnocchi a delicious whiff of the exotic, and the mineral overtone was balanced by the sweet-sour character of the apple. The glaze was tasty, but the acid in the V8 changed during cooking, leaving a slight chemical undertaste, and made me wish I'd just served these little yellow marvels on their own. I'm sure I could make a reduction of fresh juices that would work better, but I'll still endorse V8 for future experiments.

*My birthday is July 22
**That's what she said

Who Doesn't Like Brussels Sprouts

2012-01-28T12:27:00.002-06:00

There's a persistent cultural perception that people don't like brussels sprouts, and I can't figure out where it came from. Everybody I know loves brussels sprouts. Whenever somebody brings out brussels sprouts, somebody is sure to exclaim, "I love brussels sprouts!" The only thing I can think of is that there are a few noisy assholes who don't like them and complain about them publicly, and through these outbursts they have the whole world convinced their opinion matters. They're the climate-change deniers of food. Sprouts are delicious. Only an asshole doesn't like brussels sprouts. Here are some sprouts served as contourno to a sausage ragu. The ragu was pretty standard, just some lumps of sausage and bacon cooked with shallot, garlic, apple, red pepper and tomato, then spooned over some polenta and garnished with grated parmigiano. The brussels sprouts were dressed with a vinaigrette of mustard, honey, garlic, sesame oil and sriracha on top of some big bib leaves of Italian basil. When I served it, Heather clapped her little hands together and said "Brussels sprouts! I love brussels sprouts."

Who Gave Us Venison

2012-01-17T03:49:00.003-06:00

I grew up eating game meat. My dad Frank Addison Albini was a terrific shot with a rifle and had generally excellent hunting skills. While my dad loved hunting and fishing, he didn't romanticize them. He was filling the freezer, not intellectualizing some caveman impulse or proving his worth as a real man. He spent considerable time working on the accuracy of his weapons and hand-loaded rounds for specific game and conditions, because he considered taking an animal with more than one shot needlessly cruel. Everyone he hunted with aspired to his ability.

In large part I owe my adventurous palate to my dad shooting so many different things. We regularly ate elk and venison, but we also had seasons where pop filled all the tags he could get, and he occasionally made excursions to Alaska, so in addition to all manner of fowl, I've eaten bear, antelope, wild boar, caribou and probably other big mammals I've forgotten. My mother handled this Noah's Ark larder with aplomb, happily using game in place of beef or pork in lasagna, ravioli, sausage and wherever else required.

I was reminded of this all when I discovered a parcel of Venison backstrap (loin) in our freezer. Somebody had obviously given it to us as a gift, probably from some fancy food place that sends things in dry ice and styrofoam, and I had put it in the freezer for later use. Sadly, I do not remember the giver, which implies that I failed to thank whoever it was, but perhaps this public humiliation will succeed in sharpening my social graces where everything else has failed. I defrosted a tidy little loin, which is called the backstrap when it's from a deer. I suppose if squirrel meat ever becomes commercial they'll come up with a name for it on a squirrel.

I love the rub Tim Midyette has developed for red meats, and lately I use it whenever I cook anything that walked on four legs. It's a simple dry mix of espresso, sumac, salt and pepper, and it works magic. I hadn't tried it on game meat, but the discovered venison gave me a perfect excuse. I rubbed it into the loin and let it rest while I prepared to sear it.

I only have one skillet, a simple steel line cook's item I bought at a restaurant supply shop 20 years ago. I also have an iron skillet, but it takes so long to heat up that I only use it when I have time to kill or need to make cornbread. Since I needed to make both the venison loin and a sauce for pasta to serve as a side dish, I had to stage the cooking and manage the skillet resource to serve everything at an appropriate temperature. The venison would need to rest after searing, so first I needed to put water on to boil, then sear the venison and let it rest, which would give me enough time to make a sauce for pasta. So I did that.

Venison like most game meats is exceptionally lean, and has to be served rare or it's tough and nasty. With a bigger cut, this can be difficult to judge, but with a little strip of loin like this, you basically just sear the margins and let it rest to come up to temperature. Takes a couple minutes.

The pasta sauce was pretty simple. I blanched white asparagus in the pasta water, then cut some of the asparagus and sauteed it with some leeks and red pepper in olive oil. When the sauce was almost ready, I dropped the capellini in the water. Capellini is a great pasta to serve with something like this because it's delicate enough not to compete with the vegetables and it cooks in a couple of minutes.

I tossed the pasta with the vegetables and plated it with a couple of the spears of asparagus, then sliced the loin and set it on top. I garnished it with some chopped scallions and mint, drizzled it with olive oil and shaved some asiago over everything. I thought it looked pretty good, but when I brought it to Heather her first words were "Why is there penises in my food?"*

She was referring to the asparagus. Because of the shape.**

*That's what she said no kidding.
**They look like penises.

Agnolotti of Leeks, Kale and Magic Nuts

2011-12-31T21:33:00.001-06:00

I have a modest kitchen. Since it's just Heather and me eating, I don't need to cook large quantities of anything, so I don't need a large pantry for staples, I get by with a normal civilian range and oven, and I don't like gadgets so I don't need storage for a crap like a duck press, egg slicer and cherry stoning machine. In a normal week's cooking I'll literally only need one knife, one skillet, one pasta pot and one rice pan. Occasionally I'll break out the dutch oven if I need to braise something or bake bread, but that's about it. I sometimes use a food processor, but they seem a little bit too fiddly for most chores and they're annoying to clean. We don't have a dish washer, and Heather, bless her heart, has never washed a dish in her life, so the less I have to clean, the better. I own a KitchenAid mixer but I haven't used it in years, and I don't have any attachments for it. I'm solidly against attachments, because they require attaching, detaching, cleaning and other things that aren't cooking. I'm pretty sure the KitchenAid is in the cupboard under the toaster but I'm not sure. I suppose I'll find out when we move.

About the only gadget I don't mind is the pasta machine. If you're going to make pasta, you either need a giant work surface and long pin for rolling it out by hand, which I don't have, or a pasta machine and a nine-inch square spot on the counter. That's my jam right there, the nine-inch one.*

I make cut pasta sometimes, but that requires an attachment**, so I'm more likely to cut sheets of pasta with a knife, or just use dry pasta from the store. Usually if I'm making fresh pasta it's for ravioli of some kind. I don't have any ravioli molds, so usually I just fold the pasta over the middles into little agnolotti or sometimes use a glass to cut circles for mezzalune.

Tonight's pasta was a way to use up the remaining kale from a massive kale indulgence brought on by some particularly nice bunches at the fruit stand. I had some endive, kale and a leek, and made a plan to stuff ravioli with the mixed greens and serve with some browned butter. I cut some bacon into 1/2-inch cubes and started them rendering in the skillet with a little olive oil, then added the leek to get it wilted. I like almonds with greens, so as an experiment I added a bunch of chopped cashews and almonds to the skillet. More about them later, they did magic. While all that was underway I stripped the green kale leaf web off the stems and chopped it into ribbons.

When the leek was tender I added the kale and salted everything. The kale goes in before the other leaves because it takes more time to cook. If I were using collards I'd put them in first, same with beet, turnip or mustard greens. Softer greens like escarole, frisee, spinach, celery leaf, herbs -- basically anything you might eat uncooked -- take much less time to cook, and can disintegrate if cooked too long. I'm always charmed by how much the volume of fresh greens cooks down. You start with an afro and end up with a burr. I chopped up the curly endive, and once the kale had wilted I added the endive and a handful of both celery and mint leaves, which have the effect of brightening any cooked greens..

Sometimes greens can have a slightly dank, musty undertaste, so when everything was tender, I took it off the fire and added a splash of rice vinegar to keep the muddiness at bay. I didn't want to make a puree out of it while it was still hot, because the bowl of the processor is plastic and I seldom feel comfortable about putting hot things in plastic, not just because I might distort the plastic, but because maybe some mutagen chemical could cook out of it and I'd get face cancer or grow a dick out of each armpit. I tasted a bit of the greens and liked them, but doubted the wisdom of adding nuts because they didn't seem to be doing anything. How little I knew then.

I turned my attention to the pasta, which was the same simple recipe I've used forever. I put enough flour on the counter (I guess it's about a cup and a half), then crack an egg into the middle of it, making a little well, add an additional egg yolk, some salt and a spoonful of olive oil, then start stirring the egg with a fork, gradually incorporating more flour into it until it becomes a mass of dough, then grab the whole pile and knead it with the remaining flour until it comes together as pasta. I used semolina this time, but the same basic technique works with almost any kind of flour. It seems like the flour will bind with the eggs until satisfied, then no more flour joins the party, so you basically can't fuck it up. I'm all for things I can't fuck up.

I kneaded the pasta for a while to develop the gluten and make it elastic enough to stretch around the middle of the agnolotti, which I expected to be lumpy from the nuts,*** then put it aside to rest for a few minutes. If you let fresh pasta rest before you roll it, it doesn't retract after rolling as much and rolls down to thickness easier.

Then the magic happened. I put the greens in the basket of the food processor and pulsed them. When I stopped to check the consistency, I grabbed a pinch and tasted it, and was surprised to find that the nuts had given up some of their fat **** and emulsified the greens into a creamy mousse. It was both richer and nicer to eat than the greens straight out of the skillet. I suddenly felt like a goddamn genius and like I invented something and started hollering for the patent attorneys again. I couldn't wait to get the pasta ready.

I rolled the pasta out in a scorched panic, laid it out on the table in yard-long strips and filled it with the greens like I was trying to win a medal in it. Only then did I realize I had no water boiling yet. I sorted that out, and while the water was coming up I ran out into the alley and grabbed a couple of big fuzzy leaves off Old Man Sage. It's incredible, Old Man Sage is still happy out there in his bucket in the dead of winter, laughing, pimping, dancing on the graves of all the other herbs. When I got back indoors, the water had come up to boil, so I salted it and tossed in the agnolotti, and while they boiled I browned the sage in the skillet with some butter and garlic.

The sage butter was ready precisely when the agnolotti were, so I strained them into the skillet and tossed them until the butter and the residual pasta water emulsified into a light sauce. I plated the agnolotti, dusted them by grating the last of the homemade cheese and decorated them with finely sliced scallions and black pepper.

The nut transformation was evident even inside the pasta, making the greens rich and smooth, and the toasted flavor of the nuts made the agnolotti more complex, which married nicely with the butter sauce. Made it worth breaking out two gadgets for one meal.

* Said the Bishop to the Actress
** Said the salesman in the sex shop
*** Said the Bishop to nobody in particular. Maybe an actress.
**** Bishop again.

Look Ma Stuffed Tomatoes

2011-11-26T05:37:00.002-06:00

On the phone with mom the other day I felt like a triple dirtbag. 1) I got super busy and didn't call her on her birthday. 2) I remembered as I was falling asleep that I needed to call her in the morning to make up for it, but then I overslept and was late and it slipped my mind. 3) Now I'm on the phone with my mom two days late and apologizing for not calling her on her birthday or the day after. Triple dirtbag. Then she lays this on me, "I've been reading your food blog. You're getting a little too precious with it."

A too-precious triple dirtbag. I hang my head.

So this one's for my ma, who taught me by example that you can make dinner out of whatever is in the pantry plus whatever anybody happened to bring home dead, to not waste anything, and now how not to be precious. Mom always bought in bulk and stored things in the freezer because you never know when you're going to need something, and that's a habit I've picked up as well.

I was responsible for a side dish for the buffet at the Mydyette-Hunter Thanksgiving feast, and not knowing precisely what people would want to eat, I got it in my head to make some stuffed baked tomatoes. Seemed like nobody could really object to a tomato. For the stuffing I imagined a savory pilaf, nothing too heavy. I started the rice by sweating some onion and garlic in a sauce pan with olive oil, then added the rice, some saffron, water and Vegeta. I didn't have any stock. Shame on me for not having stock. For normal fluffy rice I use 2 parts liquid to one part rice, but this was going to be cooked twice, so I cut the liquid back by about a third. I wanted the rice to be al dente when I stuffed the tomatoes with it so it would absorb the cooking juices from the tomato to complete its hydration.

In preparation I had got a bunch of hothouse tomatoes, so I cut the tops off them to make little hats and saved the tops on a wet paper towel in the fridge. I cut around the perimeter of each one to a depth of about an inch and a half, then hollowed out the insides with a spoon. I saved the insides in a big bowl and salted them to get the liquid to render. I'd need the liquid later.

When the rice was done to the point I could use it, I dumped it into a big mixing bowl to cool off, and added a bunch of chopped cashews. I tasted the mixture and it was good, but could use a little more complexity, so I went to the freezer, where I keep the pine nuts I buy in bulk (thank you mom), put a handful of pine nuts on the fire with some butter and browned them, then added them to the rice. They were toasty delicious. When the rice mixture was cool enough to handle, I chopped a couple of scallions, some cilantro and a bunch of mint leaves and stirred them in along with some olive oil and crushed Mexican oregano. The rice was a little too firm for easy packing into the tomatoes, so I ladled some tomato liquor from the bowl of middles into the rice to loosen it. I also tried a sip of the tomato liquor and it was delicious. Maybe Devin can devise another cocktail with it and open franchises in New Orleans. Sell them in big tomato-shaped goblets all shaved ice and rimmed with Old Bay. Call it a Tomatogarita or a Hurri-Tomatocane or a Mai-Tomato-Tai. Hang them off the necks of revelers with a lanyard and a long bendy straw. Have a mascot like the Kool-Aid man except a big tomato guy. People need work, why not. Franchise people in New Orleans call me.

I stuffed the tomatoes with the rice and arranged them in a shallow baking dish. I put the dish in the fridge to wait for morning, but reserved four of them for Heather's dinner. Those four went into a small tin and got baked in a 350 oven for about 30 minutes covered in foil. When they were soft and giving, I doused them with another little shot of the tomato liquor to refresh the rice, then shredded some parmigiano on top, drizzled them with olive oil and browned them under the broiler for a few minutes. To balance them on the plate, I cut some croutons from some leftover skillet soda bread I made after watching Jacques Pepin do it on TV.

The tomatoes were delicious. The hot, astringent juice made a perfect compliment to the sturdy, rich interior, and the par-cooked rice didn't degenerate into mush. The tomatoes I cooked for Thanksgiving got a little mound of bread crumb mix made of panko, parmigiano, olive oil and black pepper instead of the cheese, and it browned to a nicer effect, adding a crisply toasted element. I had intended to put the little tomato hats back on for presentation but forgot all about them. If anybody has a suggestion for what to do with the little tomato hats, please let me know.* When we ate the tomatoes at Thanksgiving, I heard from the other guests about a supposed pine nut shortage that had recently crippled kitchens all over, and felt an unusual pride in having learned to buy in bulk.

Thank you mom, and happy birthday.

Mom in Hawaii for our wedding. We bought in bulk.

*You get a little tomato hat with your Tomatogarita.

Pan Roasted Pineapple in Prosciutto with Li Hing and Umeboshi

2011-11-11T01:59:00.000-06:00

My li hing mui obsession continues to find opportunities to express itself. Here's the next shot.

The celeriac skordalia was a big hit with H-Bomb. I call Heather H-Bomb sometimes. She hates it*. The last time I made celeriac I ended up with a little left over, so I needed something to serve on it as a main course. One of my favorite Hawaiian li hing items is fresh pineapple with li hing sprinkled on it. It's totally delicious, spicy and weird. At one of the PRF barbecues I was treated to some grilled pineapple rings wrapped in bacon, served with a spicy barbecue sauce. They were savory, hot and sweet and I thought I could make a version of them spiced up with li hing that would go well with the celeriac.

I'm a fan of bacon as an ingredient in its own right, but not so much of using it to dress up other things. It's such a strong flavor it tends to become the focal point of whatever it's used on, and that aspect has become quite a gimmick problem solver in professional kitchens. Dull menu item? Slap bacon on it, especially if it's incongruous, and tell the wait staff to crow about it and pull a face when they say the word "bacon." Baconizing the mundane is now a first option, and has already worn out its welcome on me. I've seen bacon-slapped doughnuts, chocolate bars, brownies and baked items, bacon fat-infused coffee, ice cream and jelly. The baconification of restaurant food has even made me tired of the more traditional -- now ubiquitous -- bacon-topped sea food and poultry. My bacon nerves are pretty well shot at the moment, but at the point I was served the bacon-wrapped pineapple mentioned above I was still vulnerable to its charms, and I wanted to do justice to that younger, less jaded response.

Wherever bacon would be rude, I've had some joy substituting prosciutto, which seems to deliver a satisfying savory richness without being an obstacle to what lies beneath it. Lardo does just as well, but tends to read as butter rather than meat, and the celeriac needs a substantial entree to compete with its savory personality, not buttered fruit.

I cut a pineapple ring approximately 1.5" thick, then into six segments, making roughly pyramidal chunks, then dusted them all over with li hing powder, which instantly stained them a brilliant crimson. The color of li hing is probably largely synthetic, since the powder is made from a pickled plum, similar to the light pink umeboshi common to Japanese rice balls. I was intrigued by this difference, so I took out a jar of umeboshi to compare the two. As soon as I opened the jar, it occurred to me to include a piece of umeboshi in the parcel to provide a sour counterpoint to the sweet pineapple. I wrapped a pitted umeboshi plum with each piece of pineapple in the prosciutto, overlapping to bind it to itself closed. Since the pieces would cook quickly, I collected them on a plate to cook simultaneously. I presumed the prosciutto and li hing would be salty enough that I wouldn't need to season the hunks separately.

I pan-roasted the pineapple chunks in a skillet just barely wiped with olive oil. I didn't want to risk trapping any frying oils in the folds of the prosciutto or the crevices of the pineapple underneath. The prosciutto both rendered and crisped nicely, the fat becoming instantly transparent and the meat becoming red and supple before browning and shrinking to enrobe the pineapple. The little things looked cool as hell, and I couldn't resist eating one piping hot. It was delicious and reasonably balanced, though mild, so I made a quick vinaigrette to spice up the plate out of an egg yolk, some Sriracha, mustard, lime juice, soy sauce and garlic. I plated the celeriac skordalia first, then plunked the pineapple chunks on top, doused the plate with the vinaigrette and garnished with some alley mint leaves.

Heather was less taken with the pineapple than I was. "I'm not so into fruit for dinner," she said. I wish I could say I was unhappy she had eaten all the celeriac and left most of the pineapple chunks, but whatever emotional pain I felt was soothed by wolfing the things down like a snuffling pig.

* Really, she hates it.

Asparagus in Perilla with Pork Rillettes and Leek Chives

2011-11-10T05:38:00.003-06:00

I mentioned previously that I got some "sesame" leaves at Jong Boo market. These are perilla, a Korean relative of the Japanese herb shiso. They taste somewhat of wintergreen or licorice and are about the size of small grape leaves. As soon as I had the Perilla leaves in my hand, I imagined wrapping something in them, and was pleased to discover while googling them that they are used that way in Korea. Since I also just acquired some nice white asparagus, I decided to make some asparagus rolls. I love asparagus for eating and am charmed by the magical way it transforms the smell of my urine. It's amazing how quickly it gets through your system. I've eaten asparagus as an appetizer and visited the toilet between courses a few minutes later and been greeted with the familiar (yet magical) transformation. Charming and intriguing. Nothing else does this to pee that I know of, though I've heard from a few experienced women that a diet heavy in celery improves the taste of semen.* So far I've been unable to confirm this due to scheduling conflicts, and my sole reference book on the subject doesn't mention it.

I like regular asparagus, but for some reason the white stalks are better represented in the produce sections of supermarkets around here. Lately whenever there are both white and green, the green is usually older, with open, drying florets and woody stems, while the white stalks are nearly pristine and closed tight. I have no idea why this is, but if I have a choice I'll take whichever looks better and lately that's been white. The modern Japanese restaurant Macku has an excellent white asparagus custard on its dessert menu, and whenever I see white asparagus in the store I make quiet plans to attempt something like that some day. Today was not the day.

With green asparagus I generally peel the bottom third of the stalks, more if the skin looks sturdy, and nip off the very end of the stalk, which can be scarred or fibrous. The "trick" often seen on TV cooking shows of snapping the bottom quarter of the asparagus stalk off is wasteful and crude. Just peel it like any vegetable and trim the bad part. White asparagus has a thinner skin, but I peeled and trimmed these out of habit.

We had eaten a bunch of braised pork shoulder recently, and there was still some left, so I imagined frying it into a sort of shredded carnitas to accompany the asparagus in the rolls. I still had some of the Korean leek chives (or are they chive leeks?) left, and while they proved underwhelming generally, I thought they could compliment the mild flavor of the asparagus and pulled them out of the fridge.

I got a pot of water boiling, salted it and threw the asparagus in. I figured it would take a couple of minutes, but while that was underway I could make use of the boiling water. Using a skimming ladle, I blanched the perilla leaves in the salted water, then shocked them in cold water to set their color. I did the same to a bunch of the leek chives, after tying them together to keep them in a tidy bundle for easier handling.

While the asparagus was boiling, I sliced an onion into thin rings and started them caramelizing in a skillet with some olive oil. I shredded a bunch of the slow cooked pork into the skillet to cook along with the onions. My plan was not just to reheat the pork but caramelize it with the onions, give it a crisp texture and intensify the flavor of the braising liquid that had clung to the pork. There was enough fat clinging to the pork that it wouldn't be lying to call it rillettes, but I would only do that if I was trying to impress somebody.**

The pork would take a couple of minutes, so I removed the asparagus from the water and shocked it, then cut it into lengths that would fit inside the perilla leaves. I didn't intend to roll the ends of the leaves over like a burrito or dolma, but I didn't want the asparagus poking out the ends. I also made a quick dressing, a kind of loose aoli with some garlic, mustard, soy sauce, sesame oil, rice vinegar, honey and Sriracha.

Since the water was already boiling, I got a third use out of it. I threw in some extra salt and a few colorful new potatoes to serve along with the asparagus rolls. The new supermarket had a special on colorful little potatoes, so I bought a bag of mixed hues, golden, blue and pink. They seemed like a good candidate for a side dish and they were small enough that they could boil in the time it took to make the rolls.

When the pork was ready, I made the rolls by laying a couple lengths of asparagus on a perilla leaf, dressed them with the aoli, laid in some of the crispy browned pork and a few of the blanched chives, then rolled them up. For presentation I cut a few of the rolls in half to show off the insides and made a nice pile of them on the plate. By then the potatoes were done, so I drained them and dressed them with the remaining aoli, black pepper and some of the chives, chopped fine, then set them on the plate and garnished with a couple of bright red olives. I was happy with the jolly look of all the different colors rumbling around on the plate. Reminded me of childrens' building blocks or Legos or something. Do they still have Legos? They must.

About the rolls, Heather ate them but said they were "a little thing, not a meal." She's right, I should have served them with something else, like a soup or a cutlet or some other more substantial item but I didn't think of it until she mentioned it.

It's honestly amazing about the pee.

* I don't even need to say it really.

** I am trying to impress you.

Three Minute Gazpacho

2011-10-08T17:37:00.007-05:00

Made a trip to Andy's and got some beautiful little cucumbers I've never seen before. They had a bumpy, leathery skin and firm flesh, almost like a zucchini, but small, inoffensive seeds. About half the size of a salad cucumber, they tasted great and were much less watery than the waxy green dildos normally available. I sat down to watch a baseball game and ponder what to do with them. When Heather summoned me and claimed to be near death from hunger, it gave me a perfect opportunity to try my hand at a gazpacho, provided I could complete the task in three minutes*, the length of a commercial break.**

I peeled two stout little fellows, cut them into segments and put them in the carafe of the blender. Their tiny, feeble little pips saved me the trouble of de-seeding them, a task that may have taken several seconds. To the cucumbers I added a smashed clove of garlic, a small purple heirloom tomato, half a small sweet onion, a cigar-butt-sized hunk of ginger and the flesh of both a fresh jalapeno and a little red cherry pepper, all cut into pieces. The peppers came from the alley. Way to go alley. I pulsed the vegetables for a bit to break them up, then added salt, pepper, Sriracha, olive and sesame oil, the juice of a lime and a glug of spicy V8.

Before juicing the lime I grated the zest and reserved it for later. Grating the zest off a lime has the same effect as massaging the pulp, which makes the lime give up more of its juice. If you're not using zest for anything you can just roll the lime on the countertop and crush it a little. Also, get one of those little lime squeezer things from the Mexican supermercado. They cost a buck or two and are super efficient at getting lime juice out of limes. Liquefying raw vegetables works best if there are smallish pieces in a wet medium rather than trying to turn big hunks directly into liquid. That usually just results in the blade whirring past the bigger pieces while punishing the puree, resulting in unpalatable chunks surrounded by overworked paste, so it's worth it to do the puree in two stages, first to coarsely chop the pieces, then with a little added liquid to make it smooth.

Another trick for pulsing larger batches, especially in a food processor rather than a blender, is to add some crushed ice with the vegetables at the beginning of the process. The ice pieces act as auxiliary blades to help break up the vegetables while preventing the soup from getting hot from the friction of the blade and motor. Keeping the vegetables cool is critical in a gazpacho, otherwise the cells break down and the soup separates into ugly layers of water and fibrous matter. Gazpacho needs to retain some hint of its constituent ingredients in the body of the soup, otherwise it's just salty Jamba Juice. I didn't bother with ice this time because it was a small batch and I was determined not to spend too long on it.

I finished processing the soup and poured it into a bowl on top of some finely-sliced scallions and the reserved lime zest. There was very little foam, but I skimmed off what there was and tasted the soup. It was bright and complex and satisfying, and the oil made the flavors linger a little on the palate while providing body. I was happy with it as it was, but in future iterations I may try adding a little fish sauce to see if that makes the flavors hang around even more. Tasting the gazpacho gave me the idea that this would be really good as a savory sorbet, so I need to get some into Tim Mydhuiette's hands before everything goes out of season.

The alley bounty provided me with an assortment of peppers to dice for garnish, so I made a tiny brunoise of green jalapeno, orange serrano and red cherry pepper and sprinkled them on the gazpacho along with some chopped tarragon from the alley. I finished the garnish with a little dollop of Greek Yogurt and a sprig of mint.

And I made it back in time to see the Yankees dump one.

(vg) (v) without yogurt

** Overheard re: Bishop and actress.
** We have TiVo but I like a challenge.

Weird Little Mushrooms in Soup

2011-09-25T04:06:00.002-05:00

After living a mile from it for a decade, I finally made a shopping trip to Jong Boo Korean Market, which I drive by often but had never set foot in. The occasion was a successful day of marketing that included the new fancy supermarket that just opened across from the Jewel, Paulina for meat and a fly-by of Andy's for some weird little cucumbers and such. Jong Boo was pretty cool, and I got some stuff I was curious to try cooking with, including red miso, a big hunk of fresh pork belly, Korean shiso leaves (colloquially called "sesame leaves" in Korean), Koeran leek chives, fresh Chinese noodles and a carton of weird little white mushrooms cultivated in a mass. As soon as we got home I decided now was as good a time as any to try making a soup with some of this stuff.

I started the soup by sweating some onions and garlic in some sesame oil reinforced with olive oil. When they were soft and smelled good, I added some finely diced ginger, carrots and peppers. The alley patch has been incredibly productive this year, prodigiously producing Hungarian wax peppers, jalapenos, tiny Thai chiles, little golfball-sized cherry red peppers and some red things that look like serrano peppers but aren't as hot. For this soup, I made a brunoise of a fat jalapeno, one of the red mock serranos and a couple of the little Thai firecrackers. Those things are pretty hot, but aren't disruptive unless you bite directly into a whole chile.

I salted all the vegetables, and once they made their introductions, I covered them with water and stirred-in a healthy blob of the red miso. When the miso had dispersed and formed a broth, I added a splash of fish sauce and let the whole thing come up to a boil. Meanwhile I boiled water for the noodles. Typical Asian soups have noodles boiled separately and added to the bowl, and that seemed like a good protocol to follow. Boiling the noodles separately keeps the starch in the noodles from leaching into the soup and clouding and thickening it. The noodles are less flavorful than egg noodles, so it's critical to salt the water they boil in or they'll be a flavorless paste.

While the noodles were boiling, I prepared some herbs. I tried one of the leek chives, and it was underwhelming. Not a lot of flavor and a strong chlorophyll taste. I plunged one into the soup stock and let it blanch a little, then tasted it again and was surprised that the raw greenness had left, leaving a nice mild onion/chive/leek flavor. I chopped a small handfull and dropped them in the soup. I tried the shiso/sesame leaf raw and it was pretty rude, with a medicinal/poisonous licorice flavor that reminded me of sassafras and wintergreen. I was intrigued by the flavor and didn't dislike it, but I suspected Heather would be put off by it. I tried blanching a leaf and the medicinal quality was reduced considerably, leaving just the suggestion of anise and wintergreen. I rolled a couple of the leaves into a bundle, cut them into ribbons of chiffonade and added them to the soup. The final flavor of the soup was hearty and complex, with considerable spiciness and a rich mouth feel. Given the complex flavor of the shiso, I thought fresh mint and tarragon would compliment it, so I ran out to the alley and grabbed some, then chopped them fine to use as a garnish.

When the noodles were done, I made a little mound of them in the soup bowls, then ladled the soup over the top. The stock had turned a lovely amber color, but was a little plain, so I floated a couple slices of spicy capicola on it. The heat from the soup instantly made the fat transparent and the meat turned a bright rosy pink. I pulled a few of the weird little mushrooms off the cluster and plunked them in the soup, then scattered some of the chopped herbs over the soup, and the final look of the soup was nice.

The pork belly will be in play shortly.

How Popcorn Came to Matter

2011-09-16T01:40:00.002-05:00

Heather loves popcorn. We go through phases where she needs popcorn every evening, so I make a lot of popcorn. When I was a kid, my mom made popcorn with olive oil and butter as the frying medium. Timing was critical, because if the fire was too hot or the popcorn didn't come off the fire precisely when it was done popping, the butter solids burned and it came out horrible, but when it everything worked, it was delicious. I have tried making popcorn this way, but in the interest of a higher success ratio I have modified the mom technique.

I use canola oil for the cooking medium. It has no flavor, but can handle high temperatures easily, and a high temperature means fewer un-popped "old maid" kernels are left. For on top* I mostly use melted butter, and once in a while we get this ridiculous Irish butter that costs like ten bucks a pound just for the popcorn. While Heather was rocking the JP, and occasionally to accommodate movie night with vegan friends, I make a topping that is as delicious as butter but isn't butter.

I'm going to call it a dressing. I hate that word "topping." It's a food industry word for something fake and gross to use instead of something normal like butter. Worse, it's an all-purpose word, used equivalently for synthetic versions of mayonnaise, whipped cream, bacon crumbles or ice cream sprinkles. Fuck "topping" and "spread" and "chocolaty" and "creamer" and the rest of the industrial food replacement dictionary.

The non-butter dressing I've settled on is a clove of garlic emulsified with some liquid smoke, siracha, sesame oil and olive oil. There's more olive oil than anything else, but the other elements make the dressing complex enough to do battle with the Irish butter. I have tried adding various other savory sauces, Worcestershire (and its Sheffield counterpart Henderson's Relish), Tabasco and balsamic vinegar, but none of them improved matters and some of them occasionally made kernels damp in spots.

Regardless of the dressing, popcorn isn't really fit for eating without salt, and given the geometry and physics of popcorn and oil, popcorn salt needs to be ground very fine to do any business with popcorn. A civilized popcorn experience requires fine popcorn salt, and trying to make do with granulated table salt is what pruno is to wine. Like that prisoner's tipple, brewed in toilet tanks from packets of mystery fruit jelly (topping? sure) and moldy bread, it sucks, it's degrading and it's for people who have been shit on by life. At the million-plex theater where Heather and I go see movies sometimes, they don't butter the popcorn at the concession, they hand it to you and make you walk over to the oil pumps to butter it yourself. With topping, we can call it topping. Adding fuck you you're a sucker and we hate you to insult, there is no popcorn salt, only little paper packets of granulated salt like you'd get in a pre-pack of plastic cutlery. In prison. The next step down the ladder is a cavity search.**

To salt our popcorn, I tart-up regular sea salt with some dried Mexican oregano, black pepper and paprika, and grind it super fine in a mortar. It comes out like talcum powder and it disperses well into the popcorn's texture. If I'm in a rush I'll grind some Vegeta with the salt instead of individual herbs and spices. If we're using the olive oil dressing instead of butter, I'm more likely to just use plain salt and pepper for seasoning. Having just returned from Hawaii (thank you Hawaii) and still being in the throes of a Li Hing Mui obsession, I'll be trying that out on some popcorn real soon, and I suspect it will be wonderful.

Li Hing Mui

Stop Press! Just made some li hing popcorn and it was delicious. Made popcorn and dressed it with butter, reserving some for the li hing experiment and seasoning the rest for Heather with ground salt, pepper and oregano. For the experimental bowl I ground li hing powder with salt and dusted the popcorn with it. It turned my fingers a rather gaudy scarlet, but man that stuff is great. Sour, salty and pungent with fruit and licorice.

Li Hing, I will see you soon. I have plans for you. (v) or (vg)

* Bishop.

** Then blanket party.

Burdock What the Hell is Burdock

2011-09-09T06:13:00.003-05:00

Like most people, the only time I ever come across burdock root is watching episodes of the original Japanese Iron Chef. They seem to throw burdock in everything they boil, and having eaten my share of Japanese food, I'm pretty sure I've eaten it, but I couldn't tell you what it tastes like and couldn't identify its flavor blindfolded. While at Mitsuwa buying a bunch of Asian stuff, I came across a pile of burdock roots, each about a yard long, in the produce section. Burdock certainly doesn't look like food, it looks like a dirty stick. Now's as good a time as any to find out what burdock is all about, I assured myself, and six bucks later I owned a solid yard of dirty stick.*

I did some googling but got bored with it and decided to just boil some and see what was up. Turns out it tastes pretty dull and isn't much fun in the mouth**. Kinda like dirt crossed with a turnip plus rope. The smell of it while boiling was pretty interesting though, like a wet dog and a rotting tree stump. If you've ever taken a dog for a walk in the woods after it rains you'll know what I'm talking about. I decided on the spot to make some vegetable stock with the burdock and use that to make a risotto as a vehicle for the funk.***

I don't know if you're supposed to peel burdock, but the outside is the part that doesn't look like food, so I peeled it and cut it into one-inch lengths. The burdock being pretty long, there were a lot of one-inch lengths to deal with.**** I started the stock by slightly caramelizing an onion, some celery and an apple, chopped coarsely, and a mess of little carrots from a bag. When they were browned a little, I seasoned the vegetables with a handful of salt and added four or five smashed garlic cloves, a couple bay leaves and the burdock, then covered everything with water and let it come to a boil. Once boiling, I turned it down to a simmer. I skimmed the stock a couple of times out of habit over the course of about an hour, but the stock was pretty clean.

Using cold liquid to make risotto takes a long ass time so I like to have the stock on a light fire right next to the rice pan so adding stock doesn't bring down the temperature of the risotto. While decanting the stock into the warming pot I noticed that the burdock pieces had retained their structure through more than an hour of cooking, while all the other vegetables were reduced to putty. Curious, I threw one in my mouth and it wasn't half bad. Still underwhelming but the texture had improved, and I could see pores in the center of the root had opened up, which might allow for a dressing to penetrate and make it tastier. I reserved a dozen or so of the burdock chunks to dress for later and pitched everything else.

I tried a shot of the stock and it was pretty good. Had the sort of dirty undercarriage musk I associate with mushroom stock, but without the lingering sensation of rot and slime. If I needed mushroom stock for something I wouldn't hesitate to use burdock broth instead.

Anyhow, made the risotto, starting with a sofrito of diced apple (or was it pear? I can't remember for sure, but I want to say it was pear) onion and celery, and while that was underway I built the dressing for the burdock hunks by making a puree of a garlic clove with a microplane and emulsifying it with an egg yolk, mustard, some sesame oil, siracha, rice vinegar, salt and a little honey. I covered the burdock with it and let it soak in. The risotto was coming together nicely but as the dirty color of the burdock broth intensified in it, the color was starting to look drab and a little shitty, so I made a plan to enliven the plate with a roasted red pepper puree. It's a pretty good quick sauce for anything starchy, just throw a roasted red pepper in the blender with a little olive oil, salt and vinegar and you've got a nice bright red sauce that tastes delicious. I built the plates with the risotto surrounded by the pepper sauce, then loaded the burdock chunks on top, scattered some alley herbs and shaved some parmigiano over everything.

The risotto was excellent, with the murky taste of the burdock***** broth brightened by the tangy dressing and red pepper sauce, and while the burdock wasn't an exciting vegetable to eat, it was a decent vehicle for a nice dressing and was the catalyst for this whole thing. Sort of like an asshole buddy who introduces you to the love of your life, he gets a pass lifetime for that. (vg) (v without egg yolk or parmigiano)

* Do I have to spell it out for you?
**Overheard at the PRF BBQ
***"Vehicle" by the Ides of March is pretty funky
****Overheard at Quenchers pre-PRF BBQ
*****While I was typing that last bit, I mis-typed burdock as "buttdock," which was too good to just erase

Homemade Cheese to Garnish Sausage and Peppers

2011-09-01T03:59:00.003-05:00

Making cheese is way more daunting than bread. Bad bread, whatever, it's still bread. Bad cheese could end up a weird moldy science experiment that stinks like rotting garbage and cures syphilis. Nevertheless, despite not really knowing how, I thought I'd give it a shot. When I was a kid, my mom made a kind of farmers' cheese by curdling milk with lemon juice and straining the curd, and I thought I could handle that. I had about a half-gallon of whole milk in the fridge, which seemed like it ought to be enough to test the principle. Milk needs to be hot for the protein to react with the acid in the lemon juice, so I put the milk in a pot on a low heat with a little salt. I saw a cheesemaker on YouTube put salt in his milk, so what the hell me too. As a kind of hedge against the cheese coming out awful, while it was coming up to temperature, I steeped a handful of mint and Thai basil leaves from the alley in it. I didn't get that off YouTube, I came up with that on my own. If the cheese had an awful consistency it would at least taste like something.

When the milk was just barely up to a simmer, I strained out the mint and returned the milk to the pot, then added the juice of a lemon and let the milk come back to a light simmer. I was concerned that lemon juice might not work as well as rennet, but it jelled fairly quickly, so I took it off the heat and let it rest. When it had cooled to room temperature, I stirred it to break the curd, then poured the curd and whey into a colander lined with cheese cloth. I was startled by how much whey there was, and how little cheese, and started to feel like an idiot. I wondered if there was enough whey to make it worth trying to make a ricotta, but decided against it, preferring to win one battle rather than lose two.

The cheese was profoundly wet, so I balled up the cheesecloth like a purse, tied it off and let it drain, sitting in a strainer resting in a bowl in the fridge. It was still about a cup's worth, so the maybe the effort wasn't wasted. I let the cheese set for almost a week before I tried to use it. Fort the occasion I made a little plate of salami and apple slices, and tried to incorporate my new cheese. It had the crumbly consistency of ricotta salata or feta, but was much milder in taste. The mint and basil imparted a cool herbal essence (1970 called, she wants her shampoo back), but overall the cheese was unremarkable. I wrapped it back up in its cheesecloth and stuck it in the fridge.

Much time passed. Heather and I went to Hawaii to celebrate our anniversary (really we just like to go to Hawaii once in a while), and while there we ate like royalty. On our first night back, I needed to make dinner, but we had very little in the kitchen, having depleted resources prior to leaving town. I made a quick run to Jewel and grabbed a couple of apples, some smoked bacon and a sweet Italian sausage. I was pretty sure I could grab enough stuff from the alley to make a decent ragu to serve over some rice, and that would be our dinner. In a quick ransacking of the alley, I grabbed two bright red jalapeño peppers, four little Hungarian Peppers and a big pile of both mint and basil leaves.

In the kitchen I started the rice cooking, then cut some bacon into chunks and put it in the pan along with a little olive oil to get things going. When the chunks were nicely rendered, I took the skin off one of the Italian sausages and pulled it into bits, which I added to the bacon. Giving the sausage a moment to compose itself, I diced half an onion, a small apple and a couple cloves of garlic, and added them along with some salt. When they were sweated down nicely I added the peppers, all cut into small pieces. When everything was brown and sticky*, I added a couple glugs of vinegar and let everything simmer to deglaze the pan and bind the components into a ragu.

By then the rice was ready, so I chopped the basil and mint into a heap and stirred it into the rice. The visual effect of the brilliant white rice and deep green herbs was nice, and when I spooned the ragu on top it made for a pretty plate. I tried a little of the ragu on its own and it was a little lean tasting. I don't mean it lacked fat, but the acidity of the vinegar and the natural tartness of the apples made it feel harsh, almost metallic in my mouth, and it cried out for something to enrichen it. It certainly didn't need any fat, so a drizzle of oil wouldn't help. I tossed a couple of pine nuts on as garnish, but that wasn't enough.

The obvious solution would be to grate some parmigiano on it, but we didn't have any. While poking around in the fridge, I came across my old buddy the homemade cheese, now hardened to almost exactly the same consistency as parmigiano. In one of my better what-the-fuck moments, I tried grating some onto the ragu. It still had a mild minty flavor, but through the drying process the milk solids now had an intensely rich mouth sensation, almost like a condensed milk caramel. It was neither as biting nor as salty as parmigiano, but it had a similar umame effect and was the perfect counterpart to the ragu.

So there's another personal milestone. Made some unremarkable cheese, then forgot about it long enough for it to become useful.

*Jesus I hope that's not what she said.

Slow Cooked Pork Spring Rolls

2011-08-16T20:54:00.001-05:00

Got a beautiful pork shoulder from Paulina Market and decided to cook it for a real long time and eat it. I'm old and have traveled a lot, and the one thing I've learned is that very few things are universal. Not every culture is monogamous, not every culture has money or property, not every culture even has numbers to express quantities bigger than three. But everybody on earth not forbidden by religion cooks pigs slowly and eats them. Some do it by burying the pig in a hole full of hot rocks, some wrap the pig in leaves and build a fire over it, some rotate the pig on a spit over the fire, and some put it in a pot and braise it. The only common feature is that a pig is getting cooked for a long-ass time and people are going to eat it and tell each other how fucking delicious it is. Pork is magical, in that as long as you season it and cook it for a real long time, you basically can't make it anything but delicious. We've all had bad barbecue or mediocre ribs. Delicious, wasn't it? Totally finished the whole thing.

I seasoned the shoulder with salt and pepper, after first scoring the beautiful fat cap into a diamond pattern, and started it off in the dutch oven. With pork I usually like to bring the meat up to temperature slowly, so it doesn't seize up and get tough. If I want to caramelize a pork chop or roast, Ill do it at the last minute under the broiler, once the meat texture has been finalized by slower cooking. For a big butt like this though, I brown it all over to develop a nice flavor and fond first, then let it braise long enough to break down and become unctuous. I started the browning on the fat cap, so the rendering fat would provide most of the cooking medium and I don't need to add much extra oil, just enough to get the fat started.

Once the meat was browned all over, I moved it to a platter to make room and loaded the pot with an onion and apple, both cut into substantial chunks, a handful of little carrots from a bag and six cloves of garlic, smashed but not chopped. I let all that brown in the rendered fat, then seasoned it all with salt, pepper and a couple glugs of vinegar. I threw a cinnamon stick and some dried hot chiles in the pot, nestled the pork back among the vegetables and added a pint each of chicken stock and apple juice. Once it came up to a boil, I stuck it in the oven at 225 degrees with a lid on it and let it cook for christ knows how long. Hours. Five hours, maybe eight.

How was it? Dude, we've been over this. It was slow cooked pork, it was fucking awesome. Delicious, succulent, unctuous and tender. That's what you get when you do this. You strike a match, you get fire. You cook pork a long time, you get something delicious. When it's a big ass pork shoulder, you also get a lot of it, way more than can be eaten all at once, and that's where the spring rolls come in. We had so much left over that I could make enough spring rolls to feed both Heather and the poker crowd.

Somewhere in there Legs* sent me an email asking if raw apples would be good with cooked pork. I replied of course they would but then realized I hadn't eaten raw apples with cooked pork before. A regular late-night snack for Heather and me is a plate of apple slices with prosciutto or salami, and I cook pork with apples all the time, but raw apples with cooked pork, nope. Time to give that a shot. I began grating an apple in preparation for making rolls with it, but the grated apple began discoloring immediately. I tried acidifying it with a little rice vinegar but that didn't stop the discoloration. I decided that since the apples were going inside the roll the discoloration wouldn't offend, and stopped worrying about it. I made the spring rolls with the apples and shredded delicious braised pork on a bed of rice cooked in stock and saffron, and some parsley, basil and mint from the alley. I served them with a quick Siracha aoli made by emulsifying some Siracha with an egg yolk, a little honey, mustard, pureed garlic, salt, sesame oil and olive oil. It's a favorite quick sauce and all-purpose dressing. It goes well with anything containing strong flavors.**

* Single men, for a good time in the LA area, call Legs. Can't find a photo of her at the moment, but picture the girl of your dreams, only sexier. That's Legs. She has a car and a Prince tape she plays in the car. She will sing along to Prince in the car. Guys, really it's better than I'm making it sound.

** Absolutely no dick jokes this time. Didn't even slip one in accidentally.***
*** Footnotes don't count.

(App)Led Zeppole

2011-08-06T01:00:00.004-05:00

Fried stuff is great, so long as you get it while it's piping hot. Since our place is small, I can get food from the kitchen to Heather in a heartbeat, so I fry stuff all the time. Usually I make little croquettes or other doughy things and fry them, but I thought they might be getting a little heavy after repetition and have laid off the fried things for a bit. Heather and I have been to Hawaii several times, including getting married there, and one of our favorite things from there are local dougnuts called malasadas that are puffy and light but tasty as all hell. I wanted to make something like that for the next fried thing, but savory rather than sweet.

We discovered malasadas at Leonard's Bakery in Honolulu on a tip from Heather's dad, Charles Ellsworth Whinna, USMC ret. When he was stationed in Honolulu in the late 1960s, and then living there at liberty in the early 1970s, he had several regular haunts, and Leonard's was one of them. On our first trip to Honolulu we were delighted to find that virtually all of the favorite spots from his time in the Marines were still going concerns, and all still superlative food experiences. Other Chuck-approved wonders of Honolulu include lau-lau dinner at Ono and shave ice from Waiola Market. Malasadas are apparently of Portuguese origin, and are balls of leavened dough, fried, dusted with sugar and eaten instantly while still in the goddamn parking lot with the box in your lap because fuck me they are delicious. I am a genuine threat to fuck up a whole box of them by myself if there's coffee available. So I always order coffee.

Charles Ellsworth Whinna USMC

Malasadas use yeast, and yeast takes time to work and also is not JP-compliant, so that idea shit the bed before it woke up. In Italy there is another delicious fried thing, the zeppola, and while some zeppole are made of leavened dough, some use beaten egg whites or soda for leavening. I thought I could probably pull that off,* and use the batter to enrobe something savory and delicious. I started the batter by separating two eggs, intending to make the batter with the yolks, then beat the whites and fold them in at the last minute so the batter didn't have time to deflate. To the yolks I added a little sesame oil, yellow curry powder** and salt for flavor and a couple tablespoons of apple juice to provide enough liquid to hydrate the flour. I whisked the yolks until they were lightened somewhat and completely uniform, then added rice flour until the batter was slightly thicker than pancake batter. I expected the batter to thicken slightly as the starch in the flour hydrated, and if I guessed right, when I added the egg whites the composite batter would be thick enough to coat the apples but thin enough to form a nice smooth layer, and aerated enough to puff into an inviting shape when fried.

With that plan, I started on the innards of the zeppole. I cut some apples into thick planks and squared them just enough to get rid of the core and seeds without wasting too much. Each piece ended up being about the size of a matchbox.*** I wrapped each apple chunk with a slice of prosciutto and set them aside. I intended to dunk them in the batter and fry them like pieces of cod, with the light batter forming a puffy orb around them, but for a minute I was baffled by how I would dunk them and transfer them to the oil without marring the coating. Then it occurred to me that I could skewer each piece and use the skewer as a handle to dunk them in the batter and fry them. Bravo me, great idea. Skewers then. I stuck bamboo skewers in all the apple-and-prosciutto hunks. I should probably have soaked the skewers in water for an hour so they wouldn't burn, but I didn't, and ultimately I don't care if they burn. They're little pieces of bamboo, not innocent children. Also, they didn't burn.

With that problem sorted, I started the canola oil heating and returned my attention to the batter. I whipped the egg whites with a drop of rice vinegar until fluffy and folded them into the batter. The rice vinegar acidifies the whites in the manner of cream of tartar, which toughens the protein and stabilizes the foam, but saves me the trouble of having to own a tin of cream of tartar. Other than beating egg whites, what the fuck am I supposed to do with cream of tartar? I could beat the eggs in a copper bowl, which has the same effect, but I'm not a millionaire so I don't own a special egg-white-whipping bowl which sits tarnishing for 360 days a year. A long time ago I saw a thing on TV, maybe Graham Kerr, maybe Julia Child, I don't remember, but the test for when egg whites are properly beaten for inclusion in a batter is to turn the bowl upside-down, and if the whites stay in place then they're done. This is slightly stiffer than "soft peak" stage, but not the completely rigid stiff peak stage. If beaten to stiff peaks, the whites don't incorporate well, and tend to streak or break as they're folded into a batter, defeating their purpose.

The handle-skewer thing worked great. I was able to completely enrobe the apple hunks, move them to the oil and flip them while cooking without marring the coating, and I could even lift them out of the oil to check their color without using tongs. When the zeppole were done, I transferred them to paper towel to drain, and when cool enough to handle, the skewers came out easily. I think I have a kind of awesome thing going with the handle skewer idea. I think I'll call it Moreskewer. I need a patent lawyer right away. Also for Morepencil and Morecupcakes. If you're a patent lawyer and want me to be a millionaire so I can afford a copper egg-white-whipping bowl and a polishing steward to keep the tarnish off it, google up my phone number and give me a tinkle.

The zeppole came out puffy and light just like I had hoped, with a firm exterior skin and a fluffy, soft interior. Traditionally zeppole would be sprinkled with sugar, and I suppose I could have made a mock-icing sugar by grinding salt, white pepper and sesame seeds in a mortar, but I'm lazy, and in service of my laziness I decided that would be tacky. I made a dipping sauce instead. I ran a garlic clove through a microplane to make a puree, then emulsified it with some mustard, sesame oil, rice vinegar, siracha, salt and a little honey. I know, honey isn't JP, but the sauce was a little bitter without it, and it wasn't much.

The apples got warm but stayed firm, making a nice contrast with the puffy dough, and the sweet apple married well with the rich and savory prosciutto. The hint of curry in the dough and the spice in the dipping sauce all made for a multi-layered eating experience in a small package.

Seriously, patent lawyers call me about Moreskewer. It's a goldmine.

*Said the Bishop to the actress.

**I know curry powder is a bastardized version of a masala and unseemly in a proper kitchen. I know using it shows disrespect to the deep and varied cuisine of the Asian subcontinent, and I apologize for that. Regardless, curry powder serves a purpose occasionally and I have some on the shelf. We're not ninjas.

***A box of matches, also a little toy car about the same size. Matches are what people used for fire between the two-sticks-rubbed-together era and the Bic lighter era. Note: the Zippo was a primitive form of Bic.

Team Pork Rides Again

2011-07-29T04:21:00.003-05:00

Having made delicious celeriac skordalia to accompany the ass-kicking steak, I naturally wanted to eat more of it. Team Pork worked so well the last time I thought I'd give them another shot. Called them up to the big show. Sent a bus ticket. Made a phone call. Talked their folks into letting them skip college.

I cut nice big slabs of bacon and browned them in a skillet. Poached the sausage to firm it up prior to slicing and browning so the pieces would hold their shape. Worked fantastically, I'm a goddamn genius. I diced a small apple and half an onion and cooked them along with the team. I also cooked a couple of tomatoes in the skillet to serve as a garnish, and they browned nicely in the rendered fat.

I started the plates with a base of celeriac puree, added Team Pork, the tomatoes and some fat leaves of basil and mint from the alley. The alley has been kicking ass lately. Italian basil is producing leaves as big as a shoe and both Thai basil and mint plants are going buck wild. The pepper plants are healthy and heavy with budding peppers, but we won't have any to harvest for a few weeks yet.

The plate was coming together but looked a little under-dressed, so I made an aoli to spiff it up a little. I pureed a clove of garlic with the microplane and emulsified it with an egg yolk, some sesame oil, freshly grated horseradish, rice vinegar, Siracha, salt and pepper. It came out a nice subtle orange color, and when I drizzled it on the plate with some olive oil, the colors made the whole plate look better. The garlic in the celeriac skordalia was still pretty strong, but the peppery spice in the aoili made a nice contrast.

The Electrons made the playoffs again, and unless the league starts testing for alcohol before games we're probably looking at the makings of a dynasty. This summer is developing a nice head of steam for both the Electrons and Team Pork.

Fuck it, I'm Fixing a Steak

2011-07-23T18:29:00.003-05:00

On my last trip to Paulina Market I spotted some beautifully marbled strip steaks and instantly nabbed them. There were six of the little beauties and I got four just in time, as one of the butchers then emerged from the back and set the other two aside, I'll assume for himself but maybe a favorite client. These steaks were fantastic looking. Three inches thick, ruby red meat capped with sturdy ivory (not yellow) fat, and veins of it running through the meat like a great Nile delta of flavor. This is what I talk about when I talk about steak. I had the butcher wrap two of the steaks separately so I could freeze them, intending to deal with the other two as soon as I got home.

Most of the red meat I've eaten recently has been grilled by Tim Mydhiett in his back yard. He masters a beautiful ceramic egg barbecue oven and tends to rub things on his meat* before sticking it in there*. Lately he has been using a rub of finely-ground espresso, salt, pepper and sumac, and it has been exceptional every time I've had it. I generally dry age beef a few weeks in the fridge before cooking it, but the rub is a pretty good approach for meat being cooked without aging. I wondered if I could incorporate some of the flavors of the rub into the aging process to make the meat even more flavorful, so I set up a little experiment. I intended to cook two steaks, one rubbed and grilled immediately and one rubbed and aged prior to cooking. I made the rub of espresso, salt, black pepper, cinnamon, mustard powder, turmeric, chile de arbol and cardamom seeds ground together in a mortar and pestle, and coated the steaks with it. I didn't have any sumac so I used the other spices for a whiff of the exotic. Yma Sumac was a Nice Jewish girl from the Bronx named Amy Camus anyway.**

As fortune would have it, the Myddiette-Hunter household was planning a dinner of grilled meats and ice cream, so I had an opportunity to try my rub a-la-minute. I say they were planning, but really I called and suggested they make such plans. Sue me.

The grilled steak was excellent, and proved the merit of grabbing good meat the moment you spot it.* Cinnamon by itself doesn't play particularly well on beef, bringing to mind the watery horror that is Cincinnati chili, but when made into a kind of masala with hot pepper and other strong flavors it does wonders. Tim has been working on his ice cream chops and fuck me he makes some delicious shit. He made a pearl green mint-basil-pepper ice cream and a ruby red sorbet of raspberry, cherry and lime juice with some way back mint that both blew my mind. Complex and satisfying, they made me lust after one of those countertop freezers and Tim's ninja skills.

So the first part of the experiment was a rousing success. Meat cooked over fire is delicious, even if you put coffee on it. After sleeping off the effects of the meal I settled into a normal life while the other steak rested and matured in the fridge. When aging beef in this manner there are a couple of things to be aware of. You need to keep the meat elevated so air can get all around it or you risk anaerobic activity and potentially lethal poisoning of yourself and guests. I do this by arranging a couple of skewers or chopsticks on a plate in a grid pattern to make a little rick, and resting the steak on top of it. You need to rotate the steaks a couple of times a month so the juices redistribute and you don't end up with rawhide leather on one end and mush on the other. You need a kitchen towel or something under the meat to absorb the condensation and sweat runoff, and you need to change it frequently or your fridge will smell like a corpse. It will smell like a corpse anyway, I just put that in there so when your fridge smells like a corpse you won't freak out, you'll just change the towel and let the steak do its thing. One of the things it does is smell like a corpse.

Time passed, I learned some things about myself and other people and had a couple laughs. I got a haircut, then a trim of the same haircut and finally a trim of the trimmed haircut. I noticed my eyebrows are still pretty bushy, but have a lot more grey in them than I remembered. I wondered if men go bald in their eyebrows like they do on their heads. There's basically no baldness in my family line. My father, his father and my maternal grandfather all went to their graves with full heads of black hair. I never thought to check their eyebrows. For the better part of a month, I basically forgot I had a beautiful steak in the fridge waiting for me to cook it.

Then out of the blue one evening I was struck with the desire to eat a big fucking steak, and remembered that I had just such a thing waiting in my fridge, smelling like a corpse covered in coffee, and resolved to cook the son of a bitch and eat it. It was big enough that I could feed Heather with some of it and still stuff myself with the remains.

I love eating mashed potatoes with steak, but earlier in the week I had bought a giant celeriac bulb and thought it would make a nice accompanying dish, since mashed potatoes weren't JP. I sweated half a sweet onion and some garlic in olive oil, then added the celeriac and a small apple, both peeled and diced into half-inch cubes, and enough salted water to simmer them. While they were cooking I tended to the steak.

If cooked indoors, I prefer the finish of broiled steaks to any other method of cooking, but I've found that a thick, cold steak cooked under the broiler generally stays cold in the center, and that can make for an unpleasant sensation in the mouth. I have taken to starting the steak in a skillet, then finishing it under the broiler, and the meat comes out nicely rare. I cooked this beauty just like that, with a couple of minutes on top of the stove in olive oil, then another three or four under the screaming hot broiler on each face. I slid a couple of halved tomatoes into the skillet for both episodes of the cooking process to serve alongside the steak.

When the steak was done, I removed it from the skillet and let it rest on the cutting board. This step is critical for aged beef because the peripheral meat can easily dry out if served hot from the fire. I used the resting period to finish the celeriac. I buzzed the contents of the pot (celeriac, apples and onions) with the stick blender until smooth and tasted it. It was good, but I was a little concerned that the strong flavors of the steak would overwhelm it and it would end up being just a kind of neutral matter on the plate. I decided to make the puree into a kind of skordalia by adding some strong olive oil and a couple cloves of fresh garlic. That turned out to be a really good idea. I plated the puree and was about to nestle the tomatoes in it when I remembered that the alley basil had recently bulked up, so I ran out into the alley and grabbed some fat leaves to set the tomatoes on. Little leaf boats. Adorable. I cut the steak into pieces, laid them into the celeriac and drizzled olive oil over them. A little cracked pepper and sea salt and the plate was done.

This meal was exactly what I needed to break the rice-and-greens monotony of the JP diet. A big fucking steak, colored purple and red by the aging process, seared and crackly on the outside, stinking like bleu cheese in a wet sock, on a pillow of savory puree that stung my eyes with its garlic breath. The fat had dried into a kind of cheese, and when I bit through the crust of seared rub and beef essence it bathed my tongue in an unctuous, marrow-like butter. Even the tomatoes were terrific, hot, astringent and wet, they acted like both a salad and steak sauce. I horked the whole plate into my gut like I was trying to impress somebody and lay down on the couch feeling like a fucking emperor. I was asleep in minutes.

Did the rub make any difference in the aged steak? Hell I don't know. A thick, quality steak like this with a couple of weeks dry age on it is so incredibly good you could probably empty out Dave's shop vac on it and it would still rule.

*You heard me.

**No she wasn't.

Vegetable Pilaf with Prosciutto Ribbons and Egg Yolk

2011-07-21T20:06:00.001-05:00

The difference between what I would call a pilaf or a risotto is almost the difference between a salad and a soup. Risotto is served pretty wet, with the starch and liquid elements creating a kind of sauce that binds the rice, and risotto can hold its own as an entree. Pilaf has distinct grains and usually accompanies something else. Heather was hungry, but I didn't want to tie myself up in the kitchen for half an hour making a risotto, so I decided to split the difference and make a pilaf with some extra crap on it that would be substantial enough to serve as a meal.

I started by making a sofrito of onions, garlic and carrot and sweating it in some olive oil. Then I added the rice, vegetable stock (did I mention I made stock? It's awesome) and a mashed chipotle pepper and brought it to a boil. Once the stock was boiling, I dunked a plum tomato in it for a few seconds, then retrieved, peeled and chopped it. If you add fresh tomato at the beginning of cooking something like this it mutes the bright flavor and the skin tends to slough off, turning nice tomato pieces into a rubbery rude confetti with bits of mush. I wanted the tomato to be a fresh element, so I reserved it to add at the end of cooking.

Dropping the tomato into the stock immediately lowered the temperature to a simmer, so when I took it out I lowered the fire to compensate and keep the rice at a steady light simmer. I let the rice go for about 12 minutes, then shut it off and let it rest with the lid on until finished, which only takes a couple of minutes. I stirred the diced tomato and reserved juice into the rice and plated it, plopping an egg yolk in the middle of the rice. The hot rice denatures the yolk slightly, changing it from a runny liquid to a capsule of creamy, rich sauce, which I imagined Heather stirring into the rice after making a flattering "ooh" sound. She probably didn't make the sound, but imagining it is what keeps me going some times.

We had some very nice imported prosciutto from Paulina Market, so I cut a slice of it into ribbons and draped them over the pilaf, then sprinkled some chopped alley parsley and alley mint over the whole plate. A quick drizzle of olive oil, some fresh cracked pepper and crunchy sea salt and the plate was done. The rice itself had much of the flavor of the stock and sofrito, the yolk made itself into a rich sauce, the prosciutto was prosciutto and therefore awesome, and the herbs, tomato, olive oil and pepper added a bright vegetal top note.

I made two plates, one for Heather and one for me, and when I stirred the egg yolk into the rice I made a little "ooh" sound, in imitation of the sound I imagined Heather would make when she did the same. This bit of business allowed me the satisfaction of inducing an "ooh," even if it was a self-satisfied one and not the genuine article. I'm too old to care about such distinctions and sometimes I just "ooh" at my own food. Fuck it, nobody's listening.

Sausage Dumplings in Gravy

2011-07-21T01:29:00.001-05:00

I had a blowout on my hands. A band was scheduled to do a one-day session, during which they intended to record and overdub three songs, an ambitious amount of work to do in a day even under normal circumstances. Over the course of a couple hours at the start of the day, two tape machines and the air conditioning unit for studio A all took a dump. Given that we were short-staffed, moving a third tape machine in from the second floor would take a long-ass time and the studio was getting uncomfortably warm, so the band decided to pull the plug. I felt awful about the studio letting the band down, so I offered them an additional day on the house so they would have enough time to get done what they wanted without feeling rushed. The whole thing put me in a rotten mood, and by the time everyone split it was early evening, so I decided to invent something for dinner to take my mind off it. I had been thinking about boiled dumplings, and wondered if I could enrobe something in a dumpling dough to make a more complex, less stodgy dish.

Don't get me wrong, I love plain dumplings in soup or stew, but I wanted something less solid, and with surprises inside. We still had a couple of fresh bratwurst from Paulina Market, and sausage is a pretty good surprise*. Instead of mixing uncased sausage into a forcemeat filling, I decided to cut the sausage into little nuggets and surround them with minced vegetables inside the dumplings. To firm them up prior to cutting into portions, I put them in a pot of cold water and turned on the fire. While they were coming up to temperature, I made the vegetable portion of the filling.

I had made lunch for Heather to take to work the day before, some little rice paper parcels full of mixed greens, which I decorated by including some colorful herbs, vegetables and apple. I only needed a half-dozen slices of apple for her lunch, so I sliced and dressed the rest of the apple for future use. I made a vinaigrette of rice vinegar, mustard, sesame oil and some left-over steak rub containing ground espresso coffee, yellow curry powder, salt, pepper and ground chile de arbol, and coated the apple slices with it. After marinating overnight, they were slightly pickled and chutney-like. I diced the apple slices fine, and did the same with some slices of carrot, ginger, red pepper and plum tomato, then mixed them all together with the residual apple dressing and a couple of mashed garlic cloves.

The sausages had come up to a simmer, which was enough to make them firm, so I took them out of the water and let them rest and stabilize until time to make the dumplings and turned my attention to the dough.

Since rice flour has virtually no gluten (the rice flour marked "glutenous" is actually a nearly pure starch useful primarily as a gelling agent), I needed to bind the dough with something to keep it together. Normally I'd use eggs, but the fat in the yolk tends to weaken the dough. The interior of these dumplings was going to be lumpy and wanted a pretty sturdy casing, so I used a couple of egg whites instead, mixing them into a mixture of rice flour and brown rice flour. This also had the effect of keeping the dough a pure white. When the dough had come together I let it rest for a moment while I cut the sausages into inch-long segments.

For each dumpling, I patted the dough into a circle, then filled the middle with a spoonful of the vegetables and a sausage nugget, then pleated the dough closed and rolled everything together into a smooth ball between my hands. The dough was barely holding together, and if I tried anything more decorative it was likely to tear or puncture. I placed the dumplings in simmering salted water and let them bob around until done. The hot water cooked the egg whites and stabilized the shape so the dumplings were sturdy enough to manipulate once they came up to temperature.

While the dumplings were poaching I made the gravy. I started by putting the remaining vegetable compote in a skillet with some olive oil, and when everything had caramelized slightly I added some vegetable stock and some leftover saffron rice. Once everything was cooked soft, I ran a stick blender through it. The rice thickened the gravy without the pasty effect a refined starch can leave in your mouth. After seating the dumpling in the gravy I dotted the bowl with some Siracha for spice and color, snipped some nori shreds over the bowl with scissors and scattered some black volcanic sea salt. I was happy with the result.

The next night I made another gravy for the remaining dumplings using apple, tomato and onion, but the leftover rice was gone, so I used a roasted red pepper to provide body instead, and the gravy came out a nice deep red color. I made a quick mayonnaise with olive oil, mustard and fresh horseradish, and dotted the sauce with that in a kind of photo-negative mimic of the Siracha.

I got so wrapped up in making the dumplings I totally forgot I was in a rotten mood. I hear that's why alcoholics drink booze. I hope I don't have a problem.

*Really? That's where we're going with this?

Parcels

2011-07-18T23:48:00.002-05:00

Since she started up with the JP, I have been trying not just to make dinner for Heather, but some kind of portable lunch when possible so she doesn't have to go off script if she gets hungry at work. I know what she likes, but sometimes it's hard to make something portable. Tupperware tubs of soup can be hard to reheat or serve from, and a lot of what I make is only really presentable when served hot. The one solution has been spring rolls, but mercy, how many damn spring rolls can a girl eat without feeling put upon. It was time to try something new to keep the spark alive.* Hyachacha.

I like the effect of bitter greens being tempered by a sour dressing or tart fruit, so I decided to make some little rice paper parcels with greens and a savory dressing, but I shuddered at the thought of Heather confronting a drab hockey puck of cooked greens staring up at her from a plastic tub. Hulk Smash mint out in the alley had come into flower, and I thought I could use the buds and leaves to add some visual interest, with a slice of apple framing them inside a contrasting background.

The Greens were pretty standard. I wilted kale and leeks with some sliced garlic in some bacon fat and a splash of vegetable stock, and once they were cooked I mixed in some fresh basil, mint and parsley leaves from the alley. While the greens were cooling down I made the dressing. The dressing was also pretty standard, some sesame oil, Siracha, chopped garlic and hot mustard whisked together into a quick vinaigrette. The hot elements contrasted nicely with the cool herbs and the acid complimented the bitterness of the greens, making the effect savory and complex rather than rude.

Also drank a shot of the pot liquor. Fuck me delicious. Somebody's gonna make a fortune off pot liquor.

For each parcel I soaked a square rice paper sheet in hot water and laid it out on a damp kitchen towel like a baseball diamond, then arranged a mint bud or other leaf and a slice of golden apple as decorations, occasionally accenting them with some shaved carrot strips or sliced tomato, then mounded the greens on the apple slice and doused them with the dressing. When bound up in the rice paper the visual effect was gauzy and muted, which had the rather nice effect of making the parcels seem less clinical, less like botanical specimens.

Look, I know this is a kind of trick. It's basically a spring roll in a different shape, and the decorations don't really change the eating experience, but cut me a little slack here. I'm trying to make it so Heather doesn't get bored or have to hide in her office eating some mud-colored putty while everybody else is whooping it up with pizzas and caramel macchiati.**

That's what they do there. They whoop it up.

*Attributed to unspecified woman, possibly an actress.

**Macchiatos

Huevos con Papas sin Papas

2011-07-15T04:12:00.001-05:00

One of Heather's favorite breakfasts has long been huevos con papas. Growing up, she had close family friends who made them for her, and I'm certain it appeals to her because it's both delicious and nostalgic. She can usually put away four or five of these breakfast tacos, stuffed with fried potatoes and eggs, usually with some onion, sometimes chorizo, and always with cilantro, jalapeño and lime juice for flavor. While she's on the JP, I strive to make her meals as appealing as her favorites from the regular world, and I decided to try to make a breakfast that was evocative of huevos con papas, but without the forbidden lime juice and potatoes. I have my doubts about tortillas as well. They seem far too bread-like to be permissible, but from the crude rules we operate by (taken from memory of a single conversation over 15 years ago), they've always been fair game. To be on the safe side, and because we didn't have any tortillas in the house, I decided to use spring roll wrappers instead.

I started by making a sofrito of onion, garlic, fennel and diced linguisa, which were all cooked together in olive oil until the linguisa had rendered a little fat and color and the vegetables were soft and giving, with a hint of caramelization. While that was underway I prepared the eggs. I beat three eggs and some sesame oil, lightened with a little vegetable stock, until they were absolutely smooth, then I added chopped parsley and fennel fronds, salt, pepper and some Mexican oregano, crushed. When the vegetables were ready, I folded the eggs into the skillet, moving them around until just shy of being set. Eggs keep cooking for a couple of minutes after they come off the heat, so I always take them off while shiny and slightly wet.

Instead of potatoes, I used slices of avocado to support the eggs inside the spring roll, wrapping them together with some cilantro, scallions, crunchy sea salt and juilienne of ginger and jalapeño. When cooked conventionally, the potatoes would be soft and rich, having absorbed considerable olive oil or butter, and the buttery, smooth avocado was a pretty good potato proxy. The visual effect was a little drab, but when served with some salsa the whole dish looked okay. The salsa came out of a jar, and I'm sure it had some non-JP elements, but fuck it, we're not ninjas.

The linguisa was a nice alternative to chorizo, which can be a little greasy and loose, and the overall effect was solidly tasty. It wasn't really that much like huevos con papas, but it was pretty good. Pretty good. That's what we're shooting for folks, pretty good.

Tomato Soup with Fennel-Scallion Soup Nuts

2011-07-11T15:49:00.005-05:00

We were about 30 minutes away from going to the neighborhood carnival with the Mydyett-Hunter family when Heather confessed hunger. I needed to make something and get it in her before we left or she'd be stuck with nothing but the horrors of the midway fry stands. I asked her if a soup would be good and she made a sad face, because her current eating regimen doesn't allow bread, and she usually has bread or toast with soup. I proposed making some soup nuts and she acquiesced, though I don't think she had much confidence in the experiment.

Soup nuts are little fried dumplings you can float on soup that serve the place of crackers or bread. I know about them from the Jewish food tradition, but there ought to be equivalents in most cultures that make soup and fry things. I started the soup nut dough by chopping a scallion and the fronds of a fennel bulb. I should have diced them really fine, but in my haste I just ran the knife through them and tossed them in a bowl. I added an egg, some salt and sesame oil and beat the wet ingredients together with a fork.

For the dry ingredients, I mixed some white rice flour and brown rice flour with a little bit of baking powder, then mixed in the wet ingredients until thoroughly incorporated. I put about an inch of canola oil in the bottom of a small pot on the stove to heat, then turned my attention to the soup. I don't really like canola oil for tasks other than frying because it doesn't taste like anything, but it can take higher temperatures than most oils, so it's fine for frying.

For the soup I diced half a sweet onion and half a fennel bulb (jesus what's with me and fennel lately) and sweated them in olive oil along with a couple smashed cloves of garlic and a couple tablespoons of diced carrot, seasoning everything with salt and pepper. When everything was soft and just starting to caramelize, I added a can of San Marzano tomatoes, crushing them as I did. Once that all came up to a boil, I turned it down to a simmer and made the soup nuts.

The baking powder had lightened the dough nicely, so I was able to use a teaspoon to make neat little morsels of it, and they fried up quickly into little hairy balls.* I fried them to a lighter color than usual to avoid burning the bits of fennel and scallion that protruded all over, but they were small enough to be fully cooked by then. I drained them on paper towels, and dusted them with sea salt while still hot. I tried one on its own and it was pretty tasty. I can imagine eating a whole bowl of them while watching a ballgame.

The soup was ready, so I creamed it with the stick blender, whose praises I have sung before, and served it with the soup nuts on the side. The whole thing came together so quickly Heather not only got lunch, but had time to change her mind about her outfit before we had to leave. At the carnival midway I found the make-your-own-slush booth and made a kind of pousse-cafe out of root beer, blue raspberry, cherry, lemon and lime. It was awesome except for the crippling brainfreeze. Lila was pretty fearless on rides and fed baby goats in the petting zoo. soup (v) soup nuts (vg)

*That's a really weak that's what she said. I don't have much to tickle you with this time.**
**That's what she said

Fake Okonomiyaki

2011-07-10T02:51:00.000-05:00

When I visited Osaka in 198something I was introduced to the local specialty okonomiyaki, a delicious dinner pancake. Restaurants serving okonomiyaki have tables with little griddles in the middle, and they're made with lots of fanfare that would be annoying if it weren't done by Japanese people. They have such a formal, serious bearing that they can do basically anything and you just assume it's an ancient ritual and is therefore cool. It's not such a stretch when you remember they actually have quasi-religious ceremonies for serving tea and sake. The kitchen dude comes out and oils the griddle, then mixes some chopped cabbage and other vegetables with a rice flour batter and pours it on the griddle, forming it with wooden tools that probably have awesome names. When the pancake has set up, you paint it with some soy sauce, then some bonito flakes are scattered on it and it's flipped over. More painting, more scattering, and then the whole thing is cut up and served. If the guy doesn't do it to your satisfaction he cuts off a finger and presents it to you in atonement*.

It's showy and fun, a kind of kabuki make-a-pizza, and I loved it. The pancake itself is substantial, the vegetables give it a complex texture, and the glazing of soy sauce and bonito is both savory and sweet. I thought Heather might like it, and eating JP style gave me an excuse to make a version of okonomiyaki for her. Granted, the dish I made for her is nothing like a real okonomiyaki, but that's why I made it.

I started by slicing a fennel bulb and half a sweet onion really thin and caramelizing them in olive oil. Fennel cooked this way gets marvelously sweet and has an almost brittle texture. Onions get similarly changed by caramelization, but the transformation doesn't seem as magical. Caramelized onions still taste like onions, but fennel tastes like candy.

While the fennel was cooking, I made the batter. I started with a couple of eggs, some olive oil and a ladle of vegetable stock, then whisked-in rice flour until the consistency was smooth and slightly heavier than a crepe batter. I mixed the flour in first so the starch granules would have time to hydrate before I had to pour the pancake. I grated a carrot and chopped the fennel fronds finely and added them to the batter along with some finely sliced scallion and celery, sea salt and black pepper.

By the time all the vegetables were incorporated, the fennel and onions were nicely caramelized, so I poured the batter over them. I couldn't cook the pancake entirely on top of the stove without flipping it, but I wanted a nice surface for presentation, so I decided to finish it under the broiler. The residual heat in the pan was sufficient to set the pancake, so it didn't need too much time under the broiler. I didn't want a browned top, just a firm surface to spread the dressing on.

I needed a dressing to substitute for the soy sauce glaze, so I used the microplane to make a puree of a garlic clove, then made it into an emulsion with sesame oil and rice vinegar, and added some grated ginger, chopped roasted red pepper and more of the fennel fronds. Microplanes are fantastic for this kind of chore. It would take a five minutes and a bunch of mushing with a mortar and pestle to make a smooth garlic puree conventionally, but just rubbing a clove through a fine microplane gets it done in seconds. I covered the pancake with the dressing and scattered some sea salt, garnishing with a chiffonnade of alley mint.

The dressing contrasted with the candy-like bottom** of the pancake, making each forkful nicely complex and mimicking the effect of the soy and bonito in the original item. Heather was pleased, and I got to keep all my fingers. I told her about the custom I observed during my stay in Japan, of the over-served salaryman pissing in a doorway, performing the traditional drunken-outside-pee ceremony. She said it sounded beautiful and moving. (v)

*Not really.
**You heard me. Candy-like bottom.

Colorful Snack Items

2011-07-08T13:54:00.000-05:00

Vegetables in Saffron Maki and Truffled Pâté in Hibiscus Maki

Avocado, Ginger and Wasabi in Calico Maki

I've gone bananas for making these maki rolls. They're pretty easy and you can put anything you want in them. For the poker game on Tuesday I made three varieties using two kinds of rice, one I cooked conventionally in vegetable stock and saffron came out a nice bright yellow, the other was soaked in jamaica (hibiscus flower infusion) overnight and also cooked in it, with a little salt. I think the salt acted as a mordant for the color, allowing the rice to stay a vivid magenta-purple when cooked.

I knew I would be doing something with hibiscus rice this week, since it had been on my mind, and while shopping at Paulina Market I saw some nice looking pâté in their refrigerator case. The ingredient list was admirably brief: chicken liver, pork liver, truffle oil, parsley and salt, so I got some to try. The tart hibiscus rice suggested a rich, flavorful interior, and after tasting a bit on some bread, it seemed like this pâté should fit the bill.

Pâté is often served with pickled vegetables to cut its richness, usually pickled onions, cornichons or gherkins, so I sliced some red onion real thin and pickled it in rice vinegar while the rice was soaking. I also like the way strong herbs work in conjunction with rich, fatty elements so I buffered the pâté with some alley mint. In the end I made some with the pickled onion and some with sliced dill pickles, and both came out fine. The pickled onions were almost the same color as the hibiscus rice so weren't as striking visually, but that's a quibble. I could easily devise a method to highlight the difference by separating them inside the roll by changing the sequence of layering with the mint if I made them again.

The vegetable rolls were made with the remaining pickled onion, some shredded carrot, roasted red pepper and some kale, cooked with onions, garlic, alley basil and mint. I dressed the carrots with sesame oil and rice vinegar so they acted as a kind of slaw, and the acidic bite did wonders to liven up the dark, muted flavor of the cooked greens. The color combination inside the roll made a nice mock flame, which mimics the logo of either the Campfire Girls, Standard Oil or the BK Broiler.

Since I had two types of rice made, I tried making a variegated roll using both. I dropped little bits of rice all over the nori sheet from each batch, then spread them with my fingers into a kind of calico, then stuffed them with slices of avocado, dressed with some diced ginger and pickled onion. I remembered while constructing the first roll that I had bought a piece of wasabi root at Mitsuwa the other day for some rice balls and still had some left. I grated it with a microplane into a smooth paste and spread a little dollop along the avocado.

Holy shit, real wasabi is awesome. Having been previously only exposed to the pea-green nuisance conventionally served as wasabi, I was absolutely startled by the difference when using the genuine article. Genuine wasabi is a lovely pastel green and has a little kick to it, but it isn't the assault on your palate and sinuses I've come to expect from the mealy paste served with most sushi. It has a smooth, gradual build of flavor with a raw, vegetal quality I described as "jungle-y" when I first tried it. The piece I bought was about the size of a 35mm film cannister (weed box) and cost me $13, so it isn't something to be used frivolously, but it is magical tucked into its traditional place next to rice and seaweed.

Yellow and calico rolls (v).

A Hibiscus Rainbo for Pride

2011-07-02T05:16:00.000-05:00

Hibiscus Spring Rolls with Savory Rice, Ham, Pepper and Mint

Hibiscus Rice Vegetable Maki

The taqerias of Chicago are ubiquitous and harbor a multitude of fantastic drinks. The cane-sugar Mexican Coke, spicy rich horchata, and many splendid flavors of Jarritos and Jumex are delicious little whiffs of the exotic within easy reach, and I indulge in them often. I have long been intrigued by jamaica, the magenta hibiscus flower infusion, but admit to not particularly enjoying it as a drink. It has a spectacular tartness and a mineral undertaste that are only calmed when served overly sweet, which doesn't appeal to me as my sweet tooth has evaporated as I mature. I have long thought that jamaica's unique attributes -- tartness, lean complexity and brilliant color -- could be useful in cooking for more than just drinking, and recently I've been experimenting with it. The dried hibiscus petals are available in most Mexican markets, and they are potent. A small handful will make a couple of quarts of infusion with a brilliant ruby color and a strong, complex flavor.

My first hibiscus experiment was to use unsweetened jamaica instead of water to hydrate the rice paper wrappers for some spring rolls. The wrappers can be a little pasty, and I thought the tartness of hibiscus could ameliorate that. The wrappers didn't take on the vivid hue of the jamaica, but were both appreciably magenta and appreciably sour. I cooked the rice in stock with saffron, and paired with some emerald green mint leaves from the alley, some pink smoked ham, and marinated roasted red pepper, the visual effect was bright and jolly. The hibiscus flavor, though muted by the rice paper, was discernible and interesting and made an additional dipping sauce unnecessary. My only reservation was that I didn't have any bright blue color to complete the rainbow in the rolls, since I made them during Pride weekend.

As an aside, I've always been intrigued by the unique Chicago idomatic spelling "rainbo." This spelling was used for Rainbo Donuts (now closed), Rainbo Roller Rink (also), the Rainbo Club (closes in about an hour as I type, but will be open again once the hipsters wake), Rainbo Gardens jazz club, the Rainbo housing development in Uptown and probably a hundred more places. It's baffling and charming.

My next Pride Week experiment was soaking rice in jamaica to add a note of sourness to some maki rolls without having to use citrus juice or vinegar. I let the rice hydrate in the jamaica overnight, then cooked it in jamaica with a little salt. Prior to cooking, the rice looked spectacular, a mottled deep purple resembling little slivers of alabaster. After cooking, the rice evened out into a uniform magenta pink that was a bit of a letdown in comparison, but tasted great, sour and salty and rich. In both color and sensation the rice reminded me of umeboshi, the salty Japanese pickled plum used as a condiment and seasoning. I intend to continue these experiments using umeboshi in conjunction with hibiscus to see how they compliment each other.

I made the maki rolls in the manner of a pretend-ninja. I put on black pyjamas and silently spread the rice on nori sheets, stealthily wrapping them around middles composed of mint, celery, julienne of ginger and roasted red pepper marinated in sesame oil and garlic. We recently made the trek out to Mitsuwa, the Asian market in Arlington Heights, and I bought several brands of nori sheet, ranging from a couple of bucks to $12 for a package. It saddens me to say the more expensive nori sheets were easier to roll, crisper to bite into and noticeably more flavorful. I guess from now on I'll know the difference and be an asshole about it. Why do I set myself up like this.

Cut into portions, the exposed colors of the rolls suited the occasion, and I couldn't jave been jappier with the eating of these. The tartness of the jamaica rice acted as a kind of trojan jorse for the rich, oily and savory elements inside the rolls. It was satisfying to eat these little pieces and jave the flavors and mouth sensations evolve and complicate over time. Jooray for jamaica. (v)

Couple-Tree Frittate

2011-06-29T23:45:00.000-05:00

A frittata is a great way to make something more substantial than a snack but less filling than a meal. It's hearty enough to be satisfying but doesn't leave you feeling stuffed and immobile. The first frittata was made with leftover risotto, bound with eggs and cooked entirely in the sauté pan. The risotto has the effect of adding additional moisture and softening the texture of the egg curd, so for a frittata of this type I wouldn't add any milk, water or stock to extend the eggs. When the frittata was nicely browned, I turned it out on the plate and garnished it with some diced heirloom tomato, rosettes of prosciutto, a chiffonade of mint and a siracha-garlic aoli with sesame oil and smoked paprika.

The mint plant has made the anger-shift from Bruce Banner to Incredible Hulk out back in the alley. Probably got peed on by something.* Forgive me honey we'll be garnishing with mint until he calms down.

The second frittata was formed in the skillet and finished under the broiler. I'll explain why in a minute. I've been on a kind of fennel kick lately, and I happened to find another apple-bottomed beauty at Andy's, so I offered her a cigarette and talked her into going home with me. Didn't get her name. Still got it fellas, just like Hef, hyachachacha. I sliced the fennel super thin, preserving the core for nice big fan-shaped pieces.

I started the whole affair with some 1/2-inch cubes of Paulina Market's house-smoked bacon and a little olive oil. Super delicious bacon. When the bacon was colored all over but not yet hard and gnarly, I added the fennel slices and sautéed them until they were just starting to color. I waited until the fennel was almost done to add some diced roasted red pepper and chopped garlic. I didn't want to risk overcooking them because the fennel can take her goddamn time getting ready jesus what are you doing in there come on we're already late. No you look fantastic. No the other one was not better. Okay if you think so but hurry. Yes you look fantastic. Jesus now with the hair. Are you kidding me.

While all that was going on I prepared the eggs. I used four eggs, mixed with a splash of sesame oil, some grated nutmeg, black pepper and a couple tablespoons of vegetable stock to lighten the curd. I chopped a couple of scallions and a handful of the fennel fronds real fine and mixed them with the eggs. I poured the eggs over the fennel and bacon, lowered the fire to moderate and covered the skillet to set the eggs. After a couple of minutes the bottom of the frittata was set but the top still had lagoons of runny egg. If I left the pan on the fire to set the frittata completely the bottom would most likely toughen and be unpleasant to eat, so I moved the skillet into the broiler to finish. I didn't want to brown the top or make a hard crust of it, just set the eggs without too much color and without toughening the bottom.

When the top of the frittata was set, I garnished it with the remaining chopped fennel frond, some celery leaves, a dusting of smoked paprika, olive oil and sea salt.

Comparing the two frittate (note pretentious italian plural), the risotto frittata had a fuller mouth sensation, almost like a rice pudding due to the bulking effect of the risotto, and the binding effect of the egg was helped along by the caramelization of the surface, which forms a kind of membrane and keeps the interior moist. The fennel frittata had a more substantial texture due to the big pieces of vegetables, but the mediating egg was soft and giving. They are fundamentally different dishes, despite sharing eggs as a principle ingredient and being made in the same skillet.

*Not what she said. I'm not going to do that for you every time.**

** That's what she said.

Sushi Ninjas are Bullshit

2011-06-26T16:17:00.000-05:00

Like everybody else who's been to a sushi bar, I assumed making sushi and maki rolls was some arcane and skilled art, full of difficult technique and requiring years of practice like glass blowing or finding the G-spot. Sushi chefs and aficionados encourage these assumptions and act like they're initiates into a select order. It takes two years before an apprentice is allowed to touch a knife. They practice rolling sheets of brass to build their finger muscles. They climb a mountain to a retreat where elders teach the technique for stirring rice. They walk silently and can kill with a single touch. They shit bonbons and sneeze kittens. They have the power of flight and their jism tastes like peach schnapps. Turns out it's a fucking scam and anybody can do it. Piece of cake. Lets go through the misconceptions the sushi mafia has instilled into our consciousness one by one.

You need special rice
You need to condition the rice after cooking
You need a sushi mat
Proportions are critical
You need a special technique for rolling

All bullshit. I used regular Calrose rice. I soaked it for a couple hours in water while I did other things, then rinsed it and cooked it in vegetable stock like normal rice. I didn't do anything to it after it was cooked, didn't let it ferment over night, didn't add any vinegar, didn't do anything, just spooned it onto the nori and spread it out. I didn't have a sushi mat, so I laid the nori on a kitchen towel. I have no idea how much rice is standard, so I covered about two thirds of the sheet with rice and then stacked the filling toward the front edge. I didn't know how to get the rolling started, so I just lifted the front edge of the kitchen towel and folded it over, continuing the until the nori was wrapped around the middles. Worked fine the very first time.

For the middle, I sliced and marinated some scorched-and-peeled red pepper filets in grated ginger, horseradish, garlic and sesame oil, and stacked them with some smoked ham, julienne of celery and mint leaves. I can't believe how easy it was to make totally tasty nori rolls. The JP doesn't permit soy sauce, so I started an attempt at a dipping sauce made with olive oil, siracha and horseradish, but it turned out to be totally unnecessary as the rolls went down great nude.*

I know these aren't beautiful, but they totally hold up as food, and that's a lot closer than the lore of the Sushi Ninja would have you believe possible for just winging it. Makes me want to try my hand at cataract surgery or watchmaking next.

*You probably thought this was going to be that's what she said, but no, it was just a comment about the rolls not needing a sauce. Cock. Double cock. Made you look at double cocks just now.

Pici with Bacon and Greens

2011-06-24T21:13:00.000-05:00

Since most of my meals incorporate pasta, the Jimmy Page diet poses some particular challenges. Noodles made with rice flour are softer than usual and require a little more care, and they don't behave the same way on the fork or between your teeth. I've found that rolling rice pasta in a machine exacerbates its drawbacks, so I tend to make hand-formed noodles, like these pici, a long pasta with a slightly thicker diameter than spaghetti.

I made the pasta with rice flour, seasoned with a little salt and lemon zest, olive oil and egg yolks, reserving the whites for another use. I'm aware that Heather could get bored of eating rice pasta while she's on the JP, so I intend to make different styles of noodle, and one element of variety will be using just yolks in this one and just whites in another, firmer pasta.

The pasta came together quickly, but I let the dough mass rest for an hour anyway to fully hydrate and minimize the graininess I've encountered with rice flour in the past. Heather's diet is particular about acids and doesn't allow citrus juice or citric acid, but the zest of the fruit is mostly oil, so I use it occasionally. It doesn't make for lemon flavor exactly, it just brightens the taste of whatever you eat with the noodle. Instead of dividing the dough, I just pinched off portions and rolled out each noodle on the cutting board. The rice dough is a little fragile, so I had to keep the noodles to about eight inches or shorter to prevent breaking.

The condiment started with some lardons of smoked bacon cooking in olive oil, and when they were browned a little I added diced red onion, julienne of ginger, sliced garlic and some mixed greens including spinach, arugula and mint from the alley. I normally splash a little vinegar on greens to wet them and mediate their bitterness, but like I said the diet is particular about acids, and the only vinegar allowed is rice vinegar, which I don't have. In place of the vinegar to help wilt the greens and provide a liquor for the sauce, I added a ladle of vegetable stock.When the liquor had reduced almost to serving consistency, I dropped the pici into salted boiling water. They firmed up when cooked, but didn't swell nearly as much as typical noodles made with white flour.

The noodles were fragile enough that I didn't want to risk breaking them by tossing them in the sauce, so I plated the noodles, then spooned the greens and bacon on top and garnished with some olive oil, parmigiano, chopped celery leaves, pepper and sea salt. The noodles were substantial enough to carry the greens, but not rubbery or tough, and the greens enriched by the bacon made a lovely compliment. A paradox of the JP is that it's a weight-loss diet, but it doesn't prohibit rich flavorful ingredients like bacon and olive oil, so making satisfying meals is less of a struggle than with a purely calorie-restriction diet. Well bowled JP, well bowled.

Apple Celery Risotto with Ripe Tomato and Carrots

2011-06-20T20:25:00.000-05:00

A few years ago I went to England to work on a record for Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. The record kept me there from the beginning of July until Christmas, so I was away from Heather for an extended period and grew homesick. One night the late movie on BBC4 was the Blues Brothers, a movie I love, and I settled into my little accommodation to watch it. A few minutes in, seeing shots of Maxwell Street and hearing all the Chicago accents, I started blubbering like a baby. I called Heather and complained of my loneliness and she arranged to come visit me. She came to hang out in the studio and Jimmy and Robert were gracious and friendly with her, and in conversation she mentioned that since I'd been gone she'd been deprived of home cooking and had put on weight. Jimmy Page volunteered that he knew a terrific weight loss diet. His exact words were "I lost a stone in a fortnight. It just melts off you."

Heather, hanging out with Jim and Bob

A stone is 14 pounds and a fortnight is 14 days, so that's quick work. The diet as he described it is a list of prohibitions rather than a menu to choose from. No refined sugar, no wheat or gluten, no mushrooms, yeast or other fungus, nothing fermented unless distilled (beer and wine not okay, distilled booze okay), rice vinegar only, no beans or legumes, no citrus and no dairy (small amounts of non-cow cheese and parmigiano permitted). Heather adopted the Jimmy Page diet and lost a bunch of weight, as advertised. While she was on the diet, I had to adapt to its restrictions when cooking and I'll admit that it improved my versatility and flexibility as a cook. Heather has decided she wants to lose some weight again, so she's back on the JP, and I'll probably be posting a couple of Page-compliant meals as a result. While I'm not interested in "diet food," most of my meals are improvised around what ingredients are available, and this just makes a few things unavailable. While Heather was in her previous JP phase I never felt like the eating suffered as a result.

Risotto is a natural replacement for pasta, so for the first JP meal I settled on that. For a condiment I saw that we had a couple of nice reticulated heirloom tomatoes, some ripe plum tomatoes and a bag of little carrots. I get nervous when I see vegetables in a bag, but Heather loves carrots and there they were. I have mentioned that I'd been using Vegeta for vegetable stock, but I thought I'd use the Jimmy Page diet as an excuse to make a nice vegetable stock and keep it handy for soup and such, so I started a stock pot with an onion and a couple ribs of celery, bay leaves, about an inch of ginger, the trimmings and core of the apple I diced for the risotto and a handful each of parsley and cilantro. After it came to a boil, I added a splash of fish sauce and left it simmering on the stove so it would be hot when I added it to the risotto.

I started the risotto with an apple, some onion and celery, all diced pretty small. I sweated them in olive oil and when they were soft, added the rice and toasted it in the hot oil until it was opaque. The risotto was conventional, I just stirred in stock every few minutes until it was incorporated and the rice had a nice, loose texture. I prefer risotto to be a little wet when served, because it firms up as it cools but shouldn't ever solidify into a lump. It should always have a loose consistency or it feels too heavy to eat*.

While the stock was simmering, I dropped in a plum tomato and heirloom tomato for a few seconds, then peeled them and set them aside. I also put a strainer into the stock to create a reservoir, and poached the little carrots in it while the risotto was underway. When the risotto was done, I plated a ladle of it, then chopped the heirloom tomato and scattered it around the perimeter of the plate. It was quite loose and wet inside*, and the jelly and juice made for a kind of sauce. I sprinkled chopped mint and parsley on the risotto, then split the plum tomato into wedges and used them to dress the middle of the plate, adding the carrots and a little sprig of celery leaf. With a little drizzle of olive oil and some sea salt on the tomatoes, the plate looked nice.

I'm not sure what to think about those little carrots. They came out of a bag*. (v) without fish sauce

*Definitely not what she said.

Spring Rolls with Kale, Leeks, Fennel, Avocado, Orange and Mint

2011-06-12T12:09:00.000-05:00

I figured out why the springroll wrappers have been splitting on me. I lay the wrappers on a kitchen towel to fill them, but the skins are very sticky prior to being fully hydrated. In order not to pick up lint from the towel, I would let the wrappers fully saturate so they would only stick to themselves. I had a little eureka moment when I realized I could use a wet towel and a slightly-less-than-fully-saturated skin fresh from the water bath, which would have some surface water clinging to it. The wrappers are much sturdier this way, don't pick up any lint, and they continue to hydrate after forming the rolls from the residual water. Much better results.

This week's trip to Andy's Fruit Ranch* was less than productive, as the produce looked pretty sad. Apart from some beautiful, fat lobes of ginger and a some nice leeks there wasn't much going on, so I had to suffer the produce section of Jewel. There's always quite a bounty there, but most of it is industrially-farmed crap, pretty and waxy on the surface, plump and perfectly formed for packing in crates but with the flavor and aroma of wet cotton. I've never bitten into anything from the Jewel and had my mind blown the way I have from about any farm stand or a good week at Andy's. Their shit is "that'll do I guess" caliber and never better. This week's that'll do items were a serviceable avocado, a pithy navel orange, a bunch of kale (how can you fuck up kale, it's awesome) and some fennel. I found a female fennel again, possibly a cousin of Latifa since she had a similar sass and ample caboose.

After splitting and washing the leeks I chopped them into fine shreds and wilted them in some olive oil. When they were soft, I added the kale, chopped into ribbons, about an inch of the ginger and the fennel bulb, both cut in julienne. I added salt, a couple sliced cloves of garlic and a splash of white wine, then let everything cook down into a dense green stew. When everything was tender I added the zest and juice of a lemon off the heat. I prefer not to cook lemon into greens, but rather use it as a dressing, as cooked it tends to synthesize weird overtones and seems less astringent. Vinegar seems to suffer this less, but because I intended to use orange in the rolls I didn't want to complicate the acidity by using both vinegar and citrus, which always tastes weird and like poison to me. I've never had poison. Wait... the salty lemonade at the Indian place Heather took us last summer, that was poison and it smelled like a dirty vadge.

I let the greens rest and cool in a bowl, and tried a sip of the pot liquor. Jesus I love the liquor you get from cooking greens like this. If they bottled it I'd drink it like Fresca. Devin needs to come up with a cocktail based on this shit, he'd be bartender-famous, which is like internet-famous but with a slur, a lean and a little wobble. "Fuckin' Devin man best fucking kale pot liquor caipirinhas, best ginger lemongrass daquiris, best chef pants... I love that guy..." I zested the orange and cut a bunch of supremes, and added the zest and byproduct juice to the greens.

I made the rolls by laying down a little carpet of mint leaves and fennel fronds, then laid in the greens with a slice of avocado and a couple of supremes of orange, which have a kind of natural agrodolce effect and an interesting texture. The avocado wasn't as tasty as I had hoped, but the buttery texture and oily richness were really good, and the colors looked smart through the translucent skin.

The rolls were good on their own, but the interior astringency hit your mouth before the avocado richness, and tended to make the initial sensation a little hard on the mouth, so I made a dipping sauce to make the initial impression a little gentler. The dipping sauce was pretty simple, some mustard, mayonnaise, soy sauce, Siracha and toasted sesame oil.

The best thing about using a spring roll wrapper is that it allows neat pairings of flavors and mouth effects. If a plate had all these elements on it, you'd need to construct an elaborate Alinea-style eating regimen to get the full effect of the ingredients. "What chef would like you to do is take the spoon in one hand and the forchetta in the other." They would totally call it a forchetta like that wasn't an asshole thing to do. "With the spoon, pick up some of the sauce, then nestle the fennel frond and lay a mint leaf on top of it. With the forchetta, move some of the greens-and-fennel onto the spoon, then stab the avocado and orange slices together, and in a kind of one-two motion, chef would like you to get the contents of both the spoon and forchetta in your mouth before biting down. Enjoy."

Eating one of these rolls did pretty much exactly what I wanted. The sauce opens your palette, then you taste the greens and feel the bite of the acid, then both the richness of the avocado and the texture and agrodolce effect of the orange kick in, have a party, get drunk on pot-liquor caipirinhas and fuck on the sofa. Finally the minty quality of the herbs lingers in your mouth as a denouement for a while. I just said denouement like it wasn't an asshole thing to do. (v)

*Should totally be the name of a gay bar featuring Devin's pot liquor caipirinhas.

Ham and Apple Soup with Pastini

2011-06-05T03:03:00.000-05:00

Using leftover stuff to make something for dinner is one of my principle occupations as a cook, and every single thing in this soup was a remnant. There were a few scraps of pasta left after making strozzapreti, so I diced them super fine into pastini and saved them in a ramekin, prescient that I would make soup sooner or later. When Heather professed her starvation I did a reconnaissance of the kitchen, finding a few pieces of cooked ham, a shallot and a solitary apple available. I thought I could make all that into a soup.

I diced the ham, shallot, a knuckle of ginger and a couple cloves of garlic fine and sweated them in the soup pot with a little butter and olive oil. While they were working I grated the apple. I was surprised how the volume of the apple reduced when grated. This was a pretty big apple and it only produced about half a cup of grated apple, which was also quite wet. I used a relatively fine grater, perhaps that's why. I added it to the pot and let it cook with the aromatics. When everything had dried out a bit and become familiar, but before getting any color, I added about a glass of white wine and let the alcohol boil off.

I didn't want to make a heavy soup, just something with nice flavor, so instead of stock I used plain water and the heel of an exhausted wedge of parmigiano. Parmigiano rind is a good way to add richness without muddying the flavor of a light soup, as the complex chemistry of this particular cheese includes salts, some milk fats, the aromatic products of aging and some MSG. You can actually make a decent meatless stock by chopping up several parmigiano heels and simmering them. I've been curious to try a clarified consommé of parmigiano made like this, maybe gussied up with some chives, chervil or tarragon. Another project for after I go deaf and have a bunch of time on my hands.

They used to make a frozen foamed essence of Parmigiano at El Bulli that was described in print as "a wisp of air that tasted like the cheese." I saw a demonstration of it on some cooking show. Apparently they made a broth of an entire wheel of Parmigiano, whipping air into it and collecting the foam, then froze the foam inside a serving vessel. That might be the number one example of what bugs me about molecular gastronomy, nashing* an entire wheel of beautiful cheese to make a frozen novelty wisp of nothing, and the best thing you can say about it is that it tastes like cheese. Pretty sure the cheese itself already tasted like cheese there Pepe.

When the stock had formed around the ingredients, I removed the parmigiano heel before it started to break down, added the pastini and let it simmer for a couple of minutes. I used those couple of minutes to run to the alley and grab some mint for a garnish. When I got there I realized that old man sage plant had not just survived the winter outdoors in his mud bucket but had come back full throttle, ready to throw down and get his swerve on with big downy leaves already in evidence. I've always liked the combination of fresh sage, apple and pork when mediated by butter, and along with the butter used at the start I thought the parmigiano heel would serve the same purpose, so I chopped a couple leaves of old man sage along with the mint. Way to go old man, let's get you laid. Don't let anybody tell you you're too old to party.

I stirred a handful of the herbs into the soup and gave it a final taste. It had a nice aroma and feel in my mouth but was initially a little polite on my tongue. I regretted not using any hot pepper in the original sofrito, but I remedied this by compounding a mayonnaise using Siracha, some vinegar and a little honey, and drizzled it in a swirl on top of the soup in its bowl. It looked nice and added the desired peppery insult. The soup now expressed itself over time, initially with the scent of the herbs and ginger, then the taste and texture of savory elements and pastini, richness from the slightly sweet broth, a nice lingering salinity, and finally a little throat burn from the siracha in the dressing. It was a pretty good soup.

*Nash is a Louisville term I learned from Clark Johnson. It means to waste something unnecessarily, as when a party guest leaves a half beer on a shelf someplace and then gets himself a fresh one. Nashing a beer is a beating offense, or used to be. I could propose a range of punishments for nashing a wheel of parmigiano reggiano, with beating on one end of the scale and howling nightmares of the Inquisition on the other.

Strozzapreti-Gemelli with Tomato, Shallot and Mint

2011-05-30T05:05:00.000-05:00

I have been meaning to make strozzapreti for a while, and since my flight got in relatively early in the day, I figured I'd have plenty of time before dinner to take a shot at them. Strozzapreti are a fresh pasta cut into strips and twisted into an open spiral. The long strozzapreti are usually served with a ragu containing meat, but we didn't have anything appropriate to make that kind of sauce. If you continue twisting the strozzapreti, they double over and become a kind of gemelli, with a dense texture and significant internal capacity suitable for a simple vegetable sauce, so that's what I made. The pasta is simple and conventional, one egg and enough flour to make an elastic pasta that isn't too wet, just under a cup. If the pasta is too wet the noodle collapses when twisted and just becomes a thick, solid lump. The noodle needs to maintain an internal hollow to allow the sauce to penetrate. I used unbleached white flour for this batch, but would prefer stronger flour like bread flour because the higher gluten content makes a more elastic dough. We didn't have any bread flour, and a couple of the noodles did have little breaks in them. Sue me.

I let the dough rest under plastic for about a half hour to hydrate and form gluten before I worked it in the machine. I've found that running the pasta through the machine several times on each thickness setting, folding it double between turns, makes for a stronger, more elastic dough. Elastic is the word for today. I finished the roll-out on setting number 5, which is one shy of the thinnest setting on my machine, and what I would use for any wide-cut noodle.

If there's a quick technique for making these strozzapreti-gemelli I couldn't figure it out intuitively. This noodle isn't traditional in Piedmonte where my family originates, so even if I had a surviving grandmother I don't think I could have learned it from her. I just rubbed them between my palms to get the twist started and then on the board to tighten them into gemelli. I don't know if it's important to let the pasta dry to set the shape, but rather than risk having them unravel in the boiling water I let these dry out until the surface was firm. Most fresh pasta is cooked in a flash, but these are more substantial and require a little more time, four or five minutes in the water, and another minute or two in the sauce.

For the sauce I made a fine dice of a small shallot (we were out of onions) and a couple cloves of garlic and sweated them in about two tablespoons of butter, fortified with a glug of olive oil. Once they were soft, I added some capers and a couple of pickled Thai birds-eye chilies from last summer's crop. The alley garden has totally saved my bacon (pasta) a hundred times since we started it. In addition to the mint, which is making an appearance daily, that one little Thai chili plant produced a bucket of little red firecrackers last year. We dried a bunch and I still have a pint or so that JSP pickled. I added the just-boiled noodles and a ladle of the boiling water, and once the sauce tightened almost to serving consistency, I crushed a couple of canned tomatoes into the skillet and tossed the pasta to combine. On the plate I added some chopped mint, drizzled some olive oil and decorated with chopped almonds and coarse grated parmigiano.

The name strozzapreti literally means "priest choker" or "strangles priests." It is thought to make reference to the priests who charged rent to farm on church-owned land. When the priest came to collect the rent, he would expect a meal, and if the meal happened to choke him to death, so much the better. The curious position the church holds in Italy is a marvel, simultaneously adored and reviled, it has historically been both the moral authority and an example of contemptible corruption. Mama would love her son to become a priest, but fantasized about strangling a priest with her pasta.

I was happy with the pasta, though it choked nobody to death, but I need to get some strong flour before making them again. Also, I need to have somebody show me how to make the noodles faster. (vg)

Skirt Steak Spring Roll with V8 Rice, Portobello, Fennel and Mint

2011-05-24T12:54:00.001-05:00

I use spring roll wrappers an awful lot. They are a pretty good way to make what would otherwise be an awkward mess of loose parts into a manageable dish. For this effort, I started by soaking some short rice in V8 juice for about an hour. I bloomed some saffron in a glass of white wine in the cooking pot and let it boil off some of its alcohol, then added the rice and V8, a bay leaf, some salt, pepper, and about half-again as much water to keep it loose. Pre-soaked rice expands considerably so you need to just cover the rice with the cooking liquid. The pre-soaked rice cooks in about 8 minutes instead of 20, which is about all the time needed to prepare the rest of the dish. Rice prepared in this way has a ton of flavor without being greasy or pasty. The combination of V8 and saffron is tart with mineral undertones and goes well with a rich savory companion.

Earlier I cut the skirt steak into square portions and rubbed them with salt, pepper and mashed garlic to marinate while the rice cooked. After they had rested for a few minutes I seared the steak chunks and moved them to a platter to rest. I added another lug of olive oil to the skillet, sliced an onion, a portobello mushroom cap and half a fennel bulb into strips and threw them in the skillet to soften. I splashed a little tamari soy sauce on everything, and that plus the liquid rendered from the vegetables was enough to deglaze the pan of the meat and garlic fond.

I don't know if they're properly called portobello, portabello or portobella mushrooms, but you know what I'm talking about. Big as a saucer, open textured, frilly gilled toothy things. They soak up flavors real well and don't get quite as gummy as smaller mushrooms. I used to detest mushrooms because of the rotting smell that we have probably evolved an instinctive revulsion to, but am now able to get past this insult and have come to like them, even really gnarly ones in moderation. They are products of decomposition, born of rotting shit, but they have their uses.

I don't know what the deal is with these Banh Trang rice paper wrappers, but lately about half of them have little holes or fractures in them and they tend to rupture when any pressure is applied in rolling. There's only one brand of them at Andy's, so I don't know if they got a rotten batch or maybe they're just the crap brand and I need to find another kind somewhere. I rehydrate them in warm water, maybe that's the problem. Next time I'll try cold water as an experiment.

I assembled the rolls by laying some fennel frond and mint leaves as a base, then loading the rice on top, finishing with a couple of strips of the skirt steak and some of the vegetables before rolling. They were tasty enough that no dipping sauce was necessary, and the colors looked cool through the translucent wrapper, but the contents were a little loose and probably would have worked better wrapped in something more substantial like lavash bread. Tortillas would probably be too heavy. There's a soybean sheet called yuba that might have worked. It's thin but tougher than the rice paper so I could cinch the rolls up tighter without risking rupture. I'm not into rupture.*

*that's what she said

Team Pork Update

2011-05-20T01:38:00.000-05:00

Since I still had some bacon and a couple of sausages left I gave it another whack. It's exactly the same with these exceptions:

Cut the bacon planks a little bigger
Par-cooked the bratwurst by poaching before browning (still used my pioneering ends-first method)
Stole some half-and-half from the client fridge to mix with the egg yolks to coat the farfalle

Results: Much improved. A little shocked how big a difference the small changes made, especially how one ingredient can be so pivotal. Also, successfully used up all the bacon and sausage.

Farfalle with Sausage and Bacon

2011-05-19T22:39:00.000-05:00

I'm leaving town at the end of the week, and we still have some of the Paulina Market bounty to get through before I go, specifically four fresh bratwurst and a hunk of their house-smoked bacon, which I thought would compliment and contrast with each other in a nice way. I cut a couple 1/2-inch thick planks of bacon and divided them into pieces about the size of a matchbox*. That's a ridiculous size for regular lardons, but pork belly served on its own is served in bigger pieces without complaint, and I thought bigger pieces would play better with the nuggets of sausage being closer in size. The idea wasn't to serve sausage with some bacon as a garnish, but to serve sausage and bacon pieces as a team. Team Pork.

I put the bacon hunks in a cold skillet with a little olive oil and started the fire. When cooking a flat cut of pork like a pork chop or loin medallion I prefer to start with a cold pan and bring the whole piece up to temperature rather than sear the outside in a hot skillet, which tends to make the meat pucker and deform, curling or cupping away from the pan and not browning well. Since this bacon was cut even thicker than some cutlets, it seemed like I ought to treat it with similar respect. The pieces didn't curl and browned nicely, but they shrank more than I expected and made me wish I'd cut them even bigger.

Ideally I'd prefer to poach or otherwise par-cook the sausage to make it firm, then slice it into morsels, then brown them along with the bacon. Unfortunately there wasn't time, as Heather was already hungry. With Italian sausage, chorizo or any other coarse sausage, I'd just peel it out of the casing and cook it either loose or as free-form lumps, but bratwurst is ground too fine for that, almost as fine as English sausage. I cut each sausage raw into four morsels and browned them in the rendered fat and olive oil. I stood them on end in the skillet, turning over once, stabilizing the shape by cauterizing the open grain so the meat wouldn't scatter. By cooking them this way I hoped that when the skin tightened with further cooking it wouldn't squeeze the pieces into hourglass or bobbin shapes and make them ridiculous. It worked and I'm pretty proud of that idea, but on the whole I'd still rather have poached them first.

Both team members were browned nicely, so I added a sliced sweet onion and four cloves of garlic, sliced, and tossed them together. When some of the onion had caramelized a little and all of it was wilted, I added a pretty good amount of white wine. I used the wine not just to make a liquor for the sauce, but to braise everything enough to marry the flavors and make the bacon pleasant to eat, not gnarly hard chips of bark.

I needed a base for the meat, and we had a box of farfalle, so that settled it. While it was boiling, I thought I might coat it with something so the cooking liquor of the meat wasn't the only sauce element, and that's where it got a little weird. I sometimes use a milk-and-egg mixture to coat pasta, but we didn't have any milk. What we did have was coconut milk. Or rather a coconut-based milk substitute, Turtle Mountain So Delicious Coconut Milk.

I'm going to digress here and explain about the coconut milk. In 2003, I went to San Juan Puerto Rico with a bunch of dudes from the studio to see the Montreal Expos play the Cubs during the final series of their freakish split-home-game season. I absolutely loved Hiram Bithorn stadium. The atmosphere was totally different from any mainland ballpark, jovial, informal and open, and access to the players was great. While standing in line to collect our will-call tickets, the pitching staff of the Cubs had to push through the same entrance as everybody else, and nobody batted an eye. The Expos set up some cabanas on the field before the third game, and we were allowed to meet and get autographs from the Expos and run around in the outfield. While I wasn't impressed with much of the food in San Juan proper, there was a stadium treat that has haunted me, coco-piña. Coco-piña as served at the ballpark is a cup of shaved ice flavored with coconut and pineapple juice, and it is absolutely delicious. It is sold out of paint buckets by vendors who scale the bleachers shouting "coco-piña!" for the duration of the game. When I was there, a pint cost a buck, and for another buck the dude would tip a glug of rum in your cup, making a bootleg piña colada. I didn't try that, but the sense memory of coco-piña has stuck with me and every now and again I try to recreate it here in Chicago. I have failed completely. In the effort I have tried coconut water, (which I have come to adore for its own merits), canned coconut milk, coconut cream, dried coconut flakes and most recently, this shit, Turtle Mountain So Delicious Coconut Milk.

I have gotten used to failing with the coco-piña thing. Totally fine with it. Every time I try something in the quest I think, "that was okay. It's no coco-piña, but it's okay." Every experiment has been palatable in its own way, until I tried Turtle Mountain So Delicious Coconut Milk. The geniuses at Turtle Mountain took a perfectly good thing, coconut milk, and added some kind of stabilizer or gelling agent to it to give it a more homogenized look and heavier body. When I poured it into some pineapple juice, it coagulated into little tapioca-like jizz lumps like the novelty "caviars" molecular chefs are so taken with. I tried slurping some of the coagulated drink, but it tasted like not much and felt absolutely repulsive in my mouth. So that's where that came from.

Why I didn't just throw it out I have no idea, but there it was in the fridge, taunting me while I'm under time pressure to knock out a dinner. In a moment of dumb-ass (weakness doesn't deserve the insult) I gave it a shot. I beat three egg yolks into a couple of tablespoons of this shit, seasoned it with some white pepper and salt, and when the pasta was ready, I coated it with the So Delicious and egg yolk. The sauce thickened nicely, no coagulating, no blobs, no caviar, seemed fine. I tasted the sauce and it didn't really taste of anything, but it wasn't bad, and it certainly let me avoid the dry pasta gluing together under the meat, which was my biggest concern.

While the pasta was boiling, I dunked a couple of plum tomatoes in the water, peeled and quartered them and added them to the skillet. I let everything braise and reduce, and when the meat was was tender I plated the pasta, grated some parmigiano over it, and spooned the sausage and bacon on top. I drizzled it with olive oil, seasoned it with some coarse sea salt and sprinkled some chopped chives on everything. It looked pretty good. Heather liked it but said the pasta could have used more flavor, and when I mentioned the coconut milk she said it was like a negative ingredient and it took away flavor. Like a Flavor Elf that robbed Team Pork. Little coconut asshole. Back to your elf hole. I'm pouring that shit out before I leave town.

*People used to smoke tobacco, and they carried matches to light their pipes, cigars and cigarettes. A "Matchbox" is a small wooden or pasteboard box, approximately one-and-a-half inches long, an inch wide and half-inch deep, that held a convenient number of matches.

Polenta With Coarse Ragu

2011-05-17T03:02:00.000-05:00

I love polenta. I'm not crazy about the way corn subsidy and industrial over-production have destroyed the rest of US agriculture, or the way corn in the form of processed ingredients and animal feed has come to dominate the food chain here, but fuck it, polenta is terrific. It has a lovely texture in your mouth and a welcome flavor that is discernible even against stiff competition, and it makes a nice vehicle for basically any kind of condiment. I've served it with cooked bitter greens, meats, ragu, under grilled vegetables with a drizzle of balsamic, even under fruit or sweet cheese with chopped nuts, honey or maple syrup. If you let it set and firm up, you can cut it into pallets and toast it, brown it in butter or under the broiler or even bread it and fry it. You can make little pockets in slabs of it and stuff them with jam or cheese. You can layer it with ragu, bechamel and cheese and bake it in a casserole. It's basically another kind of bread, and it can be used in as many ways as bread. I used to make polenta with stock pretty often, but lately I seem to prefer the simpler flavor of polenta cooked in plain unsalted water. It's basically perfect the way it is.

I have tried making polenta out of Mexican Masa, and it works fine, but I have come to prefer plain yellow corn meal. I don't know if there's any real difference, but I get the feeling there's more flavor in the yellow corn meal, and the masa seemed grainy when served loose and hot. I love tamales, and I intend to run a similar experiment with them, but it'll probably come out like you'd expect, with masa being better for tamales and yellow corn meal being better for polenta. I tried making polenta from fresh corn in the food processor once and it came out awful, gummy and gluey. I don't mind white hominy grits for breakfast, where meat and eggs provide flavor and body, but grits don't hold their own next to a ragu or other savory companion the way yellow corn does.

Enough already. We get it, you're a goddamn polenta wizard. Boil water and make polenta, what, you want a cookie?

I like to serve polenta with coarse ragu, not a smooth puree or wet sauce. The contrast in texture between the soft polenta and the chunks in the ragu is a big part of its appeal. I've used bacon, ham and steak occasionally, but sausage is my regular choice for meat, though you could make a fine ragu with just vegetables. I get a lot of meat from Paulina Market, and they usually have "torpedos" of sweet Italian sausage that I like a lot. They are about a half pound of fennel sausage formed into ovals. Not having a casing, they are easy to use and one torpedo is the perfect size to make precisely enough ragu for Heather and me. I started the Ragu by pulling lumps of the sausage off the torpedo for browning in a skillet with some olive oil. Once the sausage had a nice color, I added half a sliced onion. Once the onion was tender, I added a couple of fresh plum tomatoes and an apple, all cut into half-inch cubes. I like the flavor of grilled or seared fresh tomatoes, even the hothouse tomatoes we have in the winter, but if used alone they tend to leave the ragu a little dry, so after the tomatoes and apple had caramelized a fair bit, I added a couple of canned San Marzano tomatoes, breaking them open as I did. Once all those ingredients had gotten to know each other. I added three big garlic cloves, sliced, a hunk of ginger, a jalapeno and a serrano pepper, all diced. As an aside, what the fuck happened to jalapenos? They are hardly peppery at all any more. Maybe it's my fault for using them out of season, but it seems like forever since I've had a jalapeno that had any heat to it at all. That's why I'm also using serranos lately. They don't taste like much of anything, but they have a little kick. When all the aromatics had sweated a little, I added a couple glugs of white wine and let the ragu simmer and mellow a little.

I plated the polenta and floated the ragu on top, drizzled it with olive oil and decorated it with some shaved parmigiano and chopped cilantro and mint. Alley news: The mint is coming in like gangbusters in the JSP Memorial alley plot this year, already a shrub the size of a bushel basket. I like polenta soft enough to "catch" or slightly envelop the pieces of the ragu, but not so soft that it's runny and hard to eat with a fork, and this batch came out pretty good. It's easy to add too much dry cornmeal to the water because it takes a couple of minutes to bloom and let you know what its finished consistency will be. It will look impossibly liquid at first when you have it right, but it stabilizes and thickens over the course of about five minutes, and the consistency improves over time, so don't fear letting the polenta sit there going blop blop for as long as it takes to prepare the rest of the meal. You could let it go for an hour if it's wet enough and no harm would come.

Skirt Steak with Jasmine Rice, also Apple Onion Wine Chutney

2011-05-14T18:58:00.000-05:00

Skirt steak is one of my favorite cuts, It's a working muscle from inside the body cavity, so it gets a lot of use and develops a strong flavor. It has an open grain and takes marinades and rubs well, and it's thin enough to be cooked simply by searing and resting with no extra steps. It's perfect for the kind of cooking I do for Heather, where I need to make something quickly that's still satisfying. A lot of my food is made under time constraints, so I do whatever I can to make it easy to make delicious food quickly. One terrific time saver is pre-soaking rice, so the kernels are swollen and cook in only a few minutes. The soaking time doesn't seem to matter, anything from an hour to eight hours seems to work equally well, so when I think I'm going to be cooking rice later, I'll throw some in a bowl to start soaking. I have experimented with using green tea and V8 juice as the soaking liquid with interesting results, and at some point I want to try making a quart of fresh mixed vegetable juices and soaking the rice in that, but most of the time I just use water. I was using jasmine rice for this pilaf, which has a subtle floral aroma that could easily be overwhelmed, so water was probably best anyway.

I started the rice by sweating some onions and apples in the pot with olive oil. David Yow once called the combination of apples and onions "magical" in rice, and I concur. I know there's a big difference between different apples, but honestly when I want to put apple in something I just use whatever we have, and in this case we had a big crisp Jona Gold apple, so that's what I used. I drained the rice and added it to the pot along with some dry Chinese mustard seeds, vegetable stock and saffron. I only use additional aromatics or seasoning with Jasmine rice when it's going to be served under something with a really strong flavor, and I love the way mustard seeds hide in rice and occasionally rupture between your teeth for extra zotz. With fish or vegetables I think the scent of Jasmine is enough, and it's best served simply.

The apple was giant, and I only needed about a third of it for the rice, so I decided to make an apple chutney instead of a simple pan sauce to serve with the steak. Chutneys typically take a long time to mature, but I've found that using wine instead of vinegar means that with any decently sweet fruit you need much less time for the flavors to mellow, and basically as soon as the fruit is cooked it's ready to eat. It's not a real chutney, but I don't know what else to call it.

This steak was simply seared in olive oil with a rub of salt, black pepper and little bitter cocoa powder. For the last couple of minutes in the pan, I buried the steak in sliced onions and diced apples both to add some aroma to the steak and get them started cooking for the condiment. I removed the steak to a plate to rest and added another lug of olive oil to the skillet, along with diced jalapeno and serrano peppers. When they had all softened and gotten to know each other, I added considerable red wine, a stick of Mexican (canella) cinnamon, some cardamom, coriander seeds and diced ginger. As an aside, I prefer Mexican cinnamon to Indonesian (cassia) cinnamon for savory dishes. Cassia is used for most packaged ground cinnamon, and I associate it with generic apple desserts, so I tend to avoid it. The sauce reduced on a full boil until the rice was ready to plate, maybe another five minutes. I tasted it and the apples and onions themselves had the perfect chutney quality of being sweet and astringent in proportion, but the mediating wine reduction was a little too bitter, so I drizzled in a little honey and tossed it until it was evenly incorporated.

Part of my struggle with wine cooking is that I know basically nothing about wine. I don't drink as a rule, though I have had wine served to me in Italy and enjoyed it and I have been contemplating forcing the issue for health reasons. Unsurprisingly I have no perspective on which wines to use in cooking for which foods, other than the cliche that reds are hearty and go with meat and whites are less assertive and go with fruit and fish. I end up using whatever we have in the building, which can be anything from a beautiful Italian wine given as a gift to a bottle of celebrity-label plonk bought as a joke. No shit, I have used Don Cooper's "Coopernet" and Enie Banks version of the same, though mercifully the Dave Matthews Band wine was drunk by the poker crowd and I didn't need to suffer it in the kitchen. Capsule review: "A little jammy, hits too many notes, doesn't finish quickly." The chutney in question used a $12 bottle of Syrah I bought because the guy standing next to me recommended it. Unless and until I develop a wine palette, I'm going to rely on strangers and until one of them recommends a magnum of Ditka, I'll assume they aren't fucking with me.

Anyway, I sliced the steak into pieces across the grain and plated it on top of the rice, mixed the meat juices into the chutney and spooned it along side the rice. I know chutneys are supposed to be served at room temperature, but fuck me I'm not going to spray it with liquid nitrogen. We'll call it a warm chutney then, shall we? I sprinkled some chopped parsley and tarragon over everything, and with a scattering of sea salt, I'll admit to being pleased with the way the plate looked. Heather ate it with no complaints.

I still think about drinking wine.

My First Dolma

2011-05-14T12:09:00.000-05:00

Bought a jar of grape leaves at Andy's Fruit Ranch on a whim, thinking how tough can it be? Dolma are basically little rice leaf burritos, right? I can do that.

Andy's usually has a bunch of great weird vegetables, but things were pretty dry this trip. They had some cool looking little avocados and some fennel, and I remember reading a thing about female fennel plants having more flavor, and decided I was going to find me a female fennel. You identify the female plant by the shape of the bulb, round and voluptuous is female, longer and more cylindrical is male. I poked through all their fennel and finally found one with a big can on it. I named her Latifa and brought her home.

Classic dolma are stuffed with par-boiled dill rice and finished in stock, but I wanted to bang these out in a hurry, so they could be eaten right away. I sweated some chopped apples and onions, then added the rice and water along with a bay leaf. While the rice was cooking I prepared the other stuff for the middle of the dolma. I sliced the fennel into thin crescents and cut the flesh of the avocado into slices. The little avocado was really cool. The flesh was a uniform ochre color, the seed was small and hard, and the skin was almost like a piece of tupperware. I just had to flex the halved avocado a little and all the flesh popped out in a single kernel.

When the rice was done, chopped a couple of scallions and a mess of mint and stirred it into the rice and made the dolma. Turns out it's totally easy. The grape leaves have a little stem, which may be edible, I don't know, but it definitely interferes with rolling, so I nipped it off. I made each package with a slice of avocado, a couple slices of fennel and a blop of rice, just rolled up like a burrito.

I made a dipping sauce because fuck it, why not. Grated some ginger, chopped some garlic, stirred it into some mustard, tamari soy, siracha and sesame oil. Boom, great sauce. I know it isn't culturally correct, but it's tasty as hell. Chuck got me a ceramic ginger grater a few years ago, and I feel like an idiot not using it until recently. Regular graters, even microplanes, gag on the fibers of ginger. The little ceramic guy is fantastic, makes a great puree of the ginger and leaves the fibers still attached to the root. Super great tool.

Some of the leaves have tough fibers, but you can't tell by looking, you just need to fish them out of your mouth. Otherwise, Dolma are really easy. (v)

Orzo with Egg Yolk and Tomato

2011-05-09T03:35:00.000-05:00

For Heather's birthday we went to New York for a week and hung out with a bunch of the best people. One of the highlights of the trip was a four-hour tasting menu lunch at Del Posto, the imposing and beautiful food palace opened by Mario Batali, Lidia & Joseph Bastianich and Mark Ladner. The actual highlight of the trip was the remote-controlled mechanical animated chimpanzee bust we found at Goodwill and bought for Kennan, but the meal was a close second.

As a completely random confluence between my professional life as a recording engineer and my passion for food, I know the pastry chef at Del Posto, Brooks Headley. He was the drummer for several bands before he got too busy as a chef, and I have been lucky enough both to record him and remain in touch with him over the years as he progressed into a star chef with an adventurous and tasteful approach to food. Part of the tasting menu was a little plate of gnocchi dressed with nothing more than some crushed tomatoes from the slopes of mt Vesuvius. No salt, no pepper, no cheese, no herbs, nothing. The tomatoes were fantastic, bright, astringent, with substantial body and complex, juicy texture. They had undertastes of wine and dirt and smoke and holy shit they were amazing. This dish was a real revelation, because I have a tendency to putter around with sauces, and I realized I was probably doing more than necessary.

For the first meal back in Chicago I wanted to make something with a similar simple tomato dressing, but we didn't have anything to make gnocchi out of, no potatoes, no pumpkin, no semolina, nothing. I decided to substitute a plate of orzo, the little lozenge-shaped small pasta. I've had very good luck using orzo both in soups and alone as a complimentary dish in the manner of a pilaf or risotto. The orzo absorbs flavors from cooking liquid, so it can be made more savory than a long pasta, which allows it to substitute for the gnocchi, which naturally have some flavor of their own.

I cooked the orzo in a light broth made of vegetable soup base, saffron, a little Thai fish sauce and a teaspoon of Marmite. The fish sauce and saffron add complexity and fragrance to the broth, and the Marmite has a nice bitter richness. I particularly like how the slightly metallic saffron flavor infuses into the starchy pasta and keeps it from seeming pasty or dull. For vegetable stock I really like powdered Vegeta, found in Eastern European markets. It is made from just dehydrated vegetables and herbs, so it doesn't have the weird, nasal overdone taste of most prepared soup bases, and it's actually very close to the onion- and carrot-based vegetable stock I make myself when I have time.

Who am I kidding. I never have time. I haven't made vegetable stock in years. Vegeta is the shit.

While the orzo cooked, I tasted a piece of one of the San Marzano tomatoes I have been using for sauces, and while it was nice, it wasn't the tomato party in my mouth the Vesuvian tomatoes were. Whatever, that's the thing, just taste the tomato, it'll be fine.

I plated the orzo and nestled an egg yolk in the center. I love doing that, it makes me feel like it's a real thing, sort of like when a real cook shaves a truffle over something. It shouts "This is real food you're eating! Please like it!" Also, an egg yolk makes a bunch of little things (like a bunch of orzos or rices or spaghettis) team up into one big thing ready to fuck up your tongue with an egg yolk. I crushed a couple of the tomatoes and scattered them around the plate, grated some parmigiano and drizzled some olive oil on everything. So much for my stab at minimalism.

Listen, I tried. I honestly tried not to do anything to the tomatoes, I just couldn't stop myself. It was tasty. The orzo absorbed enough of the stock to have a nice flavor, the egg yolk added a nice richness that was offset by the tomato, and the olive oil and parmigiano were a pleasant seasoning. There was nothing wrong with it. I'm doomed to fall short of the ideal, so what. That's the human condition and I'm human. (vg without fish sauce)

Trottoli, An Unusual Pasta

2011-05-05T05:39:00.000-05:00

I found an unfamiliar pasta at the Jewel called trottoli and bought a bag on a whim. It's a big spindle-shaped curlicue, and doesn't appear in Hidebrand and Kennedy's the Geometry of Pasta, my go-to resource for unfamiliar pasta, so I tried to figure it out on my own. Most big pastas are suited to baking al forno or serving in a big basin with heavy ragu or other substantial, chunky sauce, but this one is dfferent. It's big but doesn't have a large cavity, just a capacious spiral, so I thought it would go well with a rich but smooth sauce, which would get trapped in its crevice. Each noodle is big enough to be stabbed individually with a fork, so I imagined that each of them could carry enough sauce to be a balanced bite of texture and flavor.

I boiled the pasta and made a sauce by sweating finely chopped celery, onion and garlic in butter, then adding some white wine and the packing liquid (tomato juice) from a can of San Marzano tomatoes. I reduced it all down to a fairly dense paste, then added the pasta and a little of the pasta water. Cooking the pasta in the sauce for the last couple of minutes, tossing frequently, I was able to get the sauce to fill the crevices of the noodle just as I had hoped.

I plated the trottoli with a little chopped tarragon and mint, then grated some parmigiano and scattered some finely chopped almonds and finished with a little olive oil and sea salt. Trottoli are a really cool pasta and I'm pretty sure I'll use them more. They're big enough to entertain your mouth individually* and when you bite into them the sauce trapped inside gushes onto your tongue and seems to amplify the flavors in the sauce. Because each trottolo (?) is so substantial chopped nuts and crunchy sea salt work well by adhering to the outside in contrast with the vegetal sauce trapped in the noodle itself.

I think I'm going to try trottoli with a cheese sauce or some kind of veloute-based sauce next. I just need to figure out a flavor profile that suits this sort of delivery. (vg)

* That's what she said.

Bulgur Peanut Kimchee Spring Rolls

2011-04-25T06:03:00.000-05:00

Not only did I need to make dinner for the love of my life, but also snacks for the poker game, and like an idiot I mentioned spring rolls in the group email to the poker crowd. I was on the hook for spring rolls, but I didn't really have anything prepared for spring rolls other than the rice paper wrappers.

We had a little reticulated cabbage head, an onion, some carrots, ginger and jalapenos, so I cored the cabbage and made a julienne of the vegetables and ginger, building a slaw I could quickly pickle into a mock-kimchee. I used Jacques Pepin's method of making julienne of carrots: using a vegetable peeler, cut long strips of carrot, then stack them, roll them lengthwise and slice into thin ribbons. This gives a much longer, nicer looking julienne than using a grater. I also sliced the cabbage core thinly for more substantial texture. The pickling liquid for the slaw was some chopped garlic, Siracha, white vinegar, brown sugar, lime zest and sea salt. It was tasty but quite astringent, so I needed something else to constitute the body of the spring rolls. I could have used plain rice, but lately I've been using bulgur as a malty, nutty substitute for rice and decided the additional flavor would probably help tame the slaw.

I cooked the bulgur as a farrotto (grain cooked in the manner of risotto, by adding stock a little at a time so the grains develop a binding starchy component without deteriorating into gruel) using white wine and vegetable soup stock with saffron and bay leaf. I tried a little spoonful of the farrotto and it was fine, but when I ate it with the slaw the pungent slaw annihilated it. I needed something else to moderate the strong flavor, something rich and fatty like bacon or avocado, but we had nothing like that in the house. After pondering for a while, it occurred to me that I could use peanut butter, which is fatty and has a protein mouth feel. I grabbed a jar of Jif off the shelf and compounded a lump of peanut butter with some toasted sesame oil and tamari soy sauce. The peanut sauce worked marvelously to mediate the extremes of the granular, starchy bulgur and the crunchy, acidic slaw.

I built the rolls by laying down a bed of the bulgur, then spooning in the peanut sauce, adding the kimchee and topping it off with a broad basil leaf before rolling the whole package up. I ran out of bulgur after making a half-dozen rolls, but that wasn't nearly enough, so I made a second batch, this time adding a load of chopped parsley and basil for color, and so I didn't have to fiddle with the loose basil leaves while rolling them.

I made a dipping sauce of honey, mustard, soy sauce and sesame oil, and it had the effect of making the outside of the rolls taste interesting, which complimented the flavors on the inside.

The poker crowd were thrilled, but most of them live on a diet of Hot Pockets and Gatorade and don't possess critical palates. Heather ate her share, but said "they taste like something you made up." I can't really fault her observation. (v)

Cavatappi with Peas and Dates

2011-04-21T02:34:00.000-05:00

I've been using a lot of short pasta lately for these emergency meals. A confluence of circumstances make it so we have hardly any ingredients in the house, yet I have to make dinner nightly. I'm working most of the time so I don't have time to go shopping, and we're leaving town on Sunday for a week and I don't want to risk a bunch of fixings going bad while we're gone. As a result, I'm using dry goods, canned vegetables and whatever fresh ingredients I have left to consume before we leave town. Yadda yadda long story short, we're out of long pasta.

I've never been much of a fan of tomato paste as a base for pasta sauce. It tends to remind me of the heavy, wet red gravy served at suburban Mama Mia! Free Giant Garlic Bread! Meatballs As Big As Your Head! All You Can Eat Calamari! Half Price Pitchers On Mondays! Try Our Zucchini Poppers! Famous Tiramisu! Italian Restaurant! I cannot abide restaurants of this type. They debase our palates and insult our ancestors with watery matter piled in mountainous heaps and buried under granulated Kraft Foods "Parmesan." Screw this school lunch bullshit and get it the fuck away from me. Tomato paste is where that debasement and insult starts.

Still, we had no tomatoes left, and I needed to make something. I decided to make a very light sauce to bind some peas and diced dates to the pasta, and enrichen it with some tomato paste, but not enough to give me Mama Mia! douche-chills. I looked in the pantry for some herbs or spices to shift the sauce out of the suburbs and had to stop myself from grabbing the dried oregano. If any flavor combination defines pedestrian "Italian! American!" cooking, it's dried oregano and tomato paste. I settled on some cardamom seeds, which have a weird petrochemical/insecticide aroma that I love, and cannot associate with Mama Mia! After starting the sauce with some olive oil, diced onion, ginger and garlic, I added less than a tablespoon of the paste and let it caramelize with the onions. I incorporated about a half-teaspoon of honey at the beginning of cooking to induce a little color during caramelization. By cooking the paste dry I hoped to make the flavor a little less trivial. The dates were a substitute for bacon, since we had no mammal meats left in the house. They have a meaty body and a dark sweetness and mouth feel reminiscent of pork fat. I added the dates just before the pasta, so the date sugar didn't leach out too much and the pieces would retain their texture.

The pasta went in a little underdone with a ladle of the boiling water, and with a few minutes of high heat, the sauce coated the cavatappi nicely without hanging out in a puddle. I decorated the pasta with olives, pumpkin seeds and grated parmigiano. Good thing we have a lot of pumpkin seeds or I'd be sprinkling the pasta with pennies or cigarette butts or something. (vg, v without honey or cheese)

Galletti With Peas in Pepper Sauce with Tapenade

2011-04-15T03:53:00.000-05:00

I really need to go grocery shopping. Every night Heather needs to be fed, but we have fuck all left for ingredients, so I end up making these random-element meals and hoping they aren't gross. Tonight I boiled the last of the galletti and made a tomato-free sauce of butter, onions, red pepper, peas and garlic. The sauce was rich and had a nice heat, but was a little dull and one-dimensional. I made a quick tapenade by chopping some wine-cured olives, capers and honey, and piled a little on top of the dressed pasta. I garnished with some toasted pumpkin seeds, which added a nice crunch.

I didn't have any fresh herbs, or I'd have chopped some and with a little olive oil and black pepper, might not have needed the tapenade. We're also out of olive oil. (vg)

Tomato Ditalini Soup and Toasted Cheese Sandwich Soldiers

2011-04-11T06:30:00.000-05:00

I love tomato soup. I made this, like virtually all meals lately, after midnight when Heather reminded me that neither of us has had dinner. I chopped a small sweet onion and softened it in a heap of butter in a heavy pot along with a couple mashed cloves of garlic and about a tablespoon of grated fresh ginger. Once the onions were soft, I added some rice flour to make a sort of roux and about a teaspoon of dried Mexican oregano, crushed. When that had cooked a tad, I threw in four plum tomatoes and a canned chipotle pepper, cut into 1/2-inch dice. I let them all cook until just shy of drying out, then added a can of whole peeled tomoatoes, a tablespoon each of Worcester sauce and thai fish sauce and about a pint of chicken stock. When it all came up to a boil, I buzzed it with a stick blender.

How did people make soup before stick blenders? They are the absolute stone cold nuts. You can fuck up a soup real bad and a stick blender will totally make it presentable. Having a stick blender is like a cheat code for Call Of Duty: Soup.

When the soup was fantastic, I added about a cup of ditalini pasta, which are the little tube segments about the size of a pencil eraser and brought it back to a boil. The ditalini add a nice toothiness to the soup and the pasta texture goes nicely with the butter. Ten more minutes on the simmer and boom, great soup.

Made a couple cheese sandwiches on Italian bread in the toaster sandwich basket and cut them into little dunkable sticks. I didn't dress the sandwich with olive oil as I do sometimes because we were out of olive oil. Note to self: get more olive oil. A little grated parmigiano on top and my reputation was safe. (vg without fish sauce, v also substitute oil for butter and no cheese)

Potato Tomato Galletti

2011-04-09T01:00:00.000-05:00

Tonight's pasta was an exercise in making food out of nothing. We had a couple of tomatoes, a couple of new potatoes and some other pasta standby stuff, so it wasn't too bleak, but I didn't have anything substantial in the larder.

While the galletti were boiling I fortified some Irish butter with some olive oil, peeled and chopped the potatoes and started them cooking, a sort of half-saute, half-poaching in a significant amount of butter, along with some diced sweet onion and a couple smashed garlic cloves. When the potatoes had some color, I added a couple of chopped plum tomatoes. I like the combination of tomato and potato, but I was never able to make a decent pasta sauce that combined them until I abandoned the convention of using peeled, canned tomatoes for the sauce. Fresh tomatoes sauteed seem to hold together better, and with some black pepper, the vegetal brightness of the tomato seems to work well with the rich combination of butter and potato starch. That combination is what makes the sauce come together nicely when I add the pasta and a little pasta water. The starch from the potato and the starch leeched into the pasta water act as a thickener while the butter forms a nice emulsion. After tossing the pasta to coat it, I added some shaved parmigiano and finely chopped chives. These were not winter chives, just normal from Jewel chives. I don't think I've ever used chives on pasta before, but they have a natural affinity for both potatoes and butter, and it tasted great. (vg)

Plan B Croquettes and Green Goddess

2011-04-06T02:29:00.000-05:00

Heather was hungry, and I had some chicken thighs in the fridge. Chicken these days isn't that tasty unless you get an expensive artisanal hand-raised bird, but in a pinch, I'll use supermarket chicken thighs, the only part of a modern commercial bird that still tastes like a chicken. Thighs are a nice balance of meat, skin and fat, and the knuckle of bone in there is why they have better flavor. Normally I like to brine chicken overnight before cooking it to improve the flavor, but there was no time for that. I put the oil on to heat and made a breading by mixing a little smoked paprika and vindaloo curry powder into rice flour and cornmeal, and added a little shredded coconut, which goes nicely with curry. I made an egg wash to dunk the chicken and bind the breading with a couple of eggs, Siracha, Worcestershire sauce and minced garlic. I set-up a breading station on the countertop and went to retrieve the chicken. Unfortunately the chicken was still frozen. I had moved it to the fridge from the freezer the day before, but it was still rock hard.

With the oil already getting hot I needed a plan B, so I decided to make croquettes. I quickly chopped some ham, salami, prosciutto, onion and parmigiano and loaded it into the food processor. I pulsed it dry for a while, then added the flavored egg wash and pulsed it to incorporate. I turned the mixture into a bowl, and added enough of the breading mix to give the croquette some body, then formed balls, dredged them in the coconut breading and fried them. The coconut darkened more than I would have liked, but otherwise they came out okay and tasted pretty good. If I hadn't started out on a chicken trajectory I would have put more thought into the croquettes, probably processing the meat finer and adding cream, yogurt, ricotta or another enrichening element, but for an emergency plan B they were fine.

They needed a sauce, but I didn't have anything prepared, so I made a mock-green-goddess dressing with some mayonnaise, mustard, vinegar, salt, pepper, honey and chopped parsley and cilantro. I would have liked to include some tarragon, mint or basil, but I didn't have any. The dressing was okay if a little bland, but it kept the croquettes from being too dry, which was its main purpose anyway.

Penne with Plums, Bleu Cheese and Ham

2011-04-04T15:08:00.000-05:00

Got home from poker and Heather was trapped under Bacon the cat. She could barely see her crime TV and barely get to her laptop. When she saw me her eyeballs opened wide like I was the allied army liberating her from Dachau. She was so weak she was barely able to whisper "...starving..."

Lately I've been experimenting with rich, strong flavors balanced with lighter, acidic fruit. I made a nice pasta with gorgonzola, apples, bacon and onion, and I thought plums would work in place of the apples, being similarly tart. I got water on for pasta and made a base for the sauce with some olive oil, chopped sweet onion, garlic and diced smoked ham. When all that was hot and sweating, I diced a plum and added that. I was concerned about the color running and getting muddy, but the plums basically kept to themselves and caramelized nicely. When the pasta was still a little firm I transferred it to the skillet with the sauce ingredients, along with about a third of a cup of the pasta water, which helps to bring the sauce together. I could have used a little white wine or stock, but the ham, garlic and bleu cheese were such strong flavors that to have any hope of tasting the plum I should avoid any more complicating elements. I cooked the pasta in the sauce for another few minutes, and once I added the pasta water the plum color did start to run a little, which may explain why people don't use plums in pasta that often. When the pasta water was mostly absorbed, I added the bleu cheese and tossed it until it softened and became partly incorporated as a sauce.

I plated the pasta and dressed it with some chopped parsley, toasted pumpkin seeds and a coddled egg yolk. I put an egg in with the pasta for the last few minutes of cooking. I did that because the eggs were in the refrigerator, but if I had a room-temperature egg I may have just floated the yolk on the pasta and let the residual heat denature it a little. I like using egg yolk to help bind a sauce that has chunky elements like the ham and plum dice in this one. A little snowfall of parmigiano was the last bit of business before I served it to Heather.

The reviews were unfortunately focused on the toothiness of the pasta, which was apparently a little too firm. Prior to tasting the pasta, one of the customers reported "hating" it, while another said "you know I hate raw pasta all I can taste is raw pasta," but the harshest comment was "Why did you make pasta I can't eat? You should have tested it." There were a few other comments, and possibly even some returned after trying the pasta, but unfortunately I missed them as I had left the room to watch Baseball Tonight on TiVo.

[edit] Late-returning reviews were much better. Flattering even.

Special Ramen for Late Dinner

2011-04-03T13:51:00.000-05:00

We had a fantastic dinner at the Midytte - Hunter house, ribs done in the bourgeois style Tim has been experimenting with, smoke-braised in the barbecue with a fantastic rub, served with baked potatoes dressed with sour cream and winter chives and some delicious spinach, finishing off with excellent espresso and homemade berry-citrus ice cream. We then came home and did nothing for the rest of the evening, which made Heather hungry. Knowing I can't compete with the ribs she politely asked for

special ramen. Special ramen is regular four-for-a-buck ramen noodles with the broth dolled up a little. While th noodles are cooking, I fortify the broth with some soy, thai fish sauce and vegetable boullion. In the bowl, I beat an egg yolk with a little Siracha, vinegar, minced garlic and sesame oil. When the noodles are done, I drizzle the soup into the egg, beating it to incorporate it. This is where it sometimes goes wrong and the egg curdles into a sort of stracciatella, but last night it worked fine and the broth just got slightly thicker. The egg has the effect of holding the flavors in suspension in your mouth so they linger a little longer, particularly the garlic and sesame, and combined with the fish sauce and soy, gives the soup a nice umame quality. I loaded the noodles in and chopped some fresh ginger, parsley and cilantro for a garnish and the soup made its way into Heather. If I'd had some scallions or winter chives, they would have been cut very fine and scattered on there too. Heather uses a fork for ramen, which I find really awkward so I use takeout chopsticks, but I used to have a couple sets of nice Japanese hashi that were perfect. I lose everything don't I. I wish I didn't lose everything little and cool.

I've had magical ramen in Japan, and pretty good ramen in the US at a few specialty shops and Japanese markets, so I know this is not legit ramen, but I've always liked the way a couple of extra ingredients and five minutes can make even pre-packaged bachelor fodder like this into something tasty. Tonight I'm playing poker until pretty late, but when I get home I could make another one of these in a few minutes. (vg without fish sauce, v without egg)

Handmade Mezzalune with Aged, Cured and Corned Meats

2011-03-31T03:51:00.000-05:00

March 24, 2010
These mezzalune (that I made) were stuffed with chopped prosciutto, corned beef, salami, cashews and olive oil, then cooked (by me) and dressed with a fresh sauce (that I made) of tomatoes, garlic, butter and smoked paprika. Then I put them on a plate and put a little garnish and parmigiano on there. Cashews for pete's sake. After the hard peas incident I felt a little pressure to deliver.

Sweet Sausage Hash

2011-03-31T03:47:00.000-05:00

March 19, 2010
Just a little hash made with Yukon Gold new potatoes, scallions, herbs and sweet Italian sausage, served with a white wine pan sauce and some garlic toast. Enjoy.

Braised Sweet Sausage with Cavatappi and Peas

2011-03-31T03:45:00.000-05:00

March 17, 2010
Tonight we have a braised sweet Italian sausage, served with cavatappi and peas, made with some mint, trappist cheese and white wine. I forgot the nuts, but I was going to put some toasted nuts on there. Sorry about the nuts. Also, the peas were hard because I don't know how long to boil peas. Apparently it's longer than you need to boil pasta, because that's how long I boiled them. So sorry about the nuts and the hard peas.

Simple Polenta with Ham, Shiitake Mushrooms, Tomatoes and Kale

2011-03-31T03:43:00.000-05:00

March 8, 2010
Here we have simple polenta with a condiment of kale, shiitake mushrooms and tomatoes, topped with a little smoked ham, shaved parmigiano and toasted almonds. Enjoy.

Seared Flatiron Steak with Bulgur and Mixed Greens

2011-03-31T03:40:00.000-05:00

March 8, 2010
Tonight we have a flatiron steak seared with a rosemary/salt/pepper rub, served with some bulgur and mixed greens (collards, mustard, mint and scallion topped with some sliced almonds) and dressed with a little red wine sauce. Enjoy.

Penne Rigate with Apples and Bacon

2011-03-31T03:29:00.000-05:00

February 21, 2010
Here we have penne rigate with apples, bacon, onions and gorgonzola. On top is a little shaved parmigiano and some crunchy sea salt, mint and parsley. Enjoy.

Honey-Chipotle Hanger Steak with Kale and Bulgur Farrotto (and homemade sweet tea)

2011-03-31T03:27:00.000-05:00

March 17, 2010
Here we have a hanger steak, rubbed with some honey and chipotle, then seared and finished under the broiler, served with a red wine pan sauce made with onions, porcini mushrooms and serrano peppers. For contourni we have some bulgur farrotto and mixed greens. Enjoy.

Simple Galleti and Pizzetta

2011-03-31T03:24:00.000-05:00

Here we have galleti with a simple sauce of butter, tomatoes, garlic and herbs, served with a pizzetta of salame, aged trappist cheese, spinach and tomato, broiled and dressed with a liitle olive oil and sea salt. Enjoy. (vg)

Fried Plum Wontons and Kale

2011-03-31T03:21:00.001-05:00

March 31, 2010
Here we have some kale wilted with bacon, jalapeno, ginger and onions, dressed with some coarse mustard, sea salt and honey and garnished with some almonds. On the side are a couple of fried dumplings stuffed with diced plums and bleu cheese. The dipping sauce is a mayonnaise seasoned with a little Siracha hot sauce, mustard and toasted sesame oil. Enjoy. (vg)

Vegan Spring Rolls

2011-03-31T03:19:00.000-05:00

March 29, 2010
Tonight we have some spring rolls, made with Kale, mint, ginger and cilantro, with a sweet-and-sour mustard dipping sauce. Enjoy. (v)