Sunday - May 29, 2011
Exploring the contents of our ‘fridge.
I woke up about midnight last night/this morning, not sure exactly what day it was. I was feeling somewhat peckish. I thought: a peanut butter and jelly sandwich should do the trick.
Peanut butter? Check!
Bread? Check!
Jelly?
Oh dear. This requires a very scary safari into…the refrigerator! With no certainty that I’ll even find what I’m looking for!
20+ years ago, when I was still dating my spouse, she came over with her 12-year-old son. We explored my refrigerator. We found something. I remember it was green, which was NOT its original color.
Her son asked me: “What is it?”
I said: “Shush. Quiet. You’ll wake it up.”
He’s now in his mid-30s, is bigger than me, has a wife and child, and he still giggles if I say ‘Be quiet’ when somebody opens the refrigerator.
I did not, in fact, find any jelly. I’d been resigned to possibly having to do with grape jelly. That’s what my wife likes. I prefer strawberry jam. But what I actually found was even better.
I found Baconnaise. Wife’s been holding out on me. Bacon-flavored mayonnaise. Yum!
So, I had a peanut butter and baconnaise sandwich. Admittedly, not quite as good as a peanut butter and bacon sandwich–no crunchy bacon–but a reasonable facsimile taste-wise.
Posted by Christopher
on 05/29/2011 at 02:15 PM
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Permalink • Friday - May 13, 2011
A Beginning
For proper context, you always need the back story. What comes before sets the scene for what happens now. And as much as we all love a happy ending, without a good beginning it doesn’t make for much of a story. So here you go, the next post actually started here, long long ago. Let’s let our favorite childhood time travelers show us the way ...
“Sherman?”
“Yes Mr. Peabody?”
“We’re going to explore the origins of cooking. Set the Wayback Machine for 8000 BC.”
“Yes Mr. Peaboy! We will get there in time for lunch?”
“Shut up Sherman.”
“Yes Mr. Peabody.”
Dyoing dyoing dyoing dyoing, fwwwwooosh. Boink!
[ The scene: somewhere outside a cave, around the campfire, near twilight. Ugh and Oog, two early hunter gatherers, are making their usual dinner of scorched animal flesh on sticks and a nice raw mush of grass seeds moistened with water. It is starting to rain. ]
Oog: “Better hurry up with that meat; when the rain comes it always puts the fire out.”
Ugh: “Doing the best I can Oog. Why don’t you go stand under that big leafed tree and stay dry until I’m done.”
Oog: “Ok. Here’s your portion of grass mush. I’ll put it on this nice flat rock here by the fire while you finish up. Too bad we can’t take the fire with us under that tree, huh?”
Ping! and Ping! The seeds of two complimentary ideas have just germinated. I’d use the standard lightbulb visual metaphor, but since those won’t be invented for another 5900 years, imagine little burning torches suddenly popping into existance over their heads.
[ The scene: sometime later. A series of burnt tree trunks surrounds the cave, along with piles of ash made from bark and woven grass. Several collections of soot blackened rocks show that various houses of cards made from stone have collapsed at the worst possible times. Ugh and Oog have obviously been experimenting, but without success. Taking the fire under the tree just doesn’t work. Well, not more than once per tree. But grain mush cooked on a hot flat rock not only tastes better, it lasts longer and is even a bit portable. As the sun rises we see them, smoke blackened and heat frazzled, cooling their scorched hands in the mud by the riverbank. Truly, it is the Dawn of Man. ]
Ugh: “We almost had it that time. I thought for sure that that last stack of flat rocks was going to do it. We set a bunch of them on edge all around the fire, nice and tall, and put a big flat one across the top. That keeps the rain out, and makes a nice place to cook the mush.”
Oog: “It worked just fine until somebody had to go and pull the meat sticks out, and knocked the whole thing down. I tried to grab what I could, and now look at my hands!”
Ugh: “Lucky for us we have this nice thick mud for that. Too bad that when it dries out it’s almost as hard as rock. But it’s fun to play with. Look, I made some snakes and some flat ones that remind me of that cooked mush we eat.”
Ping! and thus pottery was invented. and Ping! again, as Oog puts “ah” and “ah” together in her mind and comes up with “uh” (actual numbers were still far in the vocabulary future). Pretty soon they’d made another pile of “rocks” for the fire protector out of mud, found that they couldn’t be moved while wet, did it again with dry mud but found that their special stack of flat rocks still fell apart when you pulled the meat sticks out, and then had the final Ping! idea of making one big round tall cylinder of mud, tapered at the top a bit to keep the rain out, and rested when dry on a couple of small rocks around the campfire. This did a great job of keeping the rain off, it got even stronger somehow once it had been used once or twice, and the opening at the top was perfect for resting the meat sticks on. You’d think they would have stopped right there, having invented the barbeque, but it still failed for cooking the seed mush. And putting a flat rock across the top somehow made the fire go out. They were at an impasse until one day Ugh, in a fit of frustrated pique, threw a handful of mush against the side of the red hot chimney they’d developed. And the mush cooked up in no time at all, light and bubbly and soft on one side, and toasted and crispy on the other.
And thus the tandoor was born. It would remain that way, essentially unchanged, an open ended fired clay tapered cylinder that fit over a fire, for the next 8000 years. Until an American got his hands on one and started thinking.
Dyoing dyoing dyoing dyoing, fwwwwooosh. Boink!
“Wow Mr. Peabody, that was great!”
“I know Sherman, it was my idea after all.”
“Yup, and for once this one wasn’t half baked.”
“Shut up, Sherman.”
“Yes Mr. Peabody.”
Posted by Drew458
on 05/13/2011 at 09:34 AM
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Permalink • Feat Of Clay
Once upon a time there was an artist who worked with clay. He made cups. He made bowls. He made pitchers and bottles. He made little pots. He made big pots. He really like making big pots, and he learned the secrets of making really big ones. In a perfect world his name would have been Harold, so I could call him Harry Potter, but alas, his name is Ron Levy. And he lives in New York City.
So let’s set the scene. He’s an artist, so therefore at one point he was starving. That’s the narrative imperative; artist is to starving as jazz musician is to substance abuse problem. You can’t have one without the other. And I’m sure he was his mother’s heartbreak; she wanted him to go to medical school and become a doctor, but no, not him. He had to follow the American Dream, mk 1, which is to figure out how to get paid to do the stuff you like doing. And of course that barely worked. But unlike his soi-disant cousins portrayed in such sitcoms as Seinfeld and Friends, when Chance showed him the way to turn mud into gold he didn’t sit around and whine about it. No, he seized the brass ring through hard work and research, and achieved the best American Dream, the mk 2 model that defines the perfect job: it is now his job to cash the check and spend the money, while other people earn it for him. And now he can go back to making pots for fun, whether they sell or not. Ok, I’m embellishing like mad here, but that’s what makes a story a story. You need the setting, a bit of back story, and one of the three accepted forms of conflict. Then when you have that and add on the happy ending, plus lots of details and insightful comments, it becomes worth telling. The story exists on its own, never changing over time; it is our job only to fit the latest players to their parts and to spin the tale once again.
RON LEVY never intended to become a tandoor mogul. In fact, he had never heard of tandoors — Indian clay cooking vessels that are part oven and part barbecue pit — until 1986, when a New York gallery exhibited six-foot pots he had made, inspired by amphorae on Crete. A man with an Indian accent called, wondering whether Mr. Levy, a ceramic artist, could make a large pot with a tapered mouth, no bottom and no glaze: a tandoor.
After it was installed at a Columbus Avenue restaurant called Indian Oven, word spread through the Indian community, and orders began to pile up.
“It came to the point where I had to stop doing my ceramic artwork, and focus on tandoors full time,” Mr. Levy, 63, recalled.
So he converted his studio on Mulberry Street in Little Italy into a tandoor factory. Over the past three decades, he has built more than 2,000 for restaurants across North America ...
...
The traditional tandoor that Mr. Levy set out to copy 30 years ago was typically an unfired vessel, the clay walls strengthened with straw and animal hair.“It was very unsanitary,” Mr. Levy said, adding that ovens shipped to the United States “often arrived from India broken, or would crack with extended use.” The tandoor’s shape, a cylinder with sloped clay walls, has remained essentially unchanged for 5,000 years.
Mr. Levy’s first innovation was to fashion the body from a blend of earthenware and stoneware, the former chosen for its modeling and expansion properties, the latter for its ability to withstand high heat without cracking. For porosity (an essential quality so that flatbreads can cling to the oven’s inner walls), he added finely ground fired clay, known as grog.
So he filled a market niche that had a pre-existing demand, and started making money, but he didn’t stop there. Keeping a great clay pot red hot takes a lot of heat, so he found a way to improve the ancient design by covering it up in fireproof insulation.
For insulation and extra strength, he developed a clay and vermiculite mixture that could be baked onto the exterior of the pot.
...
A unique cast-in-place light weight insulation is bonded to a 100% clay tandoor, pre-fired to 1,000 degrees C. This provides extraordinary strength, durability, and heat retention.
So it’s a better, stronger product that lasts longer and costs less to operate. Done yet? Time to rest on those laurels? Not hardly. Now he had to make it “professional”, and please those pesky government regulators at the FDA and come up with a version that could get NSF (National Science Foundation) approval, which is the stamp that everything used in a restaurant should have. Some say NSF stands for Nominal Sterilization Factor, because you only see this stamp on food related products that can survive a trip through the autoclave or a serious treatment with Clorox. So he made that innovation as well, and the marketplace loves it.
Finally, he devised a sturdy stainless steel housing, so the tandoor could be sold and installed as a movable, freestanding unit.
“We’ve been using Ron’s tandoors for the last 20 years,” said Vicky Vij, an owner of Bukhara. “They outlast any Indian clay tandoor. They’re masterpieces.”
Nice. The stainless steel model comes with wheels so it can be moved around in the commercial kitchen. It has even more insulation than the insulated clay model. And keeping it clean is a breeze. And to keep costs down and the EPA happy, you can get it with a gas burner instead of a charcoal burner. All Ron’s tandoors come in two sizes, regular and jumbo. It’s pretty easy to see how the stainless steel model is an upgrade put over the insulated model, which itself is an upgrade over the standard bare clay model. So the ultimate modern commercial tandoor is a double improvement over the traditional one. Hey, those laurels are starting to look mighty comfy. Is it time to have a seat yet? Hella no! There’s a whole new market segment to exploit! Now we’ve got all these Indian people coming over here, being a success, making lots of money, buying homes in suburbia and trying to assimilate as much as they can yet still hold dearly to tradition. Everybody else in the neighborhood has a backyard barbeque, but what a poor desi to do?
Now Mr. Levy has developed a tandoor for home use, the Homdoor. It starts at $1,200.
And now there is a new cooking gizmo for all the “foodies” to buy. Nice going Ron. But it sounds like he’s still working hard at all of this. Let’s get to the happy ending part ...
The final challenge was production. Mr. Levy made his commercial tandoors in small batches as orders arrived. His business plan for the Homdoor, on the other hand, calls for 500 units to be built the first year. Last year, he joined forces with a ceramics company in Uhrichsville, Ohio.
“It turns out, they were using the same press molds and virtually the same ceramic blend for their fireplace components and chimney flue liners that I use in my tandoors,” Mr. Levy said.
Following Mr. Levy’s specifications, the company has built 50 Homdoors, tweaking the shape, propane burner and casing.
...
The first commercial unit rolled out in March. He was so pleased with the result that all of his tandoors are now made in Ohio.
There ya go. Cash the check and spend the money. The perfect job. The American Dream, mk 2. And he lived happily ever after.
Oh sure Drew, sure he did.
Oh, you doubt me? How’s this then for the money quote, in our current rotten economy? Don’t you wish your business was forced to say something like this?
Currently demand for Tandoors by Ron Levy is exceeding production. With the recent NSF Approval of Tandoors by Ron Levy demand is anticipated to further grow. In order to meet demand, Tandoors by Ron Levy, LLC are now being manufactured by Superior Clay Corp, Urichsville, Ohio.
Nice.
Posted by Drew458
on 05/13/2011 at 08:56 AM
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Permalink • Wednesday - May 11, 2011
Accidental Spiedies
I had some chicken breast meat left over from a recipe I made earlier in the week, and I didn’t know what to do with it. Hey, how about I marinade it in some Italian salad dressing, then grill it? Fine. So I take 10 chicken “tenderloins” and a quart Ziploc bag, and add a cup of spicy garlic zesty Italian bottled salad dressing. That didn’t look zesty enough, so I threw in a tablespoon of pizza pepper flakes, 2 rounded tablespoons of Italian Seasoning spice mix, 4 or 5 more cloves of minced garlic, and some extra olive oil and red wine vinegar. And put it back into the fridge for a day. I came back the next day and gave the sauce a little taste, and added the juice of a really big lemon, a teaspoon of black pepper, a few whole bay leaves and some salt. That seemed better. I wasn’t really thinking of what I was doing, or looking for any specific flavor. I just wanted a marinade that wouldn’t wimp out. A day and a half later, and the chicken is essentially pickled. Ceviched; cooked by acid. Bone white and ready to fall apart. So I took out one chunk of chicken and grilled it up. Tastes great. The rest will be dinner.
And that’s when I realized I had accidentally made spiedies. How about that?
Spiedies are a Southern Tier thing, a way of marinading meat that is pretty much endemic to lower central New York. Some say the Italian immigrants brought the recipe back at the start of the 20th century, others say those Italian immigrants stole it from the Hungarian immigrants who came there two generations earlier to work the coal mines. Whatever. Take your meat - pork, beef, lamb, chicken - cut it into small slices or 3/4” cubes, mix up a marinade that tastes like a salad dressing phaser set on Stun, plop in the meat, cover, refrigerate, and come back in several days. Seriously, several days. Two days minimum, but if you have a cold fridge and you get all the air out of the container, you can safely run the marinade for a week.
The proper way to cook them is on skewers over a charcoal grill, but you can do them in a pan on your stove top just as well, or under the broiler. They cook fast. The classic serving method is to grab a slice of “Italian bread” - not real Italian bread, but the sliced loaf bread that calls itself Italian - and use the the slice like an oven mitt to pull the meat off the skewer. This gives you a half rolled up sandwich, a bit like a hot dog in a bun, which you then dip in a fresh bowl of the marinade and then eat while standing. Sophisticated types could just serve the meat over a fancy salad with an herb vinegarette dressing. Less sophisticated but hungrier folks put the grilled meat on a roll, add lettuce, tomato, onion, a bit of mayo and a slice of American cheese and make a nice sandwich.
Yeah yeah, you can actually go and buy spiedie sauce. Why bother, when it’s so close to bottled Italian dressing, which is just olive oil and red wine vinegar? Just add more garlic, plenty of lemon juice, some red wine vinegar, and lots more herbs and spices. Some folks add mint leaves. Sauce recipes are easy to find, as is a formal definition of the dish.
Guess I was missing living in Binghamton. Or maybe just some of the food. Funny how I don’t miss the winter weather they have at all!
I wonder if I have time to make halupki to go with it? And my famous tater pancakes with sour cream and butter?
Posted by Drew458
on 05/11/2011 at 02:58 PM
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Permalink • Thursday - April 14, 2011
Curry For Everyone Else
You may have noticed that my recipes tend to be a bit on the intense side. I like it rich, and I usually like it hot. Not everyone else likes that for some odd reason.
Tonight I tried Barbara’s Amazing Chicken Curry at the link here. If you have the standard set of curry spices on hand it’s very simple and easy to make. Hers is actually the hot version of the dish, which was originally made as baby curry. Yes, curry for babies. Hafta start ‘em young you know.
Since it was impossible for me to find green finger chilis, the Indian Pusa Jwala pepper, I substituted. The last time I made that Vindaloo I substituted jalapenos and serranos for the green chilis called for, and got in trouble. So this time when she called for 4 of them I added 1 small seeded jalapeno and half a tiny can of the diced green sweet chilis you find in the grocery store next to the taco shells. But I did use a slightly generous 1/8 tsp of Cayenne when that was called for. Call it 3/16ths. So it isn’t complete baby curry, but it very mild in my opinion.
Her recipe specifies a black cardamom pod. If you don’t have black cardamom just add some more green cardamom. You’ll loose the dusky dark edge to the flavor but no one will know unless you tell them. There are about 6 seeds in a cardamom pod, so her 5 green pods add up to about 30 seeds, which is a little less than a teaspoonful.
Her recipe also uses a stick of cassia. Cassia is better known as Chinese cinnamon, and is the softer sweeter variety of that aromatic bark we love so well. Cassia and cinnamon are very closely related, and there are varieties of each that run the gamut from sweet to sharp. Use 1/8 tsp of plain old cinnamon if you don’t have any cassia sticks lying around. If all you have is one the stronger varieties of cassia or cinnamon, use even less.
I used 4 chicken thighs and stewed the bones with the sauce once I had most of the meat off. I also thinned the sauce down with a cup of water and let it simmer until that evaporated off, and fished out the cassia stick after about 20 minutes. The curry came out great and the meat left on the bones was ready to fall right off. To my taste buds it’s pleasantly bland with a nice cardamom flavor. The Mrs says it’s spicy enough, thank you. With a cup of white rice, her recipe makes a nice serving for 3 people.
Tip: make sure your can of coconut milk says “first pressing” on the label and is not the low fat nonsense. If it doesn’t, you probably won’t have much of any coconut fat at the top of the can, so you’ll be forced to brown your onions in a few tablespoons of oil or butter or ghee. And you’ll lose quite a bit of flavor in your curry. Find the good brand, and buy it.
Posted by Drew458
on 04/14/2011 at 07:07 PM
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Permalink • Thursday - March 31, 2011
Your Pound Of Beans
Forces loyal to Ivory Coast’s Alassane Ouattara have seized the major cocoa port of San Pedro, extending a nationwide offensive that has left incumbent Laurent Gbagbo isolated in the main city, Abidjan.
In a blow to Gbagbo, his army chief of staff, General Phillippe Mangou, sought refuge in the South African ambassador’s residence in Abidjan. A South African spokesman denied rumors that Gbagbo was on the way to South Africa.
Residents and combatants from both sides said the pro-Ouattara forces were in control of western port town of San Pedro, and that it was now largely calm apart from some sporadic shooting.
Reuters witnesses in the main city, Abidjan, Gbagbo’s last remaining stronghold, said the streets were virtually empty and gunfire could be heard overnight and on Thursday morning, but it was not clear who was involved.
Gbagbo has resisted pressure from the African Union and the West to step down since a presidential election last November, which U.N.-certified results showed he lost to Ouattara by an 8-point margin, sparking a deadly power struggle.
But forces loyal to Ouattara launched an offensive this week on three fronts, and towns across the country fell, mostly without resistance, one after another as they swept south.
Cocoa prices have fallen about 9 percent since on the push. The capture of San Pedro, which ships half of the top grower’s beans, could, in theory, mean a resumption in exports.
Diplomats said on Thursday that European Union sanctions, including an embargo on cocoa shipments from San Pedro, would remain in place and if any exemption were discussed it would take four or five days to come into force.
So, who cares? Well, you do, even if you don’t know it. The Ivory Coast provides nearly half the world’s cocoa, and the unrest there has caused the commodity price to skyrocket. Neighboring Ghana and Nigeria Cocoa together produce a bit less than le Côte d’Ivoire; the 3 West African nations account for a touch more than 2/3 of world production. Ghana and Nigeria are having their own political instabilities.
Cocoa bean production is not a huge business; only about 3.4 million metric tons (1000 kilos = 2200lbs) a year of beans are grown worldwide. With more than 6 billion people in the world this amounts to just about 1 pound of cocoa beans per person annually.
Politics in the Ivory Coast are typically African, tribal crossed with religious, and too complicated for outsiders to understand, but when they had a civil war there 8 years ago cocoa prices took a huge jump from which they never fully recovered. Laurent Gbagbo was president before, during, and after the war, so I guess his forces won. A few months ago they held an election and he lost, although his people obviously rigged the numbers and he claimed victory. Since then he has refused to step down, and this has plunged the country right back into civil war. Thanks a lot. At this point in time it looks like rebel leader and election winner Alassane Ouattara and his followers are winning, and with their troops seizing the one decent port in the country international market fears are easing.
This is some interesting economics, considering that there is a worldwide sanction on cocoa from the Ivory Coast right now. In theory they are not part of the current market, so how could the situation there impact global pricing? I guess the answer is that they are still growing the beans, and they have to be piled up in warehouses somewhere. World demand is fairly stable, so with only 1/3 of the product currently available from the other producer nations, this would cause a rather skittish market. But it is more complex than that, because cocoa is not created in a factory. The beans are grown on trees, and the pods ripen whenever they feel like it. This means the main harvest season lasts 7 months, and the minor secondary harvest season lasts another 3 months. Right now we are just into the no harvest at all period.
Cocoa farming is on the decline in several of the other producer nations. The trees take 5 or 6 years to mature and can produce for 50 years or more, but there just isn’t much money in it for the farmers. I find that interesting in itself, because the commodity price is more than half again as high now than it was when the Ivorian civil war started, and that price (around $2200/mt) was nearly 3 times as high as the price was just 2 years earlier in 2000 ($800/mt). Even if you ignore February’s record shattering price of over $3700/mt, a 32 year high and the current drop from there, cocoa beans are selling at more than 4 times the price they were a decade ago. Go figure. You’d think people would be planting left and right. I guess it’s just too much hard work, even though most of it is done by children.
Some analysts say that up to a quarter million of the pod pickers are small children, and there are very strong allegations that many of these children are kept as slaves. But given the typical abhorrent living conditions in Africa and their standard horrific inhumanity and barbarism, how could you tell? But before you feel all guilty and start searching for only Fair Trade chocolate to buy, you should know that the cocoa pods can usually only be harvested by children. The cocoa tree is fragile and the pods grow from the trunk, not from the branches. Adults climbing the trees damage them, and monkeys can’t be used because they don’t differentiate between the ripe pods and the unripe ones. So child labor is it. Don’t forget that the Turd World has a very different view on child labor than the spoiled and decadent west. What we see as child abuse they see as giving children the work opportunity to not starve to death.
Oh, and the root of all the problems in the Ivory Coast? You don’t even have to guess; you know what the answer is. Pisslam. Of course! When the French controlled the Ivory Coast it was a wonderland, with some of the highest per capita income and standard of living on the entire continent. This continued for several decades after independence in 1960, but at some point the Ivorians started importing foreign labor to do the scut work. And guess who showed up?
A former French colony and the world’s top cocoa producer, Ivory Coast was once regarded as a haven of peace and stability, until a 1999 coup that toppled president Henri Konan Bedie. Long considered a peaceful country, that welcomed millions of immigrant workers to sustain a booming economy after its independence from France in 1960, up to 40 percent of the 16 million population is now foreign. The immigrants inflamed political, religious and ethnic frictions between the largely Muslim north and the predominantly Christian south and west.
Until his death in 1993, these disputes were kept under control by the country’s post-independence president, Felix Houphouet-Boigny. But like Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the ancient ethnic and religious animosities were still there, and were exploited by rival politicians after Houphouet-Boigny was gone. Elections were held and Laurent Gbagbo, a southern nationalist, won. He tried to improve his control of the country by forcing northerners out of the security forces, and have millions of them declared foreigners, and ineligible to vote.
This led to the first round of fighting in 2002. The French sent in troops, to at least prevent escalation, and with UN help, a ceasefire was achieved in 2003. But in late 2004, the ceasefire was broken with government air raids on rebel bases in the north.
Until the push south this week, the worst of the violence had centered on Abidjan, where anti-Gbagbo insurgents, who do not necessarily support Ouattara, have seized parts of town.
In a sign violence could spin out of control, the army called on Gbagbo’s often violent youth wing to enlist in the military. They have been fired up with anti-French, anti-foreigner and anti-U.N. propaganda, and on Wednesday the army started openly handing out weapons to them.
Currently there are 11,000 UN Blue Helmets in the Ivory Coast, the vast majority of them being other Africans. So you know what that means ... it’s a mess. A chocolate mess.
Posted by Drew458
on 03/31/2011 at 09:33 AM
Filed Under: • Africa • Economics • Fine-Dining • Politics • War-Stories •
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Permalink • Saturday - March 26, 2011
Forced Spring Cleaning
We got a new refrigerator today. The old one was 15 years old and was on it’s very last legs. I’d repaired it as much as possible over the years, and glued the shelves back together several times. But it was done. Water leaking out on the floor every day, etc.
The new one is 3 cubic feet bigger than the old one. Yay!! But getting rid of the old one forced me to clean it out, and toss out all the little mystery items that had multiplied in the dark recesses. And I had to dump the out of code stuff. And I had to go through my sauce collection. Where does this stuff come from? I’ve got every kind of exotic sauce known to mankind, I’m sure. I’ve got frozen tamarind concentrate and a block of palm sugar and some proper light amber fish sauce, in case I feel the need to make Pad Thai. I’ve got 4 kinds of jerk sauce, and even a frozen bag of jerk marinade. Hoisin sauce, peanut sauce, oyster sauce, black bean sauce, spicy black bean sauce, stir-fry sauce ... I could open a Chinese restaurant. I won’t even mention my collection of hot sauces and horseradishes. And salad dressing. And all sorts of little and not so little jars of pickled Italian veggies and things. Mama mia, what is all of this??
New rule: no more new sauces or pickled anything until the old ones are used up. Pickled Sea Urchin? WTH? Oh yeah, when we made sushi ... a year ago. Buh bye!!
Then when I put all the thinned out and still good food back in the new fridge ... after lugging the old unit out the door and down the stairs, and hauling the new unit up the stairs and installing it and then realizing the door was on backwards so reversing that ... it looked so lonely inside that I just had to go grocery shopping. But I was smart, and just got food for the next couple days. So it’s fresh chorizo tonight, with red beans and rice on one side and fried plantains on the other, with a black bean and red onion soup. I didn’t have to thin out my spice casket (we call it that because it’s a great big air tight tin box nearly the size of a footlocker) so I have plenty of Epazote.
Tangential note to non-Mexican folks: If you like stewed beans but not the aftereffects, get yourself some epazote. It’s a light green powdered herb, and only costs a dollar or two for a cupful. The dried herb doesn’t have too strong a flavor, a bit like sassafras, but you use the stuff because of what it does. What it does gives us our Word For The Day, and that word is “carminative”, which means it takes the farts out of the beans. It really works. Add a teaspoon to a 1lb can of beans, or a heaping tablespoon to a big pot of them, and let them stew for 20 minutes or so.
A further tangent: The oil that can be expressed from fresh epazote seeds or steamed from the whole fresh plant is said to have numerous medicinal properties. The stuff was once known as “wormseed” and “Mexican Tea” and was used as internal delousing medicine; it is a vermicide. It is also an abortifacient, so don’t go near the stuff if you’re pregnant. Even more interesting than that is that the expressed oil from the whole plant contains up to 70% ascaridole, a naturally occurring chemical that just happens to be an explosive that gives off poisonous gas when heated. I didn’t know that Mother Nature made explosives! It’s also the active ingredient in a common commercial pesticide. Geez. Maybe they should start calling stuff this “terrorist bush” instead.
Carminative. That’s a good word. Like “hormesis”, the word Ann Coulter introduced us to the other day with her radical little hypothesis that certain exposure levels to certain kinds of radiation may actually be good for us (well yeah, Example #1 is called a suntan, through which we absorb vitamin D), we can get the carminative and vermicidal benefits from the hormetic effects of dried or concentrated “wormseed”, which just happens to be toxic, explosive, and a carcinogen in higher doses. “The solution to pollution is dissolution”: a little poison is good for you! Go figure. Better living through chemistry, and through a clean refrigerator.
Posted by Drew458
on 03/26/2011 at 12:32 PM
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Permalink • Thursday - March 17, 2011
Almost Forgot
Sure and somehow it almost slipped me wee mind. I usually rely on Google to run some sort of theme to remind me of the various holidays and special days, but I guess since at it’s heart St. Patrick’s Day is a Christian event, they choose to ignore it. And about the only Irish in my family is that all my ancestors sailed past the old Emerald Isle on their way here. But I personally don’t want to miss out on an excuse to eat tasty corned beef, eat heavy bread, and drink equally heavy sweet beer, so I make the attempt. Needless to say, my Italian wife just gives me the eye roll, but she likes the corned beef too.
For the past few years the corned beef we’ve found in the grocery store hasn’t been that good. Nice meat, not too fatty, good texture ... but the corning flavor was just somehow lacking. So this year I made my own. Well, actually I re-made my own. I took a store bought corned beef and rebrined it. I’ve done a little brining; every once in a blue moon I brine up a whole chicken with jerk seasoning, which really gets the flavor in, right down to the bone. Good! But I was not sure how this attempt would work out on beef.
Mrs. 458 brought home a 2 1/2 pounder, which is what I’d call corned beef for one. I got out the Jaquard tenderizer, stabbed it full of holes, and made up a brine:
1/2 gallon water
1 cup of salt
1/4 cup sugar
3 gloves minced garlic
and set it to boil. Then I made the spice mix, which was very easy because of all the spices I’d purchased to make Indian curry. Surprise: a pickling spice mix pretty much IS a curry mix, just minus the fenugreek, the tumeric, and most of the hot pepper, with the addition of a little dried dill. You could add a teaspoon of Chinese 5 spice powder if you wanted.
2 tsp whole black peppercorns
2 tsp mustard seed
2 tsp coriander
2 tsp hot red pepper flakes ( I crushed up 8 Indian Sanaam peppers )
2 tsp allspice berries ( I used 2 tsp powdered allspice )
1 tsp ground mace
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp cinnamon
8 bay leaves
1 tsp dried dill
2 tsp whole cloves ( about 3 dozen )
1 tsp ground cloves
1 tsp ground ginger
1 clove of garlic
Tenderize the meat and firmly rub it with the garlic clove. Throw the spices in the boiling water, stir it until the salt and sugar are dissolved, turn off the heat and let it cool. Put the beef brisket in a turkey size Boil’n Bag, pour in the seasoned brine, get all the air out of the bag and tie it off. Put this in the fridge for a week. Massage the meat through the bag once a day.
On cooking day, cut open the bag, get the meat out, rinse it off under the faucet and put it in a big pot of boiling water. Throw in that joke of a half-teaspoonful of “flavoring spices” that comes with the corned beef. Boil it for about 1 hours, then add 2 cans of Guinness ( and any potatoes if you’re doing them) and boil it for another 2 hours. Take the meat and taters out, chunk up a big head of cabbage and throw that in. Let that boil until the cabbage is nice and tender. Serve. I like mine with sharp mustard and hot horseradish.
I turned out that once I made up the seasoning, I found that I had a nice 8oz bag of pickling spice from Penzey’s anyway. So I threw a couple spoonfuls into the brining bag, and today I thew a couple more into the pot. The Penzey’s mix is almost exactly the same as what I wrote above. Double corned beef, with 6 times as much spice as what the commercial corned beef people used. It has to have a stronger taste, right? We’ll find out tonight.
I’m not sure of the chemistry, but I find it interesting that the corned beef I buy in the store floats, whereas the chunk of meat I brined sinks like a rock. And now the whole house smells like corned beef, which is driving out the curry aroma from the Vindaloo I made Monday. Have to remember to cut the Cayenne pepper on that recipe down by 3/4 as it’s still too hot for the wife. I thought it would be enough to substitute those Italian “hot” peppers for the jalapenos and serranos I used last time, but no.
Posted by Drew458
on 03/17/2011 at 02:10 PM
Filed Under: • Fine-Dining • Holidays •
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Permalink • Tuesday - March 01, 2011
ok, since drew brought the subject up, and I was supposed to have snail mailed this last week …..
And I should NEVER have clicked on that link for IHOP in Drew’s post. I’ll not forgive him for that cruelty. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!
I LOVE IHOP !!!! I want my IHOP ! Waaaaaa
( image courtesy of, http://www.pamsclipart.com/)
As Drew says .... pancakes here are a bit different and NOT a breakfast meal. A couple of ppl we know came back from a Florida traip a year ago, aghast at the idea of our pancakes for brekkers. (breakfast) So I asked em if anyone forced em at gunpoint to partake.
Posted by peiper
on 03/01/2011 at 02:31 PM
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Permalink • Oy, such a holiday
IHOP is giving out free orders of pancakes today in hopes of raising money for the Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals. Stop in, eat up, and drop a couple bucks. Bacon and coffee not included.
Since beginning its National Pancake Day celebration in 2006, IHOP has raised more than $5.35 million to support charities in the communities in which it operates. While IHOP’s National Pancake Day typically takes place on Shrove Tuesday, this year, the company will host its free pancake event one week earlier on Tuesday, March 1 to build buzz and excitement prior to Shrove Tuesday. With your help, we hope to raise $2.3 million for Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals and other local charities!
Known also as Fat Tuesday or Mardi Gras, National Pancake Day dates back several centuries to when the English prepped for fasting during Lent. Strict rules prohibited the eating of all dairy products during Lent, so pancakes were made to use up the supply of eggs, milk, butter and other dairy products...hence the name Pancake Tuesday or Shrove Tuesday.
How about that one, lefties? A corporation getting involved in a Christian tradition in a Christian manner! I’m expecting protests, judicial fiats, and cries of racism to be all over the news.
An explanation of the title for Americans: in the UK they consider pancakes a dessert item. Seriously, the thought of pancakes for breakfast is anathema to them, even with a double side of bacon. Worse, they don’t even have proper Bisquick over there. Sure, they have something in that bright yellow box you can bake with, but it’s not the same. Peiper will attest to that fact; I’ve had to send him emergency supplies of the stuff.
On the other hand, England does do this holiday better than we do. Being Britons, with their great sense of tradition, they hold pancake races, and have done so for hundreds of years now. Since 1445 - long before Columbus came over here in his leaky little boat - they have been running about in public with pancakes. I’m assuming that those are actually fresh pancakes, and not the original ones from 1445, but with the English you never know.
Oh, you think this is another one of my “fake but accurate” posts, that I’m making up the sport of pancake racing? Ha! Surprise!
The annual pancake race in Olney
Posted by Drew458
on 03/01/2011 at 10:22 AM
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Permalink • Tuesday - February 22, 2011
sidetracked
Well that ate up 2 hours.
I read the latest comments this morning and saw GW’s (aka WolfHowling) mention that he’d put his jalapeno/serrano chili recipe online. So I went and read it. I just might have to give this one a try. And then I made the mistake of reading his ginger beer post.
I have never tried fermenting anything. Except for bread, I don’t mess about with yeast at all. But I love ginger beer; it has double or even triple the ginger zing that ginger ale has. The stuff I can find is really just strong soda. No alcohol in it at all.
A quick Google or three sent me to links that said that ginger beer once was made with as much as 11% alcohol. That’s right up there with wine. More links mentioned that plain old bread yeast can deliver 11-15%. A couple more lead me to some stuff called TurboYeast, and several similar variants that all promise 20%+ alcohol with less than a week’s fermenting. Other links to home brewing forums think this is some kind of heresy; that it will give lots of alcohol but generate a taste akin to gasoline. I could only find one page where somebody had actually tried making regular beer with this stuff, but never updated the post to say what it tasted like. Quite a large number of pages say to use proper kinds of brewer’s yeast, which come in a whole legion of varieties.
But all this business about home brewing quickly gets rather involved, what with obtaining carboys, the debate over plastic vs glass, concepts of “attenuation” and “locculation”, airlocks, specifc gravity, brix refractometers, and so forth. Brewing gets just as complicated, esoteric, and gear intensive as reloading ammunition, and can have nearly as high a potential for explosion if done wrong.
The thing about ginger beer, and the root of GW’s post, hur hur, is that it’s just about as natural a process as can be. So natural that it could almost have happened by accident. And of course, the natural approach lead me to Google up a whole slew of pages on making ginger beer using a “ginger bug” or “GBP” (ginger beer plant) instead of adding horrible icky actual yeast. A ginger beer plant is kind of like a sourdough starter; another page shows an exact breakdown of what winds up in one (several kinds of yeast and bacteria), and other pages show you how to make your own or who to beg one from. But the idea is always the same: the root of the fermentation is brought about by yeast and bacteria that’s already all around you. The GBP just concentrates them and makes them a bit portable.
Of course, there are plenty of pages that show you how to make ginger “beer” in a matter of a few hours, using the fermentation process merely to put some fizz in some ginger flavored sweetened water. These pages have no interest in actually brewing something with a kick, and all the comments at those pages are full of whingers crying about the yeasty taste. Duh. Leave the stuff along, let the yeast do it’s job - which is to turn sugar into alcohol and to contribute to Global Warming by creating lots of CO2 - and then strain the yeast out. I don’t quite see the point of going to the trouble of fermenting something just to get it fizzy. Ferment things to generate alcohol that tastes good. And is fizzy.
So I’m thinking of giving this a go. Actually, my first thoughts were based strongly on the “super, natural” concept: what would a ginger beer made from honey taste like, instead of using white sugar? Ancient man didn’t have refined cane sugar. And could you make the stuff strong enough to get quickly blasted on and still have it taste good? Imagine a 12 ounce glass of cold sparkling clear ginger soda that packs the same kick as chugging a whole bottle of wine. And costs very little to make. Granted that white sugar is much less costly than honey; I’m thinking down several lines of approach at once here. I could go so far as to buy a bubble lock and a PET plastic carboy if I got into it, but I’d want to start out small, on the order of a 2 liter bottle with a balloon on top, at first. I’m certain there’s a packet or two of bread yeast in the closet.
Well made and useful links on ginger beer:
http://thehowzone.com/how/making_ginger_beer/1
http://www.happyherbalist.com/gingerbeerplant.aspx
http://innbrooklyn.wordpress.com/2010/08/07/2315/
Of course there’s a book to read, about the whole exciting world of natural fermentation, from ginger beer to kimchi, and the whole pro-biotic thing!
Posted by Drew458
on 02/22/2011 at 10:39 AM
Filed Under: • Fine-Dining • Fun-Stuff •
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Permalink • Saturday - February 19, 2011
Easy Cheesy Goodness
Pretty much a direct steal from The Joy of Cooking, with just a few small enhancements. But unlike most Drew recipes, this one is NOT over the top. You can even leave out the onions if they don’t agree with you.
There is this side dish in America called “Mac ‘n Cheese”. It comes out of a thin blue box. It’s easy to prepare, and it doesn’t cost much. The result is a sticky orange substance on your plate. Children will eat it, and with a couple hot dogs it makes a meal, sans veg. But it’s a sin against real food. It’s barely macaroni. It certainly isn’t cheese. I had a hankering for the real stuff this afternoon, so I made this recipe. Just like mother used to make, only better.
2 cups of elbow macaroni - half of a 1lb box
Fill a big pot of water, throw in a small handful of salt, and set it to boiling. You want the pasta to come out just past al dente, but not watery, gooshy, limp, and overcooked.
Take a large skillet and make a roux. By which I mean, take a heaping tablespoon of flour and spread it on the uphill side of the cold pan. Take a quarter stick of butter - 2 tablespoons - and put it in the downhill corner of the pan. Turn the heat on low. Melt the butter. Take a whisk and work the warmed flour into the melted butter a little at a time until it’s all in. Keep whisking away as the mixture cooks for another 3 to 5 minutes. You want a white roux, not a brown one, so don’t cook it too long or too hot. Easy does it. [ yeah, I actually wrote that. ]
Warm 2 cups of milk in the microwave. 60-90 seconds should get it nice and toasty. Not boiling. Not hot enough for the fat to skim on top. Just not ice cold or barely lukewarm.
Mince half a medium yellow onion. Or 1/3 of a big yellow onion. Whatever. Just chop it up until the bits are less than 1/2”. You want a decent but not heaping handful. That’s plenty. You can start them simmering in a little pan if you want; softened onions have a little softer taste than raw ones.
Add the milk to the roux a half cup at a time, whisking gently. Turn the heat up a little and get the liquid close to boiling. Add 1/2 teaspoon of regular paprika and toss in a couple bay leaves. Add the onions. Let it simmer for about 15 minutes, but stir it once or twice a minute.
Pull the pasta off when it’s right and drain it. Shake the colander around to get as much water out as you can. Set it aside.
Take a 2lb block of sharp cheddar cheese and cut it in half. Now cut off about another thumb’s thickness. Cut the cheese into 1/4” cubes. Take a palm’s width of Velveeta from the big block - about half a pound - and chunk it up a bit. That’s hard to do, but try.
Butter up the inside of a 9x9 baking dish. Or a round casserole dish. Don’t be cheap with the butter. Turn the oven on to 350.
Turn off the simmering milk mixture. Take out the bay leaves. Toss in all the Velveeta and half the cheddar cubes. Stir them around and they’ll melt. Now add all the macaroni, and stir it about for a couple minutes. You want to mixture to coat everything and get inside the noodles.
Pour about a third of the coated noodles into the baking dish. Give this layer a good grinding of black pepper. Then sprinkle a heaping tablespoon of seasoned breadcrumbs on it, and toss on a handful of cheddar.
Pour another third of the coated noodles in the baking dish. Give this layer a good grinding of black pepper. Then sprinkle a heaping tablespoon of seasoned breadcrumbs on it. Now cover the whole layer with 4 - 6 slices of Swiss cheese. I like the sharp kind myself, and the slices I get from the deli are about twice the usual thickness. Don’t overdo the Swiss, just don’t be cheap.
Pour in the last of the coated noodles. Again with the breadcrumbs. Toss on the last of the cheddar chunks, and if you don’t have enough to fully cover the top then slice up some more. Push the cubes down with a fork. You don’t need to bury them, just get them into the top of the noodles.
Into the oven. Come back in half an hour. Is it bubbling up around the edges yet? If not, give it another 10 minutes. Then crank the oven up to 425 to brown up the top cheese. This takes another 5 to 10 minutes, but you’ve got to check it every minute or two. Turn off the oven. Pull the baking dish out if the top cheese is looking a little too crispy. If not, leave it in while you make the rest of dinner. Better yet, make the dish at least a couple hours before dinner time, so you can pull it out and let it cool some. Then you can cut chunks off of it just like brownies. No, not the racist kind, the chocolate kind! Then you give them another shot of pepper, and a little salt, and heat your portion up for 45 seconds in the microwave.
Damn, this is good eating. It’s a $9 side dish. Eat your heart out Kra**. You can’t hold a candle to this with your silly little blue box product.
Posted by Drew458
on 02/19/2011 at 07:44 PM
Filed Under: • Fine-Dining •
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Permalink • Thursday - February 10, 2011
Fire In The Hole!
Thanks to everyone who sent me this graphic. You know me too well. So here’s another curry video for your enjoyment. Better living through chemistry!
Notes: what she calls capsicum peppers are what Americans call Cayenne peppers. You can substitute red Serranos for a slight reduction in heat, or use Chiles de Arbol for the same amount of hot. Her green chilies are NOT New Mexico greens. I’m pretty sure they are the mild ones you can get in a can in the Goya section of the grocery store. If you want to take most of the heat out, substitute red Anaheim peppers for the capsicum ones. So this is really a recipe for what New Mexico folks would call a Christmas chili, only not as hot as the ones they usually make.
Posted by Drew458
on 02/10/2011 at 10:01 AM
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Permalink • Monday - January 31, 2011
Eat While You Can
I read an article in the Telegraph that suggested that the political turmoil across northern Africa was driven by empty stomachs. With the surge in the commodity price of staple foods this year, the rise in the price of corn from the American silliness to turn grain into gasahol, the crop failures in Russia and several keys areas of the Middle East and Asia, plus the rising demand for actual protein in the newly middle class China, food prices are up everywhere. When prices rise, the poor suffer first. And, outside of Haiti, you can’t get much poorer than the regular people along the southern coast of the Mediterranean. Thus the article, which is partly conjectural, wonders if this is a sign of things to come. Of course the author throws in Global Warming, and I’m rather glad that the rioting Tunisians and Egyptians weren’t also making demands for GameBoys, Nintendos, and another Miley Cyrus tour, or else the article would have been all about Bread And Circuses, Round II. It’s something to think about.
But while you’re thinking, let’s have something to eat. Here’s a very simple yet elegant meal to chase away winter’s chill. You can impress your guests and yourself and call it crème vichyssoise glacée chaud avec rondes de jambon, gruyere, et les asperges, or you can call it hot farmer’s soup with nibblies. It’s the same either way, and it tastes great. The French eat this soup cold. Good for them, and maybe you’ll want to try it that way if you make it in July. Right now it’s 23°F outside, so I’ll be damned if I’m serving cold anything.
So let’s get to it.
Creamy Farmer’s Soup, aka Cream of Potato Leek Soup, aka crème vichyssoise glacée, served hot (chaud)
1 stick unsalted butter (8 tbs)
12 leeks
6 medium clean skinned potatoes - Yukon Golds are perfect - skinned, halved, and cut into thin slices, about 1/8”
6 cups of chicken stock
1 large yellow onion, skinned and roughly chopped
1 pint heavy cream
2 tbs salt
fresh ground pepper
Take out a whole stick of sweet butter and let it warm up. Cut the root end off the leaks but try to save as much of the white stalk as you can. Cut off the green leaves leaving just the white stems with just a small amount of the green transitional area. Halve these stems lengthwise, then slice them into 1/4” pieces. Rinse thoroughly under cold water in a colander, breaking the chunks apart. Leeks are often dirty, so rinse them well. Let drain.
Melt half a stick of butter in a large soup pot. Add the drained chopped leaks and the chopped onion. Under medium high heat, stir them around for about 9 minutes until the leeks have started to soften. Do not have the heat so high that the leeks or the onions start to brown. They will steam, and the aroma is heavenly. Pour in the chicken stock and add the potato slices. Add the salt and a generous grind of black pepper. Bring to a boil while stirring, then reduce to a strong simmer and let cook for half an hour. Now go make the nibblies.
Nibblies, aka rondes de jambon, gruyere, et les asperges
1 long loaf of fresh French or Italian bread, or 2 shorter loaves
several (4 or so) 1/4” slabs of tasty ham from the deli, or slices off of a nice bone in ham, brought up to room temperature
12 stalks of asparagus
8 slices of Swiss cheese, or actual Gruyere
Clean the asparagus and start it steaming or boiling. You want to remove it just before it’s done.
Cut the bread into 3/8” slices. Take a knife and lightly butter one side of each slice. Try to get 2 dozen slices from each loaf, but don’t fret about it. You want to be able to serve 6-8 of these to each person.
Put all the slices on a cookie sheet, butter side up. Set the oven to medium, about 350-375°F. Cut the ham and the cheese into bread slice sized pieces. Put a ham piece on each bread slice. Drain off the asparagus and blot it dry with a kitchen towel, and let it cool a little. Cut the asparagus into short pieces, and put 2 of them onto each ham slice. Swiss cheese on top, then into the oven for 5 minutes to melt and just lightly brown the cheese.
Now let’s get back to the soup. When half an hour is up, taste the soup and add a little more salt if necessary. The soup is done when the potato slices break easily against the side of the pot when pressed with a wooden spoon. Turn off the heat. Get out a medium saucepan (3 qt size) and your blender. Add a cup of heavy cream to the soup and stir it in. Add a bit more. Call it a cup and a half total. Ladle the hot soup into your blender, getting the bowl about 3/4 full. Put the cover on and set the speed to maximum. 15 seconds of blending will create a smooth creamy mixture. Pour it into the 3 quart saucepan, refill the blender with the raw soup, and repeat. Repeat until all the soup has been processed.
Ladle the soup into bowls. Pull the jambon nibblies tray from the oven and give it a quick grind of black pepper. Put half a dozen on each plate and serve.
There ya go. A light dinner for 3 or 4, start to finish, in less than 45 minutes. Start off by pouring your guests a nice large glass of a crisp fruity white wine, maybe have some raw veg with a gently seasoned dip on the side ... there will be no leftovers, but there is enough here for seconds for most. Plus, making more of the nibblies is dead easy. The aromas of the steaming leeks and onions will have everyone drooling, and then when the ham and cheese start to wake up in your oven ... let’s just say this meal usually never makes it to the dining table.
Posted by Drew458
on 01/31/2011 at 06:23 PM
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Oh, and here's some kind of visitor flag counter thingy. Hey, all the cool blogs have one, so I should too. The Visitors Online thingy up at the top doesn't count anything, but it looks neat. It had better, since I paid actual money for it.
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