Chuck's Kitchen

Food Vogue

2011-01-06T21:02:00.003-06:00

I've said it plenty of times that food can be a medium to express art. This depends on both the artisan making it, and the person eating it to be discriminating enough to expect expression as well as nourishment. If you want to get really nerdy and pedantic about it, think of another form of art that stimulates all five senses. See your food, smell your food, taste your food, feel it's texture, and maybe even hear it crunch or sizzle. I'm not making some bid to make food more or less than it is, but even if we're not talking about haute cuisine, we can still have a dialogue about changing food trends.

Even for relatively young folks like myself, I can remember a time when eating a bit of strange involved three flavors: Italian (generic red sauce over a mound of spaghetti and...meatballs, remember them?) Chinese (chop suey and fortune cookies are as American as apple pie, guys), and Mexican (Hamburger meat and plastic cheese on a pre-formed Dorito). In relatively short term, we've evolved.

My God, have we evolved. Now we've got sushi available at almost any grocery store and college dining halls, my workplace cafeteria serves gyros, and my alma mater's strip of bars and restaurants adjacent to campus has the bizarre distinction of having a Thai restaurant across the street from - wait for it - another Thai restaurant. When was the first time you tried hommous? Now, it's arguably a bigger mover at grocery stores than the ubiquitous french onion dip. I tend to follow these things a bit and nerd out, so I'm hip to little trends like people putting strange foods in arrangements that look like tiny ice cream cones, which Thomas Keller pioneered. Two years ago, sliders became "in". Last year, everybody made fancy hamburgers. This year, it's predicted that hot dogs will be the next gussied up street food.

Sometimes I have to wonder whether it's awesome this is happening, or if I'm becoming a slave to fashion, just of another kind of fashion. Am I going to find myself in a cold sweat at 3AM trolling Urbanspoon for some new local restaurant to land on the scene? I don't want to be that guy. I'm no Patrick Bateman. Patrick Bateman was a serial killer, and that ain't cool. But this kind of stuff does interest me, and does find me wondering where the trends will go, and if they'll be worth following. You probably won't find me pulling hairs out over molecular gastronomy taking a shot at a Moroccan tagine, but you're kidding yourself if you don't think we'll be looking at an even more diverse food scene even in five years. Welcome to flavor country.

Making stock

2011-01-05T21:48:00.004-06:00

Sometimes I'm glad I have a deep freeze.

Today would be just such a day.

You see, every once in a while, we roast a bird in our house. Usually a chicken, but sometimes the occasional turkey too. Once everything is carved out and parcelled into whatever dishes we're making, the bones are saved and put into dated freezer bags and tucked into the deep freeze, in anticipation of a backlog building up. Once I have enough (usually 4 chicken carcasses, or two chicken carcasses + 1 turkey carcass or 2 turkey carcasses, you get the idea!) I pull out the bones, arrange them on a baking sheet, and let them get toasty on 400 degrees for an hour, usually alongside a carrot and maybe half an onion. I take those out, cram them into my stock pot (sometimes violently, if it has trouble fitting) and pour about 12 cups of water in. My mom also got me a big mesh ball thing for putting herbs and aromatics into to flavor stocks, so I finally put that to use today as well. The stock I made will be used in pho, a Vietnamese noodle dish vaguely similar to ramen, so I flavored it with ginger, bay leaf, and green onions. When it's ready for showtime, it'll also get a little fish sauce and sugar, but that's for later.

I put my stock pot on a low simmer for a good two hours, all the while trying to press down the mass of bones a little farther down the pot, so everything is as submerged as possible. I kept the heat just under a boiling threshold, and after it was done, I carefully removed the small graveyard's worth of spent bones into a quadruple-bagged disposal, so I can keep it separate from our punk cats that just love to tear into neglected trash. The stock was then strained, skimmed repeatedly, and returned to the pot to reduce by a bit, until the flavor and seasoning were just right. After that, I poured the stock into a few storage tubs, and tucked them into the fridge for use later. The last thing I'll have to do before using them is to check tomorrow for the fat that will rise to the top and harden. After I remove that, I'll have a good ten cups of the best stock on earth, ready to do my bidding.

It's a bit of a ramble I guess, but if there's a moral to the story, you should probably be a miser with whatever kind of bones, shells, and stuff like that whenever possible. It's something that now comes natural to me and my wife, and when the payoff comes, it's always worth it.

Adventures in the Asian Market

2011-01-03T20:43:00.007-06:00

Last summer, a friend of mine piqued my curiosity with a trip down to one of our city's many Asian markets. I think what caught my attention was the big bin advertising live bullfrogs for sale in both English and Chinese. Now, as a self-respecting southerner of sorts, I've never had an aversion to eating frog, but the markets I get it at usually sell them, well, hacked off at the hind quarter, ostensibly ready to batter and fry, as a southerner is liable to do. I was intrigued. I had to go.

Trouble was, I'm an awful driver. Purely terrible, even with GPS holding my hand. I wound up at an Asian market, sure enough, but the wrong one. A small, forgotten little corner store tucked into a service road near one of those strange shaved ice shacks that somehow still manage to stay in business. Alas, no mysterious live bullfrogs. Not even any power in the shop, as the store owner was having a very heated one-way argument with an Alabama Power guy over what seemed to be a botched wiring job. I settled for some very affordable napa cabbage, a tall boy bottle of oyster sauce, and I went home defeated.

I moved on to other things, namely trying to find awesome carnicerias in whatever barrio I could uncover. Found myself a ready supply of the finer things in life, like beef tongue and tripe. For the moment, my attention was suitably diverted. I made tacos. Lots of tacos. Tacos for potluck events, tacos for friends, tacos for family. Sure, there were other things (the usual work week curries, to name one), but I think it's safe to say that a good chunk of 2010 was spent flipping corn tortillas.

Still, I'm loathe to stay on one trend for too long. The lure of the Asian market never left me. My wife got me into rolling our own sushi, and got me hooked on that for a good month. Seeing a good idea, she bought me a very nice sushi cookbook, and in a one-two punch, a Vietnamese cookbook. Being a sucker for regional-specific stuff like that, I tore through that book in a day. I was hooked. My wife and I made arrangements with my friend and his girlfriend for a little weekend excursion.

The Super Oriental Market was a strange sight when we first pulled up. It was in a building that, half a lifetime ago, used to be a Quincy's steakhouse. You know, the ones with the big yeast rolls, and the back quarter of the establishment set up as a sun room for whatever reason. The glass windows and doors leading in were nearly completely obfuscated with ads, fliers, and the sort of things you'd expect at any other corner store or bodega. Some bored-looking lady chain-smoked on a picnic bench outside while a couple of kids ran around and fussed. In the abandoned parking lot, a few green patches permitted a few scrawny exotic trees to grow, which looked a bit beaten-down by the nasty winter we'd so far endured.

Upon entering, it was dark, cluttered, and smelled of fish. When I say fish, I don't mean that off smell that you get from stuff that's been neglected for a day or two and is going south. I mean it smelled of nice, fresh fish. And sure enough, to our right there was a wall of delights from the sea. Live eels, live crabs, prawns, snails, conch (OMG), flounder, and lobsters. The lobsters (my wife's favorite) were both enormous and cheap. At $9 a pound, they completely undercut Publix's atrocious $15 / pound, and my wife picked one out that was nearly five pounds!

Adjacent to the lobster tank, I also spotted my holy grail:

Live bullfrogs! The staff was rather busy (and I couldn't quite justify buying any at that moment) so I saved any questions on preparation for another trip, but it was still awesome to see they had them. I'm sure I'll have them for another time. Besides, it was lunchtime, the gang was getting hungry, and the market just so happened to have an in-market restaurant, the Red Pearl. We decided to tuck in for a little strange.

This hot little number is "Crispy salted baby fish with peanuts". I wasn't sure what to expect (well, I was thinking maybe anchovies or something) but it sure wasn't this. Each one of the noodle-like things in that picture is some kind of fry, ie, literally a baby fish. You can't see it from the picture, but they're the whole fish, including the head, eyes, and all. The taste was a bit like a seafood version of a pork rind, and was mixed well with peanuts and very potent chili peppers. Tasty with rice, but a little on the dry side. Still, fun to dabble in.

My wife got a Szechwan style chitterling hot pot, which was a wonderful bit of comfort food. Hot pots have always reminded me of a slice of old school Americana, and the old fashioned sunday pot roast, just different. Very filling stuff.

After we ate, we decided to get back to shopping in earnest. Most of it was window shopping, since we could only afford to shop for a few things we'd be able to use immediately, and for things that would keep, that we could use for future cooking projects. I loaded up on the jarred and bottled necessities for further Asian cooking: fish sauce, japanese curry packets, oyster sauce, dried shrimp, bean sauce, noodles of all sorts, rice paper, and much more. We picked up a few things we were sure we could dispatch, like quail eggs (finally, I find somebody around here who sells them!), gio lua for making Vietnamese banh mi and a whole rabbit. We were tempted by this little guy, a la A Christmas Story, but decided to save the "smiling Chinese turkey" for another day.

We even dabbled in a few of the non-edible items. In the sun room section of the building, they had a dizzying assortment of serving dishes, utensils, and the like. I priced out their woks, which were too expensive for my liking, and gawked at some fantastic looking serving dishes that would probably have to wait for another day. I couldn't resist a $15 chinese cleaver that was very heavy, very sharp, and full tang. Total bargain on that one.

At the end of a good two hour shopping romp, we finally wrapped things up and checked out. In a random act of kindness, and I think as some consolation for a couple of wide-eyed idiots coming into the store and spending a hefty chunk of change, the lady at the register threw in a jar of chinese rice-coated peanuts (in "pizza flavor") for free. Totally unexpected and awesome.

Of all my discoveries of strange little markets in and around this city, I have to say this was the most fun trip to a market I've ever had. I'm well good and spent for this month, but I look forward to going there again next month, and hopefully many more times in the future.

Addendum:

Since I'm a little sleep deprived, I forgot to put the link to the market's website on here, so lemme correct that now:

www.superorientalmarket.com

I don't believe in resolutions

2011-01-02T19:48:00.004-06:00

What's it been? Seven months now?

Yeah, My bad.

I'd like to tell you I have some big excuse about why I haven't posted. Like, I was backpacking through Europe & the Middle East and didn't have a spare moment to write anything, or I moved to some faraway land without internet. Nothing so interesting. Mainly, I've been working like a dog, and when I do remember to write anything of note, I usually pull the ultimate lazy move and just put a picture and a blurb on Facebook. It would be awesome if I had some way to cross-pollinate from FB onto this blog and vice versa, and I'm sure there is, but in my old age I've become rather confused by modern technology. I was throwing pics from my iPhone onto Photobucket, but even that fell by the wayside.

The good news is that I'm getting back into the swing of things. New Year's resolution? Naw. I don't believe in them. Those usually go kaput by the time Valentine's Day rolls around anyway, so I'm not setting a goal for the sake of the new year. I am, however, redoubling my efforts in the kitchen, and while I may not have anything good to say every day, I figure I ought to have enough content to put something worth reading up every week. Maybe I go seven days a week, maybe I go one. Either way, once I get back in the habit of dumping recipes or just random food talk on here, it'll get easier I'm sure.

And to wet your appetite, here's something random from the months I've been away:

Mussels over lobster & saffron risotto. A tradition of sorts. My wife gets a lobster on her birthday, and I use the carapace to make stock for a little something the day after. First time cooking mussels, that was pretty fun.

Gulf Coast Blues

2010-05-26T01:24:00.003-05:00

Unless you're living under a rock, you all know by now about the BP Deep Water Horizon spill that's threatening essentially the entire Gulf of Mexico, if not the entire North Atlantic down the line. It's an environmental disaster, it's an economic disaster, it's a tourism disaster, it's a personal livelihood disaster. Let's face it, it's hard keeping up with the different sorts of disasters we have on our hands and will have for months and years.

Since this is a food blog and I try to stay on topic, a disaster that hits close to home is that I may be an old man before I'll ever have another gulf coast oyster again. That's tough to swallow. Tougher still when I remember what is probably the best dish of my life.

Last year on Mother's Day, I took my mom out to a nice little restaurant called Satterfield's. There were a few options for the special holiday prix fixe, but the starter I picked (paired with champagne) was a little flight of oysters.

The first oyster was a no-frills classic Oyster Rockefeller, with a touch of tarragon and rich creamy flavor that reminded me of every trip I've taken to New Orleans. The next oyster was a blue point, served raw on the half shell with shredded cucumber and a granita of passionfruit on top. Contrasted with the fatty Rockefeller, the brisk cold and acidity in that oyster completely wiped my palate clean and left me tasting the sea and sun all at once. The final oyster was such a bizarre presentation that I still smile thinking about it. A cordial glass was filled with a Bloody Mary, and nestled into the bottom of that glass was a raw gulf oyster, like the olive at the bottom of a martini. The salt and umami in the oyster really brought out the Worchestershire of the Bloody Mary, and the tart and the alcohol swept everything along as I chased it down. Three completely different directions with an oyster, and I was thrilled to be along for the ride.

I don't even really remember what else I ate that day. It obviously wasn't that important. But those oysters sure were, even as far away from the coast as we are in Birmingham. You see, even if we're not on the coast, the South relies on the gulf more than most people realize. It's our livelihood, sure, but it's also largely our culture. And with our culture involved, it certainly involves our food. The thought of a shrimp gumbo containing shrimp flash frozen from California or Mexico sickens me. The thought that I probably won't have another raw oyster unless I travel to some place with shores that aren't befouled by oil is almost unthinkable. It wasn't too long ago that I can remember being in the company of friends at a dive bar in New Orleans, down a few dozen bottles of Chimay and many more dozen empty half shells. I was a late bloomer liking those little things, and now that this has happened, I regret every day that's gone by that I didn't squeeze in an oyster or two. You just don't think about these things simply not being around anymore.

Strawberry Limeade Créme Brûlée

2010-05-10T01:18:00.003-05:00

Yes, it sounds absurd, but you see I had a lot of strawberries and a lot of limes and my idiot brain is prone to run with hair-brained schemes.

As a cap-off to yesterday's Mother's Day spread (Steak Ducasse, thyme potatoes, haricot vert, baguettes, and red pepper pesto) I knew I would be making Créme Brûlée for dessert. Now, I'm not much of a dessert guy, so when I decide I'm even gonna bother, it's a moment of terror.

I've made Créme Brûlée before, so I know it's something I can do, but I didn't want to re-hash the same flavor. To top that off, we did get some very good fresh strawberries from Grow Alabama, and I had a general idea to top them on top of the sugar crust.

But...Créme Brûlée & berries alone is so played. It's the generic presentation. While there's something to be said of simplicity, I wanted to try it different than I've had it a million times over. That's when I remembered the limes we bought to make sparkling limeades (lime juice, carbonated water, sugar, mmmm), and I realized we had a ton left. Since both my wife and my mom are huge fans of Sonic's strawberry limeade drinks, it seemed like a sure thing. Most of this crap is a copy-paste with tweaks from my previous Créme Brûlée, so whatevs

5 egg yolks
3/4 quart heavy cream
1/2 cup sugar + more for the top + more for macerating strawberries
zest of two limes
juice of two limes
1 vanilla bean
About 6 strawberries, sliced

Begin by splitting and scraping your vanilla bean. You can do this with a good pointed knife by jamming it in the middle and pulling on it until it unzips, then turning it around to fully split it. Once split, scrape out the tarry inside of the bean.

Combine the bean and scrapings with heavy cream in your sauce pot. Bring this just to the threshold of a boi and remove from the heat. Cover and let cool completely. Remove the bean and discard. Whisk in the eggs and sugar, and add your lime zest to the cream.

Preheat the oven to 325. Get 4-6 ramekins and fill them with the cream. Put into a casserole dish and add hot water until it reaches halfway up the ramekin sides. Cover with foil. Bake for about 50 minutes or so, or until just barely set.

Cover and refrigerate a few hours, or up to a couple of days. About 30 minutes prior to eating, remove from the fridge. Dust enough sugar on the top to coat evenly. Using a blowtorch (you do have one, right? Get one!) start running the tip of the cone of blue flame around the surface of the ramekin. Turn as you apply heat. Avoid buring sugar. Keep your flame moving and your sugar moving. Work outside in.

When you're done, you should have a nice sheen of caramel-colored sugar armor on top of your custard.

From here, add sugar to the lime juice until it's fairly thick, then add your strawberry slices. This is called maceration. By putting your fruit into a very sugary mix, you will both soften the strawberries and also leach some of the strawberry juice into the sugar-lime syrup.

Last thing to do is to spoon some syrupy strawberry slices on top:

This was an awesome idea. The lime zest in the custard meets the lime juice on top and the strawberries and the acid punches through the fat in the custard. Feels very light.

It was a great end to the Mother's Day lunch. Mom loved it, and after that, we sat around enjoying some french pressed coffee and listened as my wife played some tunes on the piano. Happy Mother's Day, mom.

Steak, the Ducasse way

2010-05-10T00:06:00.006-05:00

I've been eating a lot of steak lately.

Mind you, this isn't a backlash to my Lent days. You see, I'm on a mission to understand steak. I mean, I think most guys get the whole primal 'piece of meat, insert on grill here' thing. And yeah, that does produce a tasty steak when you're not using a crappy cut, cooked to medium or worse, and drowned in "steak sauce" (blech). But isn't there something else out there, man?

If you've been paying attention, you've seen the signs. I fiddled around with cast iron searing for those nice ribbon-thin italian steak salads (arugula mandatory, y'all). I've scourged my soul against the bottom of the barrel of French depravity with steak au poivre, and still I want more.

Enter Alain Ducasse, some French guy who cooks and apparently also likes steaks. Being French, he overcame his first instinct to surrender to the daunting challenge, and instead opted for the second instinct, which is to drown the hell out of a random thing with butter. Ahhh....buerre! Look, nobody said steak was a staple. If it's a staple for you, you're probably gonna die. Enjoy it as a treat, because it is a treat. And when you do, be EVIL. Seriously.

What Monsieur Ducasse does is two-fold. First off, hot fat (butter, also rendered beef fat) is a transport mechanism for flavor. You ever see those premium-priced flavor-infused olive oils? Well you're paying a premium for non extra-virgin oil that's basically heated with whatever it wants to taste like chucked into it. In that same respect, by adding aromatics and herbs into a pan with hot fat and cooking on a medium-low clip, you can pull the flavors out of those things into your delicious fat, which is...

...then basted over a steak in cast iron, cooking over a fairly low temperature. Why low? Doesn't this go against everything good and sacred in the Tome of Steak? Well...not really. For a thin steak (like, say, hanger steak), yes you want very very hot temperature on your grill, pan or whatever. That's because you want to spend as little time inducing the Maillard Reaction as possible.

Pause for a moment. Go up, click that link. The ideal crust for a steak is BROWN. Black is burnt. Black is carbon. Black is coal. You have gone too far. Unless you're a bad kid around Christmas, I don't imagine you have plans on eating coal, so STOP doing this to steak you spend your hard-earned money on, capice? There are grill-stripe fetishists out there and I guess y'all can toe the line if you must, but please don't overdo that stuff. Dry your steak off as completely as you can, season with salt and pepper, and you'll find that crust is easy to get, and you'll never look back.

Anyways, sorry for the segue. The gist is that brown is good, and makes us all happy campers. If you're keen on living on the wide open ranges of Flavor Country, you'll also want a little moo in your steak. I fully admit I used to be a medium to medium-well guy. I also fully admit I used to un-ironically listen to Chumbawamba. Bad choices only become mistakes if you don't learn from them, so I fully own up to being human. If you're an overdone steak afficionado and you're reading this, I've probably offended you. I'm not going to apologize for that, but I'm not going to prosthelytize either. You'll either try a little strange or you won't. I will tell you that if you're one of those weirdos, I've got to absolutely adore you as a friend or you've got to be a blood relative for me to overcook a steak for you. And even then, it kills me to do it these days.

So, let's assume here that we're all fans of that range between rare to medium-rare. To get that, and to get the Maillard crust, a thin steak has to be seared off fast, and is essentially over and done in maybe three or four minutes. I recommend even using it straight from the fridge so you've still got a bit of pent up chill for a cool center. For example, here's how my hanger steak turns out using that method:

Note both crust and center. That's about as money as it gets.

Now for a steak in the Ducasse style, we're basting the steak in that tasty flavored butter, right? Well to get the most flavor into that steak, we cook slow. We also do that so that we can cook a very thick steak and not have the outside a blackened mess and the inside still cold and raw (not to be confused with rare, y'all). I found most of my success to be with New York Strips. Here's the kicker, I would shoot for a cut that's two inches thick AT MINIMUM. This seems like madness, doesn't it? Well, at that thickness, I consider a cut of strip can be split to feed two people. Instead of imagining steak as some plate-covering thing, think of it instead as a fist of meat. Equal x, y, and z dimensions give or take. I highly recommend you get chatty with your local butcher if you can. Don't trust any place that just has meat out in shrink-wrapped packages and nobody to talk to. Talk to a butcher. Tell them you want some cow cut up the way you like it. That's why they're there.

With the steak being thick like that, you'll also want to bring it closer to room temp. How close is up to you. I've brought a steak all the way up to room temp and it was a bit too done through for my liking. I usually let it out of the fridge for an hour as a guess. The great thing about NY strips is that they also have this substantial strap of fat running along the back. After you rub both sides with salt and pepper, you can heat a dry cast iron pan and rest the steak on its side. This renders the fat off that strap and into your pan, so it contributes to your baste.

Once you slap a side down, DO NOT move it. Moving a steak, lifting it up to see "is it done yet?" is a great way to make sure you never get a crust at all. Busy your idle hands by putting herbs and aromatics into your skillet, then tabs of butter until you've got a liquid you can collect with a tilt of the pan, and can spoon over the top. Keep the steak where it is. If you must check on it, give the steak a prod on top. As a steak cooks, it will "tense up" a bit. Raw steak does not recover from a prod. As it cooks, it gradually gets more resilient. I'm loathe to throw out a real number of minutes to expect, but at a low gas setting on my burner, I usually keep a steak on each side for about ten minutes. Don't let this numerical estimate betray your instincts. Imagine I'm Ben Kenobi and you're Luke Skywalker, and there is a Steak Force. Use it.

Once you flip and repeat, all the while basting, you'll eventually be done with the task. I rest my steak on a cooling rack over a plate. Don't tuck into it immediately. I recommend resting it for about ten minutes after cooking to redistribute the juices inside. If you are a greedy pig and eat it piping hot, you'll leak all of the flavorful juice all over your plate and the rest will be a bit dry. The time it takes to rest will make for a better steak, trust me.

Something else to consider is that if you're like me and add shallots to your pan to flavor your butter (for mine, I ideally use rosemary, thyme, garlic, and shallots), you might be able to reserve a few of the now french-fried shallot rings as a tasty topper for your steak. I highly recommend it.

Here's a good idea of the finished product.

I made this one for my mom yesterday for Mother's Day, and it's a pretty solid medium rare. I'm happiest at the threshold between med-rare and rare, but it takes a bit of nuance to get consistency. If you've got a digital thermometer, you may want to consider catching a reading to see what is ideal, and then get used to the tell-tale signs of when you get there.

At any rate, I would highly recommend trying this method. It makes for one of the best steaks I've ever eaten.

Spring Potluck

2010-05-09T23:11:00.003-05:00

Last week, we had the first of what I hope to be many season-oriented potlucks at my house. It was really awesome to have friends come over, bring either food or booze or both, and spend a night chatting about everything and nothing over some food and drink. The weather cooperated about as well as you can expect it to in Alabama; which is to say, it didn't rain but it was about 200% humidity all weekend and looked at any moment as if a hurricane would drop out of the sky. Nevermind, we mainly stayed indoors, but under the light of tiki torches my wife played grillardin and worked both of our grills to put out a never-ending flow of kebabs for hungry folks.

She also made me these delicious stinky sardines!

These ginormous Portugese sardines own incredibly hard. I gutted them and cleaned them, then marinated them in some sherry vinegar, olive oil, thyme, and salt & pepper, and the wife grilled 'em whole. Good in a focaccia sandwich with some aioli, or equally good to yank the head off on the spot and eat it with your hands, like a bear.

I spent a good chunk of the party being the fry slinger, which actually works because my station behind the kitchen island gives me clear view of the dining area and the living room so I can chit-chat, drink, and fry whatever I please. Mainly for this evening, it was Spanish Calamares.

Calamares are awesome, but I firmly believe you can't get a good batch at a restaurant because they use wheat flour batter and fry at too low a temp. By the time their batter's set, the squid inside is tough. Instead, my batter is based on rice flour, I ramp the fry temp to the max, and those things stay in oil for 45 seconds to a minute, TOPS. The result is a completely crisp batter coating that isn't too thick and obnoxious, and the meat inside is so tender you can cut it with the flat of your fork. That's perfect. I'm normally not a guy that plays in absolutes but I'd put my calamari against anyone's, and I expect to win. Especially with the pesto I made, which is from roasted red peppers.

I made other stuff too. You have to bear with me, it's all a blur at this point. It was mostly a tapas sort of thing. We had spanish almonds, chorizo & mushrooms in a red wine sauce, some chorizo empanadillas, asparagus wrapped in prosciutto, hommous, pita bread, rosemary focaccia, etc. We also had tacos de lengua and chicken qandahari on deck, but it was plenty clear that by that time, we had no need to serve them. Our guests also came in full force, bringing tons of fantastic stuff. Lots of Leinenkeugel beer, Jefferson whisky, a fantastic fresh fruit parfait, and a Three Philosopher's beer cheese soup.

That being said, the food's only part of it. Here's the reason I love these events:

Spending hours upon hours with nothing on the agenda but hanging out, chatting about everything and nothing, and having a great time. Thanks once again to all our friends for coming out, and I hope that we can get our act together for another round of fun in the summer!

The end of Lent, lessons learned, and a few pictures along the way

2010-04-15T00:00:00.004-05:00

This post's been a long time coming, and I'm sorry to keep y'all waiting. Just been gripped by a case of lazy, and been busy doing other stuff.

The long story short - I survived Lent. It was easy. VERY easy. I went through 40 days of vegan eating with variety, imagination, and ease of transition. I won't say I didn't have cravings for omnivore food, but they were fleeting and easily put off. To be honest, I was more interested in thinking of ways to use my local produce in the next night's meal than to worry about pining over chicken livers or a good steak. Not that I don't like those sorts of things, but it wasn't causing me any undue distraction.

It was interesting to see it from the other side. Though I've never really agreed personally with the reasons most undertake vegan living, I certainly empathize with them and respect them for being very personal moral doctrines. I've already talked before about the sort of weird tendency of society at large to feel the urge to evangelize vegans back into the fold, so to speak. I got plenty of that from friends and relations. A lot of it comes from simple misunderstandings, and a lot of it comes from folks who grew up as kids who hated their veggies served by parents who maybe didn't know how to make them appealing.

The best thing about my vegan experience, and one that I would suggest the whole experience is certainly worth, is learning how to color pictures using the crayons in the box you may not use as often. Let's face it, America's a pretty red meat reality. Most folks aren't just omnivorous, but they're also pretty plain about it. My origins are actually pretty laughably sad, because I used to be a very picky eater if that can be believed. It all changed once I reached college, but some folks just don't break out of the mold easily. It's one thing to learn that veggies can be tasty, but another thing to just fully take the plunge. Having almost all of my food delivered by my local CSA helped a lot. Before this, I had only the most passing and vague idea of what it was to eat by the seasons. Now, it's in my blood. Right now I can feel it inside me, this weird ticking clock that KNOWS when tomatoes are going to go from being milquetoast abominations into being orbs of the most amazing flavor (June in case you're wondering) Eating by the seasons made me appreciate the seasons more. Of course the irony here is that Lent is positioned squarely in the midst of the waning winter, so it was creative, shall we say, to celebrate that in food. Still, one day I remember busting whole turnips with the greens into a south Indian-inspired dish that only existed in my head. It felt good. It felt sexy. There's a bit of pride in knowing that you can be a part of that celebration.

So that's a lot of rambling for me to basically tell you obvious things. Eating a vegan diet for Lent makes you a much better connoisseur of vegetables, I think. Shocking stuff huh? When you start eyeballing a sack of collard greens the way some folks eye a steak, you start to commit your perverse imagination to bringing about the types of things that you otherwise would treat as an afterthought. An accompaniment. A side dish. It's that sort of thinking that makes me respect vegans who keep it real. There's honest food to be made for a vegan diet. I've made it. I've eaten it, and it's good. Is this my clarion call for you to abandon yon omnivorous habits and take up ascetic living? Naw. But I'm confident that not only does eating vegan give you a full perspective for all sorts of cooking, but it also has legitimacy in and of itself.

As for how the fast ended, let me go ahead and say that I caught an itch for sushi in my final 48 hours and made plans to debauch myself. Easter Sunday I had a fantastic multi-course sushi romp, which I enjoyed every minute of. I didn't feel liberated or rescued, it was just something different and appreciated, sort of like the change of seasons. Kind of fitting I think.

I'm sure that some of y'all are "blah blah too long didn't read where are pictures." I realize I had a few snaps I never posted, so here's a brief gallery of other vegan eats I had during Lent:

Sweet potato & roasted red pepper flautas with avocado, cilantro, onion, and salsa verde

A vaguely-Japanese udon noodle bowl with broccoli, marinaded tofu, carrots, green onions, shitake mushrooms, and cabbage.

This one was amazing. The soup is called Sopa de Grao com Espinafres, which is basically chicpea & spinach soup. Extremely rib-sticking and rustic food from Portugal. The bread, also Portugese, is a demi-cornbread called Broa.

I cheated and got an out-of-season tomato because I wanted to make taboulleh, which is an arabic salad made with bulgur wheat, tomatoes, parsley, herbs, and served in a romaine lettuce leaf. Funny, I could resist meat and animal byproducts, but I got my pride crushed by an out-of-season tomato from Mexico that honestly was only average. Still, the itch was scratched.

Redneck hommous

2010-03-30T00:28:00.003-05:00

In a fit of mad science, I decided to make a "hommous" using traditional southern cuisine ingredients. It sounds bizarre, but if you think about it, it should work! I tweaked a little past this video (added citric acid to improve the acidity). It's not as pretty a color as traditional stuff, and black eyed peas don't quite spin as smoothly, but it's not a bad variation!

Here's the finished product, topped with some paprika and served, in true redneck fashion, with saltine crackers.

So how's your diet going?

2010-03-29T23:50:00.002-05:00

This is the number one inquiry into my vegan experiment, and it's interesting to think about it. Most folks think of vegetarian and vegan food as super-prim rabbit food. From the examples given in most pop culture, I can't blame folks. What is it again? Tofu, bean sprouts, lettuce lettuce lettuce?

Heh.

So when folks asking how my diet's going, I point to my pretty substantial middle and arch an eyebrow.

"How do you think it's going?"

I eat gooood. Probably "too good" heh. Vegan sure as hell don't mean diet, I can help you go ahead and dispel that rumor. So I figure I might as well go ahead and offset some of that by getting my workout routine back on schedule. Did a good 2 1/2 mile run tonight, which was fun to do while playing with Juno and watching the news. Hope to make it a habit again now that the weather's turning nice.

In the meantime, maybe I should eat more taboulleh and less falafel. Yeeeaaaah....

At least this way I can afford the occasional bit of evil I dish up.

Welp, I'm farming for reals now

2010-03-28T23:24:00.002-05:00

I've gone ahead and done it now.

To the tune of about 80 bucks, I've gone ahead and stuck myself into the farming racket, and purchased my first batch of seeds for the season. Mind you, I've got a nice half acre of land I can turn into veggies if I'm lucky, so hopefully this will be a fruitful (lol) endeavor.

The trick now is to stick to this. I've pretty much done the easy part. What I now need to do is to get a tractor or a tiller and tear up the earth good and proper the first time (should be easier after that!) go ahead and work in some composted manure and other nice stuff, then get a UV lamp to sprout some of the little babies as I grow 'em in bathroom cups. I'm trying to not overextend myself with growing too much stuff that I may not be able to control. Arugula, broccoli, some tomatoes, peppers, herbs, a few beans, corn, butternut squash, some kale. I'm getting okra from a friend, so that'll get put in as well. There's also the possibility something else might tickle my fancy and I might want to plant other stuff. I want to start small, but larger than last year.

Now to find a benevolent soul who can let me drive their John Deere on my property for a day.

I'd sneak into the Gaza Strip for a good Falafel...

2010-03-16T01:05:00.003-05:00

...fortunately, I don't have to.

Falafel's one of those things you don't realize it's potential until you have a good one, and then you spend an eternity wallowing in inferior ones, cursing the world that you can't find a good one anymore. At least, that's how it is for me. I had the luxury a few years ago of having a really good restaurant near my office that made what I still consider to be the best falafel in Birmingham. They were a little unconventional, as they were patties instead of the round hush-puppy-esque balls most places serve. The flavor was fantastic, but what really made the falafel an experience was the texture. I believe the shop owner fried em up in a cast iron skillet, because the mouthfeel was almost exactly like a good piece of good southern sage sausage. That perfectly crispy, yet fork-tender outside that yielded into a substantial, very moist, yet meaty interior. It was light years beyond the usual Lebanese stuff to be found in town, which had a sort of shapeless soft texture that reminded me more of dry cornbread stuffing than anything.

I was content to rest on my laurels and eat there pretty much forever, and then the shop closed. It broke my heart. I haven't been that upset about a restaurant shuttering in effectively ever. It wasn't just the falafel, which alone was worth every meal. Their baba ghannouj was the richest, their maamoul made me never want for a fig newton ever again, and I probably shouldn't talk about the electric-purple pickled turnip straws in their salads and shawarma plates, lest I get kind of emotional. Suffice to say, best pickled anything. Ever. Nevermind that the place had a hookah (and the same three dudes were always out front puffing on it, just chilling out) and had a market in the back where you could buy everything from spices to turkish delight to tea sets, but to make it even better, the proprietor was a big Alabama fan. I could go in there and BS about cooking, BS about the Tide, and enjoy every moment of it.

I tried to replicate the magic for years and the results were hit and miss. My falafels would fall apart. I'd try to dredge in some rice flour to crisp them up, which resulted in a hard outside and a fairly under-done inside. It was still better than chain falafel, but man, it was nothing like the good stuff. I began looking for volunteer slots in UNICEF to see if I could go on sabbatical doing humanitarian work that would be paid in falafel. I was that desperate.

Fortunately, I struck gold, pretty much because I was randomly looking for a recipe to try. I yanked this recipe from Chow Vegan, which is actually a baked falafel. I tweaked it a little bit because I wanted it fried (basically removed the baking powder, lemon juice, and oil) let each batch rip in 320 degree oil for about nine minutes. The results weren't as good as the best falafel I've ever had, but they're so close that I can curb my nostalgia a little bit. The bits of onion carmelize into that deeply bittersweet flavor, and the little bits of un-smashed chicpea get very nutty and provide a great difference in texture to the rest of the falafel. I crammed those into some homemade pita breads with some spinach, plum tomatoes, and diced purple onion, then spooned some dill hommous over it. I realize it's a bit of a weird move, hommous on falafel. Chicpea dip meets chicpea croquette, but seeing as tzatziki isn't vegan, it's perfectly passable, and more to the point, tastes good.

So while I eat this complete badass of a pita, I'm pouring out a little cardamom chai on the ground for my departed homie, and while it still sucks that the restaurant is gone, I'm at least able to make a falafel that I know can throttle anything else in town I've tasted.

Poppadoms!

2010-03-14T13:49:00.003-05:00

Boom, headshot!

Now that I have your attention. Looks good, huh? We all like crackery things we can dip into tasty stuff, eh?

Poppadoms, my friends, are the cure to your itch. Whether it's smearing some leftover curry on top, or dunking into a chutney, it's one of those awesome little snacks that I've eaten plenty of, but never made until now.

I even made a few videos to help you do the same:

Now, this is more of a snack thing than a meal accompaniment thing, but I was really hungry yesterday and I needed to make actual food, so how about a tofu mattar recipe as well? This is vegan-ized paneer mattar, but paneer and tofu are so similar to each other that it doesn't really matter to be honest.

Here's your meez for making tofu mattar:

1 pound tofu, cubed
1 cup sweet green peas
1 onion, finely diced
about a cup of tomato puree
about 7 ounces of coconut milk
1 tbsp canola oil
1 tbsp cumin seeds
1 tbsp dried chili flakes
1 tbsp coriander seeds, crushed
1 tsp garam masala
1 tsp turmeric
1 tsp salt
1 tsp black pepper
handful of cilantro, chopped, for garnish
basmati rice, for accompaniment

It's a song and dance you probably know by now if you've followed my recipes. Heat your oil to near-smoking in a pot, toss in cumin, let it pop, then coriander, then turmeric, garam masala, chili flakes, pepper, onions, and salt in rapid succession while taking the pot off the heat to stir. Drop heat to low, cover, sweat for 10-15 minutes.

Add your coconut milk and tomato puree. Now I left the measurements approximate here because you kind of want to add and combine until you get to an orange color. Add, stir, and taste. You want just enough coconut milk to not make the sauce overly tangy, but not enough to make it just completely coconutty. Err on the side of more tomato to coconut. Take the pot off the heat and onto a trivet, and either blend with a wand blender or transfer to a food processor and whiz up until it's a uniformly thick liquid. Return to the pot if you took it out, add your peas and tofu, then let the pot ride on low heat while covered for at least 15 minutes. I let mine go for a while and everything generally comes together nicely.

From here, serve with the basmati rice, chop up some cilantro and sprinkle some on top, and it's food. And since I was starving, go ahead and add on the poppadoms and chutney too. And if you're really wanting to seal the deal, crack open a bottle of IPA and be in pure bliss.

Three weeks in

2010-03-10T22:40:00.003-06:00

Hey guys, sorry about the lapse between posting. I promise I've been cooking fun things and enjoying the hell out of them, just haven't quite gotten to the point of posting anything substantial. Maybe this weekend will be the time.

I just by happenstance managed to check today's date, and realized it's three weeks into Lent. That makes twenty-one days of me on the vegan kick. How's it been? Pretty damn easy for the most part. The closest I've been tempted was maybe two days in when somebody had some good southern fried chicken livers. I thought "hey, I want one!" then immediately "naaaahhhh".

I'm not going to become one of those new-age health promoters. Going vegan hasn't added years to my life, made me rich and powerful, or taught me how to fly. I feel pretty good, but that's also because I'm not eating as much convenience foods as anything else. Probably the best thing I've been doing is eating plenty of fruit, which keeps me full of energy, and I only need one cup of coffee a day, instead of tapping an IV to the bean like I'd been doing before.

To be honest, I eat about like I ate before, minus a few frivolities that I usually reserved for the weekend anyway. I'm still a curry fiend of the like that puts Dave Lister to shame. It's just convenient that it takes zero effort to make vegan curry. I'm also getting through the backlog of a few slow-mover items that come in my CSA, so anything that gets us to finish our portions is always a good thing.

It's been fun to put myself into a lifestyle I haven't experienced before. I've found a lot of things that I expected to see, namely a lot of people not understanding/fearing veganism, and the really bizarre tendency of folks to blatently prosthelytize their eating habits to me. I could probably go out tomorrow and say I'm a member of the Church of Satan and have less people come rushing up to me to steer me on the path of their choosing. Mind you, I've seen the cheerleaders for vegans like everybody else. When your best known white knights are PETA and Moby, I guess it sort of makes credibility something you have to cook yourself at home.

Restaurants have been pretty chill for the most part. As long as you're not a dick, it's easy to ask people "Hey, does this thing have any animal products in it?" Whenever I do eat out in the first place, it's at places they generally care enough about their food to be able to tell me. Going to Flip burger boutique and getting a fauxlafel burger, they made sure to avoid both the butter on the bun as well as the feta, which I subbed out with artisanal ketchup anyway (Their rutabaga fries, by the by, are ridiculous and you should eat them if you get the chance). The key is don't be a dick, but this is sort of the golden rule isn't it? I'm from the South, so manners are always a good thing. I find that people respond well to them.

It's still not a game changer y'all. If some people are trying to convert this wayward lamb, don't worry. I still like food of all sorts. But I still think there's wisdom in both walking miles in other peoples' shoes, and learning how to prosper even when doing without.

And, I hate to be all doom prognosticator here, but people who deride vegetarians and vegans need to at least figure this one out: America (and to some extent other first world nations) can not survive without changing the way we eat, and being so dependent on meat as the centerpiece of each meal. I didn't eat much meat before I went vegan. I'll eat it again, sure, but I still won't eat much at all, because the amount we eat on average these days ain't sustainable.

The Seitanic Verses

2010-02-27T22:25:00.007-06:00

Yes, I went there. A cheap pun combining meat substitutes and Salman Rushdie (since we're having a curryl). Don't judge me, I've had this in my head for days.

My wife baffles the hell out of me sometimes. I make lots of curry at home. Lots. Aside from Italian and good ol' Southern cooking, it's probably the most common staple we eat. The woman eats rasam, she eats dal, she eats stuff I have no idea what I'm making, other than "it's some stuff and I'll make a curry out of it."

Despite this high sense of adventure she has when I'm the one cooking, she's hell-bent on eating only one dish at our local indian restaurant whenever we go out. It's always "Chicken Afghani, mild please!" No saag paneer for her, no. Gosht Vindaloo? Why never! Yes, she'll pick at starters and appetizers. She likes their mulligatawny soup. She likes stuff like samosas, bhajjis, and other things. But the main dish she gets is always the same, which drives me nuts.

Because I'm a great husband, I've tried to recreate this dish at home, just going by taste. It's been pretty trial and error. I finally got it right this time (or really close at least) and with a vegan dish to boot!

Now vegan chicken, hmmm how do I go about this abomination? Well, I was gifted a few cans of "meat" from a friend who dabbles in seitan, which I've made before. It's vital wheat gluten, fast-kneaded with spices and then boiled to set. Marinade it in salt, fat, and whatever you want it to taste like, and voila, it's a meat-like thing! See:

"Quack Quack"

"Bock Bock!"

I had a can of "chicken" and a can of "duck". After tasting each, I'm pretty sure there's no real difference. By themselves they really don't fool a soul, but they're decent enough that you get the right effect in a curry. Also, since this is very much a northern curry, the real McCoy traditionally uses cream or yogurt. Instead, I'm using coconut milk, because it tastes great.

Now, let me preface this by repeating my beliefs: this sort of thing is a bit of a mockery. I think vegan foods that aren't trying to be something they're not are preferable to the alternative every single time. However, sometimes you have to stuff your principles a little, especially if you are cooking for a wife who wants to eat the same sort of stuff she was eating before you went to the V-side. In that case, go for it.

Here's my mise en place, sort of.

About a pound of seitan, hand-shredded
1 cup tomato puree
12 ounces coconut milk
1 onion, chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 tbsp canola oil
1 tbsp cumin seeds
1 tbsp coriander seeds, crushed
1 tbsp amchoor powder (dried mango, can be found in indian/ethnic grocers. Sub with a tablespoon of lemon juice if you don't have any, it'll be close enough)
2 tsp turmeric
2 tsp garam masala
2 tsp chili flakes
1 tsp salt + more to taste
1/2 tsp cardamom powder
1/2 tsp cinnamon

Heat your oil in the pan to near-smoking. Add cumin, let pop for a few seconds, then add coriander and keep on heat for two or three more seconds before removing from the heat. Add your onions, turmeric, salt, and garam masala, and turn the burner to medium-low. Stir and cook, cover, and come back every five minutes or so to stir more, for 15 minutes. If it starts to stick, add a little water to deglaze and keep stirring.

Add your tomato puree, chili flakes, and amchoor, uncover, and let cook on medium heat, stirring frequently for five minutes. To that, add your seitan, cinnamon, and cardamom, and cook another 5 minutes. Afterwards, add your coconut milk carefully, stirring to combine as you drop the heat to low. Let it go another five minutes or so and turn the heat off. Stir your minced garlic in. Taste and adjust your seasoning.

It's a very thick and rich sop, and you can either have it with rice or a flatbread like naan or roti. Since I like my options open, I usually have a little of each. In this case, roti's vegan so there you go.

Mission was accomplished apparently since she raved about the curry and asked me to make it again. I may very well later down the road, but I'm ready to move onto more fun things.

Rasam for days and days

2010-02-27T19:48:00.004-06:00

It may be a byproduct of me feeling under the weather, but I've been fiending for Rasam. I did a prior blog post about the stuff before, but this time, with Dino's permission, I'm putting up the recipe for you. This is from his book Alternative Vegan, which is coming up for a second edition. Even if you don't give a damn about veganism, I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It's great for approaching food from a South Indian perspective, which is often crowded out of our understanding of Indian food by the better-known stuff coming out of the north. It's also perfect for being creative and learning to love all of your veggies, which we all need to eat more of.

Rasam

Rasam Powder:

1 tablespoon dry toor daal or yellow split peas
5-6 dry red chilis
1/2 tablespoon cumin seeds
1 tablespoon corriander seeds
1 teaspoon peppercorns
1 teaspoon dry curry leaves

Roast all the spices in a small pan, and grind in a coffee grinder.

Rasam

1 cup dry yellow split peas or toor daal
1 tablespoon oil
1 tablespoon black mustard seeds
tiny dash asafetida
1/4 cup curry leaves
1 pound tomatoes, chopped
salt to taste
1 tablespoon ground black pepper
2 tablespoons tamarind paste
1 gallon water
1 cup cilantro, minced for garnish

Boil the split peas or daal in a separate pot for 20 minutes. Heat oil in a pot, add mustard seeds, and allow to pop. Add a dash of asafetida. Wait 3 seconds, and add the curry leaves. Add the tomatoes, and sprinkle on salt. Cook for about five minutes. Add the black pepper, the rasam powder, and the tamarind paste. Add the water and cooked, drained split peas. Bring to a full boil, and keep it boiling for 15 minutes. When cooked, sprinkle on cilantro for garnish. Serve over mushy rice.

Now, straight up, this is going to create a lot of food. Easily twelve servings, if not more. Don't believe me, here's the haul I produced:

For clarity, the one in the top left corner is a double portion I didn't have enough rice to dole out for. See what I mean when I say massive quantities? It's perfect to fill a week or two with staple meals and give you some room to play around.

SCIENCE

2010-02-21T20:05:00.004-06:00

Okay, I admit as I do this vegan thing, part of me is kind of curious about folks who do this sort of thing as their real culinary gig for life. Some folks make the switch pretty painlessly, but others don't quite give up the life of an omnivore. Fear not, because SCIENCE has come to the rescue, promising vegan analogues for all sorts of things to keep otherwise sane people from thirsting for blood and their pound of flesh. Vegan, but want to eat meat? Well they got "meat". More specific, how about "sausage"? Got that, in all sorts of varieties. I bet you weren't expecting vegan bacon? Think again! Vegan cheese? Kazaam! Vegan ice cream? Kamehameha! All of these quick fixes, no doubt funded by DARPA and NASA to keep us from descending into our collective savage, hard-coded Lord of the Flies behavior. It sounds like an episode of True Blood or something, haha.

As I went out grocery shopping today, I got a weird bit of curiosity to come over me about these abominations of nature, and while my cart was otherwise loaded with nice wholesome ingredients, I had to stare into the abyss.

Went for the brass ring at first, and had some sausage. Okay, it's equal parts tofu and seitan from the package with "herbs" and a lot of SCIENCE in it. Fired up my skillet, rolled em around for a bit till they were equally crispy-brown on the outside. Divvied em up with my wife, and had em with mustard.

The inside's got a pretty compelling texture, but the outside gives it away. It forms almost like a bready crust on it, instead of a thinner, crispier outer cover you'd have with real sausage. Flavor is pretty much seitan, a ton of salt, fat, and italian herbs. It's alright enough, but you'd never for an instant think you were eating meat. These things were LOADED with salt. It's unreal. I haven't been this thirsty in a long time.

After that, time for dessert. Who likes ice cream? Who likes SCIENCE flavored ice cream! That's what this is, because I guarantee I don't know what "Vanilla Almond Bark" is, but if it tastes like SCIENCE they did a good job at recreating it. The ice cream was thin, bland, and had too many ice crystals in it. It finished with almost a gritty texture, like toothpaste. The carton said vanilla but I didn't taste any. The rabbit poop looking specks in there are I guess the "almond bark"? I don't know, there were bits of nuts coated by a bitter cocoa science alloy or something. It tasted not great.

Verdict:

The sausage was alright, if you are under no illusions that you're not eating a meat sub. If you're jonesing for some pig, then man, don't do it. Whatever you do, bring like two gallons of water because you're going to need it.

The ice cream is an abomination throughout. It's pure crap.

Findings:

It can be pretty hard to be a vegan it seems. As Americans, we're used to protein being the center of each of our three meals, and we're used to what we've grown up with. Folks wanting to make the moral switch to veganism, I can understand if you're not quite there culinarily. Myself, I'm kind of the opposite. I hold no allegiance to the moral ethos, but I think vegan food certainly has the capacity to be more honest about what it can offer than fake sausage or fake ice cream. There are fulfilling dishes out there that are honest, full of whole ingredients, and taste a lot better. To somebody who's ready to make their stand, but not quite ready to part without their tofu pork chop, I empathize. Maybe it's best to make the stand first, and develop an appetite for veganism's true bounty later. That said, I'd strongly suggest putting the bean pig aside for maybe some good hearty dhaal or ratatouille. You may just discover you like that way more.

Back in my rhythm

2010-02-21T11:14:00.004-06:00

Well after having the wind knocked out of my sails with weekend sickness, I'm slowly getting back on my feet and cooking again. Getting to clean things up a bit got me in the spirit, and after that, it took very little else.

Indian food is such a lay-up if you're wanting a good idea on how to eat honestly on a vegan diet. Most of the good dishes are already vegetarian, and without much fuss at all can become vegan. Like I mentioned before on the roti, the only thing that might prevent otherwise is ghee. Now, I love the flavor of ghee, but in the grand scheme of things, it's easy to use a neutral vegan oil to grease them up afterwards and its all good nonetheless. Usually, that's the case you'll find. It's the enrichments in vegetarian Indian dishes that are all you need to swap out. The creamy northern curries that use cream, yogurt, etc can do just as nicely with coconut milk. I usually prefer it that way, because coconut tastes flat-out amazing.

For curries further down the subcontinent, usually that ain't a problem. They're either thinner liquid curries, or they're dry stuff. Smoky-hot combinations of cumin, mustard seeds, curry leaf (tricky to find, I've got a funny story on it) and lots and lots of chili make a good southern style curry when I'm not angling for anything in particular. I'm weak in the knees on fenugreek too so I'll often sneak it in if I can get away with it.

This is one I put together in a vague south indian style. No recipe in mind, just a general idea of the flavors that work. If you'd like to recreate, here's what you'll need:

2 pounds Kale, roughly torn (stems removed)
1 onion, chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced
1/3 cup water
2 tablespoons sambal oelek, or sriracha, or 1 tablespoon dried chili flakes
1 tablespoon canola oil
1 tablespoon mustard seeds
1 tablespoon cumin seeds
2 teaspoons turmeric
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon fenugreek seeds (optional - find in any specialty or indian grocer)
small handful of curry leaves (optional, generally only available in warmer climates, check indian grocers, but its not required)

Heat your oil on high till it's nearly smoking. Add mustard seeds, wait five seconds (careful they'll be popping on you) add your cumin, curry leaves, and fenugreek seeds, wait another five, and pull off the heat. Drop heat to low. Add onions, salt, and turmeric to your pan, stir together, cover, and cook for 20 minutes, stirring about every five.

Crank the heat to high again, and add your kale and the water. Stir and press into the pan until the kale is uniformly wilted. Keep stirring to prevent anything from sticking and burning. Should take about five minutes at most. Remove from heat. Add your hot sauce or chilis and garlic, stir completely. Taste, and adjust your seasoning.

From here, put that on top of rice. I like basmati but any rice will do.

Also, folks may remember an old recipe I did back in 2008 called Gajjar ka Halwa. I reprised that one as well and used coconut milk rather than dairy milk to make it vegan. My camera skills, plating kung fu, and general awesomeness have all since improved, as has the product:

This is one of my favorite desserts ever, and a clear example of how less is sometimes very very much more. That's about three tablespoons of halwa. If you think that ain't enough, there's enough sugar in that to cause a meth-head to tweak. It's got a nice cardamom flavor too, so it leaves your breath nice and fresh. Y'all gotta try it sometime.

Feelin Coconutty

2010-02-19T22:06:00.002-06:00

Well as my last blog post hinted, I got sick. Boo sickness >:(

Nothing bad, just a massive congestion, sore throat, fever thing that left me a zombie all day yesterday and most of today. The gripe of it is that most of my potluck curry I made was used instead to supplant meals where I was physically too out of it to even shamble into the kitchen and turn on a burner.

I did, however, drink tea. LOTS of tea. Rooibos, which is a lovely and mild red tea from South Africa, that tastes vaguely of honey and vanilla, and Assam, an Indian blend most often used for the ubiquitous masala chai that folks enjoy. Of course, no milk or cream in my tea because it ain't vegan. So what to do?

How about a half teaspoon of coconut cream?

Hell yes.

It rendered thoroughly and gave the tea a lovely color. The coconut went well with the Rooibos and VERY well with the Assam, giving an added layer of comfort to the whole thing.

Yes I'm sure that I could have also used soy milk, True. That said, soy milk's expensive and coconut milk is less so. Plus I have multiple cans of coconut milk, and soy milk is...a fifteen mile drive away at the nearest grocery store.

So it's no contest. Tastes better and it's convenient. Stir in a teaspoon of raw sugar and even more awesome.

Maybe tomorrow I'll have my skills back on and I can make some Rasam.

Vegan: Day One

2010-02-18T02:11:00.004-06:00

Gotta admit, I started my first day of vegan eating pretty lame. I had a salad. It wasn't even really a great one either. It was a nice cheap $2.50 salad of spinach greens and everything in the veggie bins I could get (minus mushroom slices because raw mushrooms suuuuuuuuck) I did this for several reasons though.

Reason one is that after my blockbuster Mardi Gras dinner, I was freakin spent and didn't make any vegan chow for the next day (aside from broccoli and lemon rice which was my breakfast, nom). I have lots of non-vegan leftovers, but they're forfeit to my wife as of now.

Reason two is that I kind of wanted to see for myself how easy you could find something vegan to eat without really planning and looking. The result, it's pretty tough. Aside from junking on oreos (yes y'all, they are vegan too), the salad was pretty much the only game in town if I wanted to get vegan eats. That's fine, I'm not planning on making it a habit, but it's nice to know that if I'm stuck at work and just cannot make anything myself, I can at least do that.

I packed fresh local fruit (CSA's crankin out apples and tangerines like a monster lately) but ate none of it because I was tweaking off french press dunkin doughnuts medium roast coffee. Got home and immediately went to work slamming down food for our work potluck.

Cranked out dozens of roti and a big pot of chana masala, all done up vegan (I usually use ghee for roti but that's easily subbed) I will probably never make that many roti at once again, or at least not at night. Took forever, geeez. Dinner was pretty much me playing the part of a starving bachelor. I pawed a hot roti, spooned curry into that, and ate it sort of the way a ravenous zombie would eat brains. By that time I was pretty hungry but one roti pretty much took care of it, and what that can't cure, Abita beer can.

One minor note, I think I'm getting sick LOL VEGAN IMMUNE SYSTEM, but seriously, work has been more or less a general plague area for months so if I do end up getting felled by something it's more a work of inevitability than anything. Still, the timing is humorous.

Farewell to the flesh, hello to the vegetable

2010-02-17T00:26:00.005-06:00

This is the end, my friends.

The end.

Fare thee well.

Au revoir. C'est la vie. Some other French cliché phrases to emphasize the gravity of the situation.

Mardi Gras, for most folks, rightfully should be about over-eating crawfish, gumbo, etouffee, king cake, jambalaya, and binging on Abita beer and hurricanes. It should be about beads, boobs, parades with names like Endymion and Bacchus, and, wondering what the hell did I just step in while drunkenly shambling in the vieux carre of New Orleans. Something dark and joyous and terrifying and mystic grips my soul around this time of year, and while I haven't been to the city I love since 2005 (cue sad violin), I get filled with a wonderful nostalgia every time January turns to February.

Most people aren't even aware when the other shoe drops, and Fat Tuesday becomes Ash Wednesday, the first day of the Lentan fast. As I've mentioned on my blog earlier, I make it a point to observe Lent, and have done so for years. It's a challenge of will and spirit, and I find it renewing to embrace what wonderful things you discover when you willingly do without things you otherwise take for granted.

But before all that jazz, I had to have my send-off. I'm not a regular steak-eating guy, so I figured it was a special enough occasion for filet mignon au poivre, which is a steak finished with a sauce of peppercorns, cream, and either cognac or brandy. To pair with something that delightfully unhealthy, my wife helped me make truffled and creamed yukon gold potatoes that we browned under the broiler.

For all the ruminations on how it's done, I saved my lazy ass some keystrokes and made videos for you that will hopefully drop a little science on the subject.

After all that, the best nightcap to the evening and the carnival season would be a king cake slice, served with the traditional pairing of Abita beer. Beer and King Cake, you say? Traditional? Madness! No I'm holding firm on this. During Carnival, ANYTHING goes with Abita beer. I've even considered pouring it over cereal.

Anyways, wish me the best of luck for the next 40. If it's anything like last year, I've got this no problem, but since my wife remains as carnivorous as ever, who is to say if I might face temptation.

Borscht and deglazing lessons

2010-02-07T23:13:00.004-06:00

Made borscht tonight and it turned out way, way better than the one I made around last year. My wife, who hated the one I did before, was very into this and she cleaned her bowl. The one I made previously was a kosher vegetarian one, whereas this one was Ukranian and neither kosher nor vegetarian (pork sausage and sour cream). I think the big difference is that I straight up pureed the beets though, which changes the whole experience completely.

If winter's got you in that weird russian mood I'm in, here's how you can make this. You'll need:

1 pound bratwurst, kielbasa, or other pork sausage, casing removed and chopped
2 quarts chicken stock
4 beets, peeled and chopped
4 red potatoes, peeled and chopped
1 onion, diced
1 red bell pepper, diced
2 carrots, diced
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 tablespoon of lemon juice
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1/2 teaspoon hot paprika
1 bay leaf
sour cream, for topping
dill, dried or fresh, for topping

Start by browning off your meat in a big pot or dutch oven. Once its browned, remove to a dish and put away. You should have some gunk on the bottom of your pan, which you can then deglaze to remove from the bottom. Since I'm a nice guy, I even put in a video segment on how-to deglazing. It's one of the nicer ways to up your skill and the flavor of whatever you make:

Add your butter and get the heat to near-high. Pop cumin seeds, then add your aromatics (onion, bell pepper, carrot) and salt. Drop the heat to low and cover for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Uncover, add your beets, maybe a cup of your stock, and thyme, and continue simmering for another 20 minutes. From here, dump all that jazz into your food processor and spin it up. Beets are jerks and they're very hard and need to be destroyed without mercy, so we'll let the heat do half the work and the blades to the rest. Make a puree out of that crap.

Return the puree to the pot, add the rest of your stock, paprika, pepper, sugar, lemon juice, and bay leaf. Add your potatoes. Bring up the temp to a near-boil, and back off to a simmer. Cover, and cook down for another 20 minutes. (yes it takes forever but its worth it in the end) When that's done, taste and adjust your seasoning. Add your sausage back to the pot and give it all a good stir.

You're ready to serve. Now, if you're just famished go ahead and eat it, but borscht is tricky. It's supposedly best the day after, and you can either eat it hot, or some swear it's better cold. I really like it either way. No matter, dollop some sour cream into it and add dill at the end. If you're fully embracing the russian spirit, blare some Red Army Choir and throw back shots of vodka. That's optional.

Sodas going retro

2010-02-05T14:16:00.002-06:00

I like an occasional soda now and then. It's a treat, as it should be. It's not a water substitute or anything you should be enjoying on a daily basis at all. That said, unless you're on the look-out for good small-batch sodas or maybe like to shop at latino grocery stores or ethnic markets like I do, you're usually going with something over-saturated with high fructose corn syrup instead of real sugar. While the health issues are pretty much the same with each, the corn syrup just doesn't taste right to me and never has.

So it's been sort of a nice change of pace to see a lot of companies starting to bottle throwbacks of American brands and put them on the market. Pepsi, Mountain Dew, and Dr. Pepper have done it, and I'm happy with each of them more or less. The taste is less sticky-sweet and you actually catch the flavor of the drink behind it without feeling all disgusted after having some.

It's a great start, as I said. What I'd like to see now are the return of 12 ounce glass bottles in general markets. Yes, you can go to the aforementioned latino grocers and ethnic markets and get an imported real sugar Coca Cola, and I do that every now and then. It's a shame that it's sort of tucked away as a little secret, because glass retains the cold so much nicer than plastic. Further, I'm sorry, but you can taste a difference with plastic. It's just a little off.

So, keep putting out real sugar soda. Let's get em in glass now. Maybe after that, reduce the portion size. Y'all remember eight ounce bottles? I sure do.

Eatin' Po'

2010-02-01T00:36:00.004-06:00

The biggest kvetch I get from folks (aside that I eat like a globe-trotting pinko) is that people think I spend a lot on certain things that they can't afford. Yes and no. I fully admit that sometimes it's awesome to grab that brass ring and spring for stuff like truffle oil, jamon iberico, roquefort, and other stuff that most folks don't fit into their grocery lists. But I also (increasingly so) try to go the other way, and eat cheaply. Finances have a way of doing that to you sometimes. Having a mortgage and a car payment sometimes means that when the weather is in the single digits for a month and your power bill rolls yahtzee on your ass, maybe you can't spread it on quite so thick.

Also my unique situation grants me access to seasonal vegetables that are delivered to my doorstep, but for certain things, I still have to schlep on down to the grocery store. Since I'm waaay out in the country, our closest store is still a good 20 minutes from me. Sometimes I just can't make the time, and it's good to save money and make do with what I've got on hand.

In the spirit of both frugality and laziness I put together a dish tonight consisting of four potatoes, a head of broccoli, a cup of yellow split lentils, two tablespoons of canola oil, a quart of water, salt, pepper, and some assorted south indian spices. Spices are becoming easier to buy in bulk, and so you can easily save a lot of money by doing so. Say you spend ten bucks on a bulk load of spices. You dole that out in increments of maybe a few cents per dish. The veggies I put in that dish probably set me back two dollars and the lentils maybe a quarter. The only other input I used is tamarind, which is getting easy to find in the ethnic aisle of most grocers, and a 12 ounce jar of it sets me back three bucks and lasts me nearly half a year. Two tablespoons or so go in the pot.

The result is a stew that feeds six people to the gills and costs maybe three dollars per iteration if that? Divide by six, and you're grubbing at 50 cents, and I guarantee this will fill you up and leave you happier about life than whatever's on a value menu. Thirty minutes is a round trip for me to the nearest fast food joint, or it's the time it takes for me to make this.

The biggest leap you've got to take is overhead at the beginning. If you're willing to put down a few bucks for the spices and stuff that will keep and last, you divvy up that cost big time as you keep making little meals.

Lent is three weeks away

2010-01-28T00:07:00.003-06:00

If you don't know from my earlier posted foray last year, I'm some sort of weirdo protestant who's been observing Lent for about 15 years. I won't get into the why's and the how's other than I think it's a good thing to challenge yourself to go without for forty days. Last year I kept to a strictly ovo-lacto vegetarian diet for the duration of Lent. That was pretty easy, and the hardest thing for me to do without was anchovies of all things.

This time, it'll be harder. I'm going fully vegan.

No meat, no dairy, no eggs, no honey, no derivative stuff like gelatin, none of that stuff. I wouldn't undertake it if I didn't think it was possible, but I admit it's going to be a wild ride. Those who've known me for years know I used to be the pickiest of eaters and could barely be bribed to eat veggies on my plate. What a difference a few years make.

Fortunately, my friend Dino has added his metaphorical axe to my quest, so I'm sure that if I ever get pushed against my own personal dinner rush without any ideas left, I've got a lifeline. I doubt it'll be down to that wire, but who can say.

Part of me is also interested in this because I'm keen on veganism not for any moral or ethical reason, but because I see it as a kissing cousin of sorts to kosher and halal cuisine, which is to say that it can be a cuisine that defines itself, diversifies itself, and creates its own world based on its limits. People hear vegan and they think vacu-formed tofu "meat" and garbage like that, and I'd like to make a lot of honest food that's vegan and tastes delicious without putting on pretense.

So for now, I'll be having an extended farewell to the flesh.

Because while my chana masala is vegan, that nice little slice of naan next to it ain't. Bummer!

Happy 2010, belated

2010-01-06T01:35:00.004-06:00

Hey y'all.

Glad you're still reading my blog. As of now we're less than a week into 2010 so I hope y'all had some of this:

Followed at some point by some of this:

(and if y'all don't know about greens & the new year, you gotta eat 'em to make sure you bring in the $$$ this year. serious business in the south btw)

I hope everyone had a great new year and a great Christmas / Channukah / Kwanzaa / Eid, etc. My new year's resolution is to pick up the pace that I once maintained here, and to keep this place updated with fresh new articles. Even if I can't cook or snap a picture, I'll do my best.

So how's 2010 been so far? Here's a pictorial review.

This monster entered my kitchen. A fantastic gift from mom and dad, this is the steam driver to John Henry's hammer. I still like to hand-knead, but man this helps immensely when I'm too busy to bother. I hear I can do other things with it besides making bread (ie, grinding meat, making pasta, churning butter from heavy cream to name a few) but I haven't been bothered to do any of those things...yet.

Sometimes, with work and arranging furniture or whatever mad whim we're on, I'm just too tired to cook. Bless the KitchenAid for making the act of baking sandwich loaf a trivial issue. If you've got that, it's second nature to make a sandwich in about five minutes. Nevermind that I'm eating a decidedly non-kosher sandwich with a Jewish beer. I atoned for this...

...with bagels like a true mensch should.

We rang in the new year with a dinner of alligator gumbo, paired with a local Alabama pinot grigio. The pinot wasn't the best local wine I've had so far. For that, y'all better go to Morgan Creek. They love their muscadines.

And I tried my hand at chicken wings for the first time. Never been a fan of buffalo wings, so the sauce is inspired from South African cooking, using periperi chili, and a lot of lemon juice, butter, honey, ginger, and garlic.

Anyways, hope this is a sign of things to come. Looking forward to keeping y'all updated on all sorts.

Hanger steak and why you should eat it.

2009-12-16T01:55:00.002-06:00

1. It owns. Texture, appearance, all of it. It's just awesome. It's got little texturey stripes running across it, with the occasional stripe of fat. While fairly lean, the fat comes out nicely in it, so you aren't eating amorphous blobs of blubber in between bites. The whole thing seems to look fairly like a meat xylophone. The unique way the grains cleave lends this thing extremely well to things like a good Italian steak and arugula salad, and even a carne asada taco. It cut cut cuts into nice little strips.

2. It's a sensible portion. This is very important. Y'all are probably eating way, way more meat than is recommended in a portion. This leads to over-eating, valuing quantity over quality, props up immoral factory farming agro-empires, and also leads to you being broke when you chuck down ten bucks for a single massive slab of over-fattened, corn-fed, and antibiotics-injected Barry Bonds cow. Make a fist. Hold it in front of your face. This is roughly the size of a serving of meat. Fortunately, hanger steaks come in these nice little strips, which weigh in much more respectably than a sixteen-ounce beef stonehenge.

3. It is cheap. Let me break it down for you. We last made some steak au poivre using a pair of hanger steaks, giving enough food for two folks easily. The cost for the steaks? Five bucks, altogether. For the quality of cut, you can't find better value out there, especially since there's an entire cabal of picky boring people out there who can only pronounce sirloin, ribeye, and t-bone.

4. It's a cut made popular as the one that butchers would reserve for themselves when they took a carcass apart. If you need any better indicator that it's a good cut, that's a winner.

5. It's diaphragm. Eeeeeeewwwww!!! Impress/amaze/disgust your friends. Serve fava beans and chianti and go FTHFTHFTHP. It's not offal, but it's a good bridge between organs and meat, and I'm always a fan of whatever gateway drug gets people into eating livers, chitlins, sweetbreads, etc. They're awesome and nutritious, and not only do they taste great but you have fun eating them. Think about watching animal planet, and seeing lions on the serengeti take down a zebra. You think the lions go for the sirloin first? Hell no, they zip open that belly and get whatever is squishy. Connect with your inner predator today, and you might find new things you enjoy.

So I hope I've helped to sell you on your next red meat purchasing decision.

Thanksgiving.

2009-12-15T01:55:00.003-06:00

Yep, it's overdue. Badly. I realize this, and am genuinely sorry. I've been a bad blogger and will endeavor to keep up with the Joneses, so I'll start by recounting my very first Thanksgiving in My New Home.

It began and ended with a turkey, and why not? It's a thanksgiving story.

I started getting notions of turkey day grandeur when I found out that Grow Alabama was taking reservations for buying free range turkeys from them. Now, I'm at least some part vestigial country boy, and the sort of guy who appreciates what wild turkey has and what butterball does not. So when I had a shot at a decent turkey, I latched on. I told the wife, and the rest of the family. We eventually conspired to do the big grub at our new house. Fun!

Hol' up! I have to work on they day before Thanksgiving, and worst off, I work pretty late, getting off at 8:00. To make it more scary, due to other-family issues, we penciled in the meal for lunch. At 1:30 PM. Aaaagh. I had very little time to belt out a lot of food. Fortunately, we all chipped in and made different things. Mom made cornbread, my late-grandmother's famous ugly chocolate cake, green bean casserole, and brought a few little nibbles. My sister made my late grandmother's turkey dressing (hint yankee people, this is southern for stuffing) and a tasty southwestern corn dip thing.

That left me with just a few things. Pumpkin pie with a ginger snap crust & maple whipped cream, french baguettes, mustard greens, country potatoes*, and of course, the turkey, full of yankee stuffing*.

The asterisks denote parts of the process that I nearly drop-kicked my carpetbagging wife from my back deck. She insisted on mashed potatoes with the skins on. Now, in my vernacular, these are country potatoes, lumpy and crudely mashed taters with hunks of skin, and they suck. I was mad that I was making crappy potatoes. I made her crappy potatoes, only to find out that she was wanting something entirely different. She wanted milled, creamed, silky mashed potatoes that are all that is good and just in the free world, only with the skins incorporated into them. I still think it's goofy and that you should just go ahead and peel them, but it was a lot better after a clarification. After we sussed out our creative difference, the potatoes tasted wonderful.

Next came yankee stuffing. She insisted we had to make stuffing, yankee style. Every time I've had this, it's been hot garbage, dry and cakey with too much breadcrumbs and celery and too little anything else. I was mad at the world until she gave me her mom's recipe, which had a cornbread base. Okay, it's only slightly heathen-ey, but cornbread is good grub, so that's fine. It actually tasted good, so I'll admit I'm wrong on that.

This is a segueway from the main gist of the story. You see, I had a turkey to emergency thaw, and a bazillion other things to make, and on the day before thanksgiving, the only thing I'd already taken care of was the pumpkin pie. I proceeded to don my cook's coat, load myself with enough caffeine and alcohol to make Johnny Cash sweat in church, and essentially turned into Tom Berringer in Platoon. Remember, "the machine breaks down, we break down."

I may not have machine-gunned Vietnamese civilians in a rice farming village, but I did the culinary equivalent of a few war crimes, all the while becoming an avatar of pure piss and vinegar. I cat-napped long enough to get angry at the world, woke up, stuffed the shit outta that turkey, and got it in the pan with just enough time (I calculated like Dr. Strangelove) to get a proper roast & rest in before people were ready to eat. Snipped rosemary, because rosemary owns in poultry, and that went in the mix. While the bird cooked, I thawed pre-made baguette dough and began to proof for baking, then turned to the punishment task of trimming greens for the pot. This brings me to an important rule, and one I cannot stress enough. Profanity is the best seasoning for food. My wife disagrees but she does not understand. Food does not taste as good unless you goad it, yell at is, and say things you'll regret later to it. My late grandmother was a Picasso of the art, and my childhood is a rose tinted paradise of waking up to grandma's house, smelling of bacon and sage sausage, and filled with the sounds of "SHIT HELL FIRE DAMN SON OF A BITCH!!" Nobody believes me, but I swear it wouldn't have been as good if she was nice in the kitchen.

I practiced the inherited art, albeit not with such grace or power as she had. Somehow, despite all opportunities I had to fall into the weeds and totally screw the pooch, I actually got my portions done, just about as the rest of the family came over. I was exhausted, feeling a residual angry beer run's effects, and kind of sweaty, wearing a dirty cook's coat, but it was done.

And it was all worth it. I felt such unreal sense of pride and togetherness bringing my family together at our table. Even now, it boggles my mind that my wife and I were able to pull it off. She helped to clean up after my messy self, and kept her head on straight when I was prone to hyperbole and drama. It's one of those great firsts that we get to enjoy as a new family coming together, and even though we were a trio of couples, we were all one big family. Fitting for a day of thanks, because when we finally gathered around the table, I had a moment to come down from all of the hype and to appreciate everything. Appreciate what I was raised with, what I was given, and what I have now. With all the sleep deprivation, craziness, and chaos, it was absolutely, overwhelmingly worth it, and I can't wait to do it again.

Waterblommetjiebredie

2009-10-20T01:07:00.003-05:00

I recently had some company over at my new house for a crazy nerd gathering. One of my friends has traveled damn-near across the globe, but she's originally from South Africa, and we often talk about one of my favorite subjects, which is South African food. I've dabbled in a few things in the past, like old favorites Bobotie as well as my favorite drunk food Bunny Chow. We collaborated on a few of her favorites like Periperi Chicken too. Prior to her visit, I had been browsing over a South African cookbook I bought a while back, and thinking of anything hard to find over here that I could ask for.

The first was Elephant Biltong, which not surprisingly, is near-impossible to get. I did get Springbok Biltong, which was awesome though. It's similar to venison jerky, but imagine a little clove, allspice, or garam masala on it. No real reason for this other than sating a round of post-drinking munchies.

The second thing on my list was Waterblommetjies.

I like typing the word, I like saying the word. Afrikaans is a hilariously awesome language. It translates into "water flower" which is a polite way of saying that it's something that long ago some Voorstrekker (ie, Ted Nugent or Jeremiah Johnson or Bill Brasky) spotted growing in a stagnant ditch full of water and decided it would taste delicious with his freshly-killed Springbok. All it would take would be a little stewing, and it just so happens that the word for stew in Afrikaans is bredie. Hence, waterblommetjiebredie.

Stuff you'll want:

2 1/2 pounds of roasting meat (ideally, lamb, mutton, or game, but I used beef short ribs to great effect too.
2 pounds waxy potatoes (ie, don't go makin no damn mashed potatoes son), diced
1 giganto onion (or, 2-3 smaller ones), diced
About 2 pounds of waterblommetjies (you can get em on Amazon if you can't hop on the dakadak to Pretoria)
1 granny smith apple, peeled and grated
1/2 cup of white wine
1/2 cup of water
3 or 4 cloves of garlic, minced
2 bay leaves
2 tbsp butter
2 tsp kosher salt
2 tsp nutmeg
2 tsp periperi (african bird's eye chili powder, again, Amazon) or cayenne pepper (at minimum you weenie. You want to add more, I know you do)
1 tsp black pepper

You'll want your dutch oven for this. Crank up the stovetop to about medium-high heat. While you're doing this, towel off your short ribs and rub them down with a bit of salt. Start to brown them on each side. All we want is the look and the smell really. They'll get cooked fully later.

Once each piece is browned all over, remove from heat.

In the juices left in the dutch oven, add your butter and then your onions & salt, and turn the heat down to low. Cover and sweat those for a good 20 minutes, then return your meat to the fray.

Add the water & wine. Put your lid on, preheat your oven to 350, slap it in there for 2 hours, and forget it exists till your time's up. Remove again to the stovetop. Your meat should be getting tender enough to come apart a bit, and you can shred it with your spatula or spoon as you go.

My picture of the stupid shredded apple survived, but not my picture of the waterblommetjies themselves. They look somewhere between swamp thing and a leopard, and smell like a wonderful cross between good olives and asparagus.

Thanks, Google image search! Mine looked pretty much like that, yeah!

Too bad I didn't get a snap, because after that, I tossed the apple, potato, and waterblommetjies into the melange.

To this hearty mash, I added my nutmeg, pepper, bay leaves, and periperi. I tasted it, and added more periperi still. When my particular heat affinity was reached, I simmered for another 30 minutes with the cover on, killed the heat, then tossed in my raw garlic at the end.

I topped the "stew" over another Afrikaner dish - funeral rice, which is basically a pot of rice fried into some butter, turmeric, cinnamon, onions, shredded carrot, and raisins.

What I love about South African food is that it's completely unsophisticated stuff that seems very familiar to any of us who have or had a grandmother who liked to cook. So much of it is old timey and homey, but it's also coupled with a few exotic flavors to remind you that you're eating something just a little different.

Skin

2009-10-04T22:16:00.004-05:00

So, I've procrastinated this long enough. Time to roll up my sleeves and get back to blogging. Yes, I'm still in the long process of settling after the move. No, I'm not done yet. I'm having camera issues in the interim, so if I do get some snaps off, they will be of dubious quality, be warned. I just can't neglect this any more, and I love sharing the work I'm doing, even if I don't have pictures at hand.

My mom, dad, and sis came out to the house this weekend, which was a treat. I got to cook for everyone, and mom helped out as my sous-chef fry lady. We rocked out a never-ending stack of ruffle-cut kettle chips & fried okra fingers (with homemade remoulade, because I love making it). We also had a bit of black-eyed peas, which mom also helped with, and some trout I bought from Grow Alabama.

This is where the story is funny. See, I knew my trout was whole, and I figured it would be a snap to fillet it out. Well, not quite. I'm not at that level of awesome quite yet unfortunately. Instead of fillets though, I decided to stuff the trout with herbs, squash, and shallots and pouch steam them with some brown butter. There was just one catch - I underestimated my sister's aversion to icky fish skin! Now, if you don't like the stuff you can easily peel it away so that's not a problem. Still, it got me thinking.

We're living in a boneless, skinless dystopia, and in a world where people put bacon on all sorts of inappropriate dishes, how are people still hesitant about eating fish skin and chicken skin? It's connective tissue, salt, and fat. It comes together to not only form a deliciously crunchy layer on pan-seared and roasted dishes, but it also holds in moisture. People opt for skinless meat, realize they're often eating dry meat, and overcompensate with sauces and marinades. I would shrug it off if so many of them weren't looking down their nose at skin and the added fat in it, when their sauce is often loaded with the stuff.

This isn't in any way a slight to my sister. She thought what I thought the first time I was confronted by skin on a fish. (1) Ew gross and (2) How do I get it off. All I'm hoping for is that more people give skin a chance, and pack their bags to Flavor Country.

I'm still alive, take two

2009-09-12T10:14:00.002-05:00

Hi guys, sorry it's been damn-near a month without any updates. Moving's complete and we're just in that never-ending task of unpacking and getting things just right. The good news is that I've got my dining room set put in and I'll be expecting my pots and pans rack soon.

I've been very busy with other things too. Having a lot of company over to enjoy Dragon Con, plus hosting a lot of hungry nerds at my new abode. Everybody seemed to love tacos de lengua and hommous. Today, a friend of mine from Hawaii but originally South Africa will be schooling me on Afrikaner cuisine. If you read my blog at all, you know that this is going to be awesome. Expect Peri Peri chicken, Waterblommejiebredie, Bunny Chow, and other things shortly.

Bye for now!

I'm still alive

2009-08-15T14:51:00.003-05:00

...just moving, is all. We closed on our house yesterday and this weekend is a mad and exhaustive dash toward getting things into and eventually out of boxes. I'm going to be a little beside myself for a while so bear with me.

I promise to resume your regularly scheduled programming (and with a bigger, nicer, gas-powered kitchen) in the very near future!

Mandolines are the bees knees. Also, red bells!

2009-08-04T22:04:00.004-05:00

I really don't have much going on right now, and I'm pretty hand-to-mouth with my cooking while we prepare to close on our house. I've had to divide my kitchen into sections that I can pack away and things that I will subsist on until we pack everything else.

That's beside the point though. I want to talk about my mandoline, and why it rules. I have about five hundred pounds of squash thanks to the CSA, my wife's friends, my grandpa, and anybody else who's given me very tasty and seasonal squash. I'm sort of at a loss on what to make with all of this great squash, and then I remembered I had a mandoline, so I set out to make gratin out of a few squashes.

For those who don't know, a mandoline is an inclined plane with a super sharp guillotine blade on it. You vary the thickness between one side of the plane and the blade side by fractions of an inch to get very thin slices of food very very very fast by just sliding your food item along the plane back and forth. I wasn't quite prepared for how awesome it was at slicing the hell out of squash, and I think I blacked out during the process because when I came to I was less three goose-neck squashes and there was a huge mound of potato chip thickness squash slices. Oops!

Of course, I used up every bit of it to make a gratin with asiago cheese, rosemary, and breadcrumbs. Tasted so nice I made it twice, even.

Now, what's that scorchy-lookin red bell pepper doing in this picture? Glad you asked (if you did!) Remember way back when I planted peppers? Well, my red bells matured last week, and I finally got to trim 'em and use 'em. I was excited because in my opinion its my first real bit of produce that I've grown. I don't really consider the hot peppers and herbs as the same because they're more of flavor additives. A big juicy sweet red bell is it's own zip code of importance. I wanted to have fun with it.

I made a risotto, using grease from cooking lardons to soften the onion. To that I added rosemary & mozzarella, then returned the lardons to the dish to stir. I carefully cut the tops off the peppers, de-seeded them and removed the inner ribbing, then filled them to the top with risotto. Put each pepper in a ramekin, and into a 500 degree oven for 12 minutes to get this:

The sweet bell was fantastic against both the pork and the rosemary. It was softer in parts and firmer in parts, but still all fork tender and I'd honestly put that against any bell I've bought at the store in terms of how potent the flavor was. It was very serious business.

I just wish I had more bell peppers now. I'll have to plant more later.

Rosemary baked chicken, and I didn't make it.

2009-07-26T23:31:00.003-05:00

So we decided to have a late dinner the other day of roasted chicken with rosemary and some beans with lardons and herbs. I handled the beans, and my wife took care of the chicken. She cleaned it, she stuffed it, she baked, basted, the works. I gotta say, after roasting a few birds of my own, she's a better touch at it. It was tasty beyond words. The breast meat was still tender and moist, the skin was perfectly crackly, and rich fragrant rosemary and aromatics just filled every bite. So just as a word of warning, the next poultry served up as a roast is probably not my handiwork!

She also made peanut butter cookies this weekend but, alas, that is another tale to be told!

One year anniversary...and a little something extra

2009-07-26T23:09:00.004-05:00

Title says it all. My wife and I celebrated our first year of marriage tonight. Nothing big, nothing fancy. We didn't go out to eat or do a super-crazy multi-course meal. I told her I loved her, she told me she loved me, and we had a little meal. She, of course, got her lobster, which she insists on cooking herself. I made a meal of fresh figs, prosciutto di parma, spanish manchego cheese, and balsamic vinegar.

You might ask why the low key first anniversary? Well, we're both saving up like mad and getting ready to buy a house. In fact, we'll be closing on it within the next few weeks. That's one heck of an anniversary present to and from the both of us. I won't diverge from the scope of this blog though, and I'm sure you're already wondering what the kitchen is like. Here's an appetizer or two:

Oh yeah, the rest of the house is nice too ;-)

So, wish us luck. There's been a reason I haven't been blogging much lately after all! Hopefully the work will pay off and you'll be seeing pictures from a much larger, well-lit, and all around nicer venue in the very near future.

Remember kids: sodium alginate + calcium chloride = "caviar"

2009-07-15T18:43:00.002-05:00

So, as a really cool part of my chairman's award prize in the ICSA southern food contest, I got a baggie of a weird cream-colored powder called "sodium alginate" and another baggie of a grainy white stuff called "calcium chloride". Concerned that somebody maybe sent me drugs, a bomb, or terrible terrible poison, I mashed the internets for a minute or two, and suddenly realized what pure awesome I had received.

The two chemicals can be used to make foods with a texture almost exactly emulating caviar. I'm not a scientist, so don't grill me too hard on the science of it. You make a juice out of "something" and add a little of the sodium alginate to that to gel it up and make it a little thick. Then you put that in a syringe. In a water bath, you add calcium chlorate, then slowly drip in your juice mixture. The drops set immediately upon hitting water, and the reaction of the alginate and chloride start to create a skin that holds the liquid inside. You then let it sit for a good 30-60 seconds, fish out the pearls of caviar with a skimmer, and immerse in another water bath to stop the chemical reaction.

The power and potential for this stuff is huge. Vegan caviar with truffle oil would be pure evil, but I'm wanting to get a can of concentrate orange juice to make fruit caviar, top that on a cloud of whipped cream, and put that on a vanilla cookie or something to make a weird dreamsicle flavored thing.

Tacos de Lengua

2009-07-14T01:49:00.003-05:00

I've got a thing for tacos, you see.

No, not Taco Bell. Mind you, it's a fantastic inebriation stop-gap or hangover cure, but it's marginally food. A giant curved yellow tortilla chip, loose hamburger meat mixed with MSG and "tomato flavor" with bland lettuce and plastic cheese. What can you expect for a few cents at a place that's considered bargain basement by the American Tex Mex industry, I guess.

No, not that sort of taco. Not even a good Tex Mex taco. You see, I just refuse to believe Tex Mex as a genre has any business making them. Burritos? Enchiladas? Tex Mex does these well, and I love em. Tacos are just one of those things that are best done with a more Mexican flair.

Tacos should be greasy, hotter than hell fire, and full of bracing flavors. Lettuce BAD. Cilantro GOOD. Cheese BAD. Guacamole GOOD. Refried beans BAD. Raw onions or radishes GOOD.

It's just a different style, and I realize people do like Tex Mex tacos. I'm just not that guy.

I left for work today, but before I went out the door, I switched my crock pot on and dropped in a big beef tongue, and cracked open a can of chipotle peppers and adobo sauce. Set those to a low braise while I went off to work. There it remained for eight hours until my wife came home to baby-sit it. I came home with groceries a while later. The beef tongue has a membrane on the outside of it, so we removed that and shredded the meat. I then chopped a few cow-horn chilis from my garden to toss in there too. Took some corn tortillas, charred them slightly on the cast iron skillet, then ladled the meat and chipotle mixture onto each tortilla. Chopped cilantro, a little onion, and sliced up a lime, and food was created.

Beef tongue is really great stuff, if you're adventurous enough to try offal. It braises like pork, which is to say that you have beautifully delicate meat that shreds easily, but the flavor is still robust and beefy like a good roast. The smoke in the chipotle and adobo pairs to that very well, and even strong flavors like cilantro and raw onion don't crowd it out. The acid in the lime cuts the greasiness a bit, which is good.

I gotta admit that I was breathing fire during this. Nose running, big smile on my face, with adobo sauce dripping off my chin. The only thing I could've used was a cerveza, or maybe a glass of cool coconut water or agave juice. As it stands I had a big bottle of water, and I drank it all.

Definitely give this one a try, especially if all you have to define a taco is what you've seen on the Late Night menu.

Beer reviews, round two

2009-07-13T00:18:00.005-05:00

Hey guys, sorry its been a while. Was going to try and make the beer review thing a bi-weekly thing, but I just don't drink enough beer for that, lol. Still, figure we should have some beer reviews, whenever I get around to drinking some, that is!

Samuel Smith's Imperial Stout:

Poured from 12 ounce bottle into pint glass

Appearance: Opaque Ebony with thick tan head over 1". Head recedes quickly with little to no lacing on the glass.

Smell: Dark chocolate, tea, small scent of tropical fruit.

Taste: deeply toasty malt, butterscotch, cola, and a little coffee. Finishes with acidity.

Mouthfeel: Medium-heavy, carbonation very weak.

Smells great, but the taste is kind of unremarkable. For the money, there are better Imperial Stouts available to be had. It would go well with something with dark chocolate. For some reason, I seemed to like this more at Brewfest, but when I settled down and took a whole glass slowly, it didn't really shine through :(

Sam Adams Blackberry Witbier:

Poured from 12 ounce bottle into pint glass:

Appearance: Cloudy amber. Head a creamy white, 1". Receded with no lacing.

Smell: Blackberries all over the place. There's nothing else at all.

Taste: Berries immediately, melting into a nondescript malt, petering off after swallowing.

Mouthfeel: Light weight, light carbonation. Pretty average Hefeweizen feel.

I really am not impressed by this. It comes on way too strong with blackberries, and there's nothing else expressed in the character. Even then, you'd think they'd be kind enough to finish astringent or with some acidity or both. Blackberries do that, so why not this beer? Instead, it sort of loses its flavor after the swallow, almost like the taste going out of a piece of gum. Avoid this beer, it's not good. If you're gung ho for a fruit essence beer, you can do a lot better.

Duvel Belgian Ale:

Poured from 11.2 ounce bottle into pint glass:

Appearance: Very pale blonde color and clear. Beautiful bubbles constantly rise throughout. Head is over 1.5", creamy and frothy white. The head recedes gently, leaving heavy lacing on the glass.

Smell: Champagne grapes and alcohol esters

Taste: Dry champagne immediately on hitting the tongue, then releases a bouquet of perfumed, but not obnoxious hops. Hints of apple and buttery malts upon swallowing, but cleaned up immediately by the hops, leaving a completely cleansed palate.

Mouthfeel: This is where Duvel leaves most beers in the dust. It completely transforms upon hitting your tongue, to the point where you're not sure which part is liquid and which part is foamy deliciousness. So much of the flavor develops in the rich carbonation that you really should drink it in a glass that's good at preserving those bubbles. Once they're depleted, the mouthfeel, and therefore, the taste change. The way that the liquid transmutes into airy foam also has a way of deceiving your tongue into thinking it's a vastly lighter beer than it is. One of the best mouthfeel experiences I've had.

It's a good clean, dry beer with outstanding carbonation and very light weight. I'd be partial to having this with some delicate seafood or anything with simple and seasonal vegetables. To give it a wine analog, I'd think that anything you could drink an Alsacian Riesling with, you could also drink with Duvel. Fantastic beer.

He'Brew Messiah Bold American Brown Ale:

Poured from 12 ounce bottle into pint glass:

Appearance: Opaque dark chocolate body. Head about 1", almond colored. Recedes quickly with little lace.

Smell: A little cherry, vanilla, cola, and oak. Overall muted.

Taste: Deep toastiness, chestnuts, oak. Hops roll to the back of the tongue and it finishes bitter, with some lingering aftertaste.

Mouthfeel: Medium body, light carbonation. Pretty average compared to other brown ales.

It's a bit earthier than average brown ales, and really doesn't express much caramel or malt, letting the hops at the end do the talking. If you're looking for a really well-made brown it's probably not it, but it's not disagreeable either, and is easily drinkable. I'd pair it with maybe some roast beef or sausage, something with a bit of heft to it. Would do alright with barbecue, and let the hops clean up any sweetness in the sauce.

Tommyknocker Imperial Nut Brown Ale:

Poured from 12 ounce bottle into pint glass:

Appearance: Nearly opaque, deep chocolate body. Head over 1", well tanned. Heavy lacing retained on the glass as it slowly recedes.

Smell: Butter, a little woodsmoke, cherries, some esters

Taste: Starts toasty initially with good nutty flavor, then becomes incredibly rich, with butter and maple taste coming through and dominating the malt. No presence of hops, just persistent richness. Finishes as it begins on toasted malts, with a lingering crusty bread taste on the tongue. Doesn't fully get rid of the sweet maple, and it mingles and gets a little cloying, with a little acidity.

Mouthfeel: Gentle carbonation, milky weight. Sticks to the tongue after swallowing. Typical of the style to a large degree.

It's completely lacking in subtlety so it's probably not the brown ale you pick if you want a magic carpet ride. Still I can't help liking it. It's heavy handed, juvenile, boistrous, and delicious. I'd totally want this with dessert. A pecan pie ala mode or maybe ice cream with dulce de leche, see where I'm going? The coup de grace would be flapjacks, but that's obvious when you taste it and it feels like you're kissing Mrs. Butterworth. If you want a better crafted brown, Lazy Magnolia's Southern Pecan or Rogue's Hazelnut Brown Nectar are better quality, but for some reason this is just as fun.

Anchor Breweries Old Foghorn Barleywine Ale:

Poured from 12 ounce bottle into pint glass:

Appearance: Deep ruby, translucent body. Head over 1", creamy, off white. Receded gradually with very slight lace.

Smell: Fragrant hops, oak, alcohol esters, orange zest

Taste: Citrus fruits at first, scented with coriander and lavender. Hops are persistent from beginning to end, very fragrant, but never dominating. Doesn't quite end clean, acidity lingers a little after swallowing.

Mouthfeel: Gentle carbonation, and a little more heft than the light flavors would suggest.

First barley wine I've had, and if this is typical of them, I hope I have more! Hops complement the citrus, which is tough for some beers to do. Hops either come up way too strong in most, or are dull and get washed out. There's no bumps on the road, so you get to enjoy both of them. I'd love to grill up some fish like maybe salmon and have it with this one. I bet a good baked chicken or turkey with some fresh green beans or spring veggies would be great.

Ayinger Celebrator Doppelbock:

Poured from 11.2 ounce bottle into pint glass:

Appearance: Nearly opaque mahogany with a nearly 2" head of chestnut foam. Receded gradually with almost no lace.

Smell: Cocoa, cherries, tobacco

Taste: Very rich toasted malts, creamy chocolate sweetness. Finishes with a wash of smoky flavor and lingers a while on the tongue.

Mouthfeel: Rich and milky. Carbonation is very gentle and doesn't disrupt the comforting flavor.

Certainly the best bock I've tasted so far. It's a very rich and filling beer, but one that's easy to please. If you could make room for it, it would probably pair a bowl of chili or even gumbo and taste fantastic.

Hommous

2009-07-05T18:33:00.003-05:00

We went to our little July 4 shindig this weekend, and among a few other things my wife and I brought was a big bowl of hommous. Everyone in attendance enjoyed it, and I'm glad they did. What kind of dismayed me is that there's a mystery to hommous at all. There really shouldn't be.

Hommous is just a blend of chicpeas and a liquid, with things added for salt, savory, acidity, etc to your liking. You can make it as simple or complicated as you want it to be, but the generic stuff is really simple. Making a batch to serve four hungry mouths is as easy as:

1 14 ounce can of cooked chicpeas (with liquid*)
2 cloves garlic
2 tbsp tahini (sesame seed paste, available in most grocery stores now)
1 tsp kosher salt
1/2 juiced lemon or lime
1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil (for topping)
1/2 tsp hot paprika (for topping)

That's about it for generic hommous. You combine everything except the oil and paprika in a food processor, pulverize the hell out of it for about five minutes, pour into a bowl (and get to lick the food processor bowl!) and top with oil and paprika. Refrigeration is optional before serving, but I like mine cold.

That's it. Takes less than ten minutes, so it's one of the laziest food items you can crank out. It's perfect for when you're having company on short notice.

Now, I do take a few liberties with mine that you may or may not include. I add an extra garlic clove to satisfy my rapacious half-Sicilian counterpart, as well as a half teaspoon of cayenne pepper because I have a dependence on at least a little spiciness. Instead of generic kosher salt, I'll use smoked salts like a hickory salt, and instead of the lemon or lime juice, I'll use a half teaspoon of citric acid granules. Don't worry about either if you can't find them because they're not essential at all. Smoked salts do just what you'd imagine, they impart a little smoky flavor into your food. Citric acid is essentially the "sour salt" on some candies you find. It's the crystalized acidic stuff from citrus fruits. Great for when you want to pucker your food up, but don't want it to taste like a lemon or a lime, and don't want to add more liquid.

Some people have a huge problem using the "bean water" in a can of chicpeas or whatever. The old aspersion is that the stuff makes you fart. I've conducted rigorous scientific experiments involving wind tunnels and coal mine canaries and this is inconclusive. In my gastronomic opinion its not true, and using the bean water improves the flavor, but if you're fearful of becoming a fanny flute and don't have any beano handy, just rinse the chicpeas, return them to the can, and top the can off with water and use that.

Some people also like to cut their hommous with olive oil when in the food processor. I think it's completely unnecessary but if you want to enrich yours beyond the pale then try it a little at a time.

The paprika and olive oil on top are likewise just tradition. You can cut the oil out entirely and you'll still have a tasty dish, and the paprika can be substituted with all manner of things. Some of my favorite toppings are pine nuts, olives, roasted red peppers, dill, roasted pecans, pickles, pepperoncini, etc. The topping is a good opportunity to tie the hommous into whatever flavors you have going for the rest of your meal, so go wild with that.

I used to buy hommous from restaurants and grocery stores. I mean, the Sabra brand stuff that's ever-present these days IS really tasty hommous, but look at what you pay for the stuff. Now, turn around and look how cheap it is to make your own. A can of chicpeas is about 75 cents. You use scant garlic, oil, salt, etc. A lemon is a few cents. If you go the route of using citric acid, you can buy a jar for five dollars that will be more than enough to make hommous for the rest of your life. With tahini, you make a seven dollar investment for a jar that will make a dozen batches, if not many more.

So let's err on the high side and say your hommous costs $2.00 per batch. That feeds four people. A dish of Sabra costs about twice that, and feeds half the number of people. You're out a total of two bucks and ten minutes of your time.

CSA delivery two and other veggie ramblings.

2009-07-02T23:53:00.004-05:00

Thursday's back again, and I got a huge shipment of CSA produce from Grow Alabama once more. Loads of squash, pole beans, bell peppers, another titanic head of napa cabbage, some nice big tomatoes, a big bag of new potatoes, and a double batch of Chilton county peaches. On top of that, my wife's friends gave us a two bags filled with some pretty squashes and cucumbers. I came home with everything put away, and my better half asleep on the couch. She's an angel :-)

Along with my CSA shipment, I tacked on some extra chevre goat cheese and yellow polenta, Not sure where the chevre's from, but the polenta's from Wilsonville, just a hop skip and jump down the way.

My mission this week is to make egg rolls, and also to think of every possible way I can eat and enjoy squash.

On other news, figs should be coming into season any day now in Alabama. When they do, I gotta act fast. Like strawberries, they survive at their best for maybe a day. Fragile, but worth it.

"Why don't you cook for a living???"

2009-06-26T11:41:00.004-05:00

Invariably, I get asked this question by a lot of my friends and family. It's a completely understandable question to ask. In our modern age when being a cook is less about being the humble abode for rejects and society's dregs and more about some weird pseudo-art pseudo-celebrity thing that I don't quite understand, people generally see becoming a cook for a living as being a good pursuit to have. Fair to say, I'm sure it's great for people who choose it, but I never will.

This is the part where you're probably asking "why?" so here's the why:

Cooking is art. I'm standing behind that completely. Not in some snobby, exclusive haute cuisine way necessarily, but in a way where somebody makes an expression of themselves, whether it's their own history and roots, their own beliefs and ideals, and the broad canvas of imagination, and then sacrifice it on an altar that is somebody else's plate, vulnerable to praise and critique, or even indifference. It's the only art form that stimulates all five of your senses, and it's artwork that is fleeting, sometimes only able to exist in it's perfect state for minutes, maybe even seconds. Because it draws so heavily on creativity, it taps the muse, and it takes a lot of inspiration to continue to make something that you take enough pride in to present to another person.

With that said, cooking is also a service job. In a comical paradox you're taking something that is such an intimate medium of expression and also asking it to be a means of grinding out sustenance to whoever comes through your door and puts down folding cash. While I think there's some degree of give and take that must exist in any place that makes a living out of cooking, I don't think either side can adequately be satisfied. You truly can't serve two masters.

If somebody comes to a museum to see a painting, they're all viewing the same painting. If somebody comes into a restaurant and points to the same thing on the menu, they each get technically the same meal, just made dozens of times over, one of which just happens to get served to them. That's when people get all Catherine de Medici and start treating their cooks like a harried artisan.

Look, I've got no problem with respecting your weird food preferences if I like you. I've got lots of friends and family who all have some silly quirks about how they eat their food. Food is an expression of love, so why not pan fry plain pork tenderloin, or make those pancakes with peanut butter if I enjoy your company? I may not eat that crap, but maybe my wife does, or my dad, or my best friend. Come to my house and I'll feed you. I would hope that you'd take my roasted spanish pimiento hommous before eating a crustless PB&J, but if you're good people, you're good people.

It's when we're talking about a professional environment that I bristle. I don't know these people, I don't have any experience with them. I'm making items on a menu not to individual expressions of affection, but purely as an aesthetic representation of my own creativity. In that regard, it is caveat emptor, or let the buyer beware. If you're not not noshing at McDonalds or Applebees, or as Anthony Bourdain lovingly calls the collective mass of soulless slop-slingers "TGIMcFunster's", you know that you're going to eat something that isn't just portions of salt, fat, and sugar with other ingredients*.

So when I hear of people going to a decent restaurant, ordering something, then sending it back because "the vegetables are touching" or "I don't want any sauce on my mass of carbohydrates" or "I'm not a celiac but I'd better not have one molecule of wheat gluten in anything because Oprah told me that avoiding gluten would align my chakra points and I'd become a Super Saiyan" it makes me want to slap them in the face. It doesn't even have to be food that I made. If I hear somebody I'm with, or adjacent to doing this, it makes me furious. I may not say anything in public due to decorum, but you'd better believe that my inner monologue is calling you a jackass as hard as it possibly can.

You've got a menu in your hand. It says what the dish is. It says what's in the dish. If you read-ey no english-ey, maybe you speak-ey it, and your very knowledgable waiter can answer questions. "What is sous vide?" "Is Steak Tartare really raw hamburger meat??" "I'm allergic to rabbit turds, will this kill me?" Unless you're a cheap bastard you are tipping your wait staff, so here's a great way to let them earn their money. ASK QUESTIONS if you're such a picky ninny. If you don't like the answers? Eat somewhere else. You're not going to be happy if you do, and the cook won't be able to make something to at his or her best.

How could I expect to cook food that I can pridefully stand behind as a professional and yet suffer these indignations? Quite frankly, I can't, and I won't. That's precisely why I will never subject myself to playing that game. The only way I'd ever open a proprietorship to cook in is if I won the lottery and could afford to run a business that lost money hand over fist, just because it gave me an outlet to cook for fun. In that case, I'd hang a large banner inside in plain sight of the clientele:

"If our food does not meet with your discerning tastes, your own damn kitchen is thataway!"

Onion Soup

2009-06-23T23:30:00.004-05:00

Sometimes, the simplest things to make taste the best. Onion soup, of the style made famous in the Les Halles market of 19th century France is one of those things. An onion, sweated for an hour or two until its a carmelized mush, deglazed with a dollop of sherry, then beef stock and a little pepper. Cut a thick chunk of good bread, dry it to make a crouton, shave some aged Grüyere on top, then rest the cheesy crouton in the soup bowl, and put the entire thing under the broiler for a couple of minutes.

It's cheap, takes little effort to make, and it's pure bliss.

Ma La

2009-06-22T00:39:00.005-05:00

It's a term in Chinese, meaning "numbing". In food terms, it's the effect on your tongue when you eat a food with enough Szechwan peppercorns in it.

I've been looking for the little guys for a while. It was one of my many food geek projects that I sort of bury into a little composition book that I tote around. An idea here, an idea there. I may not be thinking about anything in particular but I'll just put it on paper, and maybe it'll turn up when I least expect it. It's a great little part of my creative process, because otherwise I just couldn't be bothered to keep up.

At any rate, I finally crossed it off my list a week ago during an extended shopping trip to Whole Foods in Birmingham. Just happened to remember it and be looking in the right place at the right time. Boom, Szechwan peppercorns. What did I do when I bought them? Immediately tore open the little safety seal and popped about five in my mouth and chewed. At first, a little lemony taste. Then...

Numbing really isn't quite what I'd call it. More like buzzing. The closest analogy I can think of is if you take a nine volt battery, and touch your tongue to both tips. The little bit of electricity going into your tongue gives it a weird buzzy feeling. It's completely surreal.

At any rate, I knew I wanted to use the peppercorns (they're actually not peppercorns at all, but little dried flower things) in something, but wasn't exactly sure. When I got my recent CSA shipment, I figured out what I wanted to do. I wanted to make fried rice.

Now, I've blogged about fried rice before. It's damn frustrating stuff. Yes, you can make rice and fry it with things, but if you've ever had fried rice done correctly, you'll know that it's really hard to replicate the experience yourself. Japanese fried rice is just about as tricky as nuclear fusion, and I've kind of put my aspirations on hold of getting it down correctly. Then again, I don't know if what I put together would be considered Chinese, either. Suffice to say I will consider it Mutt-a-nese, or in the spirit of my great nation's storied history of cultural assimilation, "American".

Here's what I used for my fried rice:

2 cups rice, uncooked (I like jasmine, any long grain white would be fine, save for maybe basmati)
4 cups water
oil for pan frying
sesame seeds (black and white or whatever)
1 pound pork tenderloin, cut into bite-sized pieces
2 eggs
1/4 cup honey
About 1/2 cup soy sauce
2 tbsp Sriracha or similar hot sauce
1 tbsp fish sauce (optional)
2 tsp red pepper flakes
1 tbsp szechwan peppercorns
1 tbsp sugar
1 tbsp ginger paste, or minced ginger
4 cloves garlic, crushed and finely minced
2 cups broccoli, roughly chopped
2 cups cabbage, chopped
1 cup pole beans, chopped
1 cup carrots, chopped

Begin by heating a tablespoon of oil in a sauce pot. Bring the heat nearly to high. Add some sesame seeds, then your rice. Stir it around. You want to get the oil evenly coated on all the rice grains. As they heat, they'll go from translucent to fully opaque white. I stop when I smell a little bit of toastiness from the rice. You can either add your water, bring to a boil, drop to low and cover for about 20 minutes, or do what I do and transfer it to a rice cooker and do it in there. Once cooked, take off heat, uncover, and let cool a little, fluffing periodically to release heat.

With that going, combine your pork, honey, and 1/4 cup of soy sauce. Oil a fry pan a bit and turn to medium high. Pour your pork into the pan, and let it cook. You want to keep it on the heat and let the water cook out of it. The cooking liquid will reduce, thicken, then finally turn to a syrup and start binding to the pork pieces. When the pan is starting to get dry, add your red chili flakes and szechwan peppercorns. When the pork looks crispy and dry, take it off the heat and reserve.

Oil a non-stick fry pan lightly, just to cover, and scramble a pair of eggs. Rather than scrambling first and pouring into the pan, crack the eggs directly into the pan, let them start to set for about 30 seconds, then smash them up. When done, take off heat and reserve.

Whisk together sugar, remaining soy, ginger, fish sauce, sriracha and garlic. Set aside.

Get a wok or at least a five quart saute pan. Add a couple of tablespoons of oil, and get it to nearly high heat. Drop in your carrots, cook about 5 minutes, then cabbage. Cook five minutes longer, then add pole beans for another five minutes, and at last your broccoli and eggs. Stir constantly, then add your rice, and your sugar/soy/ginger/etc mixture. You've got to move like your butt is on fire, or else your rice will be! Well maybe not on fire, but you might burn the rice or veg or both if you don't keep the contents of the pan in motion.

When you're nearly done, add the pork, toss thoroughly then immediately remove from the heat.

It's not really that photogenic, but it's more than a meal, that's for sure. Be warned, the ma la sensation isn't really for everybody. I love it, but other people don't care for it. My wife ate it, but said that she'd like it without the peppercorns next time. Either way, it's something you should try once, and even if you think its not for you, this fried rice is pretty solid for a mutt concoction.

Chill out

2009-06-21T21:48:00.003-05:00

Uggggghhhhh.....

...the sound of summer. YAY SUMMER'S HERE! UGGGGGHHHHH!

Seriously it is hotter than Satan's jockstrap in deepest Alabama. We've been vacillating between mid 90's to nearly 100's for days, and our rain decided to stop working. I've watered my garden twice each day since thursday, and the plants still look like they're begging for mercy. I'm stewing in sweat if I even think about going outside.

Right now, I only want to think about doing whatever I can to stay cool. With the first official day of summer now on the books, you should probably do the same. Get an ice cold beer or three. Margarita, ice cream, sweet tea, whatever takes the heat off.

It's also a great time for watermelon. Even when it's not at its coldest, it just has a cooling effect on me. I couldn't take the horrible heat today so I remembered my mom had given me a nice looking seedless melon. I hacked into a chunk of it and served it up.

I also remembered I had my pink block of himalayan salt in the freezer, so I sliced the melon and laid it all around the block. The salt sort of cured the melon and the salty flavor wicked into it a little bit. The faintest sprinkle of cayenne pepper on each slice for a bit of something different, and it was perfect. Salt hit your tongue first, then melted into cooling sweetness, with just a little spice as you swallowed. Since the melon was refrigerated and the salt was out of the freezer, the whole thing stayed COLD COLD COLD, which helped me to beat the heat.

First peppers being harvested

2009-06-20T02:19:00.003-05:00

My wife's been after me to cut a few of our bigger peppers loose this week, and I can't wait any longer. Some of these have gotten pretty big. We've got a massive amount that are still growing and not quite there yet, including cowhorn chilis, red bells, and habaneros, as well as plenty of the rest.

Here's the ones we cut today!

Two jalapenos that are utterly massive. Seriously, they're almost poblano sized. The long peppers are cayennes. The short peppers are serrano chilis. One of them is VERY ANGRY, lol.

Stay tuned for more spicy shenanigans.

Grow Alabama: The Motherlode Begins

2009-06-18T23:47:00.003-05:00

So, this is the week I am supposed to begin my CSA deliveries from Grow Alabama. The nice lady at the CSA told me that they would be able to deliver way out into my podunk neck of the woods, which was great. She wasn't sure whether that would come on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. That was fine by me, as long as they came period. Well Tuesday came and went, same for Wednesday. I was getting a little antsy coming home tonight, but I found a wonderful sight waiting for me in the kitchen:

What a haul! I'm glad I got this for bi-weekly because I'm not sure how the two of us would ever put away this many groceries in a single week. Some of the stuff we were looking for was in here, some wasn't. I was kind of sad to see they didn't have beets with the greens, but pleasantly surprised to have potatoes, bell peppers, and cucumbers. Here's the total haul:

HUGE head of Napa Cabbage
2 green Tomatoes
4 yellow onions
3 purple onions
3 green bell peppers
1 red bell pepper
4 cucumbers
5 yellow squash
Big pile of pole beans
10 new potatoes
3 massive heads of broccoli
5 Chilton County peaches

In short, a titanic sum of fruit and veg. Now the really fun part begins, which is to figure out how to creatively turn this stuff into chow. A lot of the stuff in here are things I don't usually cook with (squash and pole beans for one), so I'm excited to think outside of the box and to make it happen.

Beer Reviews for June 13th

2009-06-13T22:06:00.003-05:00

As I said in the BrewFest posting, I was going to try and review five or so beers a week and provide some perspective on them, with a focus on being able to plan on pairing a meal with beer. This week I'm starting this. I've got five beers up on the blocks for you. I would have seven, but two of them were high gravity selections I had at a bar, and I lost my crib notes for them! That just means I have to go try them again!

Here's what I've got this week:

Delirium Tremens
Delirium Nocturnum
Brooklyn Pilsner
Lazy Magnolia Southern Pecan
Dominion Oak Barrel Stout

Delirium Tremens - Belgian Strong Pale Ale:

Poured from 11.2 ounce bottle into pint glass

Appearance: Pale gold, clear. Head was lofty at two inches, but recedes gradually. Lacing is
moderate.

Smell: Champagne grapes, driftwood, alcohol esters

Taste: Crisp and sweet apple acidity with citrus zest immediately evaporating into oak finished with cinnamon. Finished with very subtle bitterness from hops.

Mouthfeel: Light in body. Carbonation is vigorous throughout, sharp on the tongue to keep with the crisp acid. Finishes mildly astringent, cleaning the palate completely.

It's such a light and inviting beer that it can deceive you, but it's very dynamic in flavors, switching from acid to bitter with the carbonation scrubbing your tongue. It's got a very similar taste to many Belgian ales of its type, but weighs a lot less and hits a little harder. I'd pair it with food that's a little rich and fattening to give the acid and carbonation room to shine. Maybe some seafood like clam chowder or diver scallops, but I'd also expect it with chicken & spring vegetables.

Delirium Nocturnum - Belgian Strong Dark Ale:

Poured from 11.2 ounce bottle into pint glass

Appearance: Ebony wood, opaque throughout. Head was cream colored, about an inch thick. Retreated relatively quickly with no lacing on the glass.

Smell: Strawberry up front, small amount of cocoa and oak

Taste: Berries up front, quickly ebbing into robust toasted bread. Some caramel and cola in the malt. Hops barely reveal themselves upon swallowing, and toast lingers on the tongue.

Mouthfeel: Carbonation is intense and persistent upon hitting the tongue, without being distracting from the flavor. Bubbles are small and gentle, but numerous. Weight is heavy without being too heavy. Finishes with an oiliness that accentuates the richness.

It's pretty stout with an 8.5% ABV, but not overbearing on the tongue at all. I would have this with any dish that I'd consider having with a brown ale, including beef dishes, stews, and deli sandwiches.

Brooklyn Breweries Pilsner - German Pilsner:

Poured from 12 ounce bottle into pint glass

Appearance: Straw colored, translucent. Head an easy 1" tall, snow white. Lacing heavy.

Smell: Hops-forward, some lemon zest and alcohol esters.

Taste: Not much happening other than the hops in here. They're rolling and not too heavy, with a little lavender to them, but that's about all you get. There's a weird metallic character that comes and goes. Finishes sharp and clean.

Mouthfeel: Sharp carbonation without being violent. Light body. Astringent finish that helps to attribute to the crisp feel.

It's a pilsner alright, but not my favorite one. It went fine with a bagel and lox, but I'm not sure if I'd reach for it again. Brooklyn has a lot of really good beers out there, but I wouldn't count this as one of them. It's pretty average.

Lazy Magnolia Southern Pecan - American Brown Ale:

Poured from 12 ounce bottle into pint glass

Appearance: Mahogany, clear. Head was 1/2", dissipating rapidly leaving no lace on the glass.

Smell: Woodsmoke, molasses, vanilla bean

Taste: Simple malts and nutty flavor initially, carrying into rich honey. Slightly unbalanced, without any expression of hops, which would help to curb the sweetness that lingers after swallowing.
.
Mouthfeel: Medium body, thin and weak carbonation. Stays on the tongue after swallowing a bit.

A beautiful brown to look at with a pleasant taste. It would be a lot better if more balanced, but it's still a really tasty brown ale. Would be very tasty with some hickory smoked barbecue ribs.

Dominion Oak Barrel Stout - American Stout:

Poured from 12 ounce bottle into pint glass

Appearance: Opaque obsidian. Head rises slowly at first, then quickly builds on itself, with a toffee color, leaving very little lacing

Smell: Woodsmoke, spice, tobacco.

Taste: Smoke dominates the flavor from beginning to end. Woodsmoke character complements
roasted nuts, then spicy pipe tobacco smoke comes with a strong vanilla character. Slight bitter end, but a little acidity lingers afterward.

Mouthful: Moderately thick, with very light, silky carbonation. Milk-like cling to the tongue after swallowing.

Guaranteed to make you exhale deeply after drinking. The smoke character is bracing and very
fun. Despite being a very smoky stout, it's not overbearing and would pair with food quite well. Obviously would be great with barbecue, for sure.

Grow Alabama

2009-06-12T22:26:00.007-05:00

My search for a community supported agriculture program is at long last ended.

It was quickly apparent that I would pretty much never get a spot on Snow's Bend's program. They are just too far exposed and too fought-over, and used by too many big name people. That, and the guy at the Tuscaloosa farmer's market pretty much told me in not so many words that it all boils down to nepotism. That's fine.

Thanks to a tip from my dental hygienist, who said her daughter also loves to cook and buys local fresh food, I was directed to Grow Alabama, which is another fantastic CSA operating in central Alabama. I signed up for their gold package, to get bi-weekly deliveries sent to my house. Here's a sample of what I'll be expecting:

Not bad at all, eh? I'm thrilled for this. Being able to eat and enjoy local fruits and veggies is exciting to me. I want to cook and eat not only the stuff I know I enjoy, but also that stuff that I'm not quite sure what to do with. Being compelled to use the box I'm given is exciting to me.

If that's not cool enough, they also have fresh local meats available if I decide to buy some. Right now its lamb, veal, and beef, but they also expect to carry chicken, turkey, rabbit, and other items as they grow. They also offer farm-raised eggs and honey as well.

I eagerly await my first delivery next week :)

Sea Bass, Fenugreek Risotto, and the Parmesan Lattice Theory

2009-06-10T01:21:00.006-05:00

It's been a great day of having weird food ideas hit me, I'll say that much.

For one, I finally had an excuse to cook sea bass. I have a friend who used to chat on and on about making sea bass, and was wanting me to do it. I think he'd been enthralled about some piece of ridiculous food porn that Gordon Ramsay has on one of his five thousand TV shows. I'm not anywhere near up to that sort of snuff, but I do like me some sea bass.

It's also fortuitous that I also had chicken stock I'd just made on Sunday, chilling in the fridge. Any time you make your own stock from a used carcass, it's going to taste a thousand times better than whatever crap Rachel Ray is hawking in her gaudy oversized juice box. It's full of flavor, not just salt. Further, unlike the unholy Queen Bitch responsible for Evil Vixen's Overpriced Oils, (Don't you dare bring up that acronym to me in public I will punch you in your mouth and I will not be held responsible) your own stock costs nothing. You've already paid for the chicken, go ahead and make stock. I've already said this before with lobster, and I'll pretty much say it with any animal or piece of animal you have that you can render stock out of. MAKE. STOCK.

Rachel Ray declaring jihad on culinary decency and quality olive oil

And just to make sure it doesn't seem like I'm deriding you for using "stock'n a box", it's better than having no stock at all. If you can't make your own, go ahead and use the big juicebox. All I'm begging is that if you have the means to do it, please don't junk that chicken carcass or bowl of spent beef ribs or whatever. Think of the wonderful stock you can make instead.

Rambling, rambling! Back on track. I have chicken stock. Any time I have a delicious stock, the chances are high I'll make a risotto. Sure, I could make soup, but I keep coming back to my queen of starches. She's been very very good to me. I'd talked to Dino a while back about making a previous risotto using fenugreek seeds, but I think the wire's got crossed and he thought I meant the leaves. It's one of those trickster plants like cilantro/coriander in which the leaves and seeds from the same thing do completely different stuff. Fenugreek to me is one of the best smells in the food world, and I cannot turn away from it. It's mostly an Indian spice, but knowing that it's earthy and bitter, I thought I could make it work in risotto, especially with sweet sugar peas, which I raided from the freezer.

Whipped the risotto up like usual, and buttered a few ramekins I'd recently got from my mom, so I could put a plate on top and invert to make those fancy little hockey puck style presentations that people like. Then, inspiration struck me. I'd had a conversation with my mom earlier in the day, and she'd suggested using grated parmesan on parchment paper in the oven to make a semi-bendy lattice that you could then form into a muffin pan to make a cheesy basket to hold things like microgreens or crabmeat or something. It's a really great idea, and I took the gist of it and made it a little simple for this, to just wedge a "chip" of baked parmesan lattice into the risotto. I added a lot of pepper to the chip, baked it in my 400 degree oven for about five minutes, then let cool another five. Rather than finish the risotto as usual with extra parmesan and pepper, I just wedged it in as a chip for an awesome texture and presentation thing.

The sea bass got a simple rub of salt and pepper. I added enough olive oil to thinly coat my saute pan, got the pan screaming hot, and seared one side of fish for about two minutes. Deglazed with wine, flipped the fish, and brought the heat down on medium for about five more minutes.

I used oregano from my garden as part of the bouquet garni when I made the chicken stock, so I also garnished the sea bass with more oregano. Spread a few bitter cacao nibs on the fish to complement the bitter fenugreek as well.

This was an extremely fun dish to make. It didn't take too long to come together, and everything just turned out like I wanted. The smell and taste of the risotto was amazing, and definitely something that I'll look to add to my usual risotto lineup from now on. The sea bass had a nice sear on top, but was so delicate that it cleaved on the flat of my fork with almost no pressure at all.

The parmesan lattice idea got me thinking about a lot of little things to bring the height out in my food, and was a great little flourish. Thanks Mom!

Brewfest 2009!

2009-06-10T00:50:00.003-05:00

This weekend was the third annual Magic City Brewfest, and I was fortunate enough to be able to attend with friends and family alike. If you read my previous Free the Hops postings, you'll know this was especially momentous thanks to Governor Bob Riley repealing the puritanical 5.9% alcohol by volume restriction on beer, allowing us to have access to an unprecedented bounty of quality brews. As a sort of welcome to this brave new world, I decided to dive into the malty unknown. We were given fairly nice little glasses made of real glass, which had a two ounce fill line, which was more than enough for a few swallows of each sample. Given our massive selection and short tasting time of four hours, we had our work cut out for us. Fortunately, my wife and I tried something different each turn and then tried what the other had, so we could get more tastes. Here's roughly the list of liquid breads I dabbled in:

Boulevard IPA
Boulevard Single Wide IPA
Boulevard Pale Ale
Boulevard Unfiltered Wheat
Brooklyn Brown Ale
Brooklyn Lager
Highland Gaelic Ale
Highland Oatmeal Porter
Highland St. Terese's Pale Ale
Lazy Magnolia Indian Summer
Lazy Magnolia Jefferson Stout
Lazy Magnolia Southern Gold
Lazy Magnolia Southern Pecan
Abita Andygator
Carlsberg Elephant
Duvel
Emerald Coast Amber Lager
Emerald Coast Pale Ale
Emerald Coast Pilsner
Good People Brown Ale
Good People Coffee Oatmeal Stout
Good People IPA
Good People Mumbai Rye IPA
Good People Snake Handler DIPA
Mendoncino Eye of the Hawk
Mendoncino White Hawk IPA
Olde Towne Amber
Olde Towne Bock
Olde Towne Pale Ale
Olde Towne Pilsner
Rogue Brutal Bitter
Rogue Hazelnut Brown Nectar
Rogue XS Imperial Stout
Samuel Smith's Imperial Stout
Samuel Smith's Organic Lager
Saranac Pale Ale
Saranac Pomegranate Wheat
Sweetwater Road Trip
Hebrew Messiah Bold
Palma Louca
Tilburg Dutch Brown Ale
Bavik
Dominion Ale
Dominion Beach House Golden Pilsner
Dominion Lager
Dominion Oak Barrel Stout
Dominion Pale Ale
Durango Amber Ale
Durango Dark Lager
Durango Golden Ale
Durango Wheat Beer
Famosa Fordham Copperhead Ale
Fordham Helles Lager
Fordham Tavern Ale
Great Divide Denver Pale Ale
Great Divide Hercules Double IPA
Great Divide Yeti Imperial Stout
Tommyknocker Alpine Glacier Lager
Tommyknocker Jack Whacker Wheat
Tommyknocker Maple Nut Brown Ale
Tommyknocker Ornery Amber Ale
Tommyknocker Imperial Nut Brown Ale
Witterkerke
Back Forty Naked Pig Ale

Bolded are roughly what I'd consider to be my fifteen favorites of what I tried. Keep in mind this is a slightly rushed and incomplete tasting, but I recall really enjoying these. A lot of stouts and brown ales in particular, as well as great IPA's. I am really excited about the selection we're starting to get. I've already gone on a few beer runs into Birmingham and have found plenty of selections that weren't even offered at the Brewfest, so I'm keen on trying them all.

In the spirit of giving each beer its own tasting in full, I'm going to try and do a weekly beer roundup posting from here on out. I've already had a few that I can't wait to talk about.

All in all, it was a really fun time at Brewfest. It's a really great time to be a beer fan in Alabama, that's for sure!

Jamaican curry turnovers, Zion-sent from Ras Chuck!

2009-06-09T22:10:00.006-05:00

Okay, so I'm not a Rasta. I'm not even Jamaican, of which Rastas are a minority group. My hair's too short for dreads, I don't smoke weed, and the only Reggae I own is a Finley Quaye album and whatever Marley I was able to steal from my sister. I'm a nerdy white guy from Alabama, but, Jah, I can at least eat like a Rasta.

I gotta give props in advance to Adventure Melaney for the concept. Mine is a riff off her excellent recipe. I went for a fully-vegan version, and used allspice, which is very prevalent in Jamaican style curries.

Here's what you use for the pastry crust:

1 cup whole wheat flour
2 cups all purpose flour
1 tsp salt
2 tsp curry powder
1/4 cup shortening, cold
1/4 cup canola oil, chilled
1/2 black plantain, boiled for 10 minutes in a pot of water, cooled, then mashed
1/2 cup cold water, or as needed

Here's the filling:

1 tbsp canola oil
1 tbsp curry powder
2 tsp crushed allspice berries
1 tsp cayenne powder
1 cup onion, chopped
2 large garlic cloves, minced
1 cup coconut milk
3 red potatoes, peeled and diced
1 1/2 cups black beans
1/2 black plantain, diced
1/2 tsp citric acid or 1 tbsp lemon juice
1 tsp kosher salt + more to taste

Let's start on the pastry. Combine your flours, curry powder, and salt. Once combined thoroughly, start to work your wet ingredients in, in the order of plantain, shortening, then canola oil. Make sure with the drier plantain and shortening that you work those in first. Work the dough with your hands and make sure to fully combine everything. You should get a consistency approaching that of wet sand. Add the canola oil and continue to do this. Add water, little at a time, until the dough just barely holds together. Do not work this any more than is absolutely necessary. You don't want to knead this. Kneading makes for stretchy and chewy bread, and since we want flaky delicate pastry dough, it would ruin that effect if you pounded on it for a few minutes.

Once it's cohesive, cover it and put it in the fridge. Keeping the dough cold makes it easier to hold together and work with.

While that's chilling, let's start the filling. Heat up your oil in your skillet on medium. Add your onions, salt, and curry powder. Bring heat down to low and sweat the onions until soft, roughly 10 minutes

Add your diced onions and bring up the heat to medium again. Let it cook a good 10 minutes.

Add black beans, plantains, and garlic. Cook another five minutes

Drop the temp to low. Add your coconut milk, allspice, and cayenne. Let this cook, stirring every so often, until the sauce thickens up slightly. Take off the heat.

Now, we're ready to put it all together. Go ahead and pre-heat your oven to 350. Remove your dough from the fridge. Roll it out using a rolling pin or wine bottle or whatever. Use extra flour if needed to prevent dough from sticking. You want a good 1/8" thickness when its rolled out.

Once its thin, get a bowl or something about five or six inches wide, give or take. It helps to have a rim on it that can be pushed into the dough.

The pastry dough isn't springy so you should be able to cut a circle without any fuss. Reserve your scraps in the main dough ball and keep making circles. When they're ready. spoon your filling onto them. Fill half of each dough circle, making sure to leave about half an inch of space from the edge of the pastry, so you have enough room to seal it.

Carefully fold the pastry over so the edges are on top of each other and you make a semicircle. With the tines of a fork, press firmly into the dough to seal everything inside.

Arrange them on your baking sheet like so...

Bake for about 35 minutes and remove from the oven. Set the turnovers on a wire rack to cool. You can eat them now, but they're wonderful the next day too.

Mmmm delicious Jamaican pocket pie goodness! Thanks again to Adventure Melaney for the inspiration.

Farmer's market veggies

2009-06-02T00:19:00.004-05:00

Thanks to a hot tip from a friend of ours, I found out that my little town has a farmer's market. Doubleplus fun, they meet each week on my off day! I had to investigate. It's a pretty small gig. They had probably about a dozen tables there if that, but the selection there was great. Somebody had live tomato plants for sale (I'll probably buy some next week if they've got heirloom varieties maybe?). Another booth was actually a neighbor of mine who keeps bees, and he sold his honey there. I bought a pound of his stuff. There was a Chilton county peach farmer, but they sold out of peaches by the time I got there. I bought some weird sour plums from them and they're kind of awesome. Another guy had a few nice things. I got a pound of his Texas Sweet onions that I'll make some Les Halles style French Onion soup later this week. He also had some red potatoes that looked good, and threw in some homemade pecan brittle for me.

Best news was that Snow's Bend Farms had a booth too. I've blogged about these guys, mainly sad that I can't get a spot in their CSA program :( but they seriously have some amazing produce. Their produce frequently ends up featured on the menus of a lot of really nice restaurants. There's a reason; it's amazing stuff. Their arugula is toothsome and thick. Their butternut squash is rich and sweet. I bought rainbow chard, broccoli, and green onion from them. Never cooked with chard before, so I wanted to try it. Decided to cook all three in a big catch-all asian noodle soup thingy.

The green onions, mind you, were enormous. I kind of wish I got pics of the veg before I chopped it all up, but I can do that later. The green onions might as well have been small leeks, they were that thick. The chard cooked tender with ease, and gave a nice slight bitterness to the soup. The broccoli however was the best part. I've never eaten broccoli that good before. I could eat pounds of it. Before the soup, I steamed some and had it with rice and edamame. I was picking the broccoli out and eating it before everything else. I normally hate steamed veg, but that stuff stood out so far on its own that it blew my mind.

Okay, enough praise singing about Snow's Bend. They've got great veggies. Such a love/hate thing, and I wish I could get on their CSA more than ever!

Also at the market, there was this really awesome family making authentic Mexican food. I've somehow gotten this far in life without eating a tamale before. Three down the hatch in short order with a Mexican coke, and I really hope they're at the market next week that's for sure!

Free the Hops part 2

2009-06-01T23:54:00.002-05:00

Dear Governor Riley,

Thank you.

Sincerely,
Chuck

Peppers!

2009-06-01T23:43:00.003-05:00

We're getting pretty close to picking peppers at my house!

Serrano chiles. These are probably my favorite general-use peppers. Much stronger than jalapeno but still versatile in anything.

Cayennes saying "sup" right next to my leeks. I've never had fresh cayenne. Figure they have to be awesome right?

Jalapenos on left, red cowhorn chilis on right. The jalapenos are just about ready, but the cowhorns have to mature (and turn red obviously) before they're ready.

For a milder take on things. Red bell pepper! Just a lil' baby! Not red yet, but I'll be keeping my eye on em! Probably my favorite pepper ever.

Provencal with a Drawl

2009-05-26T23:39:00.012-05:00

It's a travesty that I cook so little southern cuisine. It really is. I've lived in Alabama my entire life, I'm no stranger to country life and country food, and both my mother and late grandmother are/were excellent cooks. If I had to nail it down, it would be akin to living in a place your entire life, and yearning to get far away from it as soon as you could. In the end, however, you find just how much you miss home.

I've had a revival of a sort in the past year. I've really grown to appreciate the simple foods I was raised on. I'm drawn to southern cooking because it's another one of those great culinary disciplines that has come from poverty roots. In that respect, it draws a lot of similarities to the spirit of Provencal French cooking. In the case of cajun and creole influences, the similarities are more obvious, but I think all southern cuisine shares a similar love of simple recipes, quality ingredients, and being able to make the most out of what you've got.

For a southern cooking contest I participated in on Something Awful, I wanted to marry French techniques with southern ingredients. Here's my lineup:

Vidalia vichyssoise with cornbread
Fried green tomato gallettes with remoulade and blackened alligator
Baked grüyere grits with crawfish, red pepper, and bacon
Pecan creme brulee

First things first, let's start with the vichyssoise. Vichyssoise is a creamy potato soup, often with leeks or some onion accent. For mine, I added buttermilk and served it cold. I have fond memories of my grandmother and also my mom taking a nice cold glass of buttermilk, adding a little pepper, and dunking a wedge of cornbread into the glass, and eating it with a spoon, breaking up the cornbread as they went along. I wanted to capture that kind of southern treat in a different light, so I dished the soup in a way that most southerners would be familiar with - in a mason jelly jar.

For the vichyssoise, you'll need this:

1 large vidalia onion, chopped
3 russet potatoes, peeled and diced
1 quart vegetable stock
1 cup heavy cream
1 cup buttermilk
1 tbsp butter
2 tsp white pepper
1 tsp kosher salt
3 or 4 blades of chives for garnish
1 wedge cornbread (shown later)

Begin by melting butter in a stock pot. On medium heat, add your onions and salt. Saute for 5 minutes, then sweat for another 15 minutes. Add your potatoes & stock, bring up to a boil, then back to a simmer for 20 minutes.

Take the pot off the heat and put it on a trivet. Get a wand blender if you have one and puree the soup. If not, whip it up in a blender or food processor and return to the pot.

Add buttermilk and cream. Stir.

Dole out into containers to let cool and store in the fridge to chill.

Let's make the cornbread now! It's a staple to southern food and works to sop up flavorful sauces, or you can split it and drop a pad of butter or cane patch syrup on it. We'll be using it for the vichyssoise but there's plenty of leftovers so dish it up as a great complement to hashed leftovers or anything you've got.

Before we do that, let's cook some bacon. The bacon will be used in another dish. We want the rendered bacon fat. Cook down a pound of bacon, setting the cooked strips on a plate with paper towels to drain. You should have about six or seven tablespoons of bacon fat after you're done.

You only need a few strips of bacon in the actual dishes. The others are given to hungry impatient people who crowd the kitchen at the smell of bacon. You can eat a strip or two yourself if you believe in cooking tax, hehe.

Got the bacon fat, so lets make cornbread.

2 cups self-rise cornmeal (yellow is more traditional but I used white to match the vichyssoise.)
1/4 cup all purpose flour
3/4 cup whole milk
3/4 cup buttermilk
6-7 tbsp bacon fat (use butter if you don't have any)
1 egg, beaten
1 tsp kosher salt

Preheat the oven to 450, add your bacon fat to an 8 inch cast iron skillet, and let sit for five minutes in the oven. While that's heating up, combine your flours and salt in a bowl, then your milks. Stir through completely to form a very loose dough. The baking powder in the self-rising cornmeal is going to be working now, so you have to be quick. Pull the skillet out (please use a potholder!) and pour all but one tablespoon of bacon fat into the dough.

Stir that completely and add your beaten egg to the dough, again stirring until fully combined. Carefully pour your dough back into the skillet, and return to the skillet.

Put into the oven and bake for 25-30 minutes, or until the top is a rich copper brown. Pull the skillet out, place a plate over the skillet, and invert onto a table.

Let your cornbread cool about ten minutes and cut some thin wedges out of it. Prepare some eight ounce jelly jars and ladle your vichyssoise into that. Stuff a wedge of cornbread in, and stand your chive blades into the thick chilled soup.

Now, for the second course, we are making fried green tomato gallettes with remoulade dressing and blackened alligator. Gallettes are traditionally made with fried rings of potatoes in France, and the center packed with herbed goat cheese. In my southern translation, I used firm and tart fried green tomatoes to stand with equally tart remoulade and spicy chunks of alligator. I'm sure you've all seen the Fried Green Tomatoes movie with Kathy Bates and Jessica Tandy. It's not really a great movie, but it's based on a real restaurant that's within a few miles of my parent's house. In my opinion, this is just about the best way to enjoy a good tomato.

Let's start small. We need to make remoulade. That means we need mayonnaise. Fortunately it's not tricky at all.

2 egg yolks, slightly warm
1 tbsp lemon juice
1/4 tsp kosher salt
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

Begin by whisking the eggs with salt and lemon juice. Add the oil, a few drops at first, and then a stream, whisking as you go. It'll thicken up as you do this. I wanted a loose custard consistency so that's where I stopped at:

Chill in the fridge and it'll set up a little more. You've got about a cup of mayo with this recipe, so lets turn out remoulade.

Here's what we use:

1 cup mayonnaise
1/4 cup capers, washed and chopped
1 shallot, finely minced
1 tbsp coarse grain dijon mustard
1 tbsp chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
1 tbsp chopped tarragon
2 tsp paprika
1 tsp chopped anchovy filets
1 tsp sherry vinegar
t tsp cayenne pepper

Nothing fancy here. Add all the ingredients to your mayo and mix. Hooray remoulade!

Now let's make some blackening spice for the alligator. Like most of this, you can buy pre-made if you want, but it's really easy to just make your own and you'll save money this way.

Combine these spices:

4 tsp hot paprika
1 tsp dried oregano
1 tsp dried thyme
1 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp cayenne pepper
1 tsp black pepper
1 tsp white pepper

Put into a spice jar. Shake.

Should be enough for a few dishes, but you apply this stuff pretty liberally.

Lets cook some alligator.

This is pretty regional so don't fret if you can't find it. Chicken or shrimp work about as well depending on your preference. I get alligator in one pound frozen chunk-meat packages. It pulls apart into a few irregular shaped bits. Smear blackening powder all over those, flipping over to mop up as much spice as you can.

If you're sly, you can get a few bacon drippings from your cast iron skillet reserved to cook your gator. If not, a pad of butter in there will also work. Get the heat up to medium-high. You want to get a good color on that spice rub.

Take it up after about 2 minutes on each side.

Now onto the gallettes.

Pretty simple stuff. You need this:

1 large firm green tomato, sliced about 3/4" thick into discs
some buttermilk for dipping
some cornmeal for batter
oil, for frying

Heat your oil to medium-high. Take your slices of tomato and cut a circular shape out of each with a paring knife.

Each ring gets a dip into buttermilk, then a few pats into corn meal to get a good solid batter shell on it. Slip the rings into oil, cooking about 3-4 minutes each side, then flipping. Cool on a wire rack.

Arrange some arugula on a warm plate, then lay the gallette on top of that. Spoon remoulade into the hole until it is completely filled, and place four pieces of blackened alligator on the edges.

Now for the third course, we're making baked grüyere grits with crawfish tails, red peppers, and bacon. As Joe Pesci found out in My Cousin Vinny, we take our grits seriously in the south. It's like a bastard child of couscous, polenta, and risotto. Usually it's just for breakfast, but we're gonna doll it up a little. And none of you jokers had better bring that instant grits crap around here. That ain't food! We've already got part of this done if you've made the bacon to get the fat for your cornbread, so that's good. Let's get the crawfish part settled.

Here's what you want:

1 pound crawfish tails, with the fat
1 red bell pepper, diced
1 shallot, diced
1/2 cup pinot grigio or similar white wine
1 tbsp butter
1 tbsp heavy cream
1 tbsp fresh thyme leaves
1 tsp cayenne pepper
1 tsp kosher salt

Put your butter in a saute pan on medium heat. Add shallots, peppers, and salt. Saute for 5-10 minutes.

Turn heat up to high and add your wine. Let that boil off for about a minute or two, bring the heat back down to medium, and add your crawfish tails and cayenne pepper. Cook for five minutes.

Take off the heat and add the cream and thyme.

Now we have crawfish and peppers! Time to get serious here. We need cheesy grits.

Real, proper grits. Paired with Grüyere cheese. Rather than making creamy smooth grits, we're going to bake them in ramekins for something a little different.

Here's what we'll need for the grits:

1/2 cup yellow stone-ground grits
2 cups water
1/2 cup grüyere cheese, grated
1 egg, beaten
2 tbsp butter + extra to butter ramekins
1 tsp salt

Salt your water and get it to a boil. When you reach a boil, back down to low heat. Add your grits in a slow stream, stirring constantly.

Cover and stir occasionally. Ignore the package when it recommends cooking time. Grits cook slow. If you aren't cooking them slow you're doing it wrong. You should cook them for 45 minutes at minimum on low heat, stirring every 10 minutes give or take. The grits release loads of starch like risotto, and you want to encourage them to become creamy.

Remove the grits from the heat, and fold in your butter and cheese. To this, add your beaten egg. Butter up 3-4 ramekins and pour the grits in.

Preheat your oven to 350 and put your ramekins in a casserole dish or similar pan. Fill the dish with enough hot water to come halfway up the side of the ramekin, and cover the entire dish with foil. Carefully put the dish in the oven and bake for 350 degrees.

Remove from the oven and carefully open foil. Take a butter knife and gently slip between the grits and ramekin sides to release the grits from the ramekin.

Cover each ramekin with a large serving dish, and flip upside down to invert and un-mold the grits onto the plate. Raise your oven rack to the top and set the broiler on. Brown the top of your grits.

Remove from heat and let warm for a good ten minutes (this plate is hot as hell!). dole out the crawfish all around the grits. Crush a strip or two of bacon and crumble on top.

I wanted a creme brulee for dessert because it's about the most decadent thing I can put in my mouth. To give it a southern inspiration, I added a good half cup of processed pecans to the custard, because my wife doesn't like large pieces of nuts. Call it pecan "pie" brulee or what have you. Some of my favorite childhood memories of my grandparents' house involve the first cool days of fall, when pecans would start raining down in the pastures. My cousins and I would run around with grocery sacks, baskets, and anything, and gather pecans until it got dark. We'd eat enough to get nearly sick, and what was left over, my aunt would make into wonderful pecan pie. Next to my grandma's ugly-ass chocolate cake, it was the best dessert in the known world. I'm taking my grown-up love of creme brulee, and being a kid with it again.

5 egg yolks
3/4 quart heavy cream
1/2 cup sugar + more for the top
1/2 cup pecans, finely processed
1 vanilla bean

Begin by splitting and scraping your vanilla bean. You can do this with a good pointed knife by jamming it in the middle and pulling on it until it unzips, then turning it around to fully split it. Once split, scrape out the tarry inside of the bean.

Combine the bean and scrapings with heavy cream in your sauce pot. Bring this just to the threshold of a boi and remove from the heat. Cover and let cool completely. Remove the bean and discard. Whisk in the eggs and sugar, and add your processed pecan to the cream.

Preheat the oven to 325. Get 4-6 ramekins and fill them with the cream. Put into a casserole dish and add hot water until it reaches halfway up the ramekin sides.

Cover with foil. Bake for about 50 minutes or so, or until just barely set. Some of the pecan will rise to the top and give your custard a browned look. This is fine:

Cover and refrigerate a few hours, or up to a couple of days. About 30 minutes prior to eating, remove from the fridge. Dust enough sugar on the top to coat evenly.

My camera doesn't pick up sweet awesome blue fire from blowtorches. Take my word its awesome. Turn as you apply heat. Avoid buring sugar. Keep your flame moving and your sugar moving. Work outside in.

When you're done, you should have a nice sheen of caramel-colored sugar armor on top of your custard.

Whew! All that hard work! I must be insane. Where's the payoff? Here's the results:

Vidalia vichyssoise with cornbread

Fried green tomato gallettes with remoulade and blackened alligator

Baked grüyere grits with crawfish, red pepper, and bacon

Pecan creme brulee

Hope you enjoyed the recipes and my terrible pictures, and I hope you get a chance to make and enjoy some of this for yourself. Y'all come back now.

The Hops: Free at last!

2009-05-22T23:18:00.001-05:00

Governor Bob Riley signs legislation increasing legal ABV percentage in beer sold in Alabama to 13.9%

I am so incredibly happy right now. It's hard to really explain to other people who don't live in Alabama the mind-boggling frustration you have to endure to figure out what's legal to buy and what isn't. We still can't have larger single-serve containers than a pint, and we still can't buy alcohol online, but this is a step in the right direction, and hopefully one of many to be taken. Ironic, considering that we're the only state in the union that has an "official state liquor" (which, incidentally, is pretty tasty, but still).

There's so much beer out there that I've yet to get my mitts on, and I feel like I'm 21 all over again!

Just before 10 a.m., Alabama Governor Bob Riley signed into law HB373, the Gourmet Beer Bill, which will raise the limit on alcohol content in beer sold in Alabama.

The bill’s passage follows a five-year struggle by Alabama’s grassroots gourmet beer advocacy group, Free the Hops, to raise the limit on the alcohol content of beer sold in Alabama from 6.0% to 13.9%. The higher limit will allow Alabama’s package stores, grocery stores, and bars and restaurants to sell and serve higher gravity beers.

After Alabama’s senate passed the gourmet beer bill last Thursday, Free the Hops mobilized its followers. The organizations urged its members and followers to call Gov. Riley’s office and encourage the governor to sign the bill into law. Free The Hops announced a final push for calls just hours before the governor signed the bill.

“I have been informed that our phone calls made the difference,” said a post on the FreeTheHops Twitter account after Riley signed the bill. “Everyone who called the Gov deserves credit for getting this done.”

What happens next? Well, first, we celebrate. J. Clyde will host a celebratory party tonight at 5 p.m. featuring cask ale from Birmingham brewer Good People. In Huntsville, a similar party will commence at 5 p.m. at The Nook.

After that, Free the Hops might look to other limits on Alabama’s beer and brewing, such as Alabama’s container size limit for beer.

For more information and updates, check the Free The Hops website or Twitter.

Birmingham Weekly Article

Blackberries!

2009-05-22T01:02:00.003-05:00

My wife and I have been foraging on and off in our back yard for the past few days and have been pulling up a bunch of blackberries. For some reason I've lived in the south my entire life but never really taken the time to forage for one of my favorite fruits. It's a happy accident that our yard is absolutely saturated with brambles in the back, and even in some places in front. I'll be making a lot of creme brulee, blackberry infused vodka, and all sorts of stuff. Either that or I'll just get lazy, and uh...

...mmm.

"Gastrosexuality"

2009-05-20T22:35:00.002-05:00

I was listening to a saved podcast of The Splendid Table the other day on the way home from work, and there was a segment they ran that really pissed me off. The gist of it is that there is a term that is going around among young male bachelors to describe people who use their culinary skills to seduce a partner. They call people who do this "gastrosexuals". When I heard this, I rolled eyes so hard I nearly had to pull over in traffic to recover. Yes, we get it. Gotta have a label for every little bit of stupid crap. Got it the first time with metrosexual about a decade ago. It wasn't really clever or funny then either.

If any gastrosexuals find themselves reading this, let me go ahead and be clear: you're not special at all. I'm sorry, but people have been passing off their skill with chow since a cave man first dragged a hunted mammoth back to the cave and waggled his unibrow at Oog, with promises of unga bunga to come by firelight.

Food leads to sex. Say it with me people. You put effort into making a thing that not only nourishes and provides energy, but stimulates all five senses, and serve it to somebody you fancy, and it's going to set a mood. Now I'm not suggesting to share a spontaneous tender moment with the griddle cook at your local Benihana. Obviously not everybody you cook for is a target of sexual intent, and not every meal you consume is an invitation for the same, but it's a tool in the toolbox. We all know how it works when alcohol's involved, and we all get the idea about music. Food? Same thing. The fact that it took some smarmy thirty-something with an inferiority complex to create a name for obvious crap just makes me mad.

Way to rediscover that wheels are round and fire is hot. Maybe I'll go twitter with other wheelosexuals and fuegosexuals when I realize that people like making out in hot cars and by the glow of a fireplace on a cold night.

Roti, India's wonderfully edible eating utensil.

2009-05-13T01:25:00.003-05:00

I'm sick and tired of making curry and forgetting to have any flatbread with it. It's vital stuff. Flatbread is great for scooping up curry bits and sopping up delicious sauce. Why use a spoon when you can eat a flatbread and use it as a utensil at once? Naan is super tasty, but sometimes I don't really have the time or the yogurt to make it. In times like that, especially if I'm making something with a South Indian accent, I have to have Roti. Unlike Naan, Roti has no yeast, so you automatically get to skip the time-consuming act of rises and proofs. On top of that, it's mostly made from whole grain flour. This recipe is a riff from Dino's recipe, who has a great recipe. His calls for wheat germ (which I never have) and a blend of aromatic spices. Nothing wrong there, but I like to use ajowan and black onion seeds in my flatbread (If you can't find these, omit them, its not going to make or break this). He also uses all whole grain flour, where I prefer a 3:2 ratio of whole grain to semolina, to make it extra stretchy. You can find stuff called Durum Atta which would be even better for the task at Indian grocers, but my ratio works pretty well.

At any rate, enough rambling. Here's what you need:

1.5 cups whole wheat flour
1 cup semolina flour
1 cup slightly warm water
1 tbsp vital wheat gluten
1 tsp ajowan seeds
1 tsp black onion seeds
1 tsp salt
Olive oil, for brushing

Begin by crushing your ajowan seeds. I use a mortar and pestle but whatever gets the job done is what you want. Also, go ahead and pre-heat a cast iron skillet on medium heat so it has time to absorb enough heat to cook.

Combine your dry ingredients in a bowl and form a well. Add in your water.

Mix well to combine and form a dough. Turn out onto a floured work surface and knead about ten minutes or so.

From here, chafe your dough into a ball and cut it into eight equal segments.

Ball up each segment as you work. Flour your work surface and rolling pin a little, and form a nice 10-12" circle, flipping and turning the dough as you go. You want the dough about 1/8" thick give or take.

Drop each rolled dough onto the skillet and let it cook for a couple of minutes, until the dough on top turns a slightly darker shade and it releases from the skillet, allowing you to move it with a spatula.

Flip that over, and use a spatula, griddle weight, or clean towel to press the roti firmly all over. That'll help it to puff a little. Cook another couple of minutes and remove from heat. Dab a little olive oil onto a paper towel and slather that on the roti before putting it on a plate and covering to keep warm.

Soon you'll have a nice warm stack of delicious-smelling roti. Hope you have some curry! If not, that's okay too. I like to snack on em even when I don't have curry. I keep a jar of mango pickle just for such an occasion.

If you haven't had mango pickle or any other Indian pickle before, it's basically fruit that's preserved in salt, oil, and spices. The flavor is very intense, and a little goes a long way. Since this is mango, it's a lot of chunky mango bits, peel included.

Yum.

What you don't eat warm off the skillet, go ahead and wrap in foil and parchment paper. It'll keep in the freezer just fine, and you can reheat them whenever you feel the urge.

Once again, thanks Dino for another winning idea from your book. For anybody reading this, if you haven't gotten your copy of Alternative Vegan yet, do so ASAP. Even if you aren't vegan, it's definitely going to give you a wide variety of great ideas in the kitchen.

Mother's Day

2009-05-10T23:46:00.002-05:00

My wife and I took my mom out for a great lunch at Satterfield's. She was excited the moment I mentioned it, because she'd always wanted to go there, but never quite got around to it. A bit of backstory, but my mom's work requires that she has to attend a certain amount of continuing education courses. These are usually funded by people with a lot more money than I have, and usually at fairly nice establishments in Birmingham. Ocean's, Daniel George, Highland's Bar & Grill, Bottega Favorita, the former Copper Grill, to name a few. To put it succinctly, she gets to eat out at really nice places on the boss's dime, which is something I've envied her for years for doing.

I had a lot of fun treating her today. She had a smoked salmon filet on an english pea cake that was almost like a sweet falafel. She loved that. It came with soft boiled quail eggs which she wasn't a fan of, and set aside. Her main dish was a total comfort food explosion of crawfish and andouille sausage, pan-fried peppers, and smoked gouda polenta. That definitely made her day. She's not into wine pairing and has a pretty set comfort zone on drinks (which is fine!) so she had a really good Riesling that was just barely off-dry.

My wife had a lot of asparagus apparently. Both her appetizer (jumbo asparagus tips) and entree (lobster cake benedict) had these almost comically-enormous asparagus stalks that were as thick as my thumb. Of course she had her lobster too because that's what she does! She had a strawberry pomegranate mojito, which I got to steal a sip on. I've had a lot of mohito variants, and some hit where others miss, but this one was really good. Very tart, slightly astringent, and a great summer drink.

I had a starter of oysters three ways, which was easily the best part of my meal. One oyster was a gulf oyster, done classically into Oysters Rockefeller. Very rich, very creamy, very French. The next was a blue point oyster with cucumber, capers, and a citrus granite. It was ice cold and the combination of tart citrus and capers with the brisk cucumber really made it taste light on the tongue. The final was a miniature bloody mary, with a beausoleil oyster at the bottom and tomato foam on top. This was crazy stuff, and I loved it. Of course, the whole experience of swallowing liquor and raw shellfish in one go was a bizarre one. The Worcestershire sauce really held it all together. Definitely got me in the mood for more oysters! I normally don't eat them unless I'm close to the coast, but nice places make the effort to fly in fresh, so its all good. When I wasn't sucking down bloody mary, I had some Perrier Jouët Grand Brut sparkling wine, which certainly helped sort out the Oysters Rockefeller. Both dish and wine were astounding.

My main was a medium rare hanger steak with arugula, sweet potato and leek hash, and scorched tomatoes. The hash was really sweet and tasty, and my steak was great, but it didn't offer any big surprises. Never had the cut before, so I'm now tempted to cook with it. I paired it with the Napa Cab they had on offer, which was good but not great.

Mom and I split a coconut frangipane (my wife's not a sweets person usually), which was a little coconut cake with bittersweet chocolate sauce in the center. Alongside that was some sort of pecan praline with a bitter caramel sauce, and then a sphere of coconut sorbet. I loved the praline though it nearly broke my mom's tooth when she bit it. Really good dessert for a coconut fan.

It was a great day and both my wife and I enjoyed meeting mom for dinner. I owe a lot to my mom for raising me right and for helping to urge me to try new things and inspire my epicurean curiosity. It's one of the endless things she's done with grace and charm, and it's only fitting that I say thank you from the bottom of my heart as much as I can, because it's still not enough.

Mom, I love you.

Steak and Arugula, revisited

2009-05-09T22:32:00.003-05:00

Wife wanted steak tonight, and it's been a while since I've had some, so why not? I think the last time I've had any was before Lent, and I've been wanting to do another riff off my favorite steak dish - steak and arugula salad. I've posted on that before back in January, but I'm starting to feel like I'm refining my craft.

This time around, I didn't use any mushrooms or sauce, instead keeping it just steak and arugula as the main events. I did, however, add a sprinkling of cacao nibs on the top, which had that great bitter chocolate taste to further complement the Shiraz I had, and also amped up the bitter in the arugula, punching through the fat in the steak. Got my hand a little more steady on the cast iron also. Put a much more noticeable sear on this one, but didn't sacrifice the temperature of my steak to do it. I parked it under the broiler for five minutes which finished it off just right. Let it cool on a rack for about five minutes, then sliced it. The jus barely spotted my board as a result, and every bite of that steak was a sponge, full of moisture and flavor. My only regret here is that I want a much thicker steak to use the next time I do this.

What next time? I want horseradish in there. As long as it's not piled on, it's another bit player I think that can also help steak and arugula to hold hands.

Pâté, cheap food that tastes rich

2009-05-08T00:36:00.004-05:00

I love chicken livers. Being raised in the south, I first got acquainted to them as the perfect bait to catch catfish. Then, I discovered that they were pretty tasty when fried up. Then, I discovered pâté, and found my favorite use for the bloody, rubbery little lobes.

The beauty about making pâté from chicken livers is that they are dirt cheap. I bought a pound of them at the store for two bucks. That's the most expensive part of the dish. Did I mention this will feed six to eight people? All you really have to have on hand is time.

What you want:

1 pound chicken livers, washed and trimmed
1 cup cream
1 egg
1 tsp white pepper
1 tsp kosher salt
2 bay leaves
4 sprigs of fresh thyme OR 4 large sage leaves
Milk

To begin, put your livers in a dish with a lid, and pour enough milk into that dish to cover the top of them all. Put the lid on, and let the livers sit in the milk overnight. This is crucial to getting your livers to taste right, no matter what you use them for. Chicken livers can have a ferric taste to them, that if unchecked, can be unpleasant. Sitting in milk will help to avoid this.

The next day, pour out the milk. Put your livers in the food processor. Add cream, egg, white pepper, and salt.

You want to run this on the high setting for at least a minute. I ran mine for about a minute and a half. The resulting liquid was viscous and pink. It kind of reminded me of Star Trek VI when the Klingon guys got killed in zero gravity and you had all of these crazy computer-generated globules of pink blood floating around. Pretty zany.

Anyway, go ahead and pour that Klingon blood into a terrine or a small baking dish. If you're an idiot like me who doesn't have a dish of the right size available, use some ramekins instead!

Snap your bay leaves in half and place them evenly. Add your fresh herbs too. Preheat the oven to 375. Place your dish or dishes into a larger dish, and fill it up with hot water. Cover your dishes and bake. It should go about 40 or 45 minutes. Check it at 40 with a knife to look for doneness. When you can dip the knife in and out and it comes up clean, you're ready.

Remove it from heat and let it cool. Pick out your herbs and bay leaves and discard. Re-cover, and set in the fridge to chill overnight.

Your pâté will be ready to eat the next day. Whatever you want to spread it on is okay. Crackers are good, and my wife likes to spread it on regular toast slices. Me personally, it's gotta be thin-sliced baguette. Best of both worlds, really.

Never buy pita in a grocery store. Ever.

2009-04-26T10:13:00.005-05:00

There are few things more likely to bring the bile up in the back of my throat than sinking my teeth into store-bought pita bread. In one of the biggest shams of American food capitalism, somebody had this big idea that they would pass off delicious pita bread as this cakey, crumbly, flavorless nightmare, and then overcharge poor saps for the honor. I'm sure you've had it as well, and unless you're just daft or haven't had the proper stuff, you know what I mean. Go to any gyro/falafel/shawarma shop around and get it from a restaurant. Notice the difference? It's resilient and flavorful.

Well, it's not rocket science to make the good stuff. Once again, people assume something is harder than it actually is. I'm gonna fix this.

1 1/4 cups lukewarm water
3 1/4 cup bread flour
2 tbsp olive oil
2 tsp active dry yeast
1 tsp kosher salt
1/2 tsp sugar

Combine your sugar, yeast, and 1/2 cup of water in a bowl. In a large mixing bowl, combine your salt and bread flour. Form a well. Let the yeast sit five minutes in the water, then stir and add to the well, with the olive oil.

Stir in a little flour to form a thin paste and cover for 20 minutes to let it sponge.

Once sponged, start stirring in the rest of the flour. If the mixture binds too fast, add a little of your water. You want to keep the dough as stiff as possible but still keep it together. Eventually, you'll work all the flour in to form a very stiff dough ball.

Knead this thing out for at least fifteen minutes. You want as much gluten activation as you can manage. Once that's done, pop it in a greased mixing bowl, and cover with a damp towel.

Usually I give it 90 minutes to rise, but it's getting warmer these days so I cut it to 75, which is more than plenty.

Once that's doubled, punch it down, chafe it into an even ball, and cut it in two. Re-cover one half, and with the other half, cut it into four portions and make little balls with that.

Roll em out to about 8 to 12 inches diameter more or less. It should be pretty thin but not at risk of tearing apart. I usually give a few passes with the rolling pin, flip the dough, rotate it 90 degrees, and repeat. You'll get a generally round shape but don't worry if its not perfect. You want to cover these and let them proof for 20 minutes. While that's happening, work elsewhere.

Preheat your oven to 425 degrees, and if you've got a pizza stone, put it in there. If you don't have a stone, go ahead and use a baking sheet, but it's not quite as efficient at soaking up heat and dishing it out. You can use paving stones in any hardware store for an alternative if you need stone, it's up to you.

While that's preheating, I go and fry my falafels. These are from an earlier blog posting from last year, all made from scratch stuff. Again, falafel from box mix is terrible, and it's not hard to make the authentic stuff very easily.

I also had made some hommous and tzatziki sauce in advance a few days before. If you want the low-down on the falafel and tzatziki, check the posting Falafel, Tzatziki, and Mutabbal - An Arabic Feast.

The hommous is very easy too.

14 ounce can of cooked chicpeas, with liquid
3 cloves garlic
3 tbsp tahini
1 tsp salt
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
juice of 1 lemon, or 2 tsp citric acid granules
dash of hot paprika
extra virgin olive oil for drizzling on top.

Combine all that stuff sans the paprika and olive oil in food processor, and let that go on high for about five minutes until a silky puree. Spoon that into a dish, chill it, and when you serve, splash a little olive oil on top and a shake of paprika. That's it.

At any rate, when your 20 minutes is up for the proofing, take the first pita and ease it onto the stone. Let that bake for five minutes. Open the oven, and what looks like a weird bready pillow pops out!

Be gentle with it, it's going to be hard and brittle for a few minutes until it cools and softens up. If you have a towel or cloth bag or something, bundle it in there. Repeat the process with the next pita. Once they're all baked, they'll be supple and flat, but with a wonderful pocket. You can do the same with the next batch of dough, or what I recommend is to put that in the fridge for the next day. Pita should be eaten as fresh as possible to enjoy its full potential.

Dinner is served. We just recently got a nice wrought iron bistro set and wanted to eat outside to take advantage of the nice weather. My wife's carnivorous habits took over and she made beef souvlaki, which was fine by me. I also arranged some eggplant, red pepper, and onion on some awesome kebab skewers my mom gave me, and grilled those up as well. Dinner was served with beer and a healthy portion of Ouzo for a digestif.

Pocket shot. Plenty of real estate in here. I packed in the grilled veg around falafel and drizzled tzatziki all over that.

Lipstick on a Pig: Whiting Hemingway

2009-04-24T23:21:00.004-05:00

So, I had some sea bass.

Had.

No longer.

Sadly, it went south on me within a couple of days. I was going to use it to make Sea Bass Hemingway, a totally BS-ed mockup of Grouper Hemingway of my own design. Instead, I was stuck in the midst of my mise en place with a wrapper full of stinky fish, and feeling a bit frantic. To keep dinner on the plate, I resorted to frozen whiting. It's not even close to a match at all, but sometimes bad things happen and you've just got to deal. My wife was very supportive of me and helped me turn the disaster around.

Now, the spaghetti and sauce were very tasty, and the skin on the whiting was at least pleasantly crispy. That's good. The rest of the whiting itself was a bit overdone and let's be frank, whiting on it's best day will never taste as good as sea bass on its worst. It was edible, and partly good, but mostly a lesson worth learning.

What's for dinner roundup

2009-04-21T23:41:00.003-05:00

Nothing much going on, just a few things I've been making for dinner lately:

First time making french fries. They turned out pretty decent. Served with some super creamy hommous from my double batch in the food processor.

Grilled cheese with homemade bread and Red Dragon cheddar cheese (infused with lots of mustard seeds!)

Some noodle & soup amalgamation with udon noodles, edamame, water chestnuts, baby corn, cabbage, carrots, shitake mushrooms, and green onion.

More stuff to come this weekend. Making some more tapas, and a proper middle eastern dinner spread!

Tapas are an excuse to make lazy finger food

2009-04-16T21:56:00.003-05:00

I've been dabbling in a book on Tapas I found on sale, and been kinda wanting to get into making them. For those not familiar, tapas are a sort of Spanish fast food / street food / finger food sort of thing. A few here and there make for a tasty snack, and given enough of em, you can make a meal out of them too.

This one was pure lazy. I served up a tin of sardines with a little garlic-infused olive oil. With that were some manzanilla olives stuffed with red pimiento peppers. To the right, cubes of spanish manchego goat cheese, and finally some oven roasted almonds with paprika and salt. I poured up a glass of a buttery-sweet Spanish red, and had a lazy night of eating with my fingers.

I plan on getting a little more involved with this as I go. I want to make a party spread with multiple assortments of olives, a lot of chorizo sausage, and maybe some spicy prawns and other such things. There's not many rules. The Spanish love almonds, paprika, olives, chorizo, and tasty little seafood bits. It's an entire cuisine built around bite sizes!

What the heck is a Rarebit, and what is that Shepherd doing to it?!?

2009-04-14T23:05:00.005-05:00

Wales is a place I know next to nothing about. I can rattle off all sorts of trivial fluff about every far-flung corner of the earth, except for Wales and a few banana republics here and there. All I know about them is that they have a sweet-looking flag, have a disproportionately large number of people named Llewellyn, and have an unfortunate reputation for sheep relations that is probably unfair, but rivals that of New Zealanders. Baa Ram Ewe indeed.

The only other thing I know is that Welsh Rarebits rule. Rarebit, also known to some as Welsh Rabbit, is a play on words, when snooty fog-breathers in England and other parts of the Isles used to have a laugh at what a bunch of broke-asses that Welshmen were, and said that to the Welsh, cheese was considered to be their rabbit, since they were too poor for the real thing. The Welsh, being precursors to modern rednecks or something, turned it around on everybody and made rarebit, a delicious sauce for toasted bread made out of cheese and beer. I can only imagine that this would be the work of a proto-Redneck, because I can totally see some dude with a mullet waking up in his shanty with a four-alarm hangover, trying to cook something with cheese, and pouring in a warm pint of last night's libation because "Hold my beer and watch this shit" happens.

For your rarebit sauce, grab some stuff:

1 1/2 cup cheese, grated (I used some swanky black & yellow marbled Cahill's Porter Cheddar, but regular cheddar works plenty fine.)
2/3 cup cream
2 tbsp butter
1 tsp Worcestershire Sauce
1 tsp Dijon Mustard
1/2 cup dark beer (Porter or Stout preferably.)
2 tbsp all purpose flour
1/2 tsp black pepper

Begin by combining your flour and butter to whisk over medium heat in a 2 quart saucepot. You want to make a really thick roux. To that, add your Worcestershire & mustard, and whisk around quickly. Add your cream and bring the heat down to medium-low.

Mmm beer. Add the beer. Stir. That should be about half a bottle if you're like me and having a weenie 12 ounce instead of a pint. Rectify your situation with the other half of the bottle going into your face. Keep stirring.

Cheese in, pepper in, keep stirring!

Here's your finished rarebit. Mine's darker than usual on account of the Cahill's Porter cheese. Now, go toast you up some bread, and lets put it on a plate and ladle some of this stuff on top.

Haha yeah right.

You think I'd make something this awesome and just drop it on some toast? I've got bigger plans. Let's put this rarebit into some science machine and cross it with something...like a Shepherd's Pie! Also since we've basically made a drunk-ass relative of Sauce Mornay, let's put some macaroni all up in here. It may sound like I'm making all this crap up as I go, and you're absolutely right.

To begin the transformation, grab this junk:

You want about 1/2 cup frozen peas, maybe 1/3 jar of dried beef or maybe a half cup of leftover mince or whatever. You also want a small-medium russett potato. Not pictured, but also get a pound of elbow macaroni, and bring a gallon of water to boil with a few teaspoons of salt in it. Cook your macaroni about a minute or so shy of al-dente (aka done). You also want a small pad of butter reserved for the potato. I'll get to that later.

Chop your meat. This stuff is crazy delicious and I snuck a nibble. Cook's prerogative.

When your macaroni finishes, drain in a collander and transfer to a bowl. Toss with the dried beef and peas, and ladle your rarebit onto that.

Wash and dry the potato, and if you have a food processor, use the grater function to make you some awesome hash brown things. If you don't have a processor, use a grater with big holes. If you don't have that, you can always do this like a traditional shepherd's pie and mash the spuds for the topping. I want something a little more solid to contrast the macaroni, so I went with hash browns instead. When you've got your gratings, melt the pad of butter in a skillet and cook for a few minutes on medium-low, stirring a lot. You are only interested in turning the potato slightly translucent and soft. Don't crisp em yet. We'll get to that later.

Spoon your macaroni into ramekins or similar oven-happy dishes. Make it as level as you can, and leave about half an inch of space up top.

Top with the hash. Again, make it pretty even, and space it out so you get a crust and cover the macaroni. Go ahead and set your oven's broiler on, and make sure your rack is on the next-to-closest setting from the top.

Pop your ramekins onto a baking sheet and slide em in. Keep the door open because you want to watch them at all times. Don't worry about losing hot air because broiling is doing its work with direct radiant heat instead of hot air. This is fine.

Remove, let cool for a good 5-10 minutes or so, and serve with a glass of the same beer you used. In my opinion this is a one-ramekin meal, so if you are having other things make sure they're not quite as fattypants as this is. The stuff I suggested in the recipe will make easily six servings if not eight. The only difference is that each potato yields about enough hash for three or four servings. If you need more tater, just shred another one.

Mmm United Kingdom-ey.

So is this a Shepherd's Rarebit? Is it a Welsh Pie? Is it a Rarebitaroni Surprise? I don't know but it's pretty awesome stuff, and a hell of a lot more fun than some silly toast.

Les Poissons

2009-04-14T00:22:00.001-05:00

Les poissons
Les poissons
How I love les poissons
Love to chop
And to serve little fish
First I cut off their heads
Then I pull out the bones
Ah mais oui
Ca c'est toujours delish
Les poissons
Les poissons
Hee hee hee
Hah hah hah
With the cleaver I hack them in two
I pull out what's inside
And I serve it up fried
God, I love little fishes
Don't you?

Here's something for tempting the palate
Prepared in the classic technique
First you pound the fish flat with a mallet
Then you slash through the skin
Give the belly a slice
Then you rub some salt in
'Cause that makes it taste nice

Dead Animals om nom nom nom

2009-04-12T22:19:00.005-05:00

Easter's here! Time to get some serious grub on. For those who don't know, I've kept myself on a vegetarian diet for the duration of the Lentan fast, and that went really well. Does that mean that I'm on the fast track to veganism? Not so fast chief. While I have nothing at all against vegetarians and vegans, many of whom I'm friends with and know they can cook some seriously good food, it's not a lifestyle that I'd choose to embrace. True to my ultimate nature as an adventurous omnivore, sometimes I gotta just answer that call. If I find myself over some slain prey in the faint moonlight howling at the sky, that's just how I roll.

But before Bessie the Cow has a nervous fit, I think it's best to put on training wheels. Diving directly into a ribeye and arugula salad might be tasty, but I might not be able to handle it. So to start, let's go light. How about seafood?

I worked a good six hours today to put together a spread that would be gobbled up and gone between me and my wife within less than one. Some people would think this is crazy, but I just love to cook. Some people tinker in garages on muscle cars for years and drive them one day a month. If you love it, half the fun is the journey.

For a salad, I went with an adaptation of something I'd read in a French bistro cookbook about a Basque seafood salad with red peppers. I liked the general idea, but wanted to make a dressing out of peppers instead, and use some neat little things like pearl onions to go with stock-boiled calamari.

I really had fun with the presentation, and this thing tasted great. If I do it again, I might not use arugula though. I think spinach would be tastier greens, as the arugula is a little loud in comparison.

Next was a pouch-steamed filet of sole, with garlic, lemon, fresh thyme & parsley, with a crusty garlic bruschetta. The flavors complemented each other really well, but next time I don't think I'll pair something as hearty as a bruschetta with this fish, because it's seriously delicate and tender. If I pan-fried it instead, different story, but no big deal.

Risotto with lobster fumé and saffron. I took a lobster carapace from one of my wife's previous meals and put that in a pot with mirepoix vegetables and a bouquet garni, which is a little bundle of herbs that work like the mirepoix, to amp up flavor. I strained it, reduced it, strained it again through cloth, and it was excellent stuff. Definitely the best fumé I've made from lobster. I think my risotto craft is definitely improving as I make the stuff, because I loved it. The only downside is that by the time I got to this, I was only a few bites in and then I was full. Oh well, there's always leftovers.

The wine I had with all this was an off-dry Riesling that went well with the sole, but I think it was too sweet for anything else. Dry Riesling would've been better for the salad, and the Risotto could've handled Sauvignon Blanc, because it's big and rich, and wouldn't be crowded out.

All in all, it was a really fun experience to make this sort of food again, and I had a great time doing it. Am I back to murder on a plate every day? Probably not. I like meat a good deal, but I expect it's something best done on a weekend, when you can do it right.

Okay, so maybe one more veggie dish...

2009-04-12T02:15:00.003-05:00

For many a moon I have fussed and fretted with my wife to get a deep fryer, and the answer has always been no. Now, she's not unreasonable, and her refusal has been largely pragmatic. You see, our house and our kitchen are pretty damn small. In fact, I have absolutely no idea how I'm able to squirrel away the amount of culinary crap that I manage to own. I run my kitchen a lot like a U-Boat. Space is a premium that cannot be wasted. I believe I just recently put away a sack of potatoes into the keyboard drawer of a derelict computer cart! Soon, I'll get a chain-suspended cot to drop from the ceiling and I'll hot bunk in shifts with a bearded fellow named Johann. He'll handle breakfasts and torpedoing British freighters in the morning, and I'll come around for the second shift to tackle dinner and dodge depth charges. A pity I don't know any German sailing songs, and I'm pretty sure that Rammstein was gauche even back in the 1940's.

So exactly how on earth did I pull this con? She brought up the space issue again, and I countered by saying that I'd make room. She was unconvinced, so I brought out my wild card. I would make pakoras and bhajjis.

Among the first Indian food I ever made, these bite-sized potato and onion junk foods are some of my wife's favorite stuff. She says I make them better than anybody, and she's pretty good about not flattering me without meaning it. Did I mention I love to have my ego stroked? At any rate, that must've done the trick, because today I brought home a big ol' frying cauldron.

I also managed to pull down in a binge of capitalistic excess a nice clear plastic multi-portion dish. I planned to use the thing for Spanish Tapas, but my chances of finding a good Sherry in this one-horse town are hit and miss, so that was on a back burner. She wanted to fill the thing up for the two of us. I told her she was crazy, but I wanted to play with my fry monster!

Along with the fried vittles, I toasted up some naan, and served mango chutney, pickle, and some cold IPA. True to form, we didn't even get close to finishing half, but I guess we'll have fun eating leftovers. Not the healthiest thing in the world to be sure, but sometimes it's fun to have junk.

Good Friday is at an end.

2009-04-10T22:42:00.003-05:00

With the sun setting tonight, so too ends my wonderful experiment into the world of vegetarianism.

So, what have I learned? Has any wisdom been gained from the experience? Was it too much to bear?

The last question first I guess. It was easy. It was perhaps too easy really. I don't really eat much meat at all in my normal activities, but this foray certainly proved the point. I changed my habits very little. Surprisingly the hardest thing to give up were anchovies, which I think are perfectly savory and anchor so many tasty sauces in place.

How about wisdom? Sure. I learned not to hate and fear fortified greens, as long as they're cooked properly. I learned how to reconnect and enjoy some southern food. I learned that seitan is a pretty tasty, albeit pretty silly food.

Now more than ever, eating bravely is an exciting hobby. As long as the food is of good quality and prepared well, there's not really anything I won't try once. I've washed clean the stubborn pickiness of my childhood.

Is this saying goodbye to vegetarian eats for me? Hell no. I love 'em, and I'm sure they'll continue to be a major portion of my diet. I must admit I'm looking forward to easing into a habitual meat dish every now and then though. In particular, I want some seafood this weekend. More on that later.

Until then, I leave you with my final veggie dish of Lent - some yummy paneer mattar :)

Evolution of recipe ideas

2009-04-09T21:22:00.003-05:00

As most people here know, I usually don't follow recipes. Mind you, I own a zillion cook books and I read recipes the way that some nerds read comic books, but it's mainly for general concepts and ideas. I might like the way that one recipe recommends a sauce, but think that the rest of it is crap, and think about a completely different way to take it and go with a random idea. To sort of illustrate the process that goes on in my mad science lab of a brain, I'm posting up a bit of a work in progress.

Basically, I wanted to make a dish with a general Italian sense of style using three things in particular.

Fresh asparagus (it's so in season it would be a crime not to eat it often)
Pungent & garlicky bruschetta (Italian toast basically)
An egg, preferably poached (cooked in liquid just slightly under the boiling point)

Now, my first day of tinkering resulted in hit or miss stuff. My egg fell completely apart in my poaching liquid! Disaster! I had forgotten to swirl the water before adding the egg, and also forgotten to add a little bit of acidic liquid to my water, which helps to denature the proteins in the egg and make them semi-solid like we like. The swirling helps to more or less wrap the egg up in itself as it cooks, so it stays together instead of becoming a whispy white cloud in your pot.

In my frustration, I opted instead for an over-easy egg. Bad idea on two fronts. One, it ain't poached like I want it, and two, I really suck at flipping over easies. Broke the yolk, ranted and raved, and moved on. Can be eaten, just isn't pretty.

The asparagus was a simple affair, and I wanted nothing more than to just pan fry about five stalks of the stuff in maybe a teaspoon or two of olive oil. To that I'd accompany some very thin slivers of garlic clove. Now in this iteration I added them a little early to the pan. Garlic is a tricky thing. Heat changes its flavor profile dramatically. Raw or lightly cooked, and it's very pungent and a little peppery. Cooked more and it sweetens a bit. Beyond that and it gets a bit bitter. If you like that skanky, flower-wilting effect that only the first category provides, you want to add the stuff just a minute or two before removing the pan from the heat. It doesn't need much to flavor everything around it.

The bruschetta in my case was a bit of thick-sliced baguette (quiet you big babies it isn't important whether the bread is Italian or French, just as long as its crusty) that I blitzkrieg'd through my oven's broiler on the high rack. If you remember my Pecorino Toscano cheesies from the cacciatore posting, the high rack gets a huge blast of heat down onto your food. You're essentially grilling in your oven. The only thing you're not getting is a little bit of the charcoal or wood smoke, which is okay. It's best on the grill for sure, but this is convenient and still very tasty. Eyeball those like a hawk and when they look good and golden brown on top, yank em. Take a clove of garlic or two and chop in half. Now pretend its an eraser and you're erasing something you've written on the toasty top of the bruschetta. You scour the entire surface with the garlic, which is going to slowly start to disintegrate from the chafing the toast is giving it. Once you're garlic'd up, you top with extra virgin olive oil, and I went with a few flakes of fleur de sel (fancy pants sea salt) and thin slivers of red bell pepper.

I still suck at plating but I like to pretend I can do it!

It tasted great, but I felt a little meh about it. For one, that damn egg was making me mad. I don't want an over easy (and a bad one at that!) in my pseudo-Italian hodgepodge. Over easy is appropriate for a lot of things in my head, but here it's a cop out. No, that wouldn't do. Hell or high water I'd poach me an egg.

Also the red pepper tastes awesome, but its kinda blah when in raw slices. Also it didn't really do anything on that bruschetta except fall off when I went to eat it. No, needed to change that somehow. Still, the arrangement was good on the asparagus, and even though the garlic was a little overdone, it tasted great. In fact, it all tasted very nice, but that's only part of the equation. My wife may never understand my Rainman-esque obsession, but I find a particular zen in being able to not only get food to taste good, but also to feel good in my mouth and look good. Sometimes I get this to work.

This is getting places! I made a few little changes and improved my experience for the most part. I finally got my poached egg, which was a tricky jerk about wanting to stay on that bruschetta. I think the real estate is a little bit high for the egg's liking, and I think thinner bruschetta would make it happier. It would also make it easier to cut with the flat of a fork when I bleed that yolk into the toast. And believe me buddy, you'd better do just that.

I also traded the regular extra virgin oil with one that was infused with rosemary, which was paired with a tender shoot of rosemary from my garden for garnish. A falling back to my comfort zones perhaps, but I love rosemary with my bready experiences and I regret nothing.

The red pepper? That went in the pan with the asparagus, adding sort of a little ribbon effect to the intertwined stalks and definitely making a pretty contrast of colors in the veg. White garlic? Green asparagus? Red bell pepper? Italian nationalism worked for pizza margherita's backstory so I might as well have fun with kitsch right?

The poached egg took two shaves of Manchego, which is a really hard and savory goat's cheese. It's similar to Parmesan and other hard fragrant cheeses, but I think the flavor is a lot brighter and helps to say "Hey here's some fresh stuff in here".

I smashed two or three peppercorns with the flat of my knife to sprinkle on the egg, and fleur de sel went on the veg.

In the end, it made an improvement, and an evolution in my menagerie of half-assed ideas. Can I improve this further? Probably! Why shouldn't all recipes be works in progress anyway? With evolving tastes happening at all times, I think saying you can't continue to tinker with your ideas is an act of unforgivable hubris. Create new things, eat them, and make them better next time. You'll usually succeed.

You can't make vegetarian cacciatore that is unpossible.

2009-04-04T23:14:00.007-05:00

Cacciatore in Italian means hunter, so naturally it's a dish you'd expect meat to show up in. It's one of those really comforting meals full of big, hearty flavors, simple ingredients, and well, some dead animal right? Chicken and Rabbit cacciatore in particular have a following and are among the most popular rustic Italian dishes out there. So who the hell is going to eat some temporary vegetarian's version of Cacciatore?

I know who would:

Think about it. Elmer Fudd is a terrible hunter. Has he actually ever bagged anything at all? He's got dogged determination, I'll give him that, but at least when I went hunting a few times as a young guy I got the hint that I generally suck at it. That said, it isn't helping us figure out just what on earth would go into some vegetarian's version of cacciatore. I mean, all Fudd ever kills is time, and I'm not exactly sure how to properly season a metaphysical concept anyway.

No, for this one, I need some spiritual insight into matters. What to use, what to use?

"Hmmm...could it beeeee....SEITAN?!?!"

You betcha.

Seitan is a weird mad science dough represented by A + B = C. A is some random flavoring crap I don't know whatever you want and also probably water I guess. B is vital wheat gluten, which you can find in the flour isle of most grocery stores, and is the protein extracted from a wheat berry's endosperm. Gluten is what makes bread flour bake into much chewier bread than all purpose, and what generally holds your doughs together. C, if you are just not paying attention to me at all, is the Seitan, which is the delightful protein mass we want to eat today.

Okay, so lets make it, right? Get your mise en place on, homie:

Here's what you'll use:

2 cups vital wheat gluten
2 tsps kosher salt
2 tsp liquid smoke
1 tsp dried oregano
1 tsp dried thyme
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
1/2 tsp white truffle oil
3 tbsp olive oil
about 1/2 cup water, give or take

Alright, it's the same drill as making bread. Combine your dry ingredients in a bowl, make a well in that, and start by adding your water, then wet ingredients.

Alright, the similarities end right here. Full stop. This ain't no damn loaf of bread, so take what you know about bread dough and toss it out of the window. This is quick setting edible concrete, and the moment you combine wet and dry, your gluten is going to start to daisy chain and coagulate like crazy. You've got to work FAST and combine wet and dry before everything locks up, or else you're not going to have a unified mass of veggie protein. Like so:

Looks positively visceral doesn't it? You can feel yourself wanting to eat this seitan with fava beans and a nice bottle of Chianti...fthfthfthp!

Well, we'll have Chianti at least. Or I will. You buy your own!

Take your protein blob and add it to about a quart of boiling vegetable stock. I bought mine in a box because I'm super lazy but I'm sure if you make your own it'll be tasty too. Boil the seitan for about 20 minutes, then drain. You can reserve the stock for making something I'm sure. I just can't think of anything right now. Maybe reconstitute some dried mushrooms, add chopped green onions and make a lazy bum soup. Of course you can just chuck it, up to you.

Pardon the blue pictures. My camera is really big into Van Gogh or something. At any rate once your seitan is cool, you can cut it up how you please. Think of it like any cut of meat, only you don't have to fuss with fat, bone, or any of that junk. For my cacciatore, I want little cubey bits that I can stab with a fork, so thats what I do. From there, we cook it. Again. Why? Well, consider what you have in front of you as a hunk of "rare" flank of seitan. While you could probably bang that out and make seitan carpaccio with arugula, I'm not about to try it. Plus, we're making cacciatore, so we want that stuff in a stew, yo.

Now, when I'm going to be stewing meat, I like to hit it with good temperature on the stove so that it browns on all sides. Nerds call this the Maillard Reaction but basically its just a chemical change that's taking place on the contact point with your pan. Why should you care? Because it makes stuff taste good! We already know that browning stuff makes it taste good so it should stand to reason that browning seitan will...you guessed it.

Now before we do that, I dredge my seitan bites in a little dusting of rice flour. It's a completely judgment call on my part because I like a little added crisp.

Doesn't need to be long. Remember, we just want the flavor on the outside. We can cook it more when we put this into the pot with the rest of our yummies. Once you get the brown, lets put the pieces on paper towels to dry. Grind down some kosher salt in a mortar and pestle to sprinkle on it if you want, but I don't think its necessary.

Seitan's up, but what about the rest of this? What the hell is a Cacciatore anyway?

Well, Cacciatore is a stew dish that traditionally features tomatoes and mushrooms. Pretty tasty stuff, so lets construct the rest, eh?

Get all this together:

1 pound whole peeled tomatoes (I find the tinned ones are best unless you're doing this with tomatoes in season, then knock yourself out!)
1 pound mushrooms (I use small portabella, but crimini or other small-ish ones are fine. Just wash 'em!), quartered
1 shallot, thinly sliced
3 cloves garlic, crushed and minced
1 tsp capers
2 tsp fresh oregano plus extra for garnish
1 tsp fresh basil
2 bay leaves (not pictured, sorry!)
About 1/3 cup Marsala cooking wine
Hunk of good firm cheese with the rind (Parmesan, Pecorino, etc are best, but you can also do this with Grüyere if you must. I used Pecorino Toscano in mine)
2 tbsp olive oil
pinch of salt
black pepper to taste

Okay to start, add your oil to your pot, heat to medium-ish, then add sliced shallots and pinch of salt. Let that go for about 5 minutes, then add your mushrooms.

You want to cook those covered for about ten minutes. Let the mushrooms leave a bit of water in the pot and get juices flowing. To that, we add our wine!

Turn the heat up to high. The steam that comes up will smell like Keith Richard's breath so let it do its business for about two minutes, then add your tomatoes. We want to evaporate that alcohol, but keep the flavor of the wine in the pan. Simple enough.

Let it boil for about two more minutes, then bring it down to a good simmer.

Now we get to have a little fun. Add about 2/3 of your garlic to this, along with your capers, and bay leaves. With that, we also want a little dark magic at work, which we get with a piece of rind from your cheese. Just take a knife to it and extract your rind, and toss that into the cauldron. What you're doing is adding a nice umami baseline of flavor to the dish, and also thickening it ever so slightly.

So what about the rest of that cheese? Hey, lets make some cheesy garlic bread for an accompaniment, and something to mop up the remaining sauce!

Just slice your fresh-baked Mantovana bread, and...

Wait, you didn't fresh bake Mantovana bread? I guess I didn't send out that memo. Nevermind, grab whatever whole loaf of italian bread you can get and cut it up into two thick toast slices. As long as you're not using Wonderbread it doesn't really matter I guess, and it's gonna probably taste good.

The remaining garlic you reserved from earlier? Go ahead and spread those across the top of the bread. Cut thin slices off your cheese hunk and arrange them across the surface of your toasts. Try and leave no bread exposed, and maybe even overhand cheese around the edges. We're going into the broiler and we want to bubble and brown cheese, not to burn bread. Cheese covers bread, problem solved, capice? Put these on a baking sheet and get ready for fun!

If you've never used a broiler, basically your temperature is regulated by the distance of the cooking rack to the heating element or gas or whatever. Closer to the hot stuff, the hotter the heat you radiate to your food surface. Set that rack as high as it will go. We want to napalm these puppies. Now since we're cooking at such ludicrous temperature, we want to keep an eye on the cheese breads. They are going to cook within a minute or two. Keep the oven door open and watch them. Pop a squat and eyeball them. When you get leopard spots on the cheese, you're set.

Now, lets finish the cacciatore. Add your seitan, and chop and add your fresh herbs. Notice I'm only adding the herbs now, and that's because they're fresh. Fresh herbs work best right at the end of the cooking process and before service. If you only have dried, don't despair, but you want to add that stuff about when you added the garlic, bay leaves, and such.

Ladle your cacciatore into a dish, cram a cheesy bread into that, and if you've got that fresh oregano, garnish it up. For wine, I went with a Bell'agio Chianti 2007 which tasted great to go with that heavy tomato sauce. If Chianti ain't your bag, I'm a huge Merlot fan so maybe that's more your worldview?

At any rate, dig in. You may not have caught that wascally wabbit this time, but that doesn't mean you can't tuck into your cacciatore.

Ode to Spring

2009-03-21T23:46:00.006-05:00

Ahh spring!

Tired of cold weather. Time for wonderful 60 to 70 degree days, the best days of fishing, and a car full of neon-colored pollen. It's also a time for fresh spring produce, and I've been wanting to cook with some. With my recent hobby splurge on pasta, ravioli sounds like a cool idea, but I don't just want to drown fresh raviolis in some marinara. I want ravioli soup.

Frankly I'm not sure if such a thing even exists. I've had fresh tortellini soups before so why not, eh? At any rate, I figured I'd try something out and see if it was any good.

Okay, here's an obligatory mise en place for the raviolis:

1 1/2 cup semolina flour or bread flour
2 eggs
pinch of kosher salt
3 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp water
1/4 pound spinach, washed, blanched, and finely chopped
1/4 pound feta cheese, crumbled
2 tbsp fresh tarragon, washed, blanched, and finely chopped
2 tsp coarse ground black pepper

I've already gone over making pasta dough in the fresh pasta blog. Same recipe, no biggie. What we'll concern ourselves with is forming the raviolis. First, the filling. Combine the spinach, tarragon, and pepper in a bowl, and start to crumble your feta into that with a fork or your hands or whatever. You want to make a sort of lumpy paste filling that will stay together.

Mash mash mash.

With your filling ready, go ahead and roll your pasta dough, starting with the wide rollers, and going to the next to thinnest setting. When it's there, you have a lot of options. By a lot, I mean sky is the limit. You can take a pizza cutter and make nice straight cuts to make square raviolis. You can even take those squares and make things like tortellini! You can also take a little drink glasses and make half moons or even round ones. I went with the latter just because it was the first one that crossed my mind.

Making full circles like this, you get two circles to make one ravioli. One on bottom, one on top, filling in the middle. First, lets get the filling on. You want as much in there as you can, but still be able to pinch the edges together.

Once you cover each one up, gently work it to get the air out and make it pretty even. This takes practice and you'll get the hang of it. Now you want to seal it. Use the tines of a fork to press down and get a good seal and a nice pretty little border.

Eventually you get a big spread of ravioli. This is a good 4-6 person spread. You may get more or less, just keep cranking em out. You'll eventually get a wad of dough you can't make raviolis out of. Use your best judgment on how to deal with this.

Hehe.

Okay, now for the second part of ravioli soup - the soup!

Partial mise en place time!

2 tbsp olive oil
2 shallots, minced
3 tsp kosher salt
2 cloves garlic, crushed and minced
3 bay leaves
1/2 cup of dry white wine
Juice of a lemon plus teaspoon of zest, reserved
3 quarts vegetable stock
1 ounce dried porcini mushrooms
1 pound fresh (big buds with a twinge of purple) asparagus
Pinch cayenne pepper
Kosher Salt + Pepper to taste

Take a good look at that asparagus. Little things like that are why I wanted to make this dish. Look at the tips of the stalks, and the buds are tinged in purple and pretty fat. If you see asparagus that looks like that, you should drop everything and buy it, because it's going to be absolutely amazing no matter how you want to make it. If I wasn't making this, I'd smother that asparagus in some olive oil, grill it, and then serve it on a plate with cracked pepper and fleur de sel, and maybe a piece of bread to mop up my drool. The only thing you've got to do is to trim the bottom third of the stalk to get the less tasty woody parts away, and you pretty much can make great asparagus without fail.

Now, confession time. Instead of veggie stock in this, I used water. As I said, this was an entirely conceptual thing, so naturally there were some hitches. From using dried mushrooms before, I knew that they form a flavored stock when they reconstitute, so I wanted to use that. The problem was that the mushroom flavor wasn't quite enough. You want the effect of mirepoix vegetables doing some of the heavy lifting too. Live and learn. Anyways, lets make soup.

Heat your oil in the skillet on medium. Add chopped shallots and salt. Close that up and drop the heat down to low to sweat the shallots for 20 minutes. Uncover that, add your garlic, and chop your asparagus up into little one inch lengths, keeping the tips intact. Toss that in and bring the heat up to medium to get a minute or two of good dry heat before the stock or water.

Add your stock, bay leaf, lemon juice, pepper, wine, and bring it up to a boil. Once it hits boil, add your dried porcini mushrooms. Let those go for about five minutes. What you're doing is letting the mushrooms get nice and chewy again, and flavoring that cooking liquid. You're also ready to add your ravioli! Do it!

With these being a little less delicate than spaghetti, I'd say let them boil for about two or two and a half minutes. The added time also helps to get the filling cooked up, but it still doesn't take long.

You're done! Well, almost anyway. Sprinkle some of that reserved lemon zest on top. Ladle it into a bowl and eat. I like to eat a little stock and veg, pierce a ravioli and let some of the filling linger in the soup, and eat some more, eventually dismantling the ravioli as I go. If that's tedious to you or you want a different experience, try another style of ravioli or your favorite stuffed pasta. You're not exactly limited by anything but your imagination.

Nachos, hold the cheese

2009-03-19T20:31:00.009-05:00

Not much goin on, just snackin' lately.

Wanted to make nachos, but didn't feel in a cheese mood. No problemo.

I also didn't have a bag of tortilla chips. That's a good thing. One, it's relatively expensive, and two, you can make tastier chips with almost no effort. All you need are those huge stacks of soft corn tortillas you can find in either a hispanic market, or in the hispanic section in almost any grocery store anywhere. Find the bag of tortillas with the most Spanish and the least English on it, because they're usually cheaper. Why's that? Because of marketing forces! Smart people know that people who don't know better will buy food as long as it has a pretty wrapper, a nice rustic picture, and easy English words they understand. See, they think they're getting something special that way, when in actuality, they're paying a premium for that pretty picture of a senorita with an overflowing basket and "Juanita's quality stone-ground corn tortillas" in big easy English words.

Seriously, go play this game. Find food items that show up both in the hispanic section of your store and elsewhere. I found a jar of artichoke hearts for $4.00 in the general produce area. A jar of the same volume but in a much more drab label in Spanish? Two bucks. Whenever possible, I always buy the hispanic groceries, and you should too.

At any rate, I have my nice bag of soft corn tortillas. If you've seen my previous blog posting on street cart tacos, you know the kind. Get a stack of them on a cutting board and make a nice clean cut, and a cross cut across to form a stack of four quarters. Now if you'll also remember when we made Indian papadi chaat, we want to heat up oil in either a deep fryer or skillet or what have you. Once that's at a very high temperature (like about a notch or two below fully high), we add the tortilla chips. These are going to cook VERY fast, so the moment you drop each chip into the oil, flip them over in the order you dropped em, and by the time you finish that, the first ones will be ready to come out. You want them in the oil about 30 seconds to a minute total. If your oil is very hot, thats all you need to make wonderful crispy chips that aren't soggy. Put them on a rack or on some paper towels and sprinkle ground kosher salt on top.

From there, I open up a tin of black peas and a tin of diced tomatoes. If you want to dice your own, go for it. Drain those and set each aside. Next, you want to make guacamole. Please don't buy somebody else's guacamole it's expensive and it probably sucks. You can make way better stuff. Take an avocado, peel that, and drop it into a food processor, followed by four cloves of garlic, two tomatillos, a diced serrano chili or a teaspoon of dried chili flakes, a teaspoon of salt, and juice from a lime. Pulse that just to the point where they're combined, but nothing more. Scoop that out and reserve.

Arrange your chips on a plate, top with your beans and tomatoes, dollop guacamole on top. I also like salsa roja dabbed around the chips, or any salsa with a bit of heat but still good flavor. To top that off, add a few leaves of fresh cilantro, because it makes Mexican food taste soooo good.

If you just cannot part with cheese, get some crumbled queso fresco (again, shop the hispanic section please!). It's gentle and subtle. Do not get that neon yellow "nacho cheese". It's way too heavy with fresh fried chips, and you're already getting a bit of fat from the avocado.

I can't imagine good mexican food without super cold Cerveza and a lime, so that's my worldview. If you don't swing beer or whatever, stop before you leave the hispanic foods section and grab a can of coconut water. It's tasty!

Fresh pasta

2009-03-15T23:08:00.004-05:00

This past Chritmas, I got a pasta maker from my folks, but haven't found an excuse to use it yet. I would either procrastinate, or I would convince myself one way or another that I needed to get dried pasta for a dish, or that the task itself was too daunting. Either way, I hadn't made the stuff until today.

Turns out, it's a lot easier and more convenient than I imagined.

Here's what you'll use:

1 1/2 cup either bread flour or semolina (I used the latter, but as long as you're high gluten, you'll be okay)
2 large eggs, whisked
2 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp water
pinch of salt

Start by combining salt and flour, and make a well in the middle of that. Combine your eggs, olive oil, and water, and slowly add a little of the liquid to your dough at a time. Work it thoroughly, and add more again until you've absorbed it all. Once everything is combined, knead like mad for a good ten minutes. Really put your back into it, this stuff will be pretty stiff.

There you go. Oil that dough ball, and cover it up for 30 minutes to let the gluten in the dough rest and give you a little elasticity. From here, you could either roll it out with a rolling pin and cut pasta by hand either with a knife or pizza cutter or what have you. I don't have patience for that, so of course I'll use my pasta maker!

What I'm doing here is to set my basic rollers for the thickest setting. This will pull the pasta out into a roughly flat shape. Don't fret if you get holes, they'll shrink when you thin the pasta sheet out. Dust your work surface with flour, as well as each sheet when it goes through. After the widest setting, you want to adjust the rollers to probably the next-to-last setting. I'm not going to speak for your machine, so you should be familiar with it. All I know is that on most machines, the next-to-last setting is best for making spaghetti. Feed your sheet of dough through that to make a really thin sheet of dough. Flour it and keep it from sticking.

From here, move on to your cutting heads. Again, your machine may be different, but you will usually have a few cutting dies to use, and this is the most common one. Ease the thin sheets through, and have something to collect the pasta. Ideally you want to keep the pasta from touching, to prevent clumping. If you have something like a cooling rack, you can also drape the pasta from that if you want to dry it for later. I personally made mine direct from fresh.

From here, get your stock pot of water boiling with about a teaspoon or two of salt added. It'll take some time to boil this, so you can also get your accompaniments ready. If your sauce takes time, plan ahead, or you can add oil to a pan, and a few things like garlic, pine nuts, and so forth, and make a tasty mix to toss your pasta with. Whatever you choose, when your water boils, you want to add your pasta. Now with fresh, you're going to be able to cook with much greater quickness than without. Your pasta will be al dente and ready to eat between one to two minutes of hitting the water. You'll know for sure when the stuff floats. Drain in a collander, dish it up, and enjoy:

Mine was tossed in olive oil, toasted garlic and pine nuts, crushed peppercorns, and some fresh black truffle. I finished it with a grating from some Manchego cheese.

There were a few clumps in the pasta, but nothing substantial. The texture is much smoother than dried pasta, and its got a very pleasant chewiness to it that's hard to emulate. Considering how little time it takes to boil when compared to the store brands (a difference of ten minutes), it's not all that much more time to prepare. I'll most certainly be making more pasta now.