Yeeeech. My beautiful, loving, caring son is at a phase where he's learning to share. And one thing he often wants to share is his food. From his grubby little hands - or, even worse, his grubby little mouth. What does one do? I don't want to shut him down; I want him to know that I'm proud and happy that he wants to share what he has with other people.
I am getting sick of eating gritty grapes, though.
So a few weeks ago, in response to my last recipe, Trey was all like, "Onion and garlic powder? What the heck is up with that? Aren't you all about fresh ingredients?"
And I was all, "I'm about the fresh dance moves, yo!" and she was all "No you are not. In fact, I don't think I've ever met anyone who was less about the fresh dance moves than you are." A quick fact-check confirmed that she was, in fact, 100% correct in all particulars. This being the case, I set out to answer her question.
It's a good point - I usually am careful about making sure that the spices I use are fresh and of the highest quality. So why am I willing to use dried garlic and onion powder, rather than just chopping up the delicious-looking bulbs I've got stored in my kitchen?
There are a few simple reasons you might want to go with powders instead of fresh. And, of course, for those times, you can get high-quality onion or garlic powder from the same place you normally buy your spice. What you probably can't do is make your own - that requires dehydration and fine grinding. Now, if you have a home dehydrator, it's possible - but from what I've seen, home dehydrators still leave a good deal of water in the final product - as much as a fifth of what was there originally. I haven't tried it myself, but I don't think that's enough to powder the final product.
So enough with the what - let's get on with the why. When you think about it, the basics here are pretty obvious. Sometimes, you want the flavor of onion or garlic on your food, but you don't want the texture. A good example would be the recipe Trey was commenting on - it's hard to include raw onion or garlic in breading, but powders work fine. Texture doesn't only matter for cookability - it matters in the mouth, as well. Garlic bread is another application; most people like garlic bread, but not everyone likes garlic enough to want to bite into a mouthful of (even minced) garlic cloves. (Some people do, of course. Hey, some people juggle geese.)
Sometimes, the actual plant matter has other qualities you don't want to introduce into your food, like water. Everything you pull out of the ground is gonna be 80% water or more, and sometimes you want to be able to cook without all that water getting into your food. You're not supposed to infuse olive oil at home using fresh garlic - it's a good recipe for botulism. I suspect that you can get almost as good - and much safer - results using a powder.
Finally, powders are a lot easier to control, quantity-wise. For some reason, recipes - and I'm not exempting myself - tend to include raw onion by volume, rather than weight. That's just stupid. What the heck is a cup of chopped onion? One person's cup might include twice as much onion as another. Until everyone - and I'm not exempting myself - starts breaking out the kitchen scales to measure out the onion, powder is the best bet to get a controllable amount every time.
I'm ignoring the first and most obvious reason that most people actually use powders - convenience. Onion powder doesn't rot, and it doesn't take five minutes to chop up. You measure it out or just dump a bunch of it into your recipe. No dishes, no cutting board, no mess. It's always sitting there in the closet, and you rarely have to worry that you're out.
Now, this is not meant to be a ringing endorsement of onion powder, garlic powder, or any similar thing. (Red pepper flakes, on the other hand, are great. Ring, ring, ring.) In the vast majority of applications, you're going to get much, much more flavor by cooking with raw onion or garlic than you are by using powders. But as long as you're buying high-quality goods, not letting them sit around for too long, and using an appropriate amount - 1/8 teaspoon garlic powder = 1 clove, 1 teaspoon onion powder = 1 small onion - then powders are an appropriate weapon to add to our arsenal of spices.
One thing to watch out for - always use powders, never salts. While I don't have a problem using garlic salt for one particular application - grilled corn - in general, it's always better to add salt and garlic powder separately. Garlic and salt are NOT interchangeable; you really want to know how much of each you're adding into the mix.
Finally, please note that onion is bad for housepets - and for some reason, onion powder especially so, and especially dogs. Onion powder is toxic to dogs. Weird.
Join me tomorrow, when finally, after eight months and about a dozen promises, I do what I wanted to do in the second week -
I PICKLE.
(I made them last week. I haven't eaten one yet. I really hope they're good.)
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Monday, July 26, 2010
On Portion Size
I had a comment from a reader... I don't want to say who it is, so I'll make up a name. Let's call him "Joah Oualker." He suggested that I was being overly generous by claiming that the eggplant Parmesan dish would serve four people.
Victoria and I had the dish, exactly as I made it, for dinner on Wednesday. It was a meal for the two of us, with one small portion left over. We didnt have any side dishes, and both of us were pretty hungry. My assumption was that, given a salad and a side, or two side dishes, or anything else that you might serve with it, it would be an adequate main course for four adults. Delicious garlic bread, for example, is one thing that you might serve with it, or perhaps marscapone. Then again, perhaps not.
I don't know what marscapone is. Is it an Italian deli meat?
These are, however, only assumptions. There are plenty of situations in which you might want to use your own judgement. My suggestions as to how many people each dish can feed might be wrong in some or all of the following circumstances. Feel free to increase the size of the dish if:
There might be other circumstances that I'm missing - but I think my point is there. I will do my best to give an idea of how much food each dish makes. However, I fully expect my readers to be aware of their own peculiarities, and to adjust the portion size to suit themselves. If you feel that my recommendations are not a value-add for you, feel free to ignore them entirely!
In the meantime, I hope that, for most readers, my estimates prove helpful.
NOTE - Also, maybe instead you're miniature, or something? Like a perfect, tiny doll? And eat less food? So you want to, maybe, adjust the dish size down?
Victoria and I had the dish, exactly as I made it, for dinner on Wednesday. It was a meal for the two of us, with one small portion left over. We didnt have any side dishes, and both of us were pretty hungry. My assumption was that, given a salad and a side, or two side dishes, or anything else that you might serve with it, it would be an adequate main course for four adults. Delicious garlic bread, for example, is one thing that you might serve with it, or perhaps marscapone. Then again, perhaps not.
I don't know what marscapone is. Is it an Italian deli meat?
These are, however, only assumptions. There are plenty of situations in which you might want to use your own judgement. My suggestions as to how many people each dish can feed might be wrong in some or all of the following circumstances. Feel free to increase the size of the dish if:
- You are a giant, titan, cyclops, or other creature of significantly larger than average size.
- You have eaten an entire goat, cow, emu, or swordfish in a single sitting; alternately, if you know off the top of your head how long it would take you to skeletonize such an animal.
- Your guests are circus animals, such as elephants, giraffes, or dinosaurs.
- You have the ability to detach your jaw to consume things larger than your head.
- You are possessed by a demon, ridden by a loa, or are the avatar of a god whose main feature is vicious, unending hunger.
- You were cursed by a gypsy witch to eat constantly and never be sated - yet grow ever thinner, thinner... thinner.
- Your mouth is a portal to some alternate plane, and only one hundredth of the food which passes through your lips makes it to your stomach.
- You are a superhero with a hyper-accelerated metabolism, or who in some other way needs vast quantities of food to fuel super-powers.
- You measure the food you eat in gross tonnage.
- You once went to a restaurant, and ate all the food in the restaurant, and they had to close the restaurant.
There might be other circumstances that I'm missing - but I think my point is there. I will do my best to give an idea of how much food each dish makes. However, I fully expect my readers to be aware of their own peculiarities, and to adjust the portion size to suit themselves. If you feel that my recommendations are not a value-add for you, feel free to ignore them entirely!
In the meantime, I hope that, for most readers, my estimates prove helpful.
NOTE - Also, maybe instead you're miniature, or something? Like a perfect, tiny doll? And eat less food? So you want to, maybe, adjust the dish size down?
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Eggplant Parmesan
I've never made eggplant parm before. However, I came up with a dill-tastic variant on a classic dish that came out way, way better than I expected it to. I did not, however, come up with a funny dill-related name for this dish, like "dilly eggplant parm" or something like that. It's not really a loss.
I don't know why, but for some reason, I really didn't expect this to come out well. Which meant that when it came out delicious, it made me really happy. This is fairly a fairly low-carb variant on the classic dish, substituting dill for most of the breadcrumbs that cover normal eggplant parm. It's not really low-fat, but you could easily broil the eggplant instead of frying it and use low-fat cheese, and get a really healthy, really delicious dish.
Dill-Encrusted Eggplant Parmesan
Serves 4
In retrospect, it makes a lot of sense to me to break down the ingredients list based on what those ingredients are doing in the dish. It helps to understand what's going on in the dish itself as well as sorting out groups of things you're going to be using together. Where it makes sense and where I remember to do it, I think this is a habit I will continue. Not sure exactly what to do with dill weed, which appears in two different places - it is unsatisfactory to me for a lot of reasons. For now, the compromise I reached with myself is to list the total amount of the ingredient used in parenthesis afterwords.
Top-down recipe writing. I really like it.
The Main Event:
1 large eggplant, cut into rounds and purged (see below)
1 cup Mozzarella cheese
1/2 cup Parmesan cheese
1 normal-sized jar tomato sauce
2 (out of 5 total) tablespoons dill weed
The Glue:
2 large eggs
1/4 cup water
The Spicening:
3 (out of 5 total) tablespoons dill weed
2 tablespoons ground dill seed
3 tablespoons bread crumbs
2 tablespoons Mexican oregano
2 teaspoons garlic powder
2 teaspoons onion powder
Black and red pepper to taste
Step 1: Purge the eggplant[1]
Take your eggplant - peeled or unpeeled, as is your wont. Cut it into medium-thin round slices. Mine were about as thick as... a pencil, maybe? Two bagged-and-boarded comic books? Just remember that it's going to get a lot thinner, so make sure it's thick enough that you'll be able to take a nice bite out of it.
Now, lay your slices out on a drying rack, either in/over your sink or on a baking sheet. (Things are going to get messy - you don't really want to do this over a countertop.) Take your kosher salt and liberally sprinkle it over the eggplant. Sprinkle is the word - you don't want piles, you don't want snowdrifts, you want as many individual crystals, with room to breathe, as you can pack on.
Why is that? Well, try it out. After about five minutes, you'll be able to see the salt working its hygroscopic magic. It honestly looks kind of bizarre - each of those crystals will start vacuuming up the water from the eggplant, and what you'll wind up with after about fifteen minutes is a big puddle of briny water standing on top of the eggplant round. If you wind up just dumping a bunch of salt and letting it pile up - as I did today on a few of the pieces of eggplant - there isn't any room (I guess) for the water to go, and it largely stays in the eggplant. (I have no idea if that is actually what is happening, according to Science. However, it really looked like that was what happened.)
Let about fifteen minutes go by, flip over the eggplant slices, and repeat. At this point, you can let them sit for hours, if you want; most of the water gets sucked out in the first fifteen minutes, but the salt continues to do its work as long as the eggplant sits there.
After at least fifteen minutes a side, rinse the salt off the eggplant, and give it a good squeeze. I'm serious! Post-purging, the water in that piece of eggplant is like the air in an air mattress. You can just go ahead and squeeze it out - and pouring water over it isn't going to put any water back into it.
Squeeze technique is important. I think most people instinctively grab between the tips of their fingers and their palms, and squeeze that way... which means that your fingers are going to punch right through the eggplant. You want to be careful not to put too much pressure on it. If there are a lot of seeds in it, it will fall apart anyway, but still, do your best to keep each piece intact. (It won't taste any different, but it looks nicer.) One thing that I found worked fairly well was folding each piece in quarters, then squeezing it like that - the small piece was both easier to get a good grip on and somewhat reinforced.
Okay, so what was the point of all this effort? Well, have you ever baked an eggplant dish? All that water that we just pulled out of the eggplant would have been in the dish instead - specifically, in the eggplant. Duh. That means we would have had a bowl of eggplant mush.
So, by pulling the water out of the eggplant before we cook it, we ensure that water doesn't wind up in our dish. But wait! There's more! Those pieces of eggplant shrunk down to maybe a quarter of their volume, once the water got hygroscop'd out of them. (HYGROSCOP'D!) Except what stayed in there? All the flavor. This is the same theory under which beef gets dry-aged, or soup stock gets reduced. All we're getting rid of is water; all the yummy is staying in there.
Step 2: Prep Work
Beat the egg and water together in a shallow, flat bowl. Mix all of the spice ingredients together in a shallow, flat bowl. Get out a frying pan and get some oil going. Get out a 9x13 baking dish and coat the bottom with a fairly light coat of tomato sauce. Turn the oven to 350 degrees. Now, make sure your feng shui is appropriate for this dish, which means you should have everything set up in a row, like so:
EGGPLANT -> EGG MIXTURE -> SPICE MIXTURE -> FRYING PAN -> BAKING DISH
Step 3: Frying the eggplant and assembly
Well, you got your feng shui all set up, right? Just follow the harmonious flow of energy. Take a slice of eggplant and dip it in the egg, making sure to coat both sides. Let it drip for a few seconds, then dip it into the spice mixture, again coating both sides thoroughly. Drop it in the oil.
Wait about thirty seconds, then repeat the whole process, ending it by flipping the first piece of eggplant you put in the frying pan. It should look nicely fried - IE golden-brown esque. If it's not, you may want to turn up the heat a bit or insert a slightly longer pause.
Wait [PAUSE_IN_SECONDS] again, then repeat again. This time, put in eggplant piece #3; flip eggplant piece #2; take eggplant piece #1 and put it into the baking dish, laid out in one of the corners.
Continue in that fashion until the entire dish is covered in eggplant. (Should take about eight pieces.) At that point, lay down another fairly thin layer of tomato sauce, a few handfuls of cheese, and start the process all over again.
I got two layers out of my eggplant, but there was still plenty of room in the dish. This dish probably serves 4, but if you want more, it's easier to just add more more eggplant and more spices to the recipe, and pile it on top.
Step 4: Baking
The easiest part. When you're done frying the eggplant, give the top layer some more sauce, then the dill and the rest of the cheese. Toss the whole mess into the oven for about a half an hour, let it cool for fifteen minutes, and eat.
Victoria thought that the dish had fish in it; the eggplant, purged and fried, has a deliciously meaty texture. Not sure what to do with the dill - the flavor came out, in part because I used so damn much of it - but I think that the dish could probably be tinkered with to use less and bring the flavor out more. Maybe put the dill on the top after cooking? I don't know; it's worth a try.
I also used about a teaspoon of salt when I made this for dinner, but Victoria thought that it was pretty salty that way. I figured that the purging process probably left some extra salt in the mix - maybe I got lazy washing off the eggplant, that sounds like me. Additionally, commercial tomato sauces are pretty salty. So, probably no need for extra salt in the spice mixture.
I need to start coming up with a clever sign-off at the beginning of these posts, so I'm not forced to think them up when I'm exhausted from writing.
[1]As with many, many things I've done on this blog, this is more or less cribbed straight from Good Eats. It's gonna get worse, too. I'm thinking that next week is going to be ginger, so I watched the ginger episode... and felt worse and worse as Alton Brown did every single thing that I thought of doing.
I'm still going to do ginger week, it just means that I'm basically going to be replicating a Good Eats episode in blog form.
I don't know why, but for some reason, I really didn't expect this to come out well. Which meant that when it came out delicious, it made me really happy. This is fairly a fairly low-carb variant on the classic dish, substituting dill for most of the breadcrumbs that cover normal eggplant parm. It's not really low-fat, but you could easily broil the eggplant instead of frying it and use low-fat cheese, and get a really healthy, really delicious dish.
Dill-Encrusted Eggplant Parmesan
Serves 4
In retrospect, it makes a lot of sense to me to break down the ingredients list based on what those ingredients are doing in the dish. It helps to understand what's going on in the dish itself as well as sorting out groups of things you're going to be using together. Where it makes sense and where I remember to do it, I think this is a habit I will continue. Not sure exactly what to do with dill weed, which appears in two different places - it is unsatisfactory to me for a lot of reasons. For now, the compromise I reached with myself is to list the total amount of the ingredient used in parenthesis afterwords.
Top-down recipe writing. I really like it.
The Main Event:
1 large eggplant, cut into rounds and purged (see below)
1 cup Mozzarella cheese
1/2 cup Parmesan cheese
1 normal-sized jar tomato sauce
2 (out of 5 total) tablespoons dill weed
The Glue:
2 large eggs
1/4 cup water
The Spicening:
3 (out of 5 total) tablespoons dill weed
2 tablespoons ground dill seed
3 tablespoons bread crumbs
2 tablespoons Mexican oregano
2 teaspoons garlic powder
2 teaspoons onion powder
Black and red pepper to taste
Step 1: Purge the eggplant[1]
Take your eggplant - peeled or unpeeled, as is your wont. Cut it into medium-thin round slices. Mine were about as thick as... a pencil, maybe? Two bagged-and-boarded comic books? Just remember that it's going to get a lot thinner, so make sure it's thick enough that you'll be able to take a nice bite out of it.
Now, lay your slices out on a drying rack, either in/over your sink or on a baking sheet. (Things are going to get messy - you don't really want to do this over a countertop.) Take your kosher salt and liberally sprinkle it over the eggplant. Sprinkle is the word - you don't want piles, you don't want snowdrifts, you want as many individual crystals, with room to breathe, as you can pack on.
Why is that? Well, try it out. After about five minutes, you'll be able to see the salt working its hygroscopic magic. It honestly looks kind of bizarre - each of those crystals will start vacuuming up the water from the eggplant, and what you'll wind up with after about fifteen minutes is a big puddle of briny water standing on top of the eggplant round. If you wind up just dumping a bunch of salt and letting it pile up - as I did today on a few of the pieces of eggplant - there isn't any room (I guess) for the water to go, and it largely stays in the eggplant. (I have no idea if that is actually what is happening, according to Science. However, it really looked like that was what happened.)
Let about fifteen minutes go by, flip over the eggplant slices, and repeat. At this point, you can let them sit for hours, if you want; most of the water gets sucked out in the first fifteen minutes, but the salt continues to do its work as long as the eggplant sits there.
After at least fifteen minutes a side, rinse the salt off the eggplant, and give it a good squeeze. I'm serious! Post-purging, the water in that piece of eggplant is like the air in an air mattress. You can just go ahead and squeeze it out - and pouring water over it isn't going to put any water back into it.
Squeeze technique is important. I think most people instinctively grab between the tips of their fingers and their palms, and squeeze that way... which means that your fingers are going to punch right through the eggplant. You want to be careful not to put too much pressure on it. If there are a lot of seeds in it, it will fall apart anyway, but still, do your best to keep each piece intact. (It won't taste any different, but it looks nicer.) One thing that I found worked fairly well was folding each piece in quarters, then squeezing it like that - the small piece was both easier to get a good grip on and somewhat reinforced.
Okay, so what was the point of all this effort? Well, have you ever baked an eggplant dish? All that water that we just pulled out of the eggplant would have been in the dish instead - specifically, in the eggplant. Duh. That means we would have had a bowl of eggplant mush.
So, by pulling the water out of the eggplant before we cook it, we ensure that water doesn't wind up in our dish. But wait! There's more! Those pieces of eggplant shrunk down to maybe a quarter of their volume, once the water got hygroscop'd out of them. (HYGROSCOP'D!) Except what stayed in there? All the flavor. This is the same theory under which beef gets dry-aged, or soup stock gets reduced. All we're getting rid of is water; all the yummy is staying in there.
Step 2: Prep Work
Beat the egg and water together in a shallow, flat bowl. Mix all of the spice ingredients together in a shallow, flat bowl. Get out a frying pan and get some oil going. Get out a 9x13 baking dish and coat the bottom with a fairly light coat of tomato sauce. Turn the oven to 350 degrees. Now, make sure your feng shui is appropriate for this dish, which means you should have everything set up in a row, like so:
EGGPLANT -> EGG MIXTURE -> SPICE MIXTURE -> FRYING PAN -> BAKING DISH
Step 3: Frying the eggplant and assembly
Well, you got your feng shui all set up, right? Just follow the harmonious flow of energy. Take a slice of eggplant and dip it in the egg, making sure to coat both sides. Let it drip for a few seconds, then dip it into the spice mixture, again coating both sides thoroughly. Drop it in the oil.
Wait about thirty seconds, then repeat the whole process, ending it by flipping the first piece of eggplant you put in the frying pan. It should look nicely fried - IE golden-brown esque. If it's not, you may want to turn up the heat a bit or insert a slightly longer pause.
Wait [PAUSE_IN_SECONDS] again, then repeat again. This time, put in eggplant piece #3; flip eggplant piece #2; take eggplant piece #1 and put it into the baking dish, laid out in one of the corners.
Continue in that fashion until the entire dish is covered in eggplant. (Should take about eight pieces.) At that point, lay down another fairly thin layer of tomato sauce, a few handfuls of cheese, and start the process all over again.
I got two layers out of my eggplant, but there was still plenty of room in the dish. This dish probably serves 4, but if you want more, it's easier to just add more more eggplant and more spices to the recipe, and pile it on top.
Step 4: Baking
The easiest part. When you're done frying the eggplant, give the top layer some more sauce, then the dill and the rest of the cheese. Toss the whole mess into the oven for about a half an hour, let it cool for fifteen minutes, and eat.
Victoria thought that the dish had fish in it; the eggplant, purged and fried, has a deliciously meaty texture. Not sure what to do with the dill - the flavor came out, in part because I used so damn much of it - but I think that the dish could probably be tinkered with to use less and bring the flavor out more. Maybe put the dill on the top after cooking? I don't know; it's worth a try.
I also used about a teaspoon of salt when I made this for dinner, but Victoria thought that it was pretty salty that way. I figured that the purging process probably left some extra salt in the mix - maybe I got lazy washing off the eggplant, that sounds like me. Additionally, commercial tomato sauces are pretty salty. So, probably no need for extra salt in the spice mixture.
I need to start coming up with a clever sign-off at the beginning of these posts, so I'm not forced to think them up when I'm exhausted from writing.
[1]As with many, many things I've done on this blog, this is more or less cribbed straight from Good Eats. It's gonna get worse, too. I'm thinking that next week is going to be ginger, so I watched the ginger episode... and felt worse and worse as Alton Brown did every single thing that I thought of doing.
I'm still going to do ginger week, it just means that I'm basically going to be replicating a Good Eats episode in blog form.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Posting again
So, I don't really have a new plan. I don't really know why I had an old one. Do you know what I do know? Oglethorpe does.
So I'm going to write. There's some writing below, and I definitely did it. It's about pie - spinach pie, delicious spinach pie with a heaping load of dill so it is full of dilly goodness.
We'll see what happens.
So I'm going to write. There's some writing below, and I definitely did it. It's about pie - spinach pie, delicious spinach pie with a heaping load of dill so it is full of dilly goodness.
We'll see what happens.
Dilly Spinach Pie - "Batsaria"
Man, I have the weirdest freakin' dreams sometimes.
I kid you not - I just woke up from a dream in which I was the main character in a remake of The Last Starfighter. The big bad guy was a giant Ko-Dan computer played by the Floating Head of Neil Patrick Harris, and it was a total smarmy jerk. Amongst our weaponry was a giant pencil that we used to disrupt the printouts he was forever spewing. The action was happening on... two dimensions... at the same time? Or something? With me switching between the Starfighter and myself, here on Earth, running around trying to do... well, I actually have no idea what part of the quest I was trying to accomplish on Earth. But there was something really important I was doing.
The stuff that we were doing with the giant pencil was having profoundly weird effects on Earth - we'd make some marks on his printout, which he'd then have to rewind in order to correct. (He was really, really anal, I guess.) As he was rewinding his printouts, time would fold backwards on Earth, which I'd then have to deal with when I switched back to Earth. Also, I think the head of AT&T was in some way in league with the Ko-Dan on Earth. I don't know why.
I'm not joking - this is the kind of thing that goes on in my head when left unsupervised. I think it's better all around that I just keep writing this blog.
I wish that was some type of clever lead-in into this blog post - but seriously, that crap was going to be rattling around in my skull until I spit it out somewhere. And that somewhere, Gentle Reader, is right into your eyeballs. Sorry.
Okay, now that that's over with. I made a Greek spinach pie for dinner tonight. The original recipe is here; I assume, from the text on that page, that this is called a Batsaria. It was absolutely delicious... but I would follow my recipe as opposed to the original. I'll talk about why later.
Dilly Spinach Pie
STUFF TO CHOP:
1 pound fresh spinach
3 leeks
5 green onions
1 bunch parsley
1 bunch dill
1 8 oz. package of Crimini (baby bella) mushrooms
STUFF TO BIND:
1 cup milk
3 eggs
3/4 cup olive oil
STUFF TO MAKE YUMMY:
12 oz crumbled feta cheese
2 tsp salt
2 tsp black pepper
1 tsp white sugar
STUFF TO MAKE CRUST:
4 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp salt
2 2/3 cups water
1/3 cup olive oil
STUFF TO TOP CRUST:
4 oz. grated Parmesan cheese
2 tbsp (1/4 stick) butter, cut into small chunks
2 tbsp olive oil
1 handful of dill weed
This isn't nearly as difficult as the ingredients list makes it out to be - there's basically a lot of chopping, but once that's all done, the recipe is basically "mix it all up in a bowl and spread it in a pan." You can pretty much ignore the groups I put the ingredients into - the "crust" and "crust topping" groups are useful break-outs, but the other three groups all get mixed together. I was thinking about what the different parts of the recipe were doing, though, and broke them up this way in my head; I though that it might be interesting and/or educational to write up the recipe that way.
What I did differently from the original recipe:
The first thing I did was axe the mint that the original recipe uses; I do not like mint, Sam I Am. In retrospect, that may have been a mistake.
One thing that I've been realizing recently is that my knowledge of spices is really lacking in the middle of the range, if you will allow me to go back to the music metaphor. I'm getting pretty good with the high notes, the cumins or wasabis, that jump out and grab your attention. And I'm getting pretty good with the bass notes, the turmerics and oreganos - deep notes that you can build a dish on. But I'm really weak in the middle range - the things that sustain a piece.
Take, for example, a curry I made recently. I started out by heating up some oil and frying up a who's who of my favorite spices - cumin, turmeric, coriander, fennel; added some garam masala for kicks. The smell was utterly heavenly; the entire house smelled mouth-wateringly delicious. But when served over rice, the dish didn't even come close to living up to its smell. Frankly, it was somewhat boring - an explosion on the nose, and on the tip of your tongue, but after that - nothing.
This story has a happy ending - though dinner was somewhat boring, when I ate the leftovers for lunch the day after, it tasted perfect. The flavors had mellowed out quite a bit, and the sauce had soaked into the rice, mixing the flavors much better. But still, the dish was quite a disappointment.
Now that I think about it, maybe the answer isn't that I'm spicing things incorrectly, maybe I just need to give dishes like this time to cool and mix before serving.
But for now, I'm going to assume that the problem is the way I'm spicing it - that I'm paying too much attention to the top and bottom, and leaving out the middle.
That's definitely where this dish has problems. Not that it wasn't good - hell, not that it wasn't great. I mean, how could something which includes a full pound of cheese NOT be great? But I feel like, perhaps, the mint was there to fill out the middle notes - middle notes which were definitely the weakest part of this. Next time I try it, I'll definitely include the mint, just to see how it comes out. (Maybe the mint will be like cilantro in chili. I don't like cilantro, in general, but chili really needs it to reach its fullest flavor.)
I had two big problems, not with the contents of the original recipe, but the way that it was presented. Pet peeves, really. First, in every supermarket I've been to, cheese is sold by weight, not volume. So, I've substituted the weight that I had to use to get that amount for you. Second, the original recipe calls for salt and pepper "to taste". Now, I don't know about you, but I'm not inclined to taste a mixture of sugar, olive oil, and leeks... especially when raw egg is the chaser. [1] So, I'm going to strongly suggest that you add two big pinches of kosher salt and two big grinds of pepper, or two teaspoons of each.
(Also, as a number three: Come on. You split it up into three steps. Step one: preheat oven. Step two: Do all the cooking. Step three: Put in in the oven. Can we divide things a little better than that?)
Another thing I changed was adding mushrooms. I mean, come on. Look at that original recipe. Where are the mushrooms? There's an empty line there that SHOULD say "Now get some mushrooms, ja?" Ja. Victoria also suggested black olives, or maybe kalamatas - which would add some salt, and probably do the job of filling in that middle-range flavor I was talking about.
The cooking itself is fairly easy. First, whisk together all the crust ingredients in a mixing bowl. Grease up a baking pan. The original recipe says a "deep 9x9", but I don't have any particularly deep pans. A 13x9 is the way to go here, unless you've got some sort of specialized bakeware. Once the pan is greased, lay half the crust batter down on the bottom.
Now, the filling. Beat the eggs, then mix everything in the "chop", "bind", and "yummy" categories into the eggs. Spoon everything (gently) into the pan - as much as possible you want to lay it on top of the crust batter, rather than letting it drop all the way though. The batter is pretty thick, so it's not that big a deal.
You've still got about half the batter left, right? Spoon it on top of the spinach mixture to make a top crust layer. The original recipe again slips up a bit - it calls for 2/3 of the batter on the bottom, 1/3 on top, but that wasn't enough for me to make a decent top layer, so I wound up having to mix up some additional crust. If, for whatever reason, this turns out to not be enough, don't be afraid to make some more of the crust mixture. 1 cup of flour, 1/4 tsp salt, 2/3 cup water, 1 tbsp olive oil.
I really feel bad about ragging on the original recipe constantly - I'm ripping off someone else's dinner for a blog post. And in the end, it's a great meal, just not a well-written recipe, so kudos. Still - I have no idea why the recipe tries to divide the crust 2/3 - 1/3, and those proportions simply didn't work. (Probably, in part, because it's trying to fit way, way too much filling into a 9x9 pan. I just looked online for "deep 9x9 pan", and I couldn't find anything aside from the standard sizes - 9x9x2 or 9x9x1.5.) I think half and half should work fine; if not, like I said, just mix up an extra cup of batter.
Now that you've got a nice smooth top crust, put the "crust topping" stuff on top of it. Butter plus olive oil seems like a touch of overkill... but never let it be said that I wasn't willing to destroy my heart in pursuit of a delicious meal. Toss the whole thing in a 350 degree oven for an hour, or until the crust is all crusty. And the cheese is all melty. Take it out, give it a good twenty minutes or more on a cooling rack, and dig in. Serve with a Greek salad, some tomatoes, and quite possibly a prescription for Lipitor.
[1] It occurred to me that I've always interpreted the phrase "to taste" to mean "taste the dish, and add salt and pepper until you think it tastes good." Now that I'm thinking about it, it might very well just mean "you know your own tastes - add as much salt and pepper as you think you would enjoy." I still think that my original interpretation is more likely, but...
I kid you not - I just woke up from a dream in which I was the main character in a remake of The Last Starfighter. The big bad guy was a giant Ko-Dan computer played by the Floating Head of Neil Patrick Harris, and it was a total smarmy jerk. Amongst our weaponry was a giant pencil that we used to disrupt the printouts he was forever spewing. The action was happening on... two dimensions... at the same time? Or something? With me switching between the Starfighter and myself, here on Earth, running around trying to do... well, I actually have no idea what part of the quest I was trying to accomplish on Earth. But there was something really important I was doing.
The stuff that we were doing with the giant pencil was having profoundly weird effects on Earth - we'd make some marks on his printout, which he'd then have to rewind in order to correct. (He was really, really anal, I guess.) As he was rewinding his printouts, time would fold backwards on Earth, which I'd then have to deal with when I switched back to Earth. Also, I think the head of AT&T was in some way in league with the Ko-Dan on Earth. I don't know why.
I'm not joking - this is the kind of thing that goes on in my head when left unsupervised. I think it's better all around that I just keep writing this blog.
I wish that was some type of clever lead-in into this blog post - but seriously, that crap was going to be rattling around in my skull until I spit it out somewhere. And that somewhere, Gentle Reader, is right into your eyeballs. Sorry.
Okay, now that that's over with. I made a Greek spinach pie for dinner tonight. The original recipe is here; I assume, from the text on that page, that this is called a Batsaria. It was absolutely delicious... but I would follow my recipe as opposed to the original. I'll talk about why later.
Dilly Spinach Pie
STUFF TO CHOP:
1 pound fresh spinach
3 leeks
5 green onions
1 bunch parsley
1 bunch dill
1 8 oz. package of Crimini (baby bella) mushrooms
STUFF TO BIND:
1 cup milk
3 eggs
3/4 cup olive oil
STUFF TO MAKE YUMMY:
12 oz crumbled feta cheese
2 tsp salt
2 tsp black pepper
1 tsp white sugar
STUFF TO MAKE CRUST:
4 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp salt
2 2/3 cups water
1/3 cup olive oil
STUFF TO TOP CRUST:
4 oz. grated Parmesan cheese
2 tbsp (1/4 stick) butter, cut into small chunks
2 tbsp olive oil
1 handful of dill weed
This isn't nearly as difficult as the ingredients list makes it out to be - there's basically a lot of chopping, but once that's all done, the recipe is basically "mix it all up in a bowl and spread it in a pan." You can pretty much ignore the groups I put the ingredients into - the "crust" and "crust topping" groups are useful break-outs, but the other three groups all get mixed together. I was thinking about what the different parts of the recipe were doing, though, and broke them up this way in my head; I though that it might be interesting and/or educational to write up the recipe that way.
What I did differently from the original recipe:
The first thing I did was axe the mint that the original recipe uses; I do not like mint, Sam I Am. In retrospect, that may have been a mistake.
One thing that I've been realizing recently is that my knowledge of spices is really lacking in the middle of the range, if you will allow me to go back to the music metaphor. I'm getting pretty good with the high notes, the cumins or wasabis, that jump out and grab your attention. And I'm getting pretty good with the bass notes, the turmerics and oreganos - deep notes that you can build a dish on. But I'm really weak in the middle range - the things that sustain a piece.
Take, for example, a curry I made recently. I started out by heating up some oil and frying up a who's who of my favorite spices - cumin, turmeric, coriander, fennel; added some garam masala for kicks. The smell was utterly heavenly; the entire house smelled mouth-wateringly delicious. But when served over rice, the dish didn't even come close to living up to its smell. Frankly, it was somewhat boring - an explosion on the nose, and on the tip of your tongue, but after that - nothing.
This story has a happy ending - though dinner was somewhat boring, when I ate the leftovers for lunch the day after, it tasted perfect. The flavors had mellowed out quite a bit, and the sauce had soaked into the rice, mixing the flavors much better. But still, the dish was quite a disappointment.
Now that I think about it, maybe the answer isn't that I'm spicing things incorrectly, maybe I just need to give dishes like this time to cool and mix before serving.
But for now, I'm going to assume that the problem is the way I'm spicing it - that I'm paying too much attention to the top and bottom, and leaving out the middle.
That's definitely where this dish has problems. Not that it wasn't good - hell, not that it wasn't great. I mean, how could something which includes a full pound of cheese NOT be great? But I feel like, perhaps, the mint was there to fill out the middle notes - middle notes which were definitely the weakest part of this. Next time I try it, I'll definitely include the mint, just to see how it comes out. (Maybe the mint will be like cilantro in chili. I don't like cilantro, in general, but chili really needs it to reach its fullest flavor.)
I had two big problems, not with the contents of the original recipe, but the way that it was presented. Pet peeves, really. First, in every supermarket I've been to, cheese is sold by weight, not volume. So, I've substituted the weight that I had to use to get that amount for you. Second, the original recipe calls for salt and pepper "to taste". Now, I don't know about you, but I'm not inclined to taste a mixture of sugar, olive oil, and leeks... especially when raw egg is the chaser. [1] So, I'm going to strongly suggest that you add two big pinches of kosher salt and two big grinds of pepper, or two teaspoons of each.
(Also, as a number three: Come on. You split it up into three steps. Step one: preheat oven. Step two: Do all the cooking. Step three: Put in in the oven. Can we divide things a little better than that?)
Another thing I changed was adding mushrooms. I mean, come on. Look at that original recipe. Where are the mushrooms? There's an empty line there that SHOULD say "Now get some mushrooms, ja?" Ja. Victoria also suggested black olives, or maybe kalamatas - which would add some salt, and probably do the job of filling in that middle-range flavor I was talking about.
The cooking itself is fairly easy. First, whisk together all the crust ingredients in a mixing bowl. Grease up a baking pan. The original recipe says a "deep 9x9", but I don't have any particularly deep pans. A 13x9 is the way to go here, unless you've got some sort of specialized bakeware. Once the pan is greased, lay half the crust batter down on the bottom.
Now, the filling. Beat the eggs, then mix everything in the "chop", "bind", and "yummy" categories into the eggs. Spoon everything (gently) into the pan - as much as possible you want to lay it on top of the crust batter, rather than letting it drop all the way though. The batter is pretty thick, so it's not that big a deal.
You've still got about half the batter left, right? Spoon it on top of the spinach mixture to make a top crust layer. The original recipe again slips up a bit - it calls for 2/3 of the batter on the bottom, 1/3 on top, but that wasn't enough for me to make a decent top layer, so I wound up having to mix up some additional crust. If, for whatever reason, this turns out to not be enough, don't be afraid to make some more of the crust mixture. 1 cup of flour, 1/4 tsp salt, 2/3 cup water, 1 tbsp olive oil.
I really feel bad about ragging on the original recipe constantly - I'm ripping off someone else's dinner for a blog post. And in the end, it's a great meal, just not a well-written recipe, so kudos. Still - I have no idea why the recipe tries to divide the crust 2/3 - 1/3, and those proportions simply didn't work. (Probably, in part, because it's trying to fit way, way too much filling into a 9x9 pan. I just looked online for "deep 9x9 pan", and I couldn't find anything aside from the standard sizes - 9x9x2 or 9x9x1.5.) I think half and half should work fine; if not, like I said, just mix up an extra cup of batter.
Now that you've got a nice smooth top crust, put the "crust topping" stuff on top of it. Butter plus olive oil seems like a touch of overkill... but never let it be said that I wasn't willing to destroy my heart in pursuit of a delicious meal. Toss the whole thing in a 350 degree oven for an hour, or until the crust is all crusty. And the cheese is all melty. Take it out, give it a good twenty minutes or more on a cooling rack, and dig in. Serve with a Greek salad, some tomatoes, and quite possibly a prescription for Lipitor.
[1] It occurred to me that I've always interpreted the phrase "to taste" to mean "taste the dish, and add salt and pepper until you think it tastes good." Now that I'm thinking about it, it might very well just mean "you know your own tastes - add as much salt and pepper as you think you would enjoy." I still think that my original interpretation is more likely, but...
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Dill Butter and its Malcontents
Okay, I'll admit, I've had plans work out better. It's been a crazy few weeks... but hopefully I'll be able to get back to my planned posting schedule.
Victoria was gone over Memorial Day weekend, leaving me in the position of having to take care of to take care of an utterly sweet and adorable baby with no backup. I have no idea how single parents do it. If, as I suspect, Victoria's actual plan was to prove to me that I need her far more than I suspect - and my suspicion is that I need her a lot - then her plan succeeded. I had no idea just how much I relied on having an hour or two in the morning and the evening, and on not having to wake up at the same time he does.
So, it was a fairly stressful weekend. I did my best to tire him out as much as possible - which meant we spent a lot of time at the playground. My local playground is pretty awesome; it's a great middle ground between the jagged cast-iron deathtraps of our youth and the padded tire-piles of the nineties. (One of my earliest memories... or, I guess, lack of memories... is climbing up onto the big slide at my grandmother's apartment, getting ready to slide down... and then waking up in a hospital.)
You know what else I learned, in addition to "wives are really useful when taking care of children"? Playing is hard. I mean it! I remember playing as being effortless fun. It's still fun... but effortless? I don't think so.
Benjamin can't walk yet - though he's standing - and he's still in a phase where every stick and rock goes straight into his mouth. So despite how much I'd like to let him crawl around the playground and go nuts, I really can't. What actually happens is that I carry him everywhere, and do most of the playing with him on my shoulders, which he loves.
What will often happen is that one of the other little boys will come over and want to play with him. They're always really interested in him - I think they recognize that he's not really a baby any more, but at the same time, he can't do the things that they do, which they don't quite understand. So what often happens is that I will wind up carrying Benji around as we ride the bus, or go on a bear hunt, or simply go on the slide thirty or forty times in a row.
My point is... that crap is tiring. These kids have way, way, way more energy than I do... not to mention that they think nothing of charging full-steam through parts of the playground that are more than big enough for them, but which I have to squeeze into while holding a baby.
One thing that Benji loves is this clear plastic tunnel that connects two sections of the main play-area. Here's the problem - the tunnel is slightly less than a foot above the main surface, which is low enough for him to clamber into... but not nearly low enough for him to crawl out of. He can usually get a good ten or fifteen minutes of fun just doing laps in this thing - babies do not get bored particularly easily - but eventually, he'll wind up at one end, clearly ready to do something which will wind up with him face-planting his way out of the tunnel. At this point, I have two choices - crawl in there to retrieve him, which is non-trivial, because the tunnel was not designed for shoulders as wide as mine. Alternately, I can run all the way around the structure, come up the other side, and meet him there. This means that I'm running the risk of him deciding to go for it before I get there.
This particular weekend, I came up with a third option - one which seemed quite a bit easier. I decided I would simply hop on top of the pipe, run across it, and hop down on the other end. Now, it's been a while since I did anything like that, but my memory - both muscle and regular - told me that it should be trivial to do. So, I planted my hands on the edge, sprang up, and...
And the emergency system which prevents me from doing things which will wind up in me injuring my old, flabby self cut in and told me that there was a ninety-six percent chance that if I followed through with my plan, I would wind up hobbling home with a baby in my arms. At best. At worst, Benjamin would get to ride to the hospital with me. (I guess that would be my inner C-3P0.)
Now, I didn't get where I am in life (unemployed with six figures of educational debt) by not doing things merely because they were really, really stupid. So I tried the jump again. And again, my body flat-out refused to do it.
Well, I have to live in this piece of rotting hamburger, but I'm sure as heck not going to take orders from it. So I overrode all the safeties and leaped up. It was not a graceful leap. It was not an athletic leap. But it was a leap. It moved me, vertically, from the level I was at to a higher level... I counted it as a win, all things considered. I looked down into the pipe, where Benji was looking at me in what I'm going to assume was pride and awe. I made funny faces at him for a minute or two, because I thought he'd enjoy the novelty of me being directly above him, and not at all because I needed any time to recover.
After that, though, it was easy to clamber across the pipe. And jumping down? Easy-peasy. When it comes to moving horizontally, or in a downward direction, I've still got it.
My point being? Playing is hard.
You know what isn't hard, though? Making this delicious dill butter, which I used in several different applications.
EASIER THAN PLAYING DILL BUTTER
1 stick of butter
1 tablespoon prepared horseradish (the kind you get in the supermarket)
1/2 teaspoon mustard powder
2 teaspoons dill weed (or fresh dill)
Salt and pepper, as always, to taste - a small pinch of each will do.
Let the butter warm, and beat it lightly with a fork to loosen it up. Mix everything else in, and put it back into the fridge to re-solidify.
Like the wasabi butter I made last week, (and by "week" I mean "month") the butter seems to do a good job of shielding the heat-sensitive flavors of the dill from heat. It's not perfect, but the dill definitely stands up to heat better in this form than it does normally. Which is great when putting it on corn.
My favorite way to cook corn, bar none, is on the grill. Once corn season starts, I really try to make sure I grill up a few ears every time I have people over. And when it comes to preparation, there's only one choice. Shuck the corn, butter it heavily, dump a little garlic salt on it, follow that up with either lemon or cayenne pepper, and wrap the whole thing tightly in foil. Give it a half hour or so, on direct heat if you like a little charring or indirect heat if you don't. Basically, what you're doing here is broiling the corn in the butter - the butter seeps into every nook and cranny and absolutely infuses the entire ear. Delicious.
Well, I say "only one way", but it's the method I'm wedded to, not the particular combination of spices. So, the dill-horseradish butter seemed absolutely perfect; it had salt, it was both a tiny bit spicy (which goes great with corn) and the rich flavor of the dill really seemed like it would pair well. Which, of course, it did.
Both the dill and horseradish definitely suffered on the grill - they were noticeable, but they had definitely both retreated into the background. Which was fine, as far as I was concerned; corn covered in butter doesn't need a whole lot of jazzing up, and my goal is not to overwhelm the natural flavor, but to compliment it, which this does quite nicely.
I used the butter in a salmon dish, as well. Salmon in pan; onions, some more fresh dill, and lemon juice (or lemon slices, or both) on salmon. Pan in oven, 350 degrees until done. Let the butter soften while the salmon is cooking, and when the salmon comes out immediately spread the butter on top of it. The butter melts and mingles with the flavors of the stuff that's already there. A simple and tremendously tasty dish. (If I weren't married, I would totally make this to impress a girl. Not because it's so tasty - although it is - but because doing something to food after it comes out of the oven to get it ready for plating is impressive. Even if it's something as simple as "butter it", it makes you look like you know what you're doing.)
With the salmon, the dill flavor stands out much more. In part because there's more dill on the salmon, but more to the point, the butter here gets less heat, so less chance for the dill and horseradish flavors to degrade. I think this kind of dish - where the butter can be put on after cooking - is ideal for the dill butter. (Come to think of it, I could grill corn in the husk, and just butter it afterwords. I think I'm going to try that tomorrow night, see how it works out.)
I think working with the more fragile spices I've done recently has given me more of an appreciation for applications like this, or like the yogurt sauce I made a while back. I'm half-thinking that when the year - or two years, or however long it actually takes me to finish fifty-two spices - is over, I'll try "The Year of Living Saucily," and not just because I like the name.
As for the butter, I haven't tried it on popcorn yet, because, frankly, Victoria and I ran out of popcorn. But I'm going to the supermarket tomorrow... and the great wheel of science will continue.
Join me tomorrow (hopefully) when I talk about Sir John Dill, and a really, really odd dream I had.
Victoria was gone over Memorial Day weekend, leaving me in the position of having to take care of to take care of an utterly sweet and adorable baby with no backup. I have no idea how single parents do it. If, as I suspect, Victoria's actual plan was to prove to me that I need her far more than I suspect - and my suspicion is that I need her a lot - then her plan succeeded. I had no idea just how much I relied on having an hour or two in the morning and the evening, and on not having to wake up at the same time he does.
So, it was a fairly stressful weekend. I did my best to tire him out as much as possible - which meant we spent a lot of time at the playground. My local playground is pretty awesome; it's a great middle ground between the jagged cast-iron deathtraps of our youth and the padded tire-piles of the nineties. (One of my earliest memories... or, I guess, lack of memories... is climbing up onto the big slide at my grandmother's apartment, getting ready to slide down... and then waking up in a hospital.)
You know what else I learned, in addition to "wives are really useful when taking care of children"? Playing is hard. I mean it! I remember playing as being effortless fun. It's still fun... but effortless? I don't think so.
Benjamin can't walk yet - though he's standing - and he's still in a phase where every stick and rock goes straight into his mouth. So despite how much I'd like to let him crawl around the playground and go nuts, I really can't. What actually happens is that I carry him everywhere, and do most of the playing with him on my shoulders, which he loves.
What will often happen is that one of the other little boys will come over and want to play with him. They're always really interested in him - I think they recognize that he's not really a baby any more, but at the same time, he can't do the things that they do, which they don't quite understand. So what often happens is that I will wind up carrying Benji around as we ride the bus, or go on a bear hunt, or simply go on the slide thirty or forty times in a row.
My point is... that crap is tiring. These kids have way, way, way more energy than I do... not to mention that they think nothing of charging full-steam through parts of the playground that are more than big enough for them, but which I have to squeeze into while holding a baby.
One thing that Benji loves is this clear plastic tunnel that connects two sections of the main play-area. Here's the problem - the tunnel is slightly less than a foot above the main surface, which is low enough for him to clamber into... but not nearly low enough for him to crawl out of. He can usually get a good ten or fifteen minutes of fun just doing laps in this thing - babies do not get bored particularly easily - but eventually, he'll wind up at one end, clearly ready to do something which will wind up with him face-planting his way out of the tunnel. At this point, I have two choices - crawl in there to retrieve him, which is non-trivial, because the tunnel was not designed for shoulders as wide as mine. Alternately, I can run all the way around the structure, come up the other side, and meet him there. This means that I'm running the risk of him deciding to go for it before I get there.
This particular weekend, I came up with a third option - one which seemed quite a bit easier. I decided I would simply hop on top of the pipe, run across it, and hop down on the other end. Now, it's been a while since I did anything like that, but my memory - both muscle and regular - told me that it should be trivial to do. So, I planted my hands on the edge, sprang up, and...
And the emergency system which prevents me from doing things which will wind up in me injuring my old, flabby self cut in and told me that there was a ninety-six percent chance that if I followed through with my plan, I would wind up hobbling home with a baby in my arms. At best. At worst, Benjamin would get to ride to the hospital with me. (I guess that would be my inner C-3P0.)
Now, I didn't get where I am in life (unemployed with six figures of educational debt) by not doing things merely because they were really, really stupid. So I tried the jump again. And again, my body flat-out refused to do it.
Well, I have to live in this piece of rotting hamburger, but I'm sure as heck not going to take orders from it. So I overrode all the safeties and leaped up. It was not a graceful leap. It was not an athletic leap. But it was a leap. It moved me, vertically, from the level I was at to a higher level... I counted it as a win, all things considered. I looked down into the pipe, where Benji was looking at me in what I'm going to assume was pride and awe. I made funny faces at him for a minute or two, because I thought he'd enjoy the novelty of me being directly above him, and not at all because I needed any time to recover.
After that, though, it was easy to clamber across the pipe. And jumping down? Easy-peasy. When it comes to moving horizontally, or in a downward direction, I've still got it.
My point being? Playing is hard.
You know what isn't hard, though? Making this delicious dill butter, which I used in several different applications.
EASIER THAN PLAYING DILL BUTTER
1 stick of butter
1 tablespoon prepared horseradish (the kind you get in the supermarket)
1/2 teaspoon mustard powder
2 teaspoons dill weed (or fresh dill)
Salt and pepper, as always, to taste - a small pinch of each will do.
Let the butter warm, and beat it lightly with a fork to loosen it up. Mix everything else in, and put it back into the fridge to re-solidify.
Like the wasabi butter I made last week, (and by "week" I mean "month") the butter seems to do a good job of shielding the heat-sensitive flavors of the dill from heat. It's not perfect, but the dill definitely stands up to heat better in this form than it does normally. Which is great when putting it on corn.
My favorite way to cook corn, bar none, is on the grill. Once corn season starts, I really try to make sure I grill up a few ears every time I have people over. And when it comes to preparation, there's only one choice. Shuck the corn, butter it heavily, dump a little garlic salt on it, follow that up with either lemon or cayenne pepper, and wrap the whole thing tightly in foil. Give it a half hour or so, on direct heat if you like a little charring or indirect heat if you don't. Basically, what you're doing here is broiling the corn in the butter - the butter seeps into every nook and cranny and absolutely infuses the entire ear. Delicious.
Well, I say "only one way", but it's the method I'm wedded to, not the particular combination of spices. So, the dill-horseradish butter seemed absolutely perfect; it had salt, it was both a tiny bit spicy (which goes great with corn) and the rich flavor of the dill really seemed like it would pair well. Which, of course, it did.
Both the dill and horseradish definitely suffered on the grill - they were noticeable, but they had definitely both retreated into the background. Which was fine, as far as I was concerned; corn covered in butter doesn't need a whole lot of jazzing up, and my goal is not to overwhelm the natural flavor, but to compliment it, which this does quite nicely.
I used the butter in a salmon dish, as well. Salmon in pan; onions, some more fresh dill, and lemon juice (or lemon slices, or both) on salmon. Pan in oven, 350 degrees until done. Let the butter soften while the salmon is cooking, and when the salmon comes out immediately spread the butter on top of it. The butter melts and mingles with the flavors of the stuff that's already there. A simple and tremendously tasty dish. (If I weren't married, I would totally make this to impress a girl. Not because it's so tasty - although it is - but because doing something to food after it comes out of the oven to get it ready for plating is impressive. Even if it's something as simple as "butter it", it makes you look like you know what you're doing.)
With the salmon, the dill flavor stands out much more. In part because there's more dill on the salmon, but more to the point, the butter here gets less heat, so less chance for the dill and horseradish flavors to degrade. I think this kind of dish - where the butter can be put on after cooking - is ideal for the dill butter. (Come to think of it, I could grill corn in the husk, and just butter it afterwords. I think I'm going to try that tomorrow night, see how it works out.)
I think working with the more fragile spices I've done recently has given me more of an appreciation for applications like this, or like the yogurt sauce I made a while back. I'm half-thinking that when the year - or two years, or however long it actually takes me to finish fifty-two spices - is over, I'll try "The Year of Living Saucily," and not just because I like the name.
As for the butter, I haven't tried it on popcorn yet, because, frankly, Victoria and I ran out of popcorn. But I'm going to the supermarket tomorrow... and the great wheel of science will continue.
Join me tomorrow (hopefully) when I talk about Sir John Dill, and a really, really odd dream I had.
Monday, June 7, 2010
Scallops with Dill Cream Sauce
So I started writing my post on the dill-crusted tilapia, and then I kind of half-remembered that I had done something very similar a while back. So I went to check through my older posts, to see if I was right, and while I was doing that something shiny appeared and I was all like, huh, a shiny thing, and I wondered what it was and why it was there, and it was pretty and shiny and I tried to get it but it got away.
Shiny.
What was I talking about? Oh right. A shiny thing. In any case, I never figured out whether I duplicated an earlier recipe, just using dill instead of something else. I really need to make up an excel spreadsheet or something. In the meantime, I made something for dinner tonight which obviated the need for me to do background research on my own blog, so I'ma write about that.
Victoria and I had a date to watch Iron Man this evening - I had meant to go see Iron Man 2 with my brother, last week when I was up in New Jersey. My parents threw a first birthday party for Benjamin, and...
How to put this.
My dad's friend Kolya showed up early. This is a man who is two hours late for everything, and he showed up early. Why is this a problem? Well, it's a problem because by the time the majority of the guests showed up, a half hour later, I was already six shots in. And every time anyone wanted to drink a toast to my son, well, guess who had to drink with them?
So by about five - if I'm being generous to myself - I was what one could probably refer to as "passed right the hell out." No Iron Man. But I really liked the first movie, really want to see the second one... but going to see a blockbuster alone (or with a 1-year-old) is really not much fun. (Now, that's not to say that I don't look forward, more than any other part of the parenting experience, to a time when I can sit down with Benjamin and we can watch Batman cartoons together.)
Much to my delight, my wife stepped up to the plate here and said she'd like to go with me. Definitely good times; Victoria and I each have our own nerdy interests, but it's always nice when there's a little bit of crossover there. Sometimes I go to see her Morris dancing; sometimes she plays games or watches comic-book-derived entertainment with me. Obviously, if she's going to see Iron Man 2 with me, we need to see the first movie beforehand, so this is kind of a two-in-one for me.
Now, I don't know very much at all about women. In fact, I can probably sum up everything I know in two bullet points:
1. Women really like having their back scratched right under their bra clasp.
2. If they're doing something that is outside of their comfort zone, and you want them to do it again, make sure the experience is as enjoyable as possible and that they are aware of how much you enjoyed having them do it.
So, for our stay-at-home date to watch Iron Man, I decided I wanted to make scallops, which I know that she really enjoys. I looked up a few recipes, didn't find anything that really blew me away, so I winged it. I'm really starting to feel a lot of confidence with the process - coming up with an idea in my head, reading a few recipes that are close or have elements that I'm trying to reproduce, then putting the pieces together to make my dish.
In this case, I knew that I wanted to have scallops and dill in the dish. I also was laboring under the fairly serious restriction that supermarket day is tomorrow, so the house is fairly empty of veggies. I settled on something fairly simple - I pictured the scallops on top of some pasta, with some sort of butter or cream sauce. This is what I wound up with. It was delicious, and surprisingly quick to make.
Scallops with Dill Cream Sauce
1 Lb. Scallops
1/4 stick butter
1/4 onion, chopped
1/2 cup sherry
Heavy cream
Sea Salt
Pepper
Dill
Throw a nice big pat of butter in a pan and get it nice and warm - not sizzling, but enough to cook the scallops. Throw the little guys in there, and sprinkle them with some sea salt, some pepper, and some dill. (The dill is probably not going to carry significant flavor here, but I liked the way it looked. I used sea salt instead of kosher because it seemed like a good place to add the more complex flavor of the sea salt.) Give them a minute or two, depending on how big they are, then flip them over. They should be browning when you flip them, but don't let them stay on too long - I'm told scallops are really easy to overcook. Repeat, and when they're done, remove them to a plate and cover to keep warm.
Throw in the rest of the butter and saute the onions. When they're starting to turn golden, in goes the sherry. It should sizzle a bit; keep it moving, and while you're at it use it to deglaze anything left of the pan. When about half the sherry has cooked off - shouldn't be more than 5-10 minutes - add in the heavy cream. Unfortunately, I didn't really measure the amount of cream I used; I would guess that I added no more than a quarter cup, probably less. Enough to thicken the sauce and make it a nice light brown color; I see no reason you couldn't add more to make it even creamier, though.
Toss in a bit more pepper and a bit more salt; stir in the cream, warming it but not letting it go above a simmer. (My gut tells me that would get messy quickly.) At the very end, throw in the dill; I probably added about two tablespoons, all told. Give it a few more stirs - enough to mix the dill, no more, you don't want to lose the dill's flavor - and take it off the heat.
I served the scallops on a bed of linguine, and poured the sauce on top of it. Victoria licked the plate clean, and loved the movie as well. Mission accomplished. Really, what more can one ask for in a wife?
Mission accomplished. Loved the dinner, loved Iron Man.
Confidential to guys with beards - man, when you clean out your laptop's keyboard, there sure is a lot of beard in there, isn't there?
Shiny.
What was I talking about? Oh right. A shiny thing. In any case, I never figured out whether I duplicated an earlier recipe, just using dill instead of something else. I really need to make up an excel spreadsheet or something. In the meantime, I made something for dinner tonight which obviated the need for me to do background research on my own blog, so I'ma write about that.
Victoria and I had a date to watch Iron Man this evening - I had meant to go see Iron Man 2 with my brother, last week when I was up in New Jersey. My parents threw a first birthday party for Benjamin, and...
How to put this.
My dad's friend Kolya showed up early. This is a man who is two hours late for everything, and he showed up early. Why is this a problem? Well, it's a problem because by the time the majority of the guests showed up, a half hour later, I was already six shots in. And every time anyone wanted to drink a toast to my son, well, guess who had to drink with them?
So by about five - if I'm being generous to myself - I was what one could probably refer to as "passed right the hell out." No Iron Man. But I really liked the first movie, really want to see the second one... but going to see a blockbuster alone (or with a 1-year-old) is really not much fun. (Now, that's not to say that I don't look forward, more than any other part of the parenting experience, to a time when I can sit down with Benjamin and we can watch Batman cartoons together.)
Much to my delight, my wife stepped up to the plate here and said she'd like to go with me. Definitely good times; Victoria and I each have our own nerdy interests, but it's always nice when there's a little bit of crossover there. Sometimes I go to see her Morris dancing; sometimes she plays games or watches comic-book-derived entertainment with me. Obviously, if she's going to see Iron Man 2 with me, we need to see the first movie beforehand, so this is kind of a two-in-one for me.
Now, I don't know very much at all about women. In fact, I can probably sum up everything I know in two bullet points:
1. Women really like having their back scratched right under their bra clasp.
2. If they're doing something that is outside of their comfort zone, and you want them to do it again, make sure the experience is as enjoyable as possible and that they are aware of how much you enjoyed having them do it.
So, for our stay-at-home date to watch Iron Man, I decided I wanted to make scallops, which I know that she really enjoys. I looked up a few recipes, didn't find anything that really blew me away, so I winged it. I'm really starting to feel a lot of confidence with the process - coming up with an idea in my head, reading a few recipes that are close or have elements that I'm trying to reproduce, then putting the pieces together to make my dish.
In this case, I knew that I wanted to have scallops and dill in the dish. I also was laboring under the fairly serious restriction that supermarket day is tomorrow, so the house is fairly empty of veggies. I settled on something fairly simple - I pictured the scallops on top of some pasta, with some sort of butter or cream sauce. This is what I wound up with. It was delicious, and surprisingly quick to make.
Scallops with Dill Cream Sauce
1 Lb. Scallops
1/4 stick butter
1/4 onion, chopped
1/2 cup sherry
Heavy cream
Sea Salt
Pepper
Dill
Throw a nice big pat of butter in a pan and get it nice and warm - not sizzling, but enough to cook the scallops. Throw the little guys in there, and sprinkle them with some sea salt, some pepper, and some dill. (The dill is probably not going to carry significant flavor here, but I liked the way it looked. I used sea salt instead of kosher because it seemed like a good place to add the more complex flavor of the sea salt.) Give them a minute or two, depending on how big they are, then flip them over. They should be browning when you flip them, but don't let them stay on too long - I'm told scallops are really easy to overcook. Repeat, and when they're done, remove them to a plate and cover to keep warm.
Throw in the rest of the butter and saute the onions. When they're starting to turn golden, in goes the sherry. It should sizzle a bit; keep it moving, and while you're at it use it to deglaze anything left of the pan. When about half the sherry has cooked off - shouldn't be more than 5-10 minutes - add in the heavy cream. Unfortunately, I didn't really measure the amount of cream I used; I would guess that I added no more than a quarter cup, probably less. Enough to thicken the sauce and make it a nice light brown color; I see no reason you couldn't add more to make it even creamier, though.
Toss in a bit more pepper and a bit more salt; stir in the cream, warming it but not letting it go above a simmer. (My gut tells me that would get messy quickly.) At the very end, throw in the dill; I probably added about two tablespoons, all told. Give it a few more stirs - enough to mix the dill, no more, you don't want to lose the dill's flavor - and take it off the heat.
I served the scallops on a bed of linguine, and poured the sauce on top of it. Victoria licked the plate clean, and loved the movie as well. Mission accomplished. Really, what more can one ask for in a wife?
Mission accomplished. Loved the dinner, loved Iron Man.
Confidential to guys with beards - man, when you clean out your laptop's keyboard, there sure is a lot of beard in there, isn't there?
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