The Year Of Living Spicily

On Powders

2010-08-15T21:01:00.000-07:00

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.)

On Portion Size

2010-07-26T01:00:00.000-07:00

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:

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?

Eggplant Parmesan

2010-07-22T01:00:00.000-07:00

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.

Posting again

2010-07-18T21:53:00.000-07:00

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.

Dilly Spinach Pie - "Batsaria"

2010-07-18T21:41:00.000-07:00

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...

Dill Butter and its Malcontents

2010-06-10T01:00:00.000-07:00

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.

Scallops with Dill Cream Sauce

2010-06-07T01:00:00.000-07:00

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?

A Dilly of a Week

2010-05-11T01:00:00.000-07:00

"Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and dill and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith."

-Matthew 23:23

Back in the day of the Pharisees - a Jewish sect that was just one of about four bitterly feuding Jewish groups - Jews still tithed ten percent of everything that they grew to the kohenim, the priestly class. This was how the priests sustained themselves; some of the offerings were burnt on the altar, and some of them were preserved for the priests to eat. Dill - often mistranslated as anise, in this passage - was a common household herb, as were mint and cumin. From what I've read, Jesus here is chastising the Pharisees (who at this time were a fairly corrupt sect) for arguing that the people's obligation to tithe extended even to the cheapest, most easily acquired things. It's not enough that you brought seven perfect lambs from your flock; your failure to bring three agarot (the penny to the shekel's dollar) worth of dill would bring chastisement from the priests.

Of course, reports of the Pharisees' corruption come almost entirely from writings of a young sect seeking to supplant the Jews as the area's dominant religion, so... (I wrote, then revised, the phrase "Christ-worshipers". For some reason, it looks slightly offensive to me - does anyone have any instincts on this matter?) Within the Jewish people, at least, the Pharisees eventually emerged victorious from the sectarian conflict. Pharisaic Judiasm eventually evolved into Rabbinic Judaism, based on the idea that the entire Jewish community should study the Torah, rather than just a limited caste of people. Modern Jewish thinking descends entirely from that philosophy.

The name dill itself comes from the Norse word dilla, meaning soothing, and references - depending on who you read - either dill's soporific properties (dill tea was a traditional insomnia cure) or its carminative (anti-flatulence) properties. Dill is another spice that spread across the world, appearing in Asian, Mediterranean and European cooking. (I've even found a reference to it in Georgian cooking, and I've asked my dad if he's ever come across it.)

Dill is another plant that does double duty as a spice and a herb. Early in the season, the spice - dill seed - is harvested; later on, the herb - dill weed - yes, I'm serious, that's what it's called - is clipped off the plant for its herbal value. (You can also extract dill oil from any of the above parts, plus the stems and branches.) Like most such plants, the spice and the herb have quite different tastes, although in this case, supposedly, they're closer than most. (I'll follow up on that in a future post.)

Actually, I'm wondering how many herbs there are out there than don't have any value as a spice, as well. I guess that makes sense, though - a plant that has flavorful oils is likely to have them in many different areas, not just concentrated in the leaves.

Dill is supposedly a good plant to keep in a rose garden - it attracts a particular kind of bug that is one of the aphids' chief predators. It's easy to grow, and incredibly mineral-dense - one tablespoon of dill seed contains a hundred milligrams of calcium (about a third of a cup of milk.) It's fairly hearty, and tolerates having its leaves snipped off, slowly, dinner after dinner.

I don't ever use a little bit of dill - if I'm putting dill in something, I'm going all out. I like to do dill-encrusted steaks, and last week I made a fried fish recipe which used almost as much dill in the breading as breadcrumbs. And, in the last few hours, as I've learned what I can about dill, I've figured out why I do this, and why I'm an idiot for doing it.

Dill, like wasabi, is fairly fragile. It loses its flavor quickly if it is heated or dried. It doesn't seem to be quite as bad as wasabi - which loses its flavor if looked at by one not of the purest heart - but it needs to be treated with a fairly gentle touch. The broiler, it might be suggested, is probably not that touch, and the same can be said about frying oil. So the reason that I've gotten used to throwing huge amounts of dill in any dill-based dish I cook, is because I'm killing the flavor of most of it. Dill should properly be used in a cold dish, in a sauce applied post-cooking, or in a way which allows the oils to be captured rather than simply evaporating. (Tea would, one assumes, be a good example of this. I would imagine that you can infuse butter or olive oil with dill, as well.) Dill's most famous use - the dill pickle - is an example of this. (Pickles take weeks to make. Still, I really wanted to pickle when I was doing salt... maybe I'll try again this week.)

So I've got a "week" to learn how to use a soft touch on dill - how to coax its flavor out without simply dumping half a bottle of it on whatever I'm cooking. I've never used it at all as a spice, so that'll be new; I'll see what I can do with it, and see what things want the spice as opposed to the herb. And, hopefully, I'll put up some pickles that I'll be able to enjoy by the end of the summer.

Join me tomorrow, when I'll talk about the tilapia with dill I made last week. Which didn't really taste that much like dill. And now I know why.

We'll talk.

Wasabi Odds and Ends. And bagel chips.

2010-05-07T01:00:00.000-07:00

Seriously - I not only made wasabi bagel chips, they were delicious.

Well, the two slices I didn't totally fry to a crisp were. More on that later.

Wasabi Taste Test

I honestly wouldn't have thought that wasabi would be so interesting, when I started out. Once again, I really feel like this project has been a rousing success - I'm finding things - and ways to use things - that I never would have, otherwise. At the end of the year, I'll tell you whether or not I feel like the memories have stuck - whether or not learning about Wasabi for a few weeks in May helps me better use it in December. Hopefully, the answer will be yes.

When I was last at the spice store, I picked up some pure powdered wasabi. It was, as I said, quite expensive - fifteen dollars for a jar that held less than an ounce. I expected it to be a pure lark - fifteen dollars spent simply to say I had tried it, two or three lines in a blog post. I've got to admit, I was more than a little surprised by the results.

It would be pure exaggeration to say "Real wasabi is nothing like the horseradish-based powders that we get in Asian groceries and sushi restaurants." At the same time... I'm running into the problem of lack of language again. I simply don't know how to describe the difference in the tastes. They are very similar, no doubt - but I don't feel that you could ever mistake one for the other. Like Jack Nicholson and Christian Slater.

I'm not sure that was quite what I was going for.

The true wasabi is a deeper, earthier green than any of the fake powders I've seen. It is also - totally contrary to my expectations - not nearly as piquant as the horseradish-based powder. I fully expected it to have an even sharper heat, to find that the horseradish was trying vainly to imitate that. Instead, it is less spicy; a much richer and more mellow flavor, one which stays in your mouth a bit longer. Like scotches, I suppose - cheaper scotches deliver more bite and less flavor, more expensive ones taste less like alcohol and more like liquid gold. That's exactly what this was like. The harsh bite of the horseradish was significantly lessened, and the flavor of the wasabi itself was much more able to come through.

Not that I'm saying that I think anyone should run out and spend fifteen bucks on three meals' worth of genuine wasabi. It was different, but different is not necessarily good. Studies show people prefer cheap tequila in margaritas, because like scotch cheap tequila has more bite, and the bite is what people notice once there's other ingredients added. The true wasabi was richer and more flavorful - but it also had a harder time standing out in the symphony of flavors that is sushi.

The best choice, to my mind, is the middle-of-the-road "natural wasabi", which includes pure wasabi powder. It's more expensive than the fake stuff or the tube-of-toothpaste wasabi, but not by much, closer to two dollars an ounce than fifteen. It's plenty flavorful, with a nice piquant kick. And, although we might wish things were different, it tastes the way you expect wasabi to taste. (When I was a kid, my mom made Hungry Jack mashed potatoes. I'm pretty sure they're potatoes you reconstitute from dehydrated flakes. For a long, long time, that was what mashed potatoes were to me - and I hated "real" mashers.)

Bagel Chips

Wasabi definitely endures heat much better when it is in butter than in anything else I've tried so far - not only did it stand up to the microwave (albeit for about thirty seconds) when I melted it to put on popcorn, it even kept some of its zing when it went through the broiler. Now, admittedly, putting it in the broiler was a huge freakin' mistake... but as I've often emphasized, this is warts and all.

Last time my folks came down, they brought bagels. Every time they come down, I make them bring bagels. For those of you who have never lived outside the New York area... you have no freakin' idea how good you have it. In the rest of the country, a "bagel" is just toroid bread.

I love bagels. I'm not kidding about making my folks bring bagels - when they came out to Illinois for Benjamin's bris, I made them bring three dozen bagels along for the party after. In their luggage on the plane.

The problem is that bagels go stale fairly quickly. And even I can't eat them fast enough to go through two dozen before they go stale. So if my folks visit on Saturday, by Tuesday, there are usually one or two sad, stale bagels left, not inedible but hardly worth the effort.

Holy crap. I am so happy I'm going up to visit my folks this weekend - I want a bagel so badly right now.

Anyway, I decided, this time to try to repurpose one of these stale Yiddish treats. I sliced it lengthwise, as thin as I could, and wound up with about four or five thin pieces and about a dozen smaller chunks. I laid them out on a baking sheet, and decided to try some science. I split the pieces into a bunch of different batches. Some of them got olive oil, some got butter; some got wasabi powder, some would get it after cooking. (This was early in my wasabi experiments, and I didn't yet know that you need to reconstitute wasabi into paste before it really has much flavor.) Finally, the two largest pieces got lovingly slathered with wasabi butter. The whole baking sheet got throw into the oven at three fifty for five minutes, flipped, and given another five.

At this point... I had one of my less successful ideas. Now, bagel chips are supposed to be crispy, right? And these guys, while warm and delicious-looking, didn't really look crispy. What makes things crispy? The broiler.

And it did! I intended to give the whole thing one minute to crisp up - but when I took them out, sixty seconds later, the entire tray was burnt. The only pieces that survived the flames were the two large pieces that had the wasabi butter on. They weren't exactly crispy, despite the broiler - I had drenched them too thoroughly in the butter for that to happen - but they were utterly delicious.

As for the rest, maybe I'll try next time I have leftover bagels. Which should be in a day or two!

See everyone on Monday, when I start to learn about a spice I never use only a little of - dill.

Adventures in Saucery

2010-05-04T22:58:00.000-07:00

Before I get started, I want to say something. In case you haven't heard, the Supreme Court decided that, for security reasons, it would shut down the main entrance. The commentary I've read or heard on the issue, so far, has unanimously lamented the closure - I've heard the phrase "forty-four marble steps" about ten times in the last two days, and more people lament the fact that people will no longer walk into the courtroom past the marble busts of the Chief Justices.

You know what? The only thing that would make me happier than closing the main entrance to the Court would be if they dynamited the building entirely. The Supreme Court - the building, not the institution - is an affront to any decent American aesthetic.

Where to start? The fact that a building designed to house America's most important court is made to look like a Greek temple? (Cass Gilbert, the architect, was ironically enough one of the pioneers of that most American of buildings, the skyscraper. Why couldn't you have given the Supreme Court a skyscraper?) How about the feeling that one gets when walking in - that you are an insignificant supplicant, dwarfed by this gigantic building? Or maybe just that the busts of the Chiefs are clad in togas, rather than robes or suits. (Of course, it could also be the fact that the building is totally unsuitable for its job - it doesn't have enough viewing space, a decent coatroom, or, as this decision highlights, the ability to be made secure.)

More than anything else, the one that has always steamed me is the feeling of insignificance. Someone walking into the Court isn't a beggar, come for handouts from the justices. Justice is our right as Americans. The building should make us feel welcome. It should show us how awesome and unique the role of the Court is, yes, but it should make us feel like we are a part of that. All Americans are.

You know what? I like the side door. It's small. It's workmanlike; visitors and lawyers go in the same way. It leads, not into some Grand Hall with Statues of the Lords of Justice, but a museum - a place that can teach the visitor about the Court's role and history. (Also, a fairly awesome statue of Oliver Wendell Holmes, if I remember correctly.) Sure, it doesn't have the grandeur and majesty of the forty-four foot high ceiling of the main entry hall. It doesn't have the statues of Roman praetors or of "Lord Coke barring King James from sitting as judge." Just all this stupid stuff that's actually relevant to the lives of the people who walk through the door every day, to visit their highest court.

So - for security? Sure. I don't care why the front entrance is being closed. All I can say is, good riddance - I'll never be happier to go in through the servant's entrance.

Back to the topic at hand.

I've gotten a lot of mileage out of the yogurt wasabi sauce that I made the other night. I have a few last things about wasabi in general that I had wanted to finish up today, but I'll push that back until Friday. Today, let's talk about two delicious things to do with leftovers.

Leftover Sauce Shrimp Salad

1/2 pound raw shrimp, peeled and deveined
Leftover Wasabi Yogurt Sauce
Uhhhhh.... salad.

The salad, in this case, was a fairly simple green salad - some spinach, some lettuce, and some chopped-up green pepper. I think you don't want the salad to get too complex, but I could definitely see some cucumber or cherry tomatoes, sort of thing, getting added.

The wasabi yogurt sauce servers triple duty in this dish. First, when the shrimp are peeled, toss them into a bowl (or zip-lock bag) with about half of the sauce and let them marinate for about a half an hour. Then, pour the whole mess into a pot, and simmer for about five minutes, or until all the shrimp have changed color. Drain the shrimp. (I was using fairly tiny shrimp - if you're using larger ones, you may want to cut them down to bite-sized, either before or after cooking.) Toss the shrimp with the salad, then dress the salad with the remaining half of the sauce.

The shrimp themselves, as hopefully we've learned by this point, don't have any heat at all. However, the reserved sauce - the part we're using as a dressing - still does have a bit of zing. Not enough that my spice-phobic wife had any problem with; just a little bit of bite on the back end. Definitely not something you would expect out of a salad, which is part of what made it taste so good; the sauce was cool and refreshing on the shrimp, and ever-so-slightly piquant on the greens. A nice lunch, or salad course to a dinner.

Breaded Tilapia with Leftover Wasabi Yogurt Sauce

Hmm.

Actually, I think I'm going to save the fish recipe for next week. It's not really relevant here, but I'm pretty sure that I'm going to use the main ingredient as next week's spice, so I'm going to go with the path of least resistance and save myself a post.

Really, though, the relevance here is this - after making the shrimp salad the night before, I still had a few tablespoons of the sauce left. The plan was tilapia; I puttered for a while, and came up with a recipe that sounded fun. I'd like to say that I was thinking about compatibility with the yogurt sauce beforehand, but I'm not that clever; as I was frying it up, I realized that I still had the leftover sauce. It was a perfect match; the fish came out a little dry, and the sauce solved that problem while, once again, adding a little bit of zing.

I keep wanting to say something like "I'm amazed at how versatile this sauce has been." The reality is, I've used it on two fish dishes and a shrimp dish. Not exactly a showcase of versatility, to be honest. Still, it was spectacular every time we used it; the combination of cool and spicy at the same time is unusual and enjoyably surprising. Definitely something I'll make again.

On Friday, I'll give some final thoughts on wasabi, including a report on the differences between the horseradish-based wasabi powder and real wasabi. (I broke down and bought some) Also, some more ruminations on wasabi butter, and anything else I can think of that I've thrown wasabi in over the last few weeks.

Still Life With Wasabi and Mayonnaise

2010-05-03T01:00:00.000-07:00

I'm changing my posting schedule slightly. Check out the entry below this one for details.

Mayonnaise is not something that I often find myself using. My mom never really used it when we were kids - I can't remember her ever making tuna salad and it certainly never got used as a sandwich spread. Truth be told, I've always found mayo to be a fairly revolting substance. I don't know why; I think it's partially because I have no idea what it is. (So I just looked it up - at its simplest, it's an egg yolk with olive oil added in, trivial to make at home. Doesn't make it any more appetizing.) I love emulsions, in general; I love drinking them, putting them on my salads, and smothering foods in them.

Here's the thing, though. You ever have one of those days, where you're all like "I've got a substance I'd like to coat another substance with. But my first substance simply does not take a form which makes spreading convenient!" Of course you have. We all have! And, if you're anything like me - and I'm sure that you are - you then thought, "Aha! What I need is some sort of neutral-tasting organic emulsion - something which will be viscous enough to trap and contain whatever it is that I want spread, yet won't change its flavor significantly."

That was pretty clever of you.

So, despite my distaste for it, I will generally keep a small jar of it around the house. It's good if I want to make a creamy honey mustard sauce, or... Or. Oh! Or if someone comes to my house who... wants... a fairly lousy spread... on a sandwich? Hmm.

Anyway, I've got some mayo in my fridge.

So we had Yousef and Sarah over for fondue.

(Wait, before I go any further, let me spoil the ending. Two days after this, I was in the supermarket, and saw wasabi mayo for sale on the shelf. I was all like, "Huh.")

Fondue. I'm a big fan - a big enough fan that I own three fondue pots. (You really need three - one for cheese, one for broth or oil, one for dessert. A second one for the main course isn't terrible either.) For the main course, I had lamb, steak, chorizo, shrimp, and some mushrooms.

A big part of the fun of fondue - and a part that, I am ashamed to admit, I rarely give the attention it deserves - is the sauce. You're eating twenty or thirty single-bite portions of various different items, with a three or four minute interval between each piece. Time and wine do their job cleaning your palate; there's no overarching theme that needs to be obeyed. A perfect opportunity to set out a cornucopia of different sauces, and let each bite be its own combination of flavors.

But as I said, this is a part of the meal that I often neglect - and lamb is not something that we eat frequently. (I do, however, frequently remark that I wished I thought to get lamb more often.) So when I was looking for sauces that I thought would go well with it, I came up nearly empty - a can of mango chutney was about it. Then I thought... what about some kind of wasabi sauce? We have the technology! Plus, I'll get a blog post out of it.

Here's the embarrassing part - remember when I was all like, "all these wasabi things are actually really easy?" Yeah. Wasabi mayo. Make up some wasabi paste. Mix it with the mayo to taste. Make sure to give it a few minutes to develop its flavor.

Oh, you can do other stuff with it - I added some rice vinegar and a tiny bit of soy sauce. But basically, the equation is wasabi + mayonnaise = wasabi mayonnaise.

It was simple - but it was also stellar. The bowl with it in was practically licked clean by the end of the night. The mayo smoothed out the heat of the wasabi enough that it had a little kick, but no harsh bite. The rice vinegar thinned it enough that just the right amount stuck to each bite. And the soy sauce gave the whole concoction just enough of a twang to stay interesting bite after bite. It went great on both the lamb and the shrimp - although I'd be lying if I didn't I also tried it on the mushrooms, steak, and chorizo. The chorizo, not so much, but everything else? Pure yum. (Is "pure yum" some product's slogan?)

A few days later, I had a piece of salmon sitting around waiting to become dinner, and no particular brainstorms about how that process should go. I had kept the wasabi mayo in the back of my head, though, and this seemed like a perfect time to give it another go.

It would require some slight adaptation, though. First, I wanted something that was a bit runnier - something that I could drizzle over the salmon after I cooked it. Second, I was planning on doing something fairly simple with the fish - poaching or baking - so I wanted something a little bit more complex than the two-note sauce that I had made for the fondue. I just wasn't sure, though, exactly how to change it.

As always, she saved me. No, not my wife. What were you thinking? Martha Stewart, of course. Riding across the fens on a white charger, the leatherwork on her saddle resplendent in its handcrafted beauty. Riding crop held high, her mouth an angry line, used to obedience and control... but could that anger be, perhaps, turned to love?

I'm getting off track. I got a recipe from her website.

It sounded like just what the doctor ordered, throwing some ginger and lime juice into the mix. However, there was still one thing that I couldn't get over - the simple fact that I was still using, as my base, mayonnaise. Why? I don't like mayo! It's boring! It doesn't add much! And when I opened the fridge, there, right in front, was the Greek yogurt.

Greek yogurt is strained yogurt - yogurt with the whey removed, so it's a lot thicker and tangier. As I've mentioned previously, Yousef once used it instead of sour cream when cooking for us, and since then I've been a fan of replacing sour cream with it. Would it work in place of mayo?

Here is the sauce I wound up making:

1/2 cup Greek yogurt
1/4 cup cilantro leaves
3 tablespoons fresh lime juice
1 1/2 inches of fresh ginger, chopped fine
Salt and pepper to taste
3 teaspoons wasabi paste

Now, we're going to make the wasabi paste a little bit differently here. Usually, it's equal volumes powder and water, going a little bit light on the water and adding more slowly until all the powder is mixed into paste. The problem with that is that it leaves a lot of little scraps of paste all over the vessel you're mixing in. And, since this recipe calls for a bit of extra water anyway, we're going to just toss it straight into the wasabi. Mix an extra teaspoon of water into the wasabi, and you should have a fairly liquid mess - more than enough water to dissolve all the wasabi fully.

Toss everything into the blender, and pulse once or twice. Seriously; that's it. The mayo version of the sauce suggests keeping an extra tablespoon or two of water handy, in case you need it. My yogurt-based version came out a bit more watery than I'd like - I added more water to the wasabi than I suggested above - so I doubt you'll need anything extra.

More than anything else, this sauce tasted like a wasabi-flavored tzadziki sauce - the Greek sauce that goes on gyros. Lo and behold, when I looked up strained yogurt to find out what it was, I found that it is the main component of tzadziki. The spicing is different, of course, but anyone who eats a lot of Greek food will definitely taste the similarities. I thought it was a spectacular compliment to the fish, and it looked pretty nice, too:

The mushrooms are, of course, wasabi stuffed mushrooms - I'll get to them ~~tomorrow~~ on Wednesday.

One last thing, and I'll call it a day. I should have gotten the message by now, but I keep getting reminded just how fragile wasabi is. I pulled the fish out of the oven, put it on our plates, and poured the sauce over it. It was delicious, but with just a bare hint of the wasabi - a tiny bit of bite at the back end, and that's it. That's okay; it's a fairly large amount of sauce, compared to the volume of the wasabi, and yogurt is used in Indian food to cut down on spiciness, isn't it? (I should have thought about that earlier.)

After the fish was gone, I still had a taste for the sauce. I pulled out some carrots and used it as a dip - and was floored at how spicy the sauce was. It didn't taste precisely like wasabi - something was spreading it out more, turning that flashpaper burn into something a bit slower, a bit more mild and tangy - but the sauce that had rested on the hot fish was barely spicy at all. A little heat, and the sauce turned into something else. Startling and quite fun.

I wonder if that's an effect that you could use? It would be neat to find a way to make a meal whose flavor changed as it cooled.

Reconfiguration

2010-05-02T12:37:00.000-07:00

Gonna try something different

I'm gonna have to make some changes.

It seems obvious that attempting to post five times a week simply isn't going to work. In the last two weeks, Benji has gotten sick, I've been sick, Victoria has been sick... and it's been really obvious how fragile my schedule is. One little bump, and I'm all of a sudden skipping a week or more.

At the same time, I'm really reluctant to make the obvious change - taking two weeks per spice, and posting Monday, Wednesday, Friday. That would allow me to increase the number of posts per spice - something I've occasionally felt I should do - while at the same time reducing the amount I'd be writing.

The reason that I'm so resistant to doing something like this is fairly personal. I prefer - I have always preferred - to set agressive goals. Right now, I have a goal of a post per day. I've rarely met that goal, but most weeks I get three or four out. Well, some weeks. What I really don't want to happen is this: To go down to a schedule that requires me to post three fifths as often, and post three fifths as often as I do now. To lower my expections, and proportionally lower what I actually achieve.

But as I said, it's obvious something needs to change, so I'm going to give this a try. I really enjoy writing this blog, and really enjoy all the great food I've been making; I hope you've been enjoying reading it. I'll finish up wasabi this week, and move on the week after. I'm not sure if this means I'm going to do twenty-six spices, retitle the blog, or simply allow the title to lapse into inaccuracy.

Every day is an adventure.

Wasabi Shrimp and Wasabi Mashed Potatoes

2010-04-20T01:00:00.000-07:00

A good comparison today. Two recipes, both alike in dignity, in fair DC, where first we set our scene. The wasabi shrimp I tried to make worked much like any regular recipe, trying to use wasabi as a traditional spice. As a result... nothing. No heat, only the tiniest echoes of wasabi flavor. The mashed potatoes, on the other hand, did what I suggested yesterday - tried sneaking the wasabi in around the side door. As a result, they keep a lot more of the wasabi flavor.

Word to the wizard, though - mix those potatoes well. (I have, depending on how you look at it, either a good or a terrible eye for bowl sizes. That is, given a known quantity of ingredients, I am good at knowing exactly what bowl will fit all the things that need to go in. What I don't have, however, is the forethought to take the next bigger bowl, if I'm going to be mixing ingredients rather than just storing them. Combine that with being too lazy to transfer everything and clean an extra bowl once I've realized that the process of mixing will spill half of my ingredients on the floor... and I often wind up mixing things in a less than vigorous manner.)

That being said - if you don't mix them well, do not give the heaviest wasabi bit to your spice-phobic wife.

Wasabi Shrimp Ke-Babs

24 shelled and deveined shrimp (I almost always use 31-40 count shrimp, but honestly, that's purely because of pricing pressure. At my local supermarket, they're often on sale and therefore half the price of the larger shrimp. I would probably choose to use larger shrimp, if this wasn't what I had at home.)

1/8 cup peanut oil
1 tablespoon rice vinegar
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon sake
1 tablespoon wasabi paste
2 cloves minced garlic

Mix up all the non-shrimp ingredients, whisking thoroughly. Remove half the sauce to a zip-lock bag. Marinate the shrimp in the bag for fifteen minutes, making sure to squeeze all the air out so the marinade is in full contact with the shrimp. Remove the shrimp, skewer them, and either broil or grill them for 3-4 minutes a side. Serve with the other half of the sauce for dipping.

I'm learning, right? Anyone who's been reading this blog for any length of time has heard me sing the same song a dozen times. This is a bad recipe. I should have, upon reading it, realized that it wasn't going to work as promised. I probably could have corrected the flaws, come up with something different that actually did what it promised. But, I didn't; I went ahead with this recipe, and got something which...

Well, to be perfectly honest, something which was really, really good. Broiled shrimp marinated in soy sauce, with some garlic for extra punch and peanut oil to give it a nice tan? I would totally make that again. It was delicious. But, if I was appearing in the Wasabi Battle episode of Iron Chef, the vapid Japanese soap actress would remark approvingly that she couldn't taste the wasabi at all in this dish. Then Chairman Kaga would totally katana her.

I do have one thing to fess up to - when I made these shrimp, Victoria and I were out of sake, so I didn't include it in the recipe. There is a chance - a remote chance, but a chance nonetheless - that the sake, in some way, has some heat-fixing effect on the wasabi. I somehow doubt it, though.

If I had it to do all over again, I would probably marinate the shrimp in soy sauce, with some garlic, ginger, rice vinegar, and a splash of peanut oil. I would grill them, then make up a wasabi mayonnaise sauce (I'll talk about that tomorrow) and either drizzle it over the shrimp or give a small bowl to each person for dipping.

Wasabi Mashed Potatoes

Yum. These came out great. I usually do a slightly more complex mashed potato recipe - a blend of red and russet potatoes, a la Good Eats s01e02 - This Spud's For You. (Admittedly, an early episode and one I've watched several times - but I don't know if I should be worried that I can cite Good Eats off the top of my head.) However, I didn't think that would work here - I didn't want the extra texture that the red potatoes would add, I just wanted a smooth and consistent dish. For whatever reason, I didn't feel like chunks and spice would go well together, and I stand by that. (In similar news - never make a screwdriver with pulpy orange juice. Recipe for instant vomit, that.)

I'm going to be relying heavily on that good eats episode here - so if anything I'm writing is unclear or incomplete, just go to the source.

3 lbs russet potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks

Put these into a big pot, and fill it with water until it just barely covers the potatoes. Add salt until you can taste it in the water - Alton says "until it tastes like seawater" but I don't think that really helps me. Put the heat on, bring it to a boil, and then simmer until the taters are soft - about twenty minutes. You should be able to pick out a potato with tongs and crush it easily.

Prepare some wasabi paste - two tablespoons powder, one water, and leave it to sit. (If that's not enough water to reconstitute all of the paste, keep adding more, slowly - literally a drop or two at a time - until you've got a nice solid ball of wasabi.) Should leave you about fifteen minutes for the wasabi to wake up, which is exactly the right length of time.
Once those are on their way, get some whole milk or heavy cream - about a cup - on medium-low heat in a saucepan. Toss some butter and some minced fresh garlic in, and carefully - carefully! - bring the heat up. You want to soften the garlic, but a heavy boil will ruin everything really quickly, so just keep your eye on it. When the potatoes look like they're ready, take this off the heat.

Drain the potatoes, and either transfer them into a mixing bowl or put them back in the pot, depending on where you prefer to mash. Add the wasabi to the milk/cream mixture, and whisk it until it's mostly dissolved. Now, pour some of the liquid into the potatoes and start mashing; the liquid lubricates the process, and at the same time gets absorbed by the potatoes. You can definitely ruin potatoes by over-mashing them, so go easy; you're unlikely to ruin them with too much of the milk mixture, so don't worry about going heavy on that. Early on in the process, give it a taste, and add a pinch or two of kosher salt if needed. Once it's mashed, it's ready to serve.

I would go easy on the garnishes here; sour cream or butter would hardly go awry, but I wouldn't add cheese, and I'd be wary about bacon, scallions, or anything like that. Now, I know, it seems insane that I'm encouraging people not to add cheese or bacon to something; it's just my gut feeling that it wouldn't really work out that well. Actually, maybe scallions would be good. Who knows.

So, again, the lesson for today is this: don't try to treat it as a regular ingredient. It hates that, and will give you nothing in return. Treat the wasabi as something special, give it the royal treatment. Make it feel special, and it'll reward you; make it spend too much time with the hoi palloi, and it'll leave before you get a chance to taste it.

Finally, in ironic news - coming of age in the era of Dan Quayle has left me totally unable to spell the plural of the word "potato". If it wasn't for the magic typing box telling me when I'm right and when I'm wrong, I'd be making myself look like a fool accidentally, rather than on purpose.

Cooking with Wasabi is hard.

2010-04-19T01:00:00.000-07:00

Irritating and difficult, to say the least.

After a few days working with it - well, I definitely have to agree with what I wrote the other day. It is fragile, fragile stuff. A little bit of heat, or a little bit more of time and air, and you've got something which has barely any flavor at all - and no heat to speak of. It needs to reconstitute in water to really gain its heat and flavor back, but wasabi paste doesn't really mix well into things. As a result, despite how strong a snootful of wasabi seems, it's rarely something which will headline dishes.

What makes wasabi both exciting and educational, then, is that someone interested in cooking with it needs to find a way to sneak it into dishes. The most successful things that I've cooked over the last week have used wasabi as part of a sauce, dip, or other additive.

I've done a lot of experimentation; some of it has been really good, some of it has been really bad. Most of it has been fairly short. As a result, there will probably be a higher-than-average percentage of two-recipe posts this week - however, there will probably be a higher-than-average percentage of fairly short recipes, as well.

I thought today would be short, and had planned to write about popcorn, then about shrimp. Then I got to writing, and realized that I'm bad at "short". Or maybe I was trapped in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

WASABI POPCORN

Okay, this is kind of a lie - the topic is really "wasabi butter" - but here's how it went down. Wasabi butter is brutally easy to make. This is what I did:

You are standing in an open road east of a white house, with a glass front door. There is a small mail slot in the door.

>WEST
You are in the KITCHEN.

>OPEN PANTRY
You open your pantry door, exposing your pasta, canned goods, and various teas and spices to the world.

>TAKE WASABI
You have taken the wasabi powder.

>TAKE BUTTER
Do YOU store butter in the pantry? No, you don't. The butter is in the fridge. You'll have to go over there.

>GO TO FRIDGE
What, were you raised in a barn? The pantry door is still open!

>CLOSE PANTRY
Regretfully saying goodbye to your precious apple sauce stockpile, you close the pantry door.

>OPEN FRIDGE
You walk over to the Frig-o-matic 5000 and open the door. A blast of icy air fills the room. Wow, anything you take out of this baby is going to be solid as a rock!

>TAKE BUTTER
You have taken the butter.

>INV
You have:
1 teaspoon of wasabi powder
1 half-stick of butter

>SOFTEN BUTTER
You leave the butter on the kitchen table for a half hour. It slowly warms up from the chill of the fridge, releasing an aroma of delicious buttery goodness. When it is sufficiently soft to cook with, you put it back in your pack.

>TAKE FORK
Do YOU store your forks in the fridge? No, you don - aah, what's the point. You have taken the fork.

>MAKE WASABI BUTTER
I don't understand what you mean.

>USE FORK
What do you want to use the fork on?

>USE FORK ON BUTTER
Using the fork, you mush the butter up. Now you have mushy butter. Happy?

>USE FORK ON BUTTER AND WASABI
Using the fork, you mush the butter up. Now you have mushy butter. Happy?

>USE FORK ON WASABI
I don't know how you can use a fork on that.

>I HATE YOU
I don't understand what you mean.

>YOU SUCK
Maybe you should try rephrasing that.

>PUT WASABI IN BUTTER
You dump the wasabi powder into the soft butter.

>USE FORK ON BUTTER
Using the fork, you mush the wasabi into the butter until the two are thoroughly combined.

>INV
You have:
Wasabi Butter

>USE POPCORN MAKER
You plug in your trusty Pop-O-Matic 9000, but as you do you hear the sound of a fuse blowing. All your lights go out.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

>OPEN FUSE BOX
The fuse box isn't in the kitchen.

>EAST
Oh no! A lurking grue slithered into the room and devoured you!

*** YOU HAVE DIED ***

See what I mean? Easy-peasy. Make sure you've got a lantern, or at least a book of matches and a candle, when you turn on the popcorn maker and you should be fine.

I made the wasabi butter during dinner, just on a lark, with no idea what I was going to do with it. At about one in the morning, I decided I needed a snack - and with that special one-in-the-morning logic, I decided that snack should be popcorn with wasabi butter on it. The part of my brain which might have flagged that idea as "crazy" was long asleep at that point - so I got the popper running, gave the butter twenty seconds in the microwave, and got some salt.

It was delicious. I was totally floored at how much I enjoyed it, considering that I thought that it would be a random stupid experiment. There wasn't a ton of piquancy in the butter, but there was just enough to keep it interesting, and the flavor the wasabi added was totally unexpected - in a great way - on popcorn.

I'm not sure why the butter only had the faintest hint of heat. It could have been any of three things. First, wasabi powder itself isn't spicy if you taste it - it needs to be mixed with water to really develop its full heat. I had assumed that mixing with butter would be just as good. I read several recipes that used wasabi butter - none were clear that they were mixing wasabi paste in with the butter, so I assumed "wasabi" meant "wasabi powder." So it seemed reasonable that whatever chemical brought the piquancy to wasabi was fat-soluble. If not, I thought that once the butter melted, the wasabi powder would dissolve in it the same as it would water. (I know that oil is not the same as water - but I'm pretty sure there's a ton of water in butter.) Therefore, if both of these assumptions were wrong, the heat would never really get drawn out of the powder.

Second, of course, is the fact that I subjected it to heat - to wit, twenty seconds in the microwave. I think tomorrow I'll do a fairly simple experiment - take a small mount of wasabi powder, and see how the taste degrades over repeated five and ten second microwaving sessions.

Third - and perhaps most obviously - I might just not have been using very much wasabi by volume. Wasabi paste is wasabi powder mixed somewhere between 1:1 and 2:1 with water, depending on various factors. One teapoon of wasabi to four tablespoons of butter is a 1:12 ratio; the butter simply might have drowned the heat.

Honestly, though? Whatever the reason was, I think I was a lot better off with low-spice wasabi butter. Hyper-piquant popcorn wouldn't have been nearly as fun as what I got, which was popcorn dripping with a greenish-yellow butter that had hints of piquancy, like little firecrackers going off in your mouth as you ate them. This isn't just something I would do again, this is something I would serve to guests at a movie night, or something else that called for popcorn. This is something that actually makes me want to make more popcorn, simply so I can try again. Another one of those random experiments that hits gold.

Sheesh - I had hoped to get to the shrimp today. Oh well - guess I'll have to leave that off for tomorrow. This is going to be a fun week.

Week Wasabi

2010-04-12T21:46:00.000-07:00

Wasabi. That little mound of green stuff that comes along with your sushi is a surprisingly complex spice. I've always thought of it as the spice equivalent of flash paper; it's intense, but it burns out quickly. Usually, even if my eyes are watering (I learned the word for "something that makes your eyes water" when looking up wasabi - "lachrymatory") when I exhale, I exhale all of the heat along with the air. Which I like, because it means that you can risk putting a bunch on, knowing that the pain will be fairly transitory if you misjudge.

I generally like piquant food, but I find that even people who don't like food particularly hot enjoy wasabi. Well, enjoy things that are like wasabi - it's entirely possible that it's a spice that you've never actually tasted. Real wasabi is very expensive - the pure, ground root costs ten to twenty dollars an ounce or more, and that ounce generally doesn't take you very far. Wasabi powders start out, at the lowest end, not including any wasabi at all; seiyo-wasabi is made from horseradish and mustard powder and dyed green. One spice house (whose honesty I appreciate) describes their natural wasabi as "A blend of horseradish, mustard, tapioca starch and wasabi."

I'm not sure, to be perfectly honest, how large the difference is. The first time I used the "natural wasabi" instead of the non-wasabi powder we used to use, I could definitely taste the difference. Hotter and... brighter, more flavorful. Tonight, however, Victoria made sushi for us for dinner, and I have no idea which one she used. Well, that's not quite true either - the non-wasabi powder has been moved, so I'm fairly certain she used that. Three possible explanations - either I was fooling myself that I could taste a difference, or the difference is so slight that I have to be looking for it to notice. Third, and the one I think is most likely, is that the old wasabi powder is the one that I'm most used to; we've been using that type of powder for years, and have only used the new one once or twice, so nothing was different from what I expected.

So what is wasabi? It's a rhizome - an underground leaf-bearing stem, similar to ginger or turmeric. Even though horseradish is most often used to fake wasabi, they're not related; wasabi is a type of cabbage. The rich green color most of us associate with wasabi is marketing mumbo-jumbo, a reminder that chlorophyll or other dyes are being used to color it. The two main variants of wasabi are pale green and nearly white, with the lighter color being the hotter one. Outside of japan, few people will ever see an actual wasabi root. Wasabi only grows in Japan, and its flavor is extremely fragile. Wasabi gets powdered and dried to protect the flavor, then gets shipped out. (Traditionalist sushi cooks grate fresh wasabi using a sharkskin grater. This doesn't add to the flavor, but I'm sure adds significantly to the awesomeness of both the sushi and the chef.)

Fragile flavor? Sure, most of us think of wasabi as a total bruiser. It's hard to think of something that can kick your ass so easily as fragile. But wasabi has a glass jaw. Think about it - and think about our definition of spice. Volatile essential oils. Think about that flash paper effect; wasabi is strong, yes, but it's also extremely volatile. Try it for yourself; mix some up (or swipe some from the restaurant next time you go out for sushi.) By the next morning, most of the fire will have faded; by the evening, it'll be hard to taste anything at all.

This makes my life at least a little difficult, but at the same time, a little more educational. I was planning, tomorrow or the day after, buying some tuna steaks; I've occasionally grilled tuna with wasabi and soy sauce on it. I always assumed that I wasn't putting on enough wasabi, because it never came out particularly spicy. Actually, heat will kill wasabi fairly quickly. It needs to be mixed into something and kept cool in order to keep its flavor.

Ironically, respecting its fragility needs to happen on both sides - you can't just mix up some powder and water and expect it to taste good. You need to give it at least fifteen minutes to come to its full potency, after which it immediately starts going downhill from exposure to air. This is part of the reason why sushi rolls (yes, I am aware that my sushi terminology is off. Don't be pedantic.) are made with a schmear of wasabi paste inside of them - once it is rolled up, it is somewhat protected from the deleterious effects of contact with air. The lump of paste that is plated along with it has no such protection.

I will admit - I was, at one time, one of those macho idiots who piled tons of wasabi onto my sushi in order to prove I can take it. I have since learned that if you leave sushi alone, it has a subtle and complex taste that you can actual enjoy, if your eyes aren't watering through it. These days, actually, I've become an annoying purist about almost everything; I don't put a sauce on my steak, I don't take sugar in my tea, and I don't put soy sauce or wasabi on my sushi. The exception to all three cases is if I'm consuming something low-quality; Lipton tea gets sugar, but I actually want to taste the genmaicha that we bought. Steak needs to be shoe leather before I'll sauce it. And at most quality sushi restaurants, anything but the most basic rolls comes with a sauce of its own; something that the chef deliberately put on it. Why would I want to overwhelm that with a generic sauce? (Sorry, sweetie - I love making sushi with you, but the stuff we make definitely counts as low-quality, which is a testament to how bloody good sushi is.)

I'm a little excited, going into this week. I'm going to have to treat wasabi differently than I've treated anything else, because it can't just be added into a dish then cooked. I'm sure I'll talk about sushi again, but I don't know if I want to do a long post on how to make sushi; I think that's something that it would be easier to learn elsewhere. There's a great Good Eats episode on the topic. My challenge is going to be to find places where I can use wasabi as a sauce, and at the same time not overwhelm my wife - who has a low tolerance for piquancy - with its heat. I'm due for a spice shopping trip, so I'll probably splurge on an ounce of pure wasabi, and do a taste test. Aside from that - I have no idea. I'll be doing a lot of research tomorrow.

By the way - I hope at least some of you did your homework and bought some fresh oregano, and hopefully some other spices as well. Don't make me come over there.

Sleepless Oregano Cheesy Bread

2010-04-08T23:19:00.000-07:00

I’ve been losing a lot of sleep over this blog lately.

I mean that literally; I don’t mean that I’ve been worrying about the blog. I mean that I’ve been up in the evenings writing, and that for one reason or another I've been getting distracted, haven't been able to either write or get to sleep, and have been up until the wee hours. I've seen sunrise twice this week. That's not good times when I've got a baby to watch. (Who just turned one, by the way.)

I think part of it is the fact that I'm just not super-jazzed by oregano. I've definitely got some delicious oregano in the house, and I'm discovering that it is not the boring, flavorless spice that I've always thought it to be. But in the end, oregano is oregano; I've used it before. I could make a red sauce, or a pasta dish, or something, but that honestly sounds kinda boring - and honestly, several of the people who I know read this blog are better Italian cooks than I am.

The other problem is that Victoria's parents are down from Toronto for Benji's birthday, and we've been going out a lot. Like I said yesterday, I'm really into the idea of making lamb, but they're vegetarians - yet another thing that throws a wrench in the works. Maybe when my folks come down on Saturday, I'll make some lamb... or maybe I'll just say "I said what I felt I needed to about oregano, which was less about dishes - because most people know where and when to use oregano - and more about the common problems people face with, i.e. the sucking."

In any case, I made some cheesy bread as an appetizer/side dish tonight. (I say cheesy bread because... well, you'll know why I don't feel right calling it garlic bread in a second.) It was really good. It's also not a particularly long or involved recipe - hence the whole discussion about the fact that I don't feel like oregano is really getting its due.

Sleepless Oregano Cheesy Bread

Take a loaf of crusty bread and cut it open. Butter both sides. Sprinkle liberally with oregano, then minced garlic, then shredded mozzarella (or any other cheese that will get melty.) Bake at 300 degrees for fifteen to twenty minutes, or until the cheese is starting to brown. Let cool for 5 minutes, cut, and serve with tomato sauce for a-dippin'.

When I say sprinkle liberally - the bread was about 1/2 covered with oregano, and I used a big soup spoon scoop of garlic on each side.

See what I mean? That's not much of a recipe. Oh well. I need sleep more than I need a long wordcount. (I don't think that it helps that I look at the counter in MS Word which reports how many words your document is as my score for the post. Hey, if it's good enough for Dickens...)

(Oh, wait. I hate Dickens.)

Anyway - I used the Mexican oregano, which was probably not the obvious choice. The thing is, I wasn't likely to make anything Mexican in the next few days, and I haven't cooked with the Mexican oregano at all yet! It was delicious - deeper than the Mediterranean oregano, with that hint of piqancy. It definitely made the dish more interesting than it would have been otherwise. An old girlfriend always used to talk about "the wrong touch at the right time", and that's the feeling I got here - the Mexican oregano was absolutely not the flavor you were expecting, but not nearly different enough for it to taste wrong. It just jolts you out of your expectations for a moment or two, which is a lot to get from a simple choice of spices.

I'm not sure where to go from here, to be honest - I've still got a dish or two (a Greek potato dish forwarded to me by Mike, and the lamb I keep talking about) that I want to cook, but at the same time, I feel like it's time to move on. Oh well, we'll see. For now... sleep.

PS - I never realized how much of a racist I was.

Breaded Salmon with Quite a Lot of Oregano

2010-04-08T03:48:00.001-07:00

One sign, to me at least, that I’m getting to be a better cook is that I have gotten to be much better at identifying what each part of a recipe is doing. Not that it’s usually rocket science; usually it’s just “the bun is keeping my hands from getting greasy, and the burger’s is being delicious.”

Actually… I wrote that as a joke, but it’s not a terrible example. Victoria turned me into an absolute avocado fiend; we probably go through 5 avocados a week, on average. I went through a phase where I was literally putting them in everything – and believe me, I know what the word “literally” means. I got to the point where I was making burgers, saw an avocado... and, well, you know the rest. Today I rarely make burgers WITHOUT avocado in them. Don’t worry if you’re dubious; everyone is at first. And then they say “Oh my god, this is amazing!” or something similar. Silly people. Of course it is.

The spark was random – but my brain has developed fairly sensitive filters to differentiate between me being an idiot, and me merely thinking stupid thoughts that nonetheless are likely to be fun. In this case, it was the latter. And when I thought through it, it made sense. After all, avocados are deliciously fatty, but don’t taste greasy; if you mix in some avocado, you can use leaner beef than you would otherwise, and still get phenomenally great tasting burgers.

The point I’m trying to make is that middle step. I’m the first to say that there is a great deal of joy to an “idea – experiment” process. At the same time, being able to run the experiment in my head first has a ton of value as well. Being able to think, “yes, this will probably work, because avocados have such-and-such properties” is a useful skill.

I guess what I mean isn’t that I CAN figure out what’s going on in a recipe – it’s that I DO. The process is becoming more automatic. Just like anything else – you look at something that you know well, and rather than seeing the top-level elements, your brain starts translating, interpreting, recognizing patterns.

Example – show a chessboard, with a game in progress, for five seconds to a chess master and to someone who doesn’t play chess. Ask them to recreate the scenario. The non-player will make the kinds of mistakes you’d expect – pieces shifted more or less randomly. The master will have a better memory – but more interestingly, when he makes an error it is more likely to be a bigger error, in absolute terms, but a smaller error when it comes to the tactical situation of the game. For example, he may transpose an entire attack that was happening on the right side of the board to the left side of the board; a mistake that may involve many more pieces being out of place than for the non-player, but in the end recreates a situation more or less the same as the one he saw. On the other hand, take the board and put the pieces down randomly – put them into a pattern that doesn’t make any sense from a strategic perspective – and all of a sudden the chess master is in the same boat everyone else is.

Filters. Pattern recognition and filters; what separates man from beast.

So when I sat down to make a tasty looking salmon with oregano dish that I found, there were alarm bells going off in my head. I wasn’t quite sure what – but there was something wrong with the recipe.

Can you figure it out?

Herb Baked Salmon [1]
Ingredients:
vegetable oil spray
3/4 pound salmon fillet
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
1/4 cup parsley, fresh, chopped
1 teaspoon oregano, dried
1/2 teaspoon thyme, dried
1/2 cup plain bread crumbs
salt and pepper to taste
1 egg white
Preparation:
Preheat oven to 350°. Line a baking tray with foil and spray with vegetable oil spray, Wash salmon, pat dry, and spread mustard over the top. Mix parsley, oregano, thyme and bread crumbs together. Season with salt and pepper. Blend in egg white to bind mixture together. Spread over mustard. Bake in oven for 20 to 25 minutes, depending on thickness of fillets. Remove from oven and serve on individual plates with rice.
Serves 2.

See it?

The recipe is using two different methods to adhere the topping to the fish. It doesn’t make any sense. Use an egg wash or use a layer of mustard – either one works – but using both at the same time is just crazy-talk.

Now, I’ve got to come clean with you. I’m pretty sure that the whole reason that I built this all up is to make fun of myself. You know why? Because the next thing I did wasn’t to trust myself, ignore the egg and cook the fish. It was, in fact, to say to myself “Well, I don’t think that makes sense… so I must be missing something.”

Sigh.

Needless to say, putting an egg white in with the topping mixture simply turned the parts that touched the egg into a solid mass – impossible to do anything with other than throw out. Luckily, that also meant that it didn’t mix in with the other stuff at all, so it wasn’t actually a problem, aside from making me feel really stupid.

Oh, and since this is week oregano, I made a fairly significant alteration to the recipe. You see where it says one teaspoon oregano, one quarter cup parsley? I swapped those. (Actually, I doubled the whole recipe, but still only used a quarter-cup oregano… so I guess I swapped them, then halved the amount of oregano.

Yeah… remember that system I talked about above, that’s supposed to filter things like this for me? It was actually functioning PERFECTLY here. It said “A quarter cup of oregano is absolutely insane. You’re going to ruin dinner. This will NOT be fun. Abort.” To which I said, of course, “Science!” and plowed on. (Hey, the system exists. Whether or not I choose to listen to its recommendations is up to me.)

But you know what? It came out amazing. Victoria was just as dubious as I was about the massive quantity of oregano, but we were both sold once we started eating. The one thing I would do differently would be to cook it on something metal, rather than in a Pyrex dish. I really think this would have done well finished off in the broiler, so the coating got nice and extra-crispy before it got served. Alas, I have exploded one too many pieces of Pyrex bakeware to ever do it again.

I don’t do breaded stuff that often, and this was a nice change. Baking it with mustard rather than frying it with oil (much as I dearly love frying things with oil) made it slightly less crispy, but a lot less heavy than it would have been. The mustard and the oregano really played off of each other nicely, and – oh! Forgot this. I added a teaspoon of dill, as well.

Yum.

You know what I don’t eat enough of? Lamb. See you tomorrow!

PS – Confidential to MB – When you said at your rally “we are going to elect the boldest, strongest, most courageous, rock-ribbed, constitutional conservative president this country has ever seen”, did you mean Jesus Rambo? Because that guy is awesome.

PPS – Confidential to MB – you do realize that “bold” and “conservative”, in context, are conflicting traits, right?

PPPS – Confidential to MB – also, please be less crazy. Minnesota elected you to do a job… and your only concern seems to be keeping that job.

PPPPS = Confidential to MB – your biggest legislative accomplishment is introducing a bill called the “light bulb freedom of choice act.” PLEASE be less crazy.

[1] Compliments of http://southernfood.about.com/od/freshsalmonrecipes/r/bln44.htm

Oregano Daze

2010-04-07T05:10:00.000-07:00

Oregano is the first flavorant that I’ve talked about which can be strictly classified as an herb; to go back to basics, that means that the essential oils are secreted by glands located in its leaves and flowers, rather than anywhere else. In other words, unlike cilantro, which has tasty leaves AND tasty seeds, or fennel, which is delicious all over the place, oregano is only good if you’re eating the leaves.

Oregano also has looser morals than most of the plant kingdom; according to the Herb Society of America, while it has a ton of variants on its own (71, if I am counting correctly) it also crossbreeds fairly easily – “there are hundreds of unclassified hybrids growing in gardens where close proximity encourages crossing that isn't likely in the wild.” [1]

Despite all that, for culinary value, there are two main contenders – as I mentioned in passing yesterday, they are Mediterranean and Mexican. They’re actually different plants; I don’t even vaguely pretend to understand how scientific classification works, so I can’t tell you how closely related they are. (Okay, I tell a lie – I understand how it works, I just don’t know what “same order, different family” means as far as how close the two plants are.) In any case, an idea that I’ve read more than once in the last few days is that oregano should be thought of as a flavor, rather than a particular plant. In other words, there are a number of different plants that contain the chemical carvacrol, and there’s not enough difference between them to really make a fuss if one of them is technically oreganum vulgarae and the other is lippie graveolens.

Mediterranean oregano – oreganum vulgarae, or common oregano for those of you… who the crap am I trying to kid? Not only do I not know anyone who can’t figure out what “oreganum vulgarae” means, I can’t imagine any of the people I know would recommend this blog to anyone who can’t figure out what it means. I’m sorry. Let me try again.

Mediterranean oregano, the plant that is actually biologically oregano, is the type we use most frequently. Mexican oregano is darker and color, and a more complex flavor; to me, it’s more pungent, with hints of lemon in the scent. It’s slightly piquant, as well, and unsurprisingly it is a perfect complement for dishes with cumin in them, or any other Mexican-type dish that might call for oregano. I definitely wouldn’t use it in pasta sauce…

Damn it! I need to get through a paragraph without lying to you guys. I would DEFINITELY use it in pasta sauce – in fact, I think I’m going to go do that right now, for science – but I don’t think it will be nearly as good as Mediterranean oregano. I can see it overwhelming the other flavors in the sauce fairly easily.

I had a fun conversation with Joe yesterday. Fun, because metaphorically I got to punch him right in his stupid face, and then even more metaphorically he turned around and roundhouse kicked me (metaphorically, of course) right in my metaphorical balls.

Actually, I think that’s a pretty good metaphor for all of my friendships.

Anyway, this guy was all like “I use fresh oregano – fresh ingredients are teh roxxorz.” (I may be paraphrasing slightly.) To which I was like, “Your MOM are teh roxxorz. And besides, oregano is one of the few herbs that generally tastes better dried – drying it really brings out the flavor.” And I was thinking, man, pwned right in the face, poor guy. But then he busts out with “If you gots da bling, you can git yo’self a food dryer like the J-Dawg got, fool! Then you be dryin’ you OWN oreganizzle!” (Again, I might be slightly misremembering his exact words.)

I was like, I just got pwned so hard I fell out of my chair… at which time my baby came over and, as is his wont, started kicking me in the nuts. Well played, Joe, well played.

So, two good points there – first, don’t automatically assume that picked-right-off-the-plant is going to be better all the time. (Although since Victoria got me an oregano plant, I’ve been looking for a recipe that calls for fresh oregano specifically.) But second, don’t be afraid to do a little bit of work – Alton Brown is constantly doing episodes where he dries various foods without the benefit of no fancy-shmancy machine.

Mushroom Report: Turkish oregano mushrooms were spectacular. Oregano’s not a flavor that often gets to be the star of its own show – and while the stuffed mushrooms aren’t a one-man oregano show, they’re still giving the herb a chance to really strut its stuff. The fact that the mushrooms were the first thing I made using the bag of awesome oregano I bought – and thus my first chance to really sample the full flavor – might have had something to do with it as well.

Tomorrow, I get totally nuts on some fish, oregano-style.

[1]http://www.herbsociety.org/origanum/odesc.php

YOUR OREGANO SUCKS

2010-04-06T01:00:00.000-07:00

I’m sorry. It’s nothing personal. I mean, yes, it is your fault, and yes, there is something you can do about it – but really, it’s not personal. You shouldn’t feel bad, just because you consign yourself and the people you love to sucky oregano. It’s clearly your ignorance – not any malice on your part – that makes you choose to do this, over and over again. Trust me – I’m the last person to think the less of you for this.

You see, I was once like you.

But it’s okay; don’t worry. I’m here to lead you into the Promised Land – the place where oregano ceases to be bland filler and turns into rock-solid flavor.

For all its popularity, oregano has a fairly short history here in the States. It was virtually unheard-of before World War II, when soldiers returning from the war in Italy sent the popularity of pizza – and “the pizza herb” – skyrocketing. And while that word is generally overused, here it’s accurate; in the decade after the war, sales of oregano in the US increased by a factor of more than fifty. Today, in the American mind – or at least, in my American mind – it’s considered a spice for Italian food… and that’s a big part of the problem.

Italian food and oregano interact in an extremely problematic way. (Well, Italian food in America, at least.) Italian food is popular, cheap, and much of it is easy to make. (It’s possible that causal relationships exist there.) Because of that, many of us can probably count some form of simple Italian dish – of the “random box of pasta plus red sauce plus white cheese” variety – as the first thing we learned to cook on our own. And when we branched out – decided we wanted to up the flavor quotient of that relatively bland canned sauce – the first thing that we remembered was that mom added oregano.

So we went to the supermarket, and picked up a container of dried oregano. One of the little tiny ones, that costs about four bucks. And we used it up in a semester or so, and spent another four bucks on another little jar. Which we used up in another few months. And next time we went back to the supermarket, we saw… the big jar of oregano. The one that cost about twice as much, but had about ten times as much oregano, almost as though the cost of packaging and distribution represented a far, far greater part of the price than the actual herb inside. And even though $8 was a significant cash outlay in those days, we could see the economics. And dagnabbit, it was a good decision – most of us still haven’t needed to buy new oregano since then!

Which, of course, is the crux of the problem.

Remember the rule? Two years for seeds, six months for herbs or ground spices. The large jar of oregano that most American households have is a crime against cooking. Under ideal circumstances – when that container was still on the shelf of the supermarket – it already contained inferior-quality oregano, which had been sitting in warehouses, on shelves, and exposed to light for an unknown amount of time. (Remember? Essential, volatile oils; more light = more energy = more volatility.)

Go into your kitchen and open that container. Does the scent waft, or do you have to stick your nose in the jar before you know it’s there? Is it just dry, or would “desiccated” be a better descriptor? Is the color a rich, vibrant green, or is it fading to brown and gray? Well, let’s do something about that.

The simple point is this – buying spices in the supermarket is a terrible idea. The only time you should ever do it – ever – is if you’re in some kind of emergency situation; people coming over this evening, and no time to make alternate arrangements. With just a tiny bit of forethought, you can make sure that the spices in your house are better-tasting, fresher, and cheaper than the ones you buy in the supermarket.

Cheaper! No lie! In order to make sure I’m stocked up for this blog, I go to a local spice store (the local branch of a national chain, actually) every two weeks. And what absolutely blows me away is how the things that I get there are not only worlds better, but that I actually spend less money this way. As is the case in almost every other facet of life, giving just a tiny bit of forethought – and being willing to stray from the beaten path just a tiny bit – makes your outcome significantly better.

But doing anything for the first time is difficult. It’s confusing and intimidating, and a lot of the time it’s easier to continue doing something you know is wrong – a lot of the time it’s easy to find excuses why not to change things today. So I’m going to make things as easy as possible, and walk you through it.

Bet you never thought you’d have homework from a blog, right? Well, I guess this is more of an in-class assignment.

First, search Google for online spice merchants. I don’t want to shill for anyone on this blog – I’m sure all of the stores that link off of that search are good. (The one I use starts with a P.)

Now, click through to oregano. There are two main variants – Mexican and Mediterranean. More on that later; we’re going to start with Mediterranean, which is the commonly-used one. Look at those prices – I flipped through some online grocery stores a few minutes ago, and oregano averages at about $3.50 an ounce; the first store that Google linked had a quarter-pound for that price. Quality is, again, what we’re shooting for… but quality plus lower price is good stuff. (Not that you should buy a quarter-pound, of course. Weren’t you listening a few minutes ago? Find someplace that will sell you an ounce or two.)

Of course, if we’re buying online, rather than looking for a retail location, we’re going to have to pay shipping. Even adding $5 for shipping, though, it’s still cheaper to buy online… and if we do a little bit of thinking ahead – buy four or five things at a time, or more – the shipping is going to be insignificant.

Go ahead. Place the order. I’m serious! Buy some fennel and cumin, as well. Spend $10. That’s about what two tiny jars of spice would cost you at the supermarket, and then you’ll have done it, once – and the next time you need spices, you’ll know exactly what to do.

Okay, now step two, and this one is a little bit harder. This one is homework. Now, search Google Maps for “bulk spices”. Look for any places within twenty minutes or so of you that sell spices; there are a few national retailers, and a lot of independent stores as well. Even if it’s a little bit of a haul, how often are you really going to have to go? It’s worth travelling forty-five minutes every six months to ensure that your spices aren’t dull and faded. Plus, spice shopping is a lot more fun than it has any right to be. At least if you enjoy smelling new things as much as I do.

In an earlier post, I talked about things that are worth being snobby about. This is one of them. Since I started buying spices this way, it has been like taking off a pair of sunglasses that I’ve been pretty much wearing all my life. The flavors are bold and beautiful; scents waft across the room, and you never have smell something twice to try to figure out what it is.

You can do this! I have faith in you. I was once like you.

He who controls the Spice, controls dinner!

2010-04-01T01:35:00.000-07:00

As I do every month here, I'm going to repost the basics about the Melange which is so basic to our lives, and add whatever new things I may have learned recently. As I've said a thousand times, I'm hardly the Kwisatz Haderach; I'm still just learning to use this incredible substance. Hopefully, you've are enjoying my Year of Living Spicily - and if you're using spice-induced prescient powers to read my future posts, hopefully you're enjoying them, as well.

The spice melange - a byproduct of the lifecycle of the Arrakin Sandworm - is, obviously, the single most valuable and important substance in the universe. It is also an exercise in contradictions. In minuscule doses, it is responsible for elongating our lives by hundreds of years. However, as little as a gram a day is enough to get one irrevocably addicted - and, as everyone is taught in high school health class, Spice withdrawal is inevitably fatal. And in large doses, it... changes you. The Guild Navigators use it - space travel would be impossible without it - but it requires that they use so much of it that they become irrevocably mutated. In such high doses, it can lead to precognition, as well... but honestly, from what I've heard, people who learn about the future tend to wish that they had been mutated instead.

I'm sure you guys have heard this story a thousand times by now... but I never get tired of telling it. My dad is actually from Arrakis - or "Dune", as the media calls it these days. He was a Freman, working with House Atreides against the Harkonnens. My mom was a Bene Gesserit, who left the Chapterhouse to go backpacking across the universe. They met right after the Battle of Arrakeen; my dad spoke Freman, my mom Galach. They didn't have a way to communicate with each other... but my mom's love for my dad was so strong that she used her Bene Gesserit mind-witchery to instantly learn how to speak his language.

I don't know - I've just always found that story so romantic.

Almost everyone, the first time they smell or taste Spice, thinks that it reminds them of cinnamon. (Next week, I'll be talking about cinnamon - in passing - as I continue with more explanation of how to use the Melange.) As people get more and more exposed to it, though, virtually everyone reports that the taste changes. When paired with almost any food, the melange operates to enhance whatever the natural flavor is. This holds true even for fairly unexpected or exotic foods - I've tried it as a topping on ice cream, and it was amazing. Well, as amazing as it is anywhere else.

I remember, when I was a kid, the first time that I asked my dad about the Stillsuit he still has hanging in his closet. He didn't seem to want to talk about it; I kept bugging him about it for a while, but honestly, my dad can still be as hard to get a hold of as sand, when you try to pin him down. He didn't want to talk about any of it.

I moved to Arrakis for a year, and spent some time with his relatives there. It's funny; the Fremen are so different, when you're looking at their culture from the outside in. I think the popular perspective is that they are heartless murderers - peerless warriors in strange costumes who would slit your throat as soon as look at you.

Which is true, of course - your body is full of delicious, delicious water. But that's not my point. Actually, it's kind of the opposite of my point... so I think I'll ignore it.

Anyway, the point is, from inside the Freman culture, things are very different. They're not the Stillsuit-wearing, knife-wielding maniacs that everyone things. I mean, yes, sure, they wear those Stillsuits 24/7. And yes, most of their culture, directly or indirectly, revolves around threatening people with knives, or carrying out those threats... but really, once you get to know them, they're totally sweet.

So while I was living in Arrakeen, I was spending as much time as possible with my father's family. Almost every Tuesday evening (taco night) I would go out into the desert to have dinner with my dad's people. And I can see why some folks are scared of them; these people were basically proposing armed insurrection against the Emperor. In fact, once Paul Muad'dib dethroned the Emperor, they basically started a jihad across the whole length of the galaxy.

Okay, I'll come clean. The Fremen are absolute psycho nutjobs. But still - fun at parties, and TACO NIGHT!

After a few months of this (also, there was lots of drinking) my dad's family started opening up to me, telling me about the Face Dancer he killed (in a knife-fight, of course) and all that kind of thing. From my dad himself? All I ever got was static.

He said, "Nobody is interested in my past - not even my children."

I can't even imagine how lonely he must be.

There's a part of me that thinks he's an idiot, as well, of course - after all, he's the one that's walled himself off. Both my brother and I are desperate to learn about our heritage - but not desperate enough that we're going to fight him every step of the way to do it. I guess when you grow up wearing a stillsuit, it just sinks down under your skin - even when you take it off, you're still isolated from everything around you.

Also, while I was out there, I put on a stillsuit for a few minutes.
Guess how much those things suck? The proper guess is "a lot." It was fun and interesting for about thirty seconds. Then it was hot and sweaty and disgusting... and knowing that I should sweat it the hell up, because I'd be drinking that sweat later, did NOT help. Not even a little bit.

But the point is, that was what I was reduced to? No distance, ironic or otherwise? Just put on an insanely irritating garment, because I feel have no other way to connect with my heritage?

I guess so. And it's sad, because if he opened up, I think the three of us - my dad, my brother, and me - would probably have a much easier time of it. Until then, I'll be drinking sweat-water over in the corner, okay?

That's it for today, folks. Tomorrow, I'll talk about the various ways you can cover up your bright blue eyes, if you've become addicted to the Melange, and whether or not there's anything to the seaworm-produced "Ultraspice" that all the news programs are talking about. Until then, walk without rhythm, and you won't attract the worm!

Fennel Wrap-up

2010-03-23T02:48:00.000-07:00

On Saturday night, I sat down in the park up the street from me to write this entry. When I opened it up to post it this evening, I realized that I was about to give you two long philosophical rambles in a row. So, I chopped all that crap out, and cut straight to the stuff I needed to say about fennel.

Fennel Tea

It’s easy, and it’s delicious. Half-fill your tea infuser with fennel seeds, steep for ten minutes. (Lightly crush the seeds beforehand for a tea that is more potent, but also more bitter.) You get a light green tea that tastes, more or less, exactly how you’d expect it to taste – pleasantly licorice-flavored. (Remember, I don’t like licorice – one of the things that I like about fennel is that it’s got the same sharp taste, without the cloying sweetness.) It’s nice and sweet without needing sugar, and supposedly promotes the production of breast milk. Mmmm, mmmm! What’s not to like?

Fennel Bread

While I really, really enjoyed the delicious scent and slight twang to the taste buds that the fennel added, I’m not going to bother posting the recipe that I used. Because while it smelled wonderful, and tasted great, its density was approximately equal to a neutron star. Victoria and I were out of all-purpose flour, and so I substituted whole wheat. Apparently, you can’t just substitute whole wheat flour for bread flour. I never claimed to be a good baker.

Anyway, a tablespoon (or two) of whole fennel seeds in a loaf of bread is an amazing addition. I think it would also be great to sprinkle on top of the loaf, like rye seeds, or even to use on a bagel instead of sesame seeds or whatever.

Fennel Mushrooms

The fennel mushrooms were okay, not amazing. Unlike some of the other spices, the fennel flavor really seemed to conflict with the mushroom’s own flavor – it didn’t taste bad, but it didn’t blend in the same way that coriander did, for instance. The mushrooms themselves, however, are getting better and better – Victoria came up with the idea of using a wooden skewer to punch holes in them, and that seems to work perfectly.

Fennel Plant

I just wanted to show everyone a picture of my new fennel plant, Fenwick! It came in the mail last Thursday, and is still a little wilted from its trip. It's recovering nicely, though - Victoria is a good gardener.

Last Friday, the whole plant looked like the yellow, wilted part on the left side; it's been healing up nicely. The whole plant is edible; when it's mature, the leaf-tips will bear fruit - the seeds.

Right now, the plant is tiny. When it ages a bit, it will turn into this:

which is a fairly ugly piece of produce. The bulb at the bottom is kind of neat - it's all those stalks kind of wrapped together, in an odd way. Split it open and you can see it more clearly:

It's easy to see that the bulb is just different stalk-like structures, twined together.

Well, this has been a productive week, or almost week and a half, at this point. Fennel is a phenomenally interesting spice - rich and complex, with a sweetness and a twang to it. It's versatile, widely used, and yet something I knew absolutely nothing about. Which, again, is why I'm doing this.

Tomorrow (hopefully) I'll tell you why I hate your oregano so much.

Nothing to do with spices at all.

2010-03-22T01:21:00.000-07:00

Watch out, folks. This one is long.

I’m going to do something a little different today – I’m going to take this blog on the road. I usually hate the road. The road is outside, and outside has several well-known problems – the yellow face, bears – so I usually try to stay away. But today, the circus is in town, and what fun-loving kid can turn down the circus? So I’m going to walk down to the Capitol and watch all the clowns.

I feel like the narrative that is told about the tea party movement is one that I am eager – TOO eager – to believe. Old, white, ignorant, racist – this is the story that I would want to tell, if I were trying to tell it as a story. Which, of course, is the media’s job. But I’m always skeptical of stories that play this strongly to my obvious biases.

The whole problem with that – as I learned in the last entry to my Israel blog – is that I don’t drop my biases when I walk into a situation; I take them with me. I’m walking into these tea party protests looking for racism, looking for ignorance, and I’m sure I’m going to find it. I don’t know what the cure for that is; I’m going to try looking for the opposite – try to look for people who are non-white, try to look for the good arguments – but know that I’m not particularly likely to actually accomplish this. So, just remember – because if I’m doing my job right, if I’m writing well, it’s hard to remember – what you’re seeing is heavily filtered. I promise you that everything I write will be exactly what I saw… but who knows if what I saw is the same thing the person sitting next to me saw?

Anyway, I’ve got another problem, too – one that I often had during my Israel blog. Sometimes, living a life and writing about it are difficult goals to reconcile. I’ve got my final fennel post 90% completed in a different, open file. I’ve got my first two oregano posts written in my head, waiting only to be filtered from their pure form through this hideously inefficient pile of meat that I live in.

And yet here I am, sitting on the South Lawn, with a mess of middle aged white folks in front of me shouting “KILL THE BILL!” I’ve got to admit, it’s a fun time. I wish I was a better heckler, to be honest; I keep attempting to engage people in rational dialogue about the nonsense that they’re spewing. It’s not working. Whereas there is a lady behind me, shouting “TOO LATE! THE BILL IS PASSING! JESUS WAS A SOCIAL ACTIVIST! GOD BLESS NANCY PELOSI!” I love her. I wish I could just let loose with some good ol' fashioned hellraising like that.

I don’t remember where I first read this idea – but there are some phrases that get less and less true, the more they get repeated. “I am not crazy” is one of them. The first time you hear someone say that, it sounds reasonable. The fiftieth… well, it’s hard to believe someone who is shouting at the top of their lungs

“WE ARE NOT CRAZIES!”
“WE ARE NOT RACISTS!”

I have never had to shout repeatedly through a microphone that I am not a racist. At the same time, I rarely stand in a huge group of white people shouting racially charged things through a megaphone, so maybe it’s a viewpoint kinda thing.

Okay, I’m wrong – I’ve moved from the periphery to right behind the stage. From here, I can pretty much see the whole crowd. And there are two nonwhite people in in – an Asian lady holding up a red “HELL NO” (with the Obama campaign symbol for the O) and a “young, black, African American conservative” who has gotten a surprising amount of megaphone time.

Now a Congressman – Pete Hoekstra (I heard and originally wrote the name Orszag, but that’s Obama’s budget director – after coming home and doing some fact-checking, I got his name right.), Michigan – took the bullhorn for a second. And it’s sad, listening to him. I feel like the crowd needs a heaping dose of ironic distance – because he didn’t say anything at all. He knows that they’re going to lose. He knows that this fairly pathetic protest – a few hundred people at most – isn’t going to accomplish anything. But he also knows that keeping this crowd shouting is vitally important to him – so he spent the majority of his three minutes here stroking the crowd’s ego. Telling them how patriotic they are – how important they are. And they probably are, to his party, to his job.

Then there was a prayer.

I’ll generally join in with your prayers, even though I’m not particularly religious. But my one requirement is that your prayers can’t deliberately exclude me. I mean, I guess that praying to Jesus isn’t exactly a tough call to this crowd… but still. I’m here. I’m Jewish. And I would join in with your prayer – if it included me, even a little bit.

Congressman Hoekstra walked out during the prayer. That seemed like a bad move, to me, but nobody noticed.

Bart Stupak evidently voted no. I wonder if a single person in the crowd today will remember how wildly they shouted “we love you, Stupak” when election day rolls around. (Note from after I got home – apparently those people had no idea what they were talking about. Stupak is a firm yes, as of 4:15.)

Now they’re singing “We love you Stupak, oh yes we do.” I honestly don’t know what to make of that.

And now – as if they felt like they needed to top that – they’re chanting “NAN-CY”, with the quiet cadence of “DA-RYL.” Do they think that the ball is going to roll through her legs? That she’s going to accidentally vote no, because they threw her off her game?

More invocation of “our lord Jesus Christ.” I have to admit, there is a part of me which is actually made nervous by the chanting. I know it’s ridiculous – I’m not implying that I think that anyone here would be anything except polite if I were to mention that I was Jewish, or claim to be Buddhist, or whatever – but it really is something that makes me uncomfortable.

At the edges of the crowd, as we go from the punchy, three word signs to the more complicated invocations of Founding Father rhetoric, it becomes harder and harder to tell which people are protesters and which people are involved in ironic counter-protest. I actually had to ask a woman whether her sign – with an extensive quote about how tyranny is often cloaked in the disguise of “the people’s will” - was intended to be for or against the bill. She answered my question completely when she asked me, in response, if I understood what the quote meant. I thanked her politely and walked away.

I have to admit that my favorite three-word sign goes over the word limit – but purely in service to the message. Thanks for making things clear, lady!

OBAMACARE DOES NOT
(CARE)

Next to me, a group of kids in their late teens are holding up signs with the picture of Obama in whiteface as the Joker. I can’t help but wonder – do they not get the racism? Do they know, but not care? Or is that their intention? (One of their signs says “uninsured by choice.” Thanks, lady – I’m glad to know that you want me to pay for your healthcare, instead of paying for it yourself.)

Ooh! Thank you, Mr. “Obamacare creates tyranny, not jobs”! Your sign just the right size to shade me and my computer screen.

Now back to “GLORY BE TO GOD.” Over and over again. And now a song – “our god is an awesome god.” And the battle hymn of the republic. I honestly feel like an idiot – but I can feel that I’m reacting to this. My pulse is jumping. I’m starting to sweat a bit. I guess it’s the same feeling that you get when you walk into a restaurant, or bar, or other social situation, and realize that you’re the only [member of race/class/religion] there. It’s primal – I don’t think anyone is going to attack me, but at the same time, my little reptile brain gets the message loud and clear – I am alone.

There’s a guy holding up a “KILL THE BILL” sign that has a caricature of Obama, dressed in a sharp blue tux, in a coffin. (Postscript - I can’t seem to find it on the web, or I’d link to it.) I went up to him and asked if it didn’t occur to him that people might perceive the sign as racist, or if it occurred to him but he didn’t care. (I’ll admit, it took me a minute to screw up my courage to do this.)

It was actually an interesting conversation, for certain values of interesting. It took me a few minutes to convince him that I was genuine – that I wasn’t just trying to pick a fight with him. Which was, in fact, true – I actually wanted an answer to my question. Which he definitely, definitely didn’t want to give. Which more or less answered my question, but… He asked me what was racist about it; I carefully pointed out that it was showing a caricature of Obama, prominently displaying African-American features like his lips. It’s showing him in a coffin. And he’s wearing a suit that makes him look like the dandy in a minstrel show. (Another postscript – I had to look that up. I associated the costume with ‘minstrel show’ but I don’t know enough about racist stereotypes to know that there were different characters in them, and that this one was “the dandy.” Kind of like a racist commedia dell’arte.)

I don’t know if this is actually true – but I do remember watching a movie – and it making sense at the time – where the main character was sent to prison for defending himself violently. The court reasoned that since he was an advanced degree black belt, he was capable of defending himself from the attacker without inflicting the (high) level of harm that he did. (I don’t think that would actually ever happen, but it’s not an unreasonable line of thinking.) I kind of feel like that, sometimes, when I’m arguing with people. This guy kept trying to answer my questions with “let me ask you a question”, which is a great tactic if your opponent is an idiot. (Or if your opponent has come on your TV show, and has no ability to control the conversation.) But I’m not an idiot – I’m actually kind of good at this kind of thing. So he kept asking me questions, and I kept answering or deflecting, and then re-asking my original question. Eventually, he cornered himself – he asked me (and I’m dead serious about this) “so, this wouldn’t be racist if it were a WHITE person, but it is racist because there’s a BLACK person?”

All of a sudden, I felt about as proud as I would be beating up my son. I answered quickly that yes, that’s what racism was all about – an effigy of a white person lynched on a lamppost isn’t nearly as offensive as an image of a black person in the same position, because white people don’t have a history of getting lynched in this country. Just like white people don’t have a history of offensive caricatures that look like your picture. To which all he had to say was that he didn’t want to spend his life worrying about what other people thought about the things that he did.

A not-unreasonable point. Not one he was wholly comfortable with – as was clear from how long he evaded it – and not one that I can agree with, but one which I can at least understand.

And the nice young black man, who had ridden up on his bicycle halfway through the conversation and had been listening in, also agreed with that. I kind of felt like hugging him, though, as he softly and gently explained to the sign-holder – whose point that that I was the one seeing racism here – the way that seeing a sign like that made him feel.

I walked around the east side of the capitol as I headed home; the protest had slowly meandered around to the side of the building. I didn’t like what I saw here; it made me feel even dirtier than Hoekstra use the crowd. I saw (at various times) Michelle Bachmann and John Boehner walk out onto a balcony overlooking the crowd and, for all the world like El Presidente of some third-world junta, raise their hands as the crowd began to scream.

I talked to a lot of people today, on both sides. Some of the tea party people are morons. Some are racists. And plenty of them need to learn what socialism means. But you know what? More than a few of them are good people, with legitimate fears and legitimate gripes about the direction this country is going in. Plenty of them were angry and screaming – I had more than one person refuse to shake my hand, and got called names (that honestly, stopped hurting in fourth grade, but…) – but there were people in there that were cordial, interested in talking, and interested in trying to make other people understand why they were so upset.

And to see people like that get wound up, be it by Bachmann or Boehner or Beck… it’s sad. Patriotism is most definitely a class where your grade is based on where your heart is, not whether or not you’re right or wrong. I’m not saying that everyone there has their heart in the right place, of course. I personally feel that you can’t claim to be a patriot – to love this country and think it is the strongest on Earth – and also think that one bill, no matter how bad, can destroy it. It made me really, really sad to hear people espousing that point of view. It reminds me, in a way, of people who reject evolution for creationism. Really? You think God is all-powerful, but somehow not powerful enough to make things evolve? How does that make sense?

Really? You think America is so weak that Bart Stupak can destroy it? Then why do you bother to fight for it? Something that weak deserves to be put out of its misery, not protected.

But that’s not my point. The point is… right or wrong, patriotic or misguided… they deserve better than being used by some demagogue, who doesn’t see them as anything more than pawns in a game they’ll never even realize they’re part of. Watching people get used by leaders preying on their fears and hatreds… well, I’ll take demagogues leading people via their hopes and dreams, any day.

On the way out, I hopped into an argument two departing pro-reformers were having with an older lady from the anti-reform crowd. As was fairly typical, the pro-reformers were making logical and factual arguments, while the anti-reformer was making an emotional one. Were I judgmental, I would call those arguments “monumentally shitty.” When you make arguments, your opponent says “that’s not true, and here’s the proof” and you just ignore them and move on to your next point, you’re not winning that argument. Then again, neither are they; you’re basically saying that you refuse to have a conversation with them.

I hopped in, partially because I was a bit frustrated and wanted to verbally smack someone down a bit. Ten seconds after, however, a bunch of other pro-reformers walked by our conversation; one rolled up his sign into a megaphone and screamed in this lady’s face.

Look, I’m an asshole. I don’t make any bones about it. I’m snide, I’m condescending, I’m occasionally insulting. But you know what I’m not? Rude. Well, to my friends, yes, of course, constantly. But to strangers? No matter how much I disagree with them? Never, without tremendous provocation – and in most cases, the more I get provoked, the more controlled and polite I get. I am absolutely not the sort of fellow who abides screaming in lady’s faces. So I spent the next five minutes working off my aggression on this asshole. You win more arguments by being polite than by screaming in people’s faces.

That’s the thing that I don’t get about the tea party; at some point they’re going to have to grow up. Sure, 3 million Americans – assuming that they can actually claim those numbers in any real way – is a lot of people, in absolute terms. But that’s less than 1% of the population, and it’s going to take more than half-crazed rants to start making a dent in the other 99%. So why work so hard to alienate people?

Why be an asshole to an old lady you’ve never met? Her viewpoints may be wrong. They may be stupid. They may be caustic and uninformed and frankly offensive – but not a single thing on that list is an excuse to scream in her face.

So there I was, five minutes later, screaming in this lady’s face. Trying to get her, in some way, to support a single thing that she said, or at least realize how horrible some of them were.

But I didn’t use a megaphone, you see. Also, I was very angry at this lady, in particular. That’s what makes it okay when I do it, and bad when other people do it.

Look, at least I can admit when I’m being a hypocrite. That’s gotta be worth something.

At about that point, the two other guys there were looking at each other uncertainly. “I don’t think she’s all there, man,” one said to me, as they walked away. I thought that was kind of rude – no need to insult people.

Three minutes later, I realized that they had been talking to her longer than I had been, and they weren’t trying to be insulting. After hearing her rambling about “being in the wilderness” and “having been in business”, I started to realize that they had actually meant it. She really wasn’t playing with a full deck, in a way which had nothing at all to do with the fact that she couldn’t see my brilliantly-made and incisive points.

I felt like quite the heel, as I wandered on back home. I asked one of the capitol police if this sort of thing was normal, if this size protest was a regular affair but it rarely makes the news. He seemed happy to have something to do other than stare straight ahead. It seems that now that the winter’s over, this size protest (1000 people at most, I would say) happens fairly frequently, and often multiple times in a single weekend. There hasn’t been a lot of it this year so far, because people may want to save their country, but not enough to freeze their asses off to do it.

I came back late the evening, for more of the same. Victoria and I had thrown a dinner party, and so I was fortified with a touch of the demon drink. The bill’s passage was a virtual certainty, the vote was being held, and it was late, late, late. The tea party crowd had shrunk to a shadow of its former self; a thousand or two to a hundred at most. The pro-reform crowd, on the other hand, was jubilant.

The mood of the tea partiers was surly, to say the least. Well, that might not be getting the whole of it in. Whittled down to this core, I found some conversations that quickly resorted to me getting surrounded, insulted, or ignored. But I also found people who were actually willing and interested in talking – people who it didn’t surprise me to find that I shared a lot in common with. People who were often apologetic for the way their compatriots were acting.

For my part, I had no problem with the pro-reformers chanting YES WE CAN, or 219 (the number of yes votes in the house) or whatever. But standing right above the tea partier’s area and shouting down at them? Come on. Don’t be a dick, especially when you win. (yes, yes, I know. It’s not hypocrisy this time, though, because I’m not claiming that it’s okay when I do it.) The point is, there was plenty of dickishness on both sides. I honestly didn’t know, at some points, who I liked less – the loud, ignorant assholes in the tea party area, or the smug, superior assholes populating the pro-reform area. I’m not saying that I don’t know which group I fit right into, of course…

I just don’t get the theory of ‘argument’ which says that you simply choose to never answer any of your opponent’s questions. I finally gave up on trying to talk to a guy – who seemed perfectly nice, seemed like a decent fellow, if not particularly bright – who refused to answer the simple, yes or no question – if a factory dumps waste in a river, should they be responsible for cleaning it up? He rambled about the free market for a bit. I asked it again. He started to ramble again. I asked him for a yes or no answer three or four more times, smiled, shook his hand, thanked him, and wished him good luck. (According to him, “Liberals” and “liberal cities” are the reason that Detroit makes such shitty cars, by the way. I’m not sure how that plays into my hypothetical question.)

Another conversation I really had to work up my nerve to have – the tea partiers were having their last kumbaya of the evening. There was a lot of shouting about revolution, about fighting “the war”, about “taking it back”. And right at the edge of the crowd were two young black women, smiling and taking in the scene. After stammering out an apology for bringing up such an uncomfortable topic, I mentioned my earlier experience, a Jew among Christians, and how uncomfortable it made me feel. I asked them if they weren’t uncomfortable at all, what with the language and the imagery and the overwhelming whiteness of the crowd. (The token black guy and asian girl had left. The hardcore crowd left at 10:30 at night was 100% white.)

They almost sounded relieved to talk about it. I got a straightforward answer: ”YES”, with wide eyes, smiles, and half-nervous, half-thankful laughter. Like this was something that they wanted to face, but it was somehow easier to do with me there. They talked about their experiences – that, like me, they didn’t really think there was any true danger. Unlike me, though, they thought – or at least admitted to thinking – that sure, there probably wasn’t – but you never know. (And I’ll admit, there was a moment that evening – when I got surrounded by a bunch of angry, frustrated tea partiers – that part of my brain switched to disaster planning mode.) But they were there – without rancor or enmity for the scary folk talking the scary talk.

I apologized again for bringing up such an uncomfortable topic, and moved on.

For some reason, the fact that they were both drop-dead gorgeous made it a lot easier to have that conversation. I’m not sure that makes any sense at all, but there it is.

I stuck around for another hour or so – until past midnight, and all the votes were in and counted. As the lawmakers began to file out, the bill’s supporters gave each of them applause, high fives, handshakes… hero’s welcomes. It wasn’t the largest crowd the building had seen today by a long shot - lined up two deep across a hundred feet of guard rails – but it was definitely the happiest. Small groups would break into a frenzy as their representative walked out; pictures were taken. The loudest applause, though, was reserved for the black representatives, especially Rep. Lewis, who had to suffer through some fairly nasty abuse yesterday. But today, they were basking in the crowd’s love – of all the congresspeople who walked out, Rep. Lewis was the one who looked the most satisfied, the most vindicated.

I stood and clapped for a while, even though I barely recognized any of the faces. It was fun, first of all. Second, how often do these people actually get greeted by people happy to see them? It can’t happen that often. Third, though, it was really interesting to watch people file out.

Some were jubilant, of course, slapping hands and posing with the crowd. But many of them didn’t look even the least bit excited. (I’m assuming, by the way, that the Republican members would have taken some other route out of the building, rather than walk past the group clapping and cheering the democrats. I could be wrong though.) It was late – for many of the members, I’m sure, way past their bedtime, and a Sunday evening to boot. But I’m sure that more than one of those people will lose their job because of this vote – and I can’t imagine that at least some of the harried faces I saw weren’t contemplating that exact thing.

One last comment, and I’ll call it a night. I pulled this quote off of Fox News’s site:

“Pro-health care reform folks, who were largely overshadowed by the much larger anti-health care protestors…”

No doubt. I was there, and I can tell you for sure – the tea partiers were, on average, MUCH larger than the pro-reform crowd. In a lot of cases, by a hundred pounds or more.

Hah. I made a fat joke, at the expense of people I don’t like. I am truly the slyest.

Thanks for letting me get this all out, folks – I had a lot to process today, and it’s easier to sort my thoughts out about things like this when I get to write them. And it’s easier to write them when I know that there’s a point to it – that the writing might be read. Tomorrow, I’ve got a few last bits of fennel to deal with, then on Wednesday I’ll talk about why your oregano is so shitty. I’m going to try to run updates Saturday and Sunday as well, so I can start the new spice next Monday, but I haven’t been stellar at updating over weekends thus far. We’ll see.

Nothing to post today...

2010-03-19T01:00:00.000-07:00

This might sound silly - but we just had too many leftovers for me to cook something new. Also, I didn't really feel like it.

I've still got a few miscellaneous things about fennel I'll try to post tomorrow - including an introduction to my new fennel plant. Does anyone have a good name for a fennel plant? On Monday, I'll start on oregano.

Sing-Along Blog Act 2: Fennel Pot Pie

2010-03-18T02:00:00.000-07:00

Ahem... hmm... uhhhhhhhh......

Pot pie needs work.

I also need to be a little bit more careful about what I say on this blog... apparently both the MPAA and Martha Stewart are among our viewers. They were waiting for me when I pulled the pot pies out of the oven... the pies take a few seconds to cool down...

Martha Stewart threw a car at my head.

Not to worry, though, because I'm...

You people are so friggin' lucky. If I could sing one dang note you'd be suffering through another video blog today. Instead, I'll watch Dr. Horrible for the sixth time and just TELL you about the pot pie. Rather than singing about it.

Oh - one quick note - I was feeling like an idiot, because several people emailed me and told me "I don't know why you're having such a hard time finding fennel, my local grocery store sells it, and it's not a fancy place or anything." Well, it turns out that my local store does, as well. I tend to go shopping on Fridays, which means that I'm just in the early planning stages for the next week when I hit the supermarket. In this case, it wasn't until Sunday that I learned anything about fennel - including the fact that it is often sold as "sweet anise", which it isn't. However, when I was in the store today to buy some supplemental ingredients for the pot pie, I noticed that the store had sweet anise. Bingo!

Okay, so pot pie. Despite what I said earlier, the pot pie actually came out great! (When I said "pot pie needs work", that was in character - I may not be able to sing, but I am such a good actor that I can even act in writing.) The crust definitely does need work, but I made the executive decision earlier today that rather than making my own crust, I was just going to buy one from the store. (Benjamin is having some butt-related issues which are making him fussy, and I threw my back out in some mysterious way... so spending hours making pie crust didn't really seem to be the order of the day.) Even with store-bought crusts, I mangled them almost beyond recognition.

My wife, bless her heart, said that it "looked homemade" when she saw it. It's really, really nice to have a spouse who is willing to turn your incompetence into a virtue. Long story short, I'm pretty much going to be ignoring the crust part of this pie, and just focus on the filling. Chances are you can make a better crust on your own - or at least go to the supermarket, buy one, and not mess it up.

Basically, there are three steps to putting the pot pie together - filling, sauce, crust. The filling can be whatever you want, pretty much - I decided I wanted to get crazy-go-nuts, and used pretty much everything in my fridge. Here is the final list of what I used. The amounts are, unfortunately, approximate. I will tell you, however, that the ingredients I chopped up gave me enough filling to make a grand total of four pies; I only had two crusts, so I might try my hand at making a crust tomorrow.

THE FILLING

1/2 bulb of fennel
2 medium carrots
2 stalks of celery
4 baby yellow potatoes
2 oz white mushrooms
1/2 cup frozen peas
1/2 cup frozen corn
1 chicken breast

6 cups veggie broth

I just edited that list; I halved all the amounts that I put in based on what I actually used. I wound up with about four pies worth of ingredients, and did my cooking in two batches; the second batch is still in the fridge, waiting to be put in a crust. So, what I've given you above is a good estimate of the amount of ingredients needed to make two pies. Note that I made one vegetarian, one chicken - so that amount of chicken went into a single pie. If you want to make two chicken pot pies, you might want to increase the amount of chicken.

All of the above were chopped fairly roughly - no huge chunks, but I didn't need them minced, either. While you're chopping, get the broth up and simmering.

All of the stuff above is going to get cooked in the broth - but not everything needs to be in for the same length of time. I'm not going to claim that what I did was anything but guesswork, based on other things that I read along the way, but it seemed to work.

First, in went the fennel and potatoes, for seven minutes. Then, I threw in the mushrooms, carrots, and celery; if you're not planning on doing a veggie pie you can throw in the chicken at this point as well. Give that stuff another five minutes, then throw in the frozen ingredients - the peas and corn. Give the whole shebang another five minutes, and then strain out the good stuff from the broth. If you're planning on cooking more, reserve the broth; I wound up reusing mine twice by the end of the evening.

THE SAUCE

5 tbsp butter
5 tbsp all-purpose flour
2 1/2 cups whole milk
3 tbsp lemon juice
2 tbsp whole fennel seeds
2 cloves garlic
1 tbsp ground coriander
Salt and pepper to taste

As I often do, this pot pie recipe isn't so much 'mine' as an amalgamation of about five different ones that I read through before making this. The sauce, however, is pretty much lifted from this recipe here, so credit where it's due. I started making the sauce when I had just tossed the last ingredients in to the broth, and the timing worked out fine.

We're making a thick, creamy sauce to fill up the empty space in the pie. This sauce is eventually going to get all of the rest of the ingredients you're cooking in the broth mixed in with it, so don't make the mistake I did - you're going to need to use a larger pan for the sauce than for the broth.

Get the butter melted on medium low heat, and toss in the garlic, fennel seeds, and coriander. (This is an application where I don't mind using fennel seeds; I don't think that they're going to raise eyebrows in a chunky pot pie. At the same time, after tasting the results, I might add in a tablespoon of ground fennel as well, to up the ante a bit.) Give it a few stirs, then start slowly whisking in the flour. (For those that don't know, this is called a roux; if you just try to thicken a sauce by tossing flour into it, you get big chunks of flour. Making a roux avoids that.) Eventually, you're going to have something which is almost like a dough; that's when you start adding the milk in. Again, add it slowly, whisking all the while.

After about five minutes, the milk will thicken up. (I couldn't for the life of me tell whether the roux simple took a while to dissolve, or if it was dissolving and then something else was happening afterwords.) While you're waiting for that to happen, go back to the veggies and drain off the broth, coming back to the sauce every once in a while to check that it's thickening. (It didn't feel thick enough to me during the first batch, so I added in another tablespoon of flour. That might have been unnecessary.) Once it's thickened, toss in the lemon juice, salt, and pepper. Give the whole shebang a final mix or two; the sauce should be almost as thick as pancake batter - it should stick to the whisk but slowly drip off. When you're there, toss in the filling ingredients, and stir the whole thing until the sauce is completely coating everything else.

THE CRUST

Like I said, I'm not really going to go into the crust too much. Once you've got the sauce made, pour it into the crust, close it up, and put it in the oven at 375 for about 40 minutes. Make sure to let it cool for a while before you serve it - the thick sauce in there is going to be mouth napalm when it comes out of the oven.

I really enjoyed making this, and pot pie is something that I don't really eat enough of. I strongly encourage you to read this post for the process, but not for the specifics; the filling can really be just about anything that your little heart desires. I can definitely see cauliflower, broccoli, zucchini, shrimp, or any of a hundred other things going really well in there (and frankly, I can't really believe that I didn't add onion.) I would take an educated guess that I wound up with slightly more than five cups, total, of filling, so if you aim for around there you should be in the right ballpark whatever stuff you choose to use. I don't think I had a particular reason for using frozen peas and carrots rather than canned; I must have read a recipe that called for them, and decided to go that way.

I wouldn't be afraid of over-spicing this; as I said, I feel like I could have added another tablespoon of fennel - or more - to good effect. All in all, I'm surprised at how well this came out, for something fairly complex that I've never done before; I really expected, for whatever reason, for the whole thing to turn into an utter disaster. It was much, much easier than I expected, and I strongly recommend that you try it at some point.

I actually have no idea what I'm going to do tomorrow. Anyone have any bright ideas? Anyone know any good recipes for soups that use fennel?

Aaron's Sing-Along Stuffed Shells

2010-03-17T02:00:00.000-07:00

There aren't a whole lot of talents that I feel like I am missing.

Maybe I should rephrase that in a way that makes me sound like less of an arrogant prick.

In general, I'm happy with the talents that I have, and don't often feel like I wish I could do the many, many things I'm bad at. It would be nice to be able to draw, no doubt, and I have to admit that skiing looks like something I might enjoy if I was able to do it more on those wooden plank-things they give you and less on, you know, my face.

There is one huge exception to this - I really, really wish that I could sing. I'm not even asking for rock-star level talent... not that I wouldn't take it, if offered. Is there any better job than Rock Star? (Okay, Hugh Hefner. That job is already filled, though.) I would settle for being able to play Rock Band with my friends and not being forced to relegate myself to Beastie Boys or other mostly atonal spoken-word songs. I would settle for being able to understand the connection between what's going on with my voice, and what's going on with the pitch arrow on the screen. (I find that stupid arrow incredibly frustrating - not because it's always telling me I'm failing the song, but because I honestly don't have the slightest clue what it wants me to do. I've tried just about everything I know how to do with my voice, and it doesn't seem to impact how I do at the game one bit.)

But my loss is your win, folks. Today was our anniversary, and one of the things Victoria got me was the DVD of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. If you haven't seen it... Who am I kidding? You've seen it. You're reading this, which means you and I have probably hung out. If you look at the Venn diagram of "people who are willing to hang out with Aaron" and "People who have seen Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog", I'm pretty sure that you'll find the first circle is entirely within the second.

So anyway, it's a terrific DVD - and one of the things about a 45-minute movie is that you can actually watch and enjoy the commentary tracks on them. There are two - one normal, and one called "Commentary: The Musical", which was more awesome in theory than in actual practice, but still fairly awesome. Great making-of stuff, a few fun (and fiendishly hard to get at) easter eggs.

I think you know where I'm going here, because you know I'm about as impressionable as warm silly putty.

My complete lack of any ability whatsoever to sing is the only thing that's saving you from having to listen to me singing this blog post. Maybe watch me dancing around in some sort of evil chef costume. OH MY GOD YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW MUCH I WISH I COULD SING RIGHT NOW.

Grump grump. I feel like I felt during my Hulk post - I mean, I made some stuffed shells, they were really yummy, I'm going to write about them. I'm good at writing! I enjoy writing! But I really, really want to be singing about them. Oh well. Picture me, walking sadly off camera, whistling Sweet Georgia Brown.

I like making stuffed shells. They occupy this odd headspace for me - my mental filing system at once tags them as "fancy" and "homey", two things which should be pretty much at odds with one another. They are kinda fancy - it's hard to argue that a tray of hand-stuffed pasta is anything but - and they're one of the dishes that I'll make for company when I want to serve something nice. At the same time, they're not so much trouble that I can't make them for a family dinner, and it's hard to argue that something which is pasta, cheese, and sauce is anything but comfort food. Plus, my mom made them when we were kids.

The fennel definitely works here. It really did its job, adding a nice zing to the shells without really overwhelming any of the other flavors. I was originally intending to scratch-make a fennel-heavy tomato sauce to go with it (and give me another blog post) but honestly, I'm glad I didn't - the sauce is a compliment here, not a main element like it would be with, let's say, lasagna. Every time I make stuff shells, I keep meaning to cut back on the amount of sauce I use, but I never remember to - and adding a bunch of fennel straight to the sauce would bring it more into the forefront than I think would really work.

(I still might make sauce - I haven't done that in a long, long time and it's a lot of fun. We'll see if I have time for an all-day cooking project in the next day or so.) (PS I won't have time, so if you see a post where I do tomato sauce, call child services to come and take my neglected child away from me.)

Fennel Stuffed Shells

1 box jumbo stuffed shells1 handful shredded mozzerella
Most of a can of pasta sauce

Filling:
1 lb (about two cups) ricotta cheese
1/2 cup parmesan[1] cheese
4 cloves garlic
1-2 tablespoons ground fennel[2] (I cooked this with one, and I would have liked more.)
1/2 tablespoon basil
1 large egg
6 oz spinach
6 oz mushrooms

1 pinch kosher salt
Dried red pepper flakes to taste

You know how to make pasta, so I'm not going to bother with instructions for the shells. As with most pasta that's getting baked, you want it fairly al dente.

Meanwhile, chop the hell out of the spinach, mushrooms, and garlic. There's not much more to it; dump everything listed under "filling" in a big bowl and mix it together. You may want to beat the egg for a few seconds first, but it's not a big deal if you don't. In the end, you should have a fairly consistent, fairly smooth filling that fairly easily spoons out.

Put the oven on 350. Take out a large baking dish, and put a layer of tomato sauce in the bottom. Hopefully, you've timed this right and your pasta is just about cooked. I generally don't rinse pasta after cooking it, but this is an exception - I run the shells under cold water to cool them down, because we're about to handle them. Now, take the shells one at a time in the palm of your hand - so that the tips of the shell are pointed at your wrist and your fingertips. Gently squeeze the shell with your fingers, so that the edges of the shell (which are probably currently curled in) bow outwards, and the whole thing is wide open.

Damn it, I need to take more pictures. This is something which would be easy to show, but is hard to explain. Oh well, you're smart, you'll figure it out. Squeeze the shell in your hand until it opens up. Take a spoonful of the filling, load up the shell, put the shell in the sauce, and repeat with the next shell. Don't go crazy - it's better to slightly understuff the shells than overstuff them, both from the perspective of managing the amount of filling you have (can always add more later) and from a taste perspective. (I think too much ricotta does more harm than good in both shells and lasagna.)

When you are out of shells, or filling, or hopefully both (if you run out of dish, just go and get a second dish. Do I have to tell you everything?) give the whole thing a bit more tomato sauce on the top of the shells, then give it the mozzarella on top of the sauce. (You could probably dust with some more fennel at this point, too - wish I had thought of that.) Put some tin foil on the top, give it twenty minutes in the oven, take the foil off, give it ten more minutes. Give it ten or fifteen minutes to cook and set before serving; serve with garlic bread, red wine, and your fanciest bon mots. Under no circumstances, while serving these shells, inadvertently introduce your archnemesis to the girl of your dreams.

Tomorrow, I try to make pot pies. Tune in to see if I screw them up!

Actually, that should probably be "Tune in to see how badly I'm gonna screw them up."

[1]I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but in almost any case where I claim to be using parmesan, it's actually a parmesan/asiago/romano blend that Victoria and I get. It's really good.

[2]A quick addendum to my irritated "Why would you want to grind spices more or less finely" post the other day. There's an advantage to buying things in seed form, in that you only need to store the seeds and you can grind it whenever. But I bought not only fennel seeds, but some very finely ground fennel - almost a powder. Way finer than I can grind at home with the tools I currently have. And one thing I really like about it is that it is phenomenally easy to control; it's really, really easy to take a good-sized pinch and then put exactly as much as you want exactly where you want it.

Then again, Alton is always saying that control is one reason that he likes coarse Kosher salt. So, I probably have no idea what I'm talking about.

Oh, one last thing - keep in mind that the more finely ground your spice is, the more spice and the less air you're getting in the same volume.

Not your mom's grilled cheese

2010-03-16T01:00:00.000-07:00

Cooking grilled cheese today reminds me of making eggs, in that I took a food that I vaguely remember my mom making when I was a kid, tried making it, failed, refined, tried again, failed, refined… and succeeded. (This would be a crappy post without that last part.)

(Remind me to tell you some day about the first time I ever scrambled eggs.)

I mean, grilled cheese, right? Not that difficult. But making easy things difficult is really one of my best qualities. Take a simple, ancient food, add a stubborn insistence to ignore the thousands of years worth of culinary development, and poof! A recipe for lousy grilled cheese sandwiches. Until, of course, you get a recipe for good ones.

Now, by good, I’m talking about good for a refined, adult palate. I somehow doubt that in three or four years, my son is going to be clamoring for the sandwiches I just made for lunch. That’s actually one of the biggest things that I’m worried about happening in the next few years; I’m not sure if kids just naturally gravitate towards bland food, or if they can be taught away from it. Even if it’s natural, I’m going to be a bit hurt when Benjamin wants to go out for McDonald’s rather than have one of my homemade burgers.

One of the reasons that I came to grilled cheese the hard way is that the two main ingredients – white bread and American cheese – are things I tend to run away from kicking and screaming. Actually, that paints a poor picture of me. How about this – I tend to run towards them kicking and screaming, as I run towards all of my enemies. White bread? Seriously? I will quote the Belgian superhero Éclair:

“I too have been sorely disappointed by the quality of baked goods in this country. The bread is bleached, soaked in chemicals… flavorless!”

When you have to go through a second chemical process to replace the nutrients that your first chemical process removed, well, maybe you should reconsider exactly what you’re doing. One of the smartest things that has ever come out of Rich’s mouth was the statement that, with good pizza, toppings are a nicety, not a requirement – if you can’t imagine sitting down and just loving a slice of plain pizza, you’re ordering from the wrong place. (Or are not in the New York area.) Since then, to be honest, I’ve eaten a lot more plain pizza. I feel the same way about bread – bread should be something you’re willing to snack on. As a snack. Without jelly or butter or hummus or any of those accoutrement. If that sounds gross to you, start buying better bread.

American cheese, or any of the various process cheeses, do not get nearly as much of my scorn. (Nota bene - process cheese, not processed cheese.) (Nota even more bene – actually, I’m wrong there. “Processed” is a label which can be applied to a wide variety of cheeses. American cheese is a “pasteurized process cheese”. In other words, the label is not telling you that it has been processed, but that it was created via the pasteurization process, as defined by 21 CFR 133.169(e)(2)(ii). I had thought that processed vs. process was simply one of those mistakes that people make – like saying daylight savings time instead of daylight saving time – but it turns out that they’re interchangeable.)

The thing is, even though processed cheeses have been through as many horrors as the bleached, enriched flour in white bread, there’s at least some kind of point to them. I’m not talking about “extended shelf life”, either – if something can’t support simple forms of life like mold, I have a hard time believing it’ll support complex forms of life like bloggers. But cheese, when heated enough, doesn’t melt smoothly – the fat will melt off, and what’s left will be a blob of protein. Not that I mind, 95% of the time. But there are some applications where you want that piece of cheese to just play nice and melt itself smoothly over something. Cheese fries, for one, and burgers for another. While I love, and have used, swiss, bleu, cheddar, and provolone on burgers, nothing looks quite as perfect as a burger that has a form-fitting comforter of gooey American cheese keeping it warm.

Oh, and when I say horrors, I do mean horrors. Do you know how we get those big blocks of Kraft singles? I had assumed that they started life as a single block, then got machine-sliced and wrapped. Nope – the wrapping comes first, and the molten cheese is poured into it. It is then sealed and left to become the mold for the cheese as it solidifies. While I recognize that many of the foods I eat are created by industrial processes, it’s just hard to stomach the idea that injection molding is one of them. In any case, when you’re buying American cheese, get it at the deli counter. Just like everything else in life, there are various levels of quality.

(Check out 21 CFR 133 someday. You actually have to jump through hoops to be able to call your product “pasteurized process cheese.” If you’re not careful, you’re going to wind up being a “pasteurized process cheese food”. Recently, the FDA warned Velveeta and Kraft that they weren’t even meeting that standard, and in response some items got relabeled “cheese product” or “cheese snack”. Neither of those labels are regulated by the FDA. Run.)

Gooeyness is also an issue – I mean, cheddar melts, as long as you’re careful and don’t let it separate, but it never really gets gooey, not in the way that American cheese gets. For a cheese steak, or cheese fries, gooeyness is a quality you really want to see. The same is true with grilled cheese sandwiches.

Let’s be honest – grilled cheese is a fun food. Grilled cheese reminds us of being kids. It’s not just that it’s something our moms used to make for us, it’s the fact that the American cheese made it gooey and melty and messy and delicious, that it reminds us of a time that we didn’t mind if we spent half the meal with a string of cheese running down from the corner of our mouths to our beards and down onto our shirts, while she looks on with increasing disgust but doesn’t say anything and then never calls again.

Not… not that I’m saying that’s ever been an issue for me. I’m just saying, grilled cheese. Gooeyness. Fun.

So, the design parameters of NYM (Not Your Mom’s) grilled cheese are: Good bread, gooey cheese, appealing to adult palate. I will readily admit that this is nothing like the grilled cheese of memory – but try it. I think you’ll like it.

NYM Grilled Cheese

Bread: Any sandwich loaf. I used a fairly small, brown, whole-grain loaf sliced into 12mm slices. (I have to admit, I like that the local supermarket has a slicer that deals with actual numbers, rather than vagaries like “sandwich slice” or “thick-cut”.)
Cheese: 150 grams (about 1/3 pound) of brie, rind on or off at your whim.
1 Avocado, cut into thin slices
Ground fennel
Butter (about half a stick, total.)

Makes six sandwiches

Get a frying pan (or griddle, or grill, if you own them) nice and hot. Butter should melt and sizzle, but not brown immediately. I always screw this up – the first sandwich I make out of any batch is always a little bit burnt. I’m the same way with pancakes. So, actually, let me rewrite this, with that in mind.

Get a frying pan (or griddle or grill, if you own them) nice and hot. Throw in a pat of butter, and let it coat the pan. It should melt and start browning pretty immediately. Turn the heat down to slightly below medium – I think I had my stove top set to four out of ten. Take a paper towel and lightly wipe down the pan. Your goal is to get up the burned-ness and make sure the pan is nice and evenly coated. Now, throw in a second pat of butter. This one should melt fairly quickly, but not brown quite as quickly. This one you don’t want to swirl around – you want a buttery mess in the middle of the pan.

THE BREAD: Toss two pieces of bread right into the middle of the butter, and give the whole thing about two minutes to fry up. Take some tongs and flip the bread – they should be lightly-toasted and glistening. After you flip them, move them around in the pan a bit so that they soak up any of the extra butter.

THE CHEESE: Brie is a pain in the ass to work with. It is soft and sticky – I strongly suggest, if you don’t have one, getting a cheese knife. Honestly, I use ours maybe twice a year, and I’m still glad I have it. Peeling slices of brie off of a regular knife is a phenomenally irritating process. You can pick a cheap one up for ten dollars.

I had a wedge of brie, which I truncated about a third of the way down, so I could make nice-sized slices. I didn’t bother cutting the rind off – I think maybe I should have gone through the bother, but it’s purely personal taste. This left me with the problem that my slices got larger and larger the more I made. For the first two sandwiches, I would use two slices of cheese per piece of bread; for the next two, I wound up using one big slice from the main piece, and a slice from the small triangle I had cut off. For the last two sandwiches, I was pretty much using one slice of cheese per slice of bread. Actually, that also gives you an idea of how big the loaf of bread that I was using was – I was covering slightly more than two thirds of each slice of bread with cheese. Brie can quickly get overwhelming – the first time I tried it on grilled cheese, I plastered the sandwich with it, and wound up making myself sick to my stomach. So, go light on the cheese.

Once the bread is fried on one side, throw the cheese on. You really want to get the cheese down as soon as possible – the leftover heat should be doing as much work to melt the cheese as the heat coming up from the pan. With other kinds of cheese, I wouldn’t mind if some gooped over the side, but 1. brie is expensive and 2. the brie didn’t wind up melting down the side of the sandwich, the pieces that were dangling just kind of detached themselves and fell into the pan. (I fished them out and threw them on top of the sandwich, though, so THAT was okay.)

THE FENNEL: So last week, with coriander, I had a feeling that this wasn’t really working – that I didn’t really get a feel for coriander. When I was making this, I got the exact opposite feeling. Sometimes I’m definitely shoehorning the spice of the week into a recipe, and figuring out later whether or not it was a good idea. The day before, Victoria had asked if I wouldn’t mind making lunch for some friends of hers who were coming over for the afternoon. I decided on grilled cheese, wondered if I could fit fennel in somehow, and then realized that fennel would be great in this recipe. And guess what? It was.

After the cheese had gotten a little melty and sticky, I put a healthy-sized pinch of fennel on top of each piece of bread. Well, to be honest, that’s what I did about a third of the time. The other third, I forgot and wound up putting the fennel on after the avocado. I don’t think it really matters much, except it’s easier to judge how much of the (green) fennel is going on the (white) brie rather than the (slightly different green) avocado.

THE AVOCADO: The avocado I was using was not quite as ripe as I would have liked, so while I was cooking up the bread, I also gave the avocado a few minutes to toast up in the butter mixture. I have no idea if “frying in butter” does anything even vaguely chemically similar to ripening, but it definitely made it softer and tastier. Which, if I remember my chemistry, is what happens when you… fry things in butter. So that was a win/win situation.

(How neat! I just read on Internet that you can force-ripen an [unopened] avocado by running it through the dishwasher. That, at once, sounds like it couldn’t possibly work, and sounds like it absolutely should work. This sounds like a job for science!)

Take a slice or two of avocado, and press it down into the cheese, which should be ever so slightly sticky. (It hasn’t had much time to absorb heat, yet.) You now have three choices – you can put avocado on every other slice of bread, and flip them over into sandwiches so that the cheese will stick them together. You can put avocado on every slice of bread, and serve them as open-faced sandwiches. Or, you can put avocado on every slice and still turn them into sandwiches, which means that your sandwich sides will not adhere quite as well. If you’re an avocado fiend like Victoria and I are, you’ll probably choose the third option.

THE SANDWICH: You want to give the second side of the bread about two minutes, total, from the time you flip it to the time you make it into a sandwich. It’s going to take significantly more heat than the first side, so you really don’t want to overdo things.

The thing you’re really looking for is stickiness. You’re going to take your tongs and flip one piece of bread over on to another one. If you haven’t covered every slice in avocado, you can do that pretty easily, but if you HAVE covered every slice in avocado, you want to make sure that the avocado isn’t immediately going to slide off the sandwich. Pick up one slice of bread in your tongs, flip over on to the other side, and press down. The traditional method at this point is to take a small plate, put it on top of the sandwich, and apply a bit of pressure. You want a bit of compression, but not all the cheese squeezed out onto the pan. Give it a minute – less if you smell burning – remove the plate, flip, put the plate back, and give it another minute. Now, put the sandwich on top of the plate, cut in half (if that’s your preference) and serve.

I think that you’ll agree, this is pretty far from your mother’s grilled cheese sandwich. But you know what? It’s simple, it’s delicious, and it’s good gooey fun. Also, for reasons I don’t claim to understand, surprisingly good at impressing the ladies without earning stern looks from one’s wife.

What? What's wrong with that?

Also - I hope I didn't imply that my mom makes anything except the most awesome grilled cheese. Your mom, too, I'm sure. This is just something different.

There's fennel for you

2010-03-15T09:10:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I feel like half of the things I write are just inside jokes that nobody but me is in on. That is not, as the sages say, a good way to rock and roll.

"There's fennel for you, and columbines: there's rue for you; and here's some for me: we may call it herb o' grace o' Sundays..." Ophelia, Hamlet IV:V

Fennel is an anomaly, at least thus far in my education - it is a a plant which we use as an herb, a spice, and a vegetable. Unlike coriander - whose herbal elements are so different from its spice...al.... elements that we call them by different names - fennel is just fennel. The leaves and the seeds don't have identical tastes, but they're variations on a theme rather than different flavor; you can substitute fennel seeds for fennel leaf in the exact same way you cannot substitute coriander for cilantro.

This week, I'm going to be focusing on fennel seeds. To be perfectly honest, my spice store doesn't sell the herbal form of fennel, and I couldn't find any at my local grocery store. I'm going to try to hit Whole Foods this week, and see if they've got it, but I'm not hopeful - I can't even find a place online that sells it. ("Outside of France, it is hard to get the dried fennel greens...") I just placed an order for a whole damn fennel plant - I'm somewhat dubious about what the odds of a plant surviving a trip through the USPS are, but what the hell.

I'm not going to bother with the vegetable form, fennel bulb, because it's, well, a vegetable, not a spice. There is one more form you can get fennel in, as well - fennel pollen, which as far as I can tell is basically a super-potent form of the ground seed, which makes sense. It's pretty expensive - about ten times as expensive as the seed - which also makes sense. And, I don't see any real reason to bother with it, which is the third thing in a row which makes sense. Seriously, what's with things making sense all of a sudden.

Speaking of things making sense, Fennel has an extensive mythological history. Prometheus used the stalk of the fennel plant to carry stolen fire down from Mount Olympus. Why fennel? Well, giant fennel - not the kind we eat - is kind of a natural tiki torch. Its stalks can grow as large as fifteen feet tall, and it burns slowly. In other words, it was something that the ancient Greeks who wrote the myths actually used as torches. Way to spoil the magic, guys.

Dionysos had a staff which was a long, thick fennel stalk tipped with a pine cone. Hur, hur. Subtle, Dion. Grow up.

In Greek, fennel is called "marathon", and the city, the battle, and the subsequent type of foot-race all derive from this plant which used to grown in that area of Greece.

The ancient Egyptians considered fennel to be an aphrodisiac, which probably wasn't too far from the mark. Fennel has a fresh, licorice-like smell and taste; in modern India, people crunch fennel seeds after meals as breath freshener. And anyone will tell you that you're much more likely to get some action with fresh breath than without. Also in modern times, the Hippies use fennel in their toothpastes, but that just goes to show.

In the middle ages, fennel was hung over the door to ward off the devil, and fennel seeds placed in keyholes to keep ghosts from coming through them. Those people were, to be frank, idiots. Honestly, while the ghost thing makes sense - fennel smells really good, and any decent ghost would probably just sit in the keyhole, sniffing the fennel - how is fennel going to keep the devil out? Is he really likely to just take the fennel and go home and cook? Greece is really close to hell - back in those days, Greek heroes came and went all the time - so the devil has a ready source of high-quality fennel. Anyway, everyone knows the devil cooks almost exclusively with various hot sauces of his own infernal devising, and if you want to keep him away, you've got to hang wild garlic, which he can't really get down in hell.

I already mentioned that fennel has a very licorice-y taste. I actually don't like licorice at all, which spins my taste buds into confusion when I taste fennel. I'm pretty sure I really like it, but the fact that it tastes like licorice means that when I'm tasting it, I'm being reminded of something that I don't like. My working theory is that there are parts of the taste I identify as licorice that I like - but those parts are overwhelmingly strong. (Liquorice root itself contains a natural sugar fifty times sweeter than sucrose.) Fennel includes those tastes that I enjoy, but without the cloying taste of liquorice itself. (Or, in the case of twizzlers, the always-wonderful flavors of potassium sorbate and partially hydrogenated soybean oil.)

I've read fennel described as "anise-like" several times in the last few hours, but that's just dumb to me. Anise is a less-used spice than fennel, and a less common taste (at least among people I've met) than licorice... so unless the purpose is pure snobbery, why would you describe it using a term that people are less likely to be familiar with?

Fennel, Liquorice, and Anise - A Taster's Guide

Liquorice, the plant, is most commonly tasted in licorice, the candy - at least the variant we call "black licorice". Which is funny, because red licorice is simply a twisted candy rope, usually with cherry or strawberry flavor, made to look like licorice candy. But it's not actually flavored with any licorice, nor is it supposed to be. So "black licorice" is really just "licorice". And now the word "licorice" has lost all meaning, and I can't even tell if I'm spelling it right any more. I hate that.

Anise is the spice that gives its flavor to Sambuca, as well as Anis/Anisette, Ouzo, Raki, and a whole variety of other horrible, horrible liquors, depending on what country you're currently in. Star anise is an unrelated herb that tastes a lot like anise but is much cheaper, and so is often substituted. (It also has really cool star-shaped pods.)

Fennel is most commonly tasted as the primary spice in sweet Italian sausage.

None of these plants have any particularly close botanical relationship. What they do have in common is the organic compound para methoxy phenyl propene, or anethole, which is the common flavor that links all of them. Anethole is also extremely sweet - thirteen times as sweet as sugar - though not nearly as sweet as glycyrrhizin, the super-sweet sugar in liquorice. Anethole interacts with water oddly; it creates something called a microemulsion. Without making myself sound like an idiot by trying to explain chemistry I don't understand at all, I'll say it the easy way. When you pour a drink containing anethole into water, it clouds up. This is called the "ouzo effect", after the drink that it's most commonly seen in. However, it is also a characteristic of the anise liquors' sexy older cousin, absinthe. Absinthe is primarily flavored with three herbs - wormwood, which everyone knows, but also anise and fennel.

It's been a really long time since I've had absinthe, and I have to say, my reaction to it was pretty much the same as my reaction to sambuca, ouzo, and raki - disgust. However, since it's got fennel in it, I am willing - for your sake, dear reader - to see if my wonderful local liquor store has any of the new breed of absinthes that have been distilled since US law deregulated it a few years ago.

I want to go back to my music metaphor, because I've had one thought in my head the whole time I've been cooking with fennel. I've been comparing spices to instruments, to their roles in a band, but fennel is a person. Specifically, Clyde Stubblefield. I feel like I don't really know enough about either music or spices to make that claim, but there it is. Clyde Stubblefield was James Brown's drummer, and - no disrespect meant to the Godfather of Soul - probably is the hardest working man in show business. You've heard Stubblefield's drums a thousand times, even if you've never actually listened to James Brown, because his beat are considered the epitome of funky drumming (for a good example, see "The Funky Drummer") and he's been sampled more than anyone else on Earth.

Fennel makes me feel like I'm a young DJ, making my first record. I'm a kid, I'm just starting out, and I just heard this awesome drum beat on a CD my older brother gave me. I want to use it in everything - it's just so good, so fresh and unique. I want to share it with everyone - I want to be known as the guy who first understood how awesome this thing is, who first shared it with the world.

Hoo, boy, am I in for some disillusionment. Still, here's the thing about something that good - my record may not be as original or unique as I think, but it's still going to be good. As MC Frontalot says, you can always wring another single out of old Clyde Stubblefield. And over the next few days, I'm going to show you - with breathless excitement - a few recipes that really highlight the flavor and uniqueness of this spice.

Try not to laugh, okay?

Coriander, I Hardly Know Thee

2010-03-14T21:10:00.000-07:00

That's my big take-away from my Week of Living Coriander-ly - I hardly know it. I feel like, with the other spices I've done, I've accomplished my mission - I've gotten a handle on how to use them, and when faced with them in the future, I'll know what they're doing. Actually, that's not the important part. I mean, it's useful to know what cumin is doing in a particular dish, no doubt. But the reason I started this is because it's much, much harder to know when cumin should be in a dish, but isn't. And that's the place that I feel like I'm at, now.

With coriander, not so much. I mean, I like coriander - it's a good spice. The coriander mushrooms were honestly my favorite thus far; the coriander really brings out the natural flavors of the spinach and mushrooms, making them taste more mushroom-y and spinach-y than usual. And the other things I've cooked with it were the same way - the coriander did a good job of enhancing the existing flavors, but I wasn't really sure what the coriander itself was doing.

So I spent part of the day brainstorming - I'm supposed to write about coriander, but I don't have anything to say - not even a lame music metaphor. Then I came up with the brilliant idea that I could talk about grinding spices. I've got coriander seeds, and I've got ground coriander that I made myself, and I've got ground coriander that I bought. The stuff I ground myself is a much coarser grind than the stuff I purchased, and I know that you can get grinders that have coarse or fine grinds, or are variable. It seemed a simple matter to figure out the circumstances in which you would you want a coarse grind, and those where you would use a fine grind.

And you know what? I came up just as blank there as I did with coriander as a whole. Which, to be perfectly frank, pisses me off. I consider myself a fairly apt researcher, and to not be able to find anything - ANYTHING! - about the topic means either the question is so obvious that nobody on the Internet has even bothered to ask it before, or that I am being a total moron and am using the wrong search terms.

Seriously - right now I am so irritated that the is my writing process. Write a sentence, go and try another search. Write a sentence. Try another search.

But... nothing. So, I'm going to speculate for a few seconds, then call it a night.

My best guess is that your approach to spices should be similar to your approach to salt. You use finer salts for situations where you really want it to dissolve easily, where you want a more intense salt flavor, or where you want small bits of salt to stick in nooks and crannies of a dry food. (Such as popcorn.) A seed has a lot of empty space in it; the more finely you grind it, the less air and more spice your final product will have. A tablespoon of coriander seeds will turn into far less once you pull it out of a spice grinder.

Were I grinding coriander for something like chili, I wouldn't mind the rough grind that I used in the soup the other day - the rough grind that had people picking the hulls out of their teeth. However, for that soup, as I said at the time, a finer grind would have done better.

All the same, I feel like there's got to be more to it than that. I'll keep looking, ask about it the next time I'm at the spice store, and keep you posted. Until then, I'm going to get on to fennel; it promises to be a bit more exciting.

Spider-Man Underpants

2010-03-04T01:00:00.000-08:00

I don't have anything coriander-related for today, so here is a cute story.

Victoria and I spent last weekend up at my folks' house. Since Benjamin was born, I've probably seen more of my parents than I have at any point since high school, and it's all win/win; they get to enjoy having their grandkid, and I get to enjoy not having him.

I've heard most of my family's stories about me hundreds of times, but last weekend I got one from my mother that I had never heard before. When I was about two, my folks were settling in to potty train me. As I assume is true for most kids, the actual mechanics were easy - teaching the kid to learn to use a toilet isn't that hard, it's the follow-through that is generally the issue; getting the kid to do it once he knows how.

So, phase one had been completed, and my mom had moved on to the hard part - getting me to change my behavior. As all good parents do, she resorted to bribery. "Aaron, I've got this pair of Spider-Man underpants for you. But these are only for big boys, who use the potty." I looked at the prize she was holding, looked at the bathroom, walked in, used the toilet, and took my Spidey underpants. And that was pretty much it. I wasn't about to lose something that cool over something as silly not using the toilet.

With great power truly does come great responsibility.

What the heck am I going to do if Benjamin turns out to not be a nerd? Will I be able to relate to him at all?

In Which Martha Stewart is Ripped Off

2010-03-03T01:42:00.000-08:00

In Which Martha Stewart is Ripped Off

I have to admit, I have always had a thing for Martha Stewart. (All right, not always. You got me, Clever Dan. But I have for a while now.) What’s not to adore? She’s a former model, an ex-stockbroker, a writer… oh, and she rules the media empire she built with an iron fist. Covered, of course, in a tastefully-embroidered velvet glove that she made herself, all for under ten dollars!

Actually - and I can’t believe I’ve never looked at it this way before – it’s also got to be what she does for a living. She’s a smart, powerful, sexy woman who chooses to spend her days making a perfect home. It’s her choice! What a fantasy! What else could a guy want, other than a woman with all those qualities waiting patiently for him at home, ready to welcome him with scintillating conversation and a perfectly-made crown roast?

(Also, in my experience, women who feel the need to be in that much control of everything around them inevitably need one place in their life where they can lose it. And that once place is inevitably the bedroom.

Which kinda goes along with the whole male fantasy thing, I guess.)

As I said last time, I had settled on salmon as our main dish. This project has definitely made my life easier in at least one way – Googling (for example) “salmon recipes” turns up about twenty times as many hits as “coriander salmon recipes”. I’m not saying “Sure, I read all 300K hits for coriander salmon, but I’d need to be an idiot to look at all 6.5 million for salmon alone.”

Most of the time I spend a lot of time looking - but sometimes, I find a recipe that really just calls out for me to try.

A lot like Martha, herself.

Salmon with honey-coriander glaze

1 tablespoon whole coriander seeds
1/4 cup honey
5 tablespoons soy sauce
2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice
4 salmon fillets (5 ounces each), skinned
2 teaspoons vegetable oil

Directions

1. Toast the coriander seeds in a dry, large nonstick skillet over medium- high heat, stirring constantly, until golden, about 3 minutes. Remove from heat; let cool. Grind seeds in a spice grinder or crush with a mortar and pestle until coarsely ground; reserve skillet.

2. Make glaze: Stir together crushed coriander seeds, honey, soy sauce, and lemon juice in a small bowl until combined.

3. Lightly brush the top of each salmon fillet with glaze; reserve remainder. Heat oil in the nonstick skillet over medium heat until hot but not smoking. Cook salmon fillets, glazed sides down, 1 minute; reduce heat to medium-low, and cook 2 minutes more. Turn fillets over, and cook 3 minutes for medium-rare (salmon will be slightly pink in the middle), or longer if desired. Transfer to a plate; loosely cover with foil to keep warm.

4. Pour remaining glaze into skillet; bring to a boil over medium heat. Cook until glaze has thickened to the consistency of syrup, about 1 minute. Serve salmon with glaze on the side.

It's not the kind of thing I usually cook - I'm not really much of one to make recipes that use words like "glaze". But I really like the simplicity of this recipe.

A few points, and then I'm off for the night -

1. Step one isn't really part of the recipe - it's just how you turn coriander seeds into ground coriander. From what I've been learning, it's also how you turn just about any seeds into ground X. Huh, I should probably dedicate a post to the art of grinding spices.

2. Five tablespoons of soy sauce?!? Five tablespoons! That's more soy sauce than honey. This wasn't a glaze, this was a friggin' SAUCE. I mean, COME ON. If I were cooking this again, I'd drop it down to two - half as much soy as honey - and then add from there if I didn't think the consistency was quite there.

Aside from that, like I said - a really nice, really quick recipe, and the kind of recipe that's impressive without being hard. (If I were inviting a young lady over to my apartment for dinner, I feel that saying that I had made salmon with a honey-coriander glaze would substantially increase my chances for post-dinner appreciation of my cooking skills. Unfortunately, the ten-month old even more substantially reduces those chances. Luckily, my wife is always appreciative... and is not turned off by the fact that I have a kid.)

Time to catch some sleep. Martha, I dream of you.

Tomorrow: I tell an embarrassing but funny story about me that my mom told me this weekend.

Hallelujah Coriander Bean Sprouts

2010-03-01T21:44:00.000-08:00

Living in DC is strange. DC is a square, split up into quadrants, with the capitol building at the center, and I’m five blocks diagonally northeast of the capital. As a result, most of the local restaurants and bars are capitol-adjacent. I’m writing this bellied up to a mostly-empty bar. To my left, a Congressional aide is loudly telling a lobbyist what his boss’s plan is for the health care bill.

That wasn’t really apropos of anything – I’m talkin’ about bean sprouts today.

I bought a piece of salmon for dinner, and I was looking for a side dish. I was thinking maybe pasta or rice – but honestly, I think blog already has two entries that are salmon + spice of the week + rice, so I decided to give it a miss. I had bought bean sprouts at the store that day, and bean sprouts don’t really last that long; in my head I put together coriander and salmon and bean sprouts, and the result was pleasing to my mind’s eye.

So I did what I always did – walked over to the altar, lit some incense, and prostrated myself before the icon of Google. “Oh great lord, I beseech thee – I wish to cook bean sprouts with coriander. Please, instruct me in how such a thing can be done.” I made unto It divers sacrifices – Power, as represented by three batteries, and Information, as represented by a photo I uploaded and then deleted.

I thought at first that my offerings displeased Google. Instead of recipes involving coriander, I got nothing but recipes involving cilantro! But what I have realized since is that Google, in its algorithmic wisdom, was giving me not a petty recipe I could use to feed myself for one meal, but instead knowledge – knowledge of the world around me, knowledge that would help me cook many meals, not only in this world but the one to come.

Google spake to me that night, and in gratitude I now pass along those words to you.

I. Hark well: In Indian cooking, Cilantro is known as Coriander, or Fresh Coriander – the Spice and the Herb have not different Names;
II. Look not for dishes that use Coriander and Bean Sprouts together; they all actually use Cilantro, or are Salads, or Both;
III. In Any Case, None of them are Side Dishes.

When the incense had burned down, I returned to the kitchen, where my wife looked strangely upon me. “Upon your face, a letter glows – the letter G! What does this mean, my husband?”

“I have been visited by Google, and the G is for Wisdom, my wife.”

“Wisdom does not start with a G, husband.”

“Aah, my sweet darling – but Gwisdom does.”

“I… honestly don’t know what to say to that. Truly, the wise can seem as total morons to, well, to just about everyone they meet. Oh, sorry, I mean the gwise. I think I’m just going to pretend you said that wisdom starts with a G in Greek, for my own sanity.

“But my husband – a great hunger is upon this household, and we know not how it shall be ended.”

And in their hunger, I made unto them a new dish. Hallelujah!

200 grams bean sprouts
1 carrot
1 onion
1 green bell pepper
1 clove garlic, minced
2 teaspoons sesame oil
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1 big pinch of sea salt
1 teaspoon ground coriander
1 teaspoon coriander seeds
1 handful of pine nuts

Peel the carrot, and cut it into thin pieces, about the same size as the bean sprouts. (I took a cleaver, cut the carrot into thirds, then took each third and cut it in half crosswise. At that point, I took a small veggie knife and cut each piece into strips lengthwise. The knife would bite into the grain of the carror, and I was able to easily slide the knife the whole way down. Here is what I got . (what I started with is to the right.)

Next, I cut the onion into similar sized strips, which was pretty straightforward. The pepper I decided to make easy – I took my cleaver, lopped off the top and bottom, and put them in a piece of Tupperware to use some other time. Now I just had the cylindrical center part, which was trivial to cut into strips.

I got a frying pan sizzling and tossed in the sesame oil. As soon as the oil had warmed up, I threw in the ground coriander, to get the flavor into the oil as much as possible. Once we’re up to frying temperature, in goes the garlic. Don’t give it time to get lonely - the onion, carrot, and pepper should go in about fifteen or twenty seconds later. Keep it moving – this would be a good dish to do in a wok. I didn’t, because there just didn’t seem to be enough stuff involved to be worth it – if I was doubling the size of the dish, I probably would have. The bean sprouts go in about a minute later, remember to keep everything moving, and finally the pine nuts and the coriander seeds. One more minute, the soy sauce and salt. There should be enough heat still in the pan that the soy sauce goes fwoosh when you put it in. At this point, the bean sprouts should be browning – give the whole thing a few good stirs to mix and combine, and get it onto a plate.

Sometimes, you just roll a twenty. I had spent fifteen minutes looking for a good recipe that involved both bean sprouts and coriander, but I kept running into the terminology problem. There is a high amount of correlation between using bean sprouts in your cuisine and referring to both the seed and leaf of the plant as coriander, it seems. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that – it seems pretty odd to me to call the seeds of the plant and the leaves by different names.) Finally, I just threw up my hands and decided to wing it. After all, I knew what I wanted to do – I was really just looking for a recipe to confirm that it wouldn’t taste awful. But really, it’s not science if you’re just looking to confirm your preconceptions…

I’m sorry I don’t know how much pine nut I used – I had a box sitting in the fridge from making pesto a while back, and I stumbled upon it while I was brainstorming. As for the sea salt, I passed a recipe along the way that used it, and it seemed like an easy way to kick in a bit of flavor. I probably should have tried the Kala Namak… but I have to admit, I’m really wary of accidentally ruining a dish with that strong sulfury smell.

This was a really delicious dish, and it went wonderfully with the salmon - I put together a honey coriander glaze that I found, of all places, on Martha Stewart's web site. I will definitely be making it again.

Tomorrow: Honey Coriander Salmon

Thursday: Martha Stewart Kicks My Ass For Ripping Her Off

Poor, poor Yousef.

2010-03-01T01:00:00.000-08:00

I don’t have a lot of friends.

It’s true! And it’s not something I feel even slightly bad about. There are a lot of reasons for this – I move around a lot. I’m not especially gregarious. And, probably most significantly, I’m kind of an asshole. But, to be honest, I’ve always been okay with that. It would be better if I wasn’t – I’m not trying to turn a vice into a virtue – but in this world, you have to play to your strengths. Some situations call for assholes, and I’m a great person to have around when those situations show up[1]. At least I’m polite to strangers…

I don’t have a lot of friends – but the friends that I do have are a collection of utterly awesome human beings. And I’m lucky enough to live three blocks away from someone who I’ve been friends with for more than twenty years now.

I met Yousef – who I have mentioned before – in high school, and we spent most of the time in between then and now playing games against each other. (I fib, for dramatic effect – technically, we met during junior high, when along with Shahram we agreed to become part of a multi-ethnic terrorist conglomerate. This was back when terrorism was a bit funnier.) Fun fact – at Yousef’s wedding, I tried to give a toast, the general idea being that not only had we been friends so long, but that it looks likely that our children will grow up together, too. Unfortunately, I rolled a critical failure and broke out in tears halfway though.

It is possible, though, that I had imbibed alcohol that night. As we know, strong drink is a mocker - after all, it’s not often that I’m unable to speak my mind.

Actually, the idea that our friendship is so strong that it might outlast us – that it might infect our children, and get passed down through the years – is such a comforting thought that I’m misting up thinking about it right now.

It is possible, though, that I have imbibed some alcohol tonight. After all, it seems a little pathetic and pat to tell you what an asshole I am, then let you in to see my gentle, poetic, sensitive side.

Seems almost manipulative on my part, actually.

So, to protect myself from accusations of being manipulative – because manipulating you, gentle reader, in such a way would sort of be an asshole move - I will say this. Yes, I do have a gentle, poetic, sensitive side. However, I in no way affect an asshole demeanor in order to cover it. I can be an asshole and be sensitive at the same time, without conflict, without one being my true self and the other a persona. My dickishness has Buddha-nature.

Unsurprisingly, Yousef is a frequent visitor at my house, and vice versa. We’re both pretty decent cooks, although our styles are totally different, and totally befitting our personalities. Yousef is studied, methodical; when he wants to do something new, he learns about it, then does it (usually to excellent results). As a result, he’s a spectacular baker; baking, after all, calls for a methodical approach. He makes croissants and bagels; I’ve always considered those to be bakery-only items.

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve probably guessed that’s not the way I roll. I’m a bit more spontaneous, a bit more playful. I’m definitely less reliable, but sometimes my plans are just crazy enough to work. I’m the original series to his Next Generation[2].

So when Victoria and I go over to Yousef and Sarah’s house, we get consistently great meals. When they come over to our place, more often than not they’re getting some experiment that I’m trying and feel like inflicting on people. I’m not saying that I make them bad meals – I mean, they keep coming back – but…

Well, here’s the point. Since I started this blog, I’ve taken the opportunity, when people come over, to make a meal showcasing the spice of the week. Maybe I’ve got some meat dishes that I haven’t had a chance to make because I’m cooking for my vegetarian wife. Maybe I want to try one last thing before the end of the week. Or maybe I’m still short on things to write for the next week so need to force some extra turmeric on people.

The obvious problem with that – in Yousef’s words – is that a meal where every dish focuses on one spice is not necessarily the best put-together meal in the world. Cumin, for example, goes really well with coriander – so rather than a cumin-heavy dish with cumin rice, I could make coriander rice instead, and the tastes would compliment each other nicely. My response, of course, was that I was quite aware of the problem, but I had a hungry blog to feed so he should shut up and eat.

(It’s not really that surprising that I don’t have that many friends. Well, I’m not surprised.)

So when Yousef and Sarah came over, the meal was coriander. Coriander and carrot soup, followed by coriander naan, saag tofu and aloo ghobi. (Aloo ghobi uses coriander, but not a ton. Saag paneer is the same… except, in my recipe, I substituted coriander seeds for mustard seeds. In case someone hadn’t gotten the point.)

Victoria did the aloo ghobi, the saag definitely needed some work, and the naan was nothing spectacular. But the soup – well, look, I’m not going to claim that the soup was perfect. It wasn’t. But unlike the saag – which I’m going to need to cook a few more times before I can figure out what’s going on with it – the soup’s problems were obvious and easily-fixable.

Also, Carrot and Coriander Soup reminds me of the Strong Bad email with Carrot and Kazoo Hill. I don’t know why that is significant, but it is true, and truth is beauty, so at least it’s beautiful.

Carrot and Coriander Soup

1 tablespoon butter or ghee
1 onion, chopped
1 1/2 pounds carrots, peeled and diced
3/4 inch fresh ginger
2 teaspoon coriander seeds
4 cups veggie broth
1/2 teaspoon cumin
Salt to taste

(It makes a lot more sense to measure fresh ginger in inches to me – when I’m cutting a piece off, I have no idea how much whole ginger it will take to make a teaspoon, or whatever.)

In a soup pot, get the fat (butter or ghee) frying and then toss in the onions. Give them a few minutes head start, and toss in the coriander seeds, ginger, cumin, and carrots. Another few minutes, and throw in the veggie broth. Let cook for at least a half an hour. Pour it into a blender, blend it thoroughly, and pour it back into the soup pot. Keep simmering as long as you want; add salt and/or pepper to taste.

Serves 4.

This soup had two major problems, which in all likelihood have the same solution. First, the coriander seeds did not get fully pulverized, and so whole or mostly-whole seeds were turning up in spoonfuls. At the end of Cumin Week, Victoria was feeling sick, and so I whipped up some quick vegetable soup for her. Before I threw anything else in, I toasted some cumin seeds for a bit, and then cooked the soup around them. When it came time to serve, I poured them all in my bowl – correctly assuming that seeds in soup wouldn’t really be her thing. I enjoyed them, though. Still, seeds are not really what people are looking for in soup.

Second, the soup tended to separate kind of like salsa – a spoonful of it would have a watery part and a chunky part. It wasn’t bad at all, but texture-wise it definitely could have been better.

Chances are, both problems can be solved with the same fix – leave it in the blender a bit longer. However, I will admit that I am a bit shaky on the actual mechanics of blending – ie, the extent to which additional blending will combine the pulped carrot and the leftover broth. I mean, it meakes sense that it should work – but I don’t know for sure.

Another thought that I had – which would change the soup significantly, but it’s hard to see a world in which it wouldn’t be for the much better – would be to throw some coconut milk or even heavy cream into the blender along with the rest of the stuff.

Victoria took a crack at the soup few days later. She threw some leftover spicy lentils we had from an Indian restaurant into the blender with the rest, then served the soup with a dollop of yogurt in the middle. (Again, the yogurt is serving as a sour cream substitute, and doing the job quite well.) It was definitely better – I still feel like it wasn’t quite as good as it could have been, though. We’re going to have to try the coconut milk idea some day.

Tomorrow, I roll a twenty.

[1] I had a story I quite like here, about a time when I got to use my powers for good, instead of evil. Problem is, the story made this post huge… and I already have a page of rambling instead of cooking. I’ll keep the Asshole Story around for another day.

[2] Note for people who aren’t nerdly enough nerds to follow my line of thinking – Star Trek: The Next Generation, once it got past its first season, was consistently better than the original series – but it was also much less variable. There were far, far fewer incredibly terrible shows than the original series had, but the cost for that is that there were also fewer incredible shows.

Over time, it certainly did not average out in the original series’ favor – but I am definitely the type of person willing to sit through the more frequent lows, for the rare high point. Thus it is also with cooking.

Blog Update! Mushroom Report! All this and more!

2010-02-21T23:03:00.000-08:00

First, a quick update on the blog - I didn't manage to get anything posted over the weekend, so there's another quick post below this one, with possibly a third to come this afternoon if I remember what it was supposed to be about.

Ideally, I will get two posts written about coriander tomorrow and start week four off on Tuesday. That's what we call "aspirational." If that doesn't happen, I'm not sure what I'm going to do - I will probably throw in some short filler posts, either cumin-related or Batman-related, and then start coriander the Monday after.

I have to admit, the pace I set for myself is more than a bit ambitious. I really like having a solid posting schedule, and being able to have something go up every weekday. However, it seems more than likely that I'll find that I simply can't keep up with it, and I'm going to wind up taking a week off every three or four weeks. I don't particularly like that idea. The big problem I'm running into is this - when I have the weekend free, I can sit down and write most of the week's articles. But when I don't - like last weekend, when I went to visit my parents, then I fall behind very, very quickly. Luckily, having a baby means I don't have much of a life, but still...

So with that on the table, I'll repeat something I said a while ago - I'd love for people to contribute. Now, you wouldn't just have the enjoyment of participating - you'd also be helping me keep the schedule going! Either way, I'm going to try to keep juggling the best I can, and when I need to, I'll take a few days to catch up.

Or play Civilization IV. You know how it is.

Victoria and I tried something different with the mushrooms this week. Now, ideally, every week the mushrooms would use precisely the same recipe, because of SCIENCE. But the problem that I've mentioned before - that the mushrooms come out watery - is a vexing one, so I'm tinkering a bit. The first question that needed answering was where the water actually was coming from. I know that sounds odd - but I had a hard time figuring out if the water was pooling in the mushroom cap, or if it was being squeezed out of the mushroom itself when I bit down into it.

We decided the way to test that would be to put holes in the mushroom caps. Mushrooms are so spongy, though, that any holes would have to be fairly substantial in order to actually let water through - if you just stuck a knife into one (as we did) the hole will essentially close itself back up. So we tried a bunch of different methods on different mushrooms, to see which would be the most effective. In addition to the knife-slit, we did three other things:

1. Used a syringe to punch holes in the mushroom. These holes were also small enough that they pretty much just closed up.

2. Put one big drain-hole in the middle of the mushroom cap. This worked well - the water was unquestionably pooling in the cap, probably squeezed out of the mushroom itself as well as the fillings. The big hole let the water drain out, but it also ruined the structural integrity of the mushroom cap. Nobody wants to eat a floppy mushroom.

3. Put five smaller holes in the cap. Bigger than the syringe holes, smaller than the drain-hole one. To be honest, I have no idea what Victoria used to actually make these holes. This was the best of both worlds - enough space for the water to drain out, but the smaller holes didn't really interfere with my ability to pick up the mushroom and shove it into my mushroom-hole.

Mushroom mushroom mushroom. Mushroom. Okay, that word has lost its meaning.

So, those are preliminary results - we'll keep tinkering. Still got forty-nine trials left; I'm sure we'll get it.

As for the cumin - it was great. The mushroom experiment is a little bland - that's by design - but cumin had the power to make this a worthwhile dish on its own.

One thing I've really noticed is that some things really bring out the piquancy of cumin, while others do a great job of dampening it. (Piquancy is the sense of "hotness" you get from food - I'm going to use piquancy because using the word "spiciness" is pretty confusing in the context of a blog about spices.) I was told recently that lemon juice, for instance, does a great job of cutting the piquancy. Something in the mushrooms or the spinach kept a lid on the hotness; we used a fairly hefty amount of cumin but Victoria was still able to eat them comfortably.

There's still a lot to learn about cumin, to be honest - but I feel like I've made some good headway. Time for some sleep.

Easy Refried Beans

2010-02-21T22:02:00.000-08:00

It’s always good to have a few standards – quick and easy dinners that you can make from stuff that keep in either the freezer or the pantry. Pasta is the easiest example of this – I don’t know anyone who doesn’t keep a few boxes of pasta and a can or of tomato sauce in their house at all times.

One of our favorite standards are burritos. I’ll be honest – I’m not exactly going for authenticity here. I doubt the things that I make and call burritos have any relationship to actual burritos – but like the stuff I talked about in the last post, this is an evolved recipe. I started with an idea, and maybe even a recipe – but after a ton of tinkering, what I cook is nothing like what I started with.

I found the last ingredient this week in cumin. I’ve done middle eastern and a lot of Indian stuff… but cumin is used just as commonly in Mexican food. Again, another perfect example of why I started this project. Before I learned about cumin, I used some ground black pepper and red pepper flake. I never had any problem doing things that way – but now that I’ve used cumin instead, I’m unlikely to go back. The cumin was exactly what I needed to give this a little bit of oomph.

This isn’t the kind of thing I’d serve company, but Victoria and I probably wind up eating this once every week or two, because we’re too tired to do any serious cooking.

Quick Refried Beans

1 Onion, small, finely chopped
1/4 – 1/3 pound raw shrimp (51-60 count), peeled and cut into thirds
2 cloves garlic, minced
1.5 teaspoons ground cumin
1 15 ounce can each black beans and vegetarian refried beans
1 half-avocado, cut into small cubes
1 half-handful of yellow cheese – cheddar, Monterey jack, whatever.
1 tablespoon cooking oil
1 pinch kosher salt

This recipe is piscetarian – suitable for people who don’t eat red meat or poultry, but do eat fish. If you want to make it vegetarian, or kosher, just remove the shrimp. Luckily for me, my wife thinks that shrimp are vegetables.

Put a small amount of your favorite type of oil in a pot on high heat. Toss in the shrimp, onion, garlic, and cumin, and let that cook for two or three minutes. When the onions look like they’re getting done, throw in the black beans, including about a third of the liquid from the can. When the beans start simmering, which should be fairly soon, throw in the refried beans. They’ll start out as a gloopy mass, but as they get heat they’ll soften up and start to mix with the other stuff. Just keep stirring them until the mass blends. When it does, turn the heat down, toss in the avocado, cheese, and the pinch of salt, and keep stirring.

The cheese will add some flavor gooeyness to the beans, but should more or less disappear entirely once it gets stirred in. Once the ingredients are fully mixed, you’re pretty much done – you can simmer it for a bit longer, just turn the heat way down so you don’t burn anything. If you go too long, you’ll get a lot of drying on the bottom and a crust on top. Not bad, just not ideal. The whole process, from the time the oil is hot to the time you’re ready to serve, should take about ten minutes. Prep shouldn’t take you more than about ten minutes, either.

Serve on tortilla shells or as taco filling, along with whatever you would normally do in those situations – spinach or lettuce, salsa, extra cheese, chopped tomato, cucumber, cilantro… two quick tips, though.

First, from Yousef – many people would put sour cream on something like this. Try Greek yogurt instead – it is healthier and (in my opinion, after Yousef served it instead of sour cream with fajitas a few weeks ago) at least as tasty, if not more so.

Second, from my mom – it is so odd to me that many people don’t seem to know this trick. I’ve heard a lot of people say that they don’t like making tacos, because the taco shell is always so brittle – the crunch is good but the whole thing just falls apart. What you need to do is this – stuff the taco shells with the filling, be it meat or beans, before they go into the oven. The shells will soften where the filling touches it – so you get a wonderful crispy crunchy outer shell edge, but a soft middle part that doesn’t break into pieces. Also, you can put the cheese on top of the filling, and then it melts in the oven. So delicious.

Hummus-Fried Chicken and Mushrooms, Jeera Rice

2010-02-19T01:00:00.000-08:00

Convergent evolution. Funny stuff.

I like to cook eggs. Eggs are among the first things I really learned to cook well, and I definitely did it the hard way. (Remind me to tell you the story of the first time I cooked eggs, sometime.) I spent years learning how to make a good omelet - cooking, figuring out what went wrong, refining, practicing the flip, adjusting the batter, adjusting the pan. And when I was done - when I felt like I could make a great omelet every single time, regardless of circumstances, available ingredients (within reason) or anything else, someone pointed something out to me that caught me by surprise.

What I had developed wasn't an omelet at all; it was almost exactly, in fact, like an Italian frittata. Which is, admittedly, just an Italian omelet - but comes out a lot more like a crustless quiche than like a French omelet. Seems like somewhere along the line, someone else had done the same thing that I had, and had refined and perfected until they got something that was not really what they were reaching for at all. Not to be bold, but I think it's a heck of a lot better, to be honest. Actually, that shouldn't be surprising. After all, what I was doing was refining the recipe so that it fit my taste better and better; of course I think the end result tastes awesome.

When I was in Israel, I was sitting around my tiny, tiny kitchen one day thinking about what I might want to eat for dinner. I had half a plate of hummus left, as well as some chicken breasts. Feeling adventurous, I coated the chicken in the leftover hummus (well-mixed with the paprika and olive oil by now - you DID read my last post, right?) and fried it up. It tasted great, and I wound up making it fairly often.

Cut forward a year or two. I'm in law school, and a local diner - Sam's Cafe, a wonderful little greasy spoon on Walnut Street in Champaign, IL - decides to start doing a Lebanese menu on Friday evenings. The owners are both Lebanese, and they've been feeling a bit homesick. As for me, I've been feeling a bit home-away-from-homesick, and since all the good food in Israel is either Lebanese or cooked by one of my aunts, a Lebanese diner sounded right on the money.

It was a small menu - they only had four or five dishes, which is understandable, considering that they were just starting to do the Lebanese thing; I wouldn't want to stock up to do middle eastern cooking in the middle west. In fact, that first evening, there were only about three group that showed up in the entire two hours my friends and I were there. (Gratifyingly, word of mouth spread - less than a month later, the place was packed on Friday evening. Six months after that, it was a normal evening crowd. So that worked out okay.) I ordered a chicken dish I vaguely remembered having before, called Shish Taouk. (To be perfectly honest, what I was really looking forward to was being able to take the hummus, fries, and whatever else I ordered as a main dish, wrap them all up together in a pita, and eat it that way.)

(Shawarma is pretty much the best food in the world. It's kind of like a Greek gyro, in the same way that a Kobe steak is kind of like a Big Mac. You can generally get them one of two ways - stuffed into the pocket of a pita, or in a laffa - a larger piece of flatbread without an empty space in the middle. I desperately miss it.

Seriously - this was something I would eat six or seven times a week in Israel. For four bucks, I could get a full meal - including a ton of vegetables - wrapped in an amazingly delicious piece of bread, and walk down the street eating it.

Man, my next blog should be "the year of eating nothing but shawarma.

I have no idea why it's been so difficult for me to actually talk about cumin this week. I mean, I really like it! It's a delicious spice! I think I made a strategic mistake in cooking hummus first - that mistake being that I forgot how totally nuts I am for middle eastern food.

DAMN I miss shawarma!)

...called Shish Taouk. I knew that I'd had it before, and that I had really liked it, but couldn't remember when. When it finally arrived, I bit into it... And tasted my hummus-fried chicken. Apparently, twice in my life now I've made up on my own, dishes that already have a long history.

The joke was on me, of course, because although they taste similar, Shish Taouk is actually nothing like the chicken dish that I make. They taste similar, and use many of the same flavors, but shish taouk is missing both hummus and tahini, two things that many people might consider fairly important to the whole hummus ambiance.

I have no idea what this story was supposed to be about.

So, anyway - I had some hummus. I had some chicken. I also had some mushrooms. I made some hummus-fried chicken, as well as some hummus-fried portobello.

HUMMUS-FRIED STUFF

Ingredients:

One pound of chicken breasts
Two good-sized portobello caps
One cup of hummus (Recipe in previous post)
One half teaspoon cumin
A pinch of salt and pepper
Lemon juice
Oil - olive or sesame

This is a really simple deal here. First, turn the hummus into a marinade. That involves making it slightly more acidic, and amping up the primary flavors a bit. So, mix in the extra cumin, salt, and pepper, and hit it with the lemon juice. How much? Damned if I know. I've been trying to be better about measuring things, but I totally forgot. Also, I was using squirt-bottle lemon juice rather than fresh lemon juice, so I just kept adding it until it was the consistency I wanted. To put it differently - keep adding lemon juice until the hummus loosens up a bit - you want to be able to smoothly spread it on the chicken, but it shouldn't be runny.

I cooked the chicken breasts whole, but you could also slice or cube the chicken. The mushrooms should be sliced think. Coat everything liberally in the hummus mixture, and let it sit for a half hour or more. (really, for as long as you have the forethought to have given yourself.) (Work through that sentence again, slowly - it'll make sense.) Warm up the oil and toss in the food. (You'll probably have to do it in two batches, if you made all the stuff I listed above.

You want the oil to be medium-high. You're playing a dangerous game here; you need to get it hot enough to turn the hummus into a crust, but if you let it get too hot, the hummus will burn, bind to itself and the pan, and pull right off when you go to remove your food. (Using tongs is a good idea.) If you're cooking chicken breasts, it may be a good idea at this point to go back in time and cube the chicken - it will definitely be easier to control the heat and not overcook things with cubes rather than whole breasts.

Your mileage may vary, depending on the thickness of your cut of chicken, but I find about five minutes, flip, then another five does the job. (You could also start in a frying pan, then switch to the oven - but you'll probably wind up with soggier chicken than you'd prefer.) The mushrooms get basically the exact same treatment, except less time per side - two minutes should do fine.

Serve over rice. In my case, I served it over the following:

JEERA RICE

This is an Indian rice recipe, using cumin seeds. You can find many different variations on it, all over the internet. It's an interesting variant on fried rice; instead of taking already cooked rice and frying it, you take rice that's about 3/4 cooked and fry it for a few minutes to add some flavor before finishing cooking it.

In one pot, start a cup of basmati rice goin'. When it's almost done - soft, but still hard in the middle - drain out the water. Get some oil (or ghee - and sorry if you don't know ghee, I don't know enough about it to explain) cookin', and toss in a small chopped onion. When it gets lonely, throw in two teaspoons of cumin seeds to keep it company. After about two minutes, your nose should be telling you that cumin is delicious - when this happens, dump the rice in and give the whole mixture a minute to get acquainted. Once you feel like the rice has gotten some oil, cumin, and onion all up in its business, rain on the party - a half cup of water, cover, and simmer till the rice is complete. Serve it with the hummus-fried chicken.

Yousef, at this point in the dinner, made a really smart point - you could do some really nice harmonies, with (let's say) coriander rice going under the heavily cumin'd chicken. As it is, the main flavors in the rice and the chicken went smoothly together, which is definitely one way to do things. There are others.

Tomorrow - I've been looking so long at these pictures of cumin that I almost believe that they're real. Also, a quick recipe, the weekly mushroom report, and black cumin.

(He was my favorite cooking-related superhero in the turbulent 70s.)

delayed a bit today

2010-02-18T01:06:00.001-08:00

~~Come back at about 1. It seems I've eaten through the week I took off.~~

Hectic day. I'll have a post up normal time tomorrow, then finish off Cumin on Saturday.

Five Digressions on Hummus (#s 3-5)

2010-02-17T01:00:00.000-08:00

Here are the remaining three parts of my post about hummus. Cumin is actually mentioned in this one.

SNOBBERY

I’m going to come clean - I am a total hummus snob. It makes it hard to talk about the food with any objectivity.

The thing is, in Israel, hummus is an obsession – more popular, I am told, than in Lebanon, where it originated. It has been suggested that this is because when Jewish settlers first came to Israel, they were eager to embrace their new home, including its food. My Israeli cousins are a perfect example.

I have a large family in Israel which emigrated from the republic of Georgia in the early 70s. My cousins are split down the middle – some of them are Israeli, some of them are Georgian. This has nothing to do with age or place of birth; the two oldest, Yossi and David, are both very Israeli, while the youngest, my cousin Leah, is far more Georgian. Admittedly, this is a small sample set – seven data points – but in my experience hummus consumption tracks strongly with Israeli identification. I’m not saying that some of my cousins don’t consider themselves Israeli – I’m just saying that some of them act more like Israelis, some more like Georgians. This is made more complicated by the fact that, as a country, Israel is barely sixty years old… what does it even mean to be Israeli when almost everyone is an immigrant? Our grandfather – my father’s father – was born in Israel, before his family returned to their native Georgia. A grandfather born in Israel – if there were an Israeli DAR, I would be in it. My point is, I come by hummus snobbery, if not honestly, at least arguably morally.

Snobbery. Sometimes it’s worth it, sometimes it’s not. It’s worth being a wine snob; there's just not enough difference for it to be worth being a gin snob. (Although I’m sure that there are gin people out there who are gasping in horror right now.)[1] It’s worth being a bagel snob – there is nothing I hate more in life than biting into what was advertised as a bagel but in fact turns out to merely be toroidal bread. On the other hand, Yousef recently bought a bunch of “high-end” milk from a frou-frou local creamery; nobody really felt like there was a significant difference, and some people liked the regular milk better. So what's the point? Why be a milk snob?

Hummus? Dear lord. The best hummus is sublime. The worst hummus tastes like chickpea dog food. This mostly happens when you buy store-bought hummus in the US. Athenos – I’m looking at you. Tribe of Two Sheiks is edible, but not particularly good. Sabra is the only major brand that I’ve ever felt was decent, but you pay quite a premium for it. (Sabra also sells prepackaged hummus in Israel – it’s both tastier and cheaper over there.)

If you want top-quality hummus, what you’re looking for is a restaurant run by a slightly older, slightly plump Lebanese or Turkish lady. The thicker the accent the better. Even better, a grocery store that makes its own hummus – but again, ownership is critical. If you don’t see that Lebanese lady – past her prime, but still quite handsome – behind the counter, reconsider your situation. If instead there is a hippy behind the counter? RUN. HIPPIES MAKE SHITTY HUMMUS. I’m sure there are exceptions – my friend Meg is a great cook, and I know she makes hummus – but I stand by that rule. It will get under-blended, because they think chickpea chunks are more "authentic", and you just know they're gonna put patchouli oil or some shit like that in it.

DO NOT LET HIPPIES MAKE YOUR HUMMUS.

What foods are you snobby about?

RECIPE

Victoria told me that her friend Mog had a great recipe for hummus with cumin in it. That sounded great – just like what I wanted to make. Only three problems. Mog wasn’t available, Victoria didn’t have the recipe, and every time I’ve tried to make hummus on my own it’s come out as the previously-mentioned chickpea dog food.

I think I should subtitle this blog Telling you how to cook then doing the exact opposite. Two days after I write up a post about not sweating recipes, I spend half a week following recipes exactly; a few days ago I wrote about how useless cookbooks are. So what was the first thing I did when I wanted some hummus? I whipped out my Syrian and Lebanese cookbook.

Oh, by the way, this is the picture from the back of the cookbook:

That is just about the youngest and thinnest a hypothetical Lebanese lady should be in order for you to trust her to make hummus.

Unfortunately, the recipe in the cookbook didn’t really do it for me. I mean, it sounded great – but it used dried chickpeas, which take forever to cook, and it used pomegranate seeds, which are absolutely delicious but which I didn’t have. So, I went with plan A – I looked up a few additional recipes, and wung it.

Cumin Hummus

2 Cans (15 oz) Chickpeas (Hummus, Chickpeas, Garbanzo Beans – all the same thing)
½ Cup… Okay, Let’s Call It Tahini, Because That’s What It’ll Be Called In The Store
3 Tbsp Olive Oil
1 ½ Tsp. Salt
Pepper (Some)
1.5 Tbsp Cumin
Garlic (As Much As You Can Stand, That Stuff Is Good)
Juice of One Half Lemon

Open the cans, and drain most of the liquid from them. Pour them, the garlic, tahini, olive oil, and lemon juice into a blender. Blend until mostly smooth. Add in the salt, pepper, and cumin. Blend until seriously just barely not smooth yet. Taste – if delicious, finish blending and serve. If not quite there, add garlic, salt, pepper, lemon, cumin, or any combination until you are satisfied.

I used two teaspoons of cumin, and to be honest, it was probably too much. I liked it a lot, but several people reported it as at the far edge of their spiciness tolerance – any more and it would cease to be enjoyable. So, for this recipe, I dialed it back a bit. Also, I used some water to loosen things up – but why use water when the cans of chick peas already have liquid? If you feel that your hummus is a bit thick, you can always add a bit of water to loosen it up a bit, but it’s a lot harder to go in the other direction, so err on the side of less water.

PLATING

This is how hummus should look when it is served:

Look - you can see the dried bits from the previous plate, which I ate before Victoria could get the camera.

That, maybe your hummus shouldn't look like so much.

Unless you’ve got some damn good reason for it, there is no excuse for your hummus not to look like this. This is, objectively, the right way to do things. It doesn’t matter where you got your hummus; from a restaurant, from a store, from a Turkish grandma who runs a shady back-alley hummus operation. When you get it home, before you eat it, and certainly before you serve it to other human beings, you do the following things:

1: Get out a big spoon and a plate. Spoon the appropriate amount of hummus into a pile in the center of the plate, then smooth it flat using circular motions. When you’re just about done, push a bit harder in the center of the plate (while still moving your spoon in circles) to make a dent in the center of the hummus.

2. Take some paprika and dust the hummus to taste. Note – I’m giving you some leeway here. Don’t abuse it. In either direction.

3. Pour some olive oil into the well in the center. Pour carefully – you want a glistening golden yolk to your middle eastern egg, not a runny oily mess all over your hummus. If you didn’t make your dent properly, the oil will spread out everywhere. Throw it out. Throw it all out. Just toss the plate in the garbage. The spoon, too. You don’t deserve hummus. This is why she left you.

4. Assuming you are not weeping on the floor over the ruin you have made of your life, you’re done! Feel free to garnish with parsley, olives, or pickles (the tiny Mediterranean variety.) Chances are you’re now about to ruin a perfect hummus plate with absolutely terrible pita, but that’s not your fault. You can’t get good pita in this country for love or money. Trust me, I’ve tried both.

Okay, I just looked at that picture again… I was a bit wrong. Apparently, Victoria didn’t get to the camera before I got to the pita... so that is what a plate of hummus should look, after some inconsiderate asshole has taken a piece of pita and swiped it straight through the middle spilling olive oil all over the place and ruining the visual.

Tomorrow – I’ve got all this hummus! I’m going to make one of my favorite dishes – hummus-fried chicken.

[1] I'm also not saying that there's no difference between a $10 bottle of gin and a $30 bottle of gin. I'm sure there is. You know what? Let me switch to vodka, a drink where I'm on better grounds. A $10 bottle of vodka tastes like absolute shit. It burns your mouth and throat (and not in a good way, either) and gives you a headache. But once you get to the "decent vodka" level... look, I am a vodka snob. I have a stated preference for Stolichnaya (the black labeled one) over Grey Goose, or Level 1, or any of the other premium vodkas I've tasted. I have, in fact, turned up my nose at other premium vodkas over my preferred brand. That's stupid snobbery right there. Sure, I prefer one, but let's be honest. They're all either [delicious] or [paint-thinner] depending on whether or not you like vodka. Not worth snobbery.

Scotch, on the other hand? My word. Just at the $30 price point, you have scotches as different as Laphroaig and Glennfiddich. While they're both fine drinks, it's entirely possible to love one and hate the other, and if you're not at least a little snobby, you're not going to know the difference until you get a mouthful of the Laphroaig, do a spit-take, and say "My god! Did the distillery burn down while they were making that scotch?"

By the way, while I'm writing this, I'm drinking a lovely 12-year called Driftwood which my wife bought for me on the recommendation of the excellent staff of the local liquor store. Shout-out to Schneider's of Capitol Hill.

Five Digressions on Hummus (#s 1 and 2)

2010-02-16T01:00:00.000-08:00

So, I made some hummus. It was really good. It had a bunch of cumin in it. I wrote a blog post about this hummus.

This post has two problems: first, it is too long for one blog post, but not quite long enough for two. Not only that, but it doesn't split up particularly well. Oh well; such is life. Second, it's all about hummus. This week isn't about hummus, it's about cumin. I mean, the hummus I will wind up giving a recipe for - tomorrow - has a lot of cumin in it, but I'm going to come clean with you - I'm not saying word one about cumin today.

Since I've already gotten that out in the open, I think I'm going to shortchange you today, and give two fifths of the post today, and the rest tomorrow. I present: two short digressions on hummus.

HOW TO PRONOUNCE THE WORD HUMMUS

A guide for the perplexed, with a prologue on spelling

Since we had so much fun talking about pronunciation yesterday

Hummus is an Arabic word. It uses sounds which do not exist in English, and for which English has no proper way to spell. As a result, there is no canonical way to spell it. I’m going to choose hummus out of convenience, but humus, hoummous, humos, hoummos, hoummus, or haminababilazeebalaboubilahaminababilazeebalabop are all equally valid. Ḥummous – the H with a dot under it – seems to be the best option to my ear, assuming you’re willing to go with extended character sets. As for how to say that word…

CHOO-MOOSE. And that’s not choo, as in choo-choo train, neither – that’s the Arabic/Hebrew CHHH, or Ḥ - the guttural sound that leads off channukah. It comes entirely from the back of the throat, without requiring the lips or throat.

CHOO-MOOSE. I will never forget that. Once, while I was living in Israel, a waitress in a Lebanese restaurant I was eating in decided that she had had it up to here with these idiot Americans who didn’t even bother to learn how to pronounce words. I asked for “chuh-miss”, and was rewarded with a blank stare. I had no idea how to react – it’s practically the national dish, it would be like a waitress not knowing what you were talking about if you asked for ketchup. Chuh-miss, I repeated, assuming she had misheard me. “What?” “Chuh-miss! For, you know, pita! Chuh-miss!” My Hebrew is terrible… but this was not exactly something which required advanced communication skills. I ordered hummus almost every day. “Aah!” she said, giving me a smile, triumphant and cutting. “Choo-moose! You mean choo-moose.” “Yes?” I said, suddenly unsure of myself. Her eyes were as nasty as her smile, and were clearly indicating that she had beaten me in some way. I really had no idea what that way was. I just wanted some hummus. “It’s not ‘huh-meees’. It’s CHOO-MOOSE.”

“CHOO-MOOSE!” At this point I realized that I was trapped in a private war, a war that thousands of tourists had started with this woman – and one that she fully intended not just to finish, but to win. The thing is, I was really, really hungry, and fairly confused. So I meekly apologized, eyes low, for my terrible Hebrew, and I thanked her for correcting me. Magnanimous in victory, she walked away, head held as high as any soldier returning from the front. She was back quickly – it is proper to treat a defeated foe with respect – with a plate of perfectly-prepared hummus, and some deliciously fluffy pita. If this was surrender, I decided, I could manage to give up more often.

MYSTIQUE

Have you ever noticed how translating the names of a lot of foreign foods to English totally ruins the mystique? Pita is Greek for bread. That’s it. Just bread. So stop asking for pita bread. When you order maki sushi, you're ordering... rolled sushi. What a surprise. My favorite Thai soup – Thom Kha Gai – is, if I remember correctly, “Coconut milk soup with chicken.” And I’m not even going to start on café con leche.

Well, I hate to be a mystique-ruiner, but hummus simply means chickpeas. That’s it. In fact “hummus” isn’t, technically, even the name of the dish – it’s ḥummus bi taḥina, (On the other hand, tahina – that’s “ta-ḤEE-nah”, with the CHHHH sound, not “ta-hee-knee”, pale face – is from a word meaning “to grind”, so I guess that’s okay.) The taḥina – the sesame paste that binds the dish together – is every bit as important as the chickpeas are to the dish. Still, we call the dish hummus, mostly for the same reason that we don’t call Linux GNU/Linux.[1]

I honestly don't know what I expected. I mean, Chinese restaurants have all these lovely poetic names like Dragon and Phoenix Soup, or Ants Climbing on Trees, or even General Tso's Chicken. So you expect Moo Goo Gai Pan to be something slightly less prosaic than "sliced chicken and button mushrooms." I'm not saying that expecting anything but that is even slightly realistic - after all, how many restaurants offer dishes with names like "Washington DC On A Spring Day"? No, they offer things that people can understand - sauteed shrimp in garlic sauce.

I guess all I'm saying is, don't ever try to translate the names of foreign dishes. I like the mystique - but I'm also incredibly curious, and it's sad to see that curiosity lead to bad ends so often. For every imported food word like penne ("quill"), there are ten like croissant. If you never find out what it means, there's never anything there to disappoint you.

Tomorrow - Digressions Three, Four, and Five

[1] For those of you who are not the particular type of geek to know what I’m talking about… Linux is an operating system – a competitor to Windows or Mac OSX. It’s also open source, which means unlike those two operating systems, the underlying source code (the instructions that tell the computer how to make everything work) is available for anyone to look at and make their own version of, if they like. Linux itself is the “kernel” – the central part of the operating system. If an operating system were a car, the kernel would be the engine.

There are those who would argue – quite loudly – that while the engine is the most important part of a car, it doesn’t constitute a car in and of itself. It was (in their opinions) the addition of the GNU tools – a set of basic software that extends the operating system’s functionality – that made Linux a fully-fledged operating system, as opposed to simply a powerful but ultimately useless engine. They therefore believe that Linux should properly be referred to as GNU/Linux, and they make this point as loudly and as frequently as possible.

Here’s the problem – when everyone else in the world calls something by a simple name, and you insist that it be called by a more complex name which is, despite being technically correct, confusing to everyone else, you are an asshole. Luckily, the world of food, as far as I can tell, isn’t populated by the same sort of socially retarded nerds that comprise the world of Linux. As a result, I’ve never heard anyone make a fuss that hummus should actually be called hummus bi tahini. It’s just what you do – when you ask for a sandwich on “whole wheat” you don’t expect the sandwich to come on unground kernels of wheat. You expect that people will serve you bread. And when you ask for hummus, nobody is ever going to think you’re asking for a plate of chickpeas.

Now you know. And knowing is half the battle. Also, this rant is much more about the GNU/Linux types… and that fight mostly ended about five years ago. I’m really not sure why I’m ranting about it today.

I hope that it’s because it is a charming thing to do?

Week 3 is icumin in

2010-02-14T22:35:00.000-08:00

The title to this post is a punne, or a play on words. It takes advantage of the fact that the first line of a traditional English ballad, in Middle English, starts out with the line "Sumer is icumin in", or "Summer is a-comin' in". However, the word icumin looks and sounds a lot like the spice that I'm working on for Week Three - cumin. Hence the joke. Funny, no?

I haven't magically solved my description problems in the last few weeks. Cumin, like turmeric, is delicious and complex. At least it's not earthy.I'm going to give it my best.

Cumin is mildly spicy – enough so’s you’d notice, not enough to send anyone running to stick their head in the water butt. It’s a little bit bitter, a little bit sweet. A little bit country, a little bit rock and roll…

Actually, I like the music analogy that I used in the final Turmeric entry better than I like having to try to describe the taste itself. My vocabulary about music isn't exactly master-level, but it’s a whole hell of a lot more developed than my vocabulary about tastes and smells. I really have no idea which is more helpful - the description above, or the one below.

I’ve really enjoyed getting to learn to cook with cumin. If turmeric is the bass, cumin is the lead guitar. You’re always going to be hearing it – it never fades totally into the background, the way a bass can. It can be a solid, dependable rhythm, content to be support while someone else is showing off. But like a guitar, what cumin really wants to do is wail. Give it half a chance, and cumin is doing a power solo on everyone’s taste buds. Sometimes that’s exactly what you want – to let the whole arena fall into a hushed silence while cumin just shreds.

It blends perfectly well with other spices, if you’re careful to keep all that power on a leash – and that’s not always easy. You can’t leash a tiger, baby!

A Brief Digression on Pronunciation:

I’ve been pronouncing the name of this spice as COO-min all week. People have been correcting me to Q-min all week. So, I decided to look it up… and the authorities are mixed, to say the least. Any of the following seems to be equally valid, with none particularly favored by dictionary sites:

COME-in

Q-min

COO-min

(I checked Dictionary.com, which is based on American Heritage and Webster’s, and Merriam Webster online. The OED, really the only dictionary that counts, does not make an online edition available for free, and I’m not somewhere I have access to one.) Among non-dictionary sources – IE, various forum threads where someone asks “hey, how do you pronounce cumin?” - Q-min seems to be the most favored, followed closely by coo-min with come-in as a distant third. Historically, it’s a fairly slutty word – it’s an English word, sure, but before that it went from Arabic to Greek to Latin to Spanish then again to Arabic, back to Spanish then French and finally English. That’s without even unsealing its juvenile record, which supposedly goes all the way back to Sumerian. So, depending on various little foibles of your own particular branch of English, any of the three is probably equally valid.

However you pronounce it, Cumin is an incredibly popular spice. Various unsourced statements on Internet claim that it’s the second most popular spice in the world. (Behind pepper, of course; remember, salt is not technically a spice.) I don’t know about that, but its morals are just as loose culinarily as they are linguistically. It shows up in the foods of western Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, and Central and South America, as well as in Mexican and Tex-Mex. The French use it in some breads, in South Asia it shows up in teas, and the Dutch put it not only in cheese but in liqueurs as well.

In general, there is only one choice you’re going to have to make when dealing with cumin – do you buy it whole, or do you buy it preground? There are two main reasons for that. First, while there are three types of cumin sold – amber, white, and black – amber and white are not particularly different, and black cumin isn’t really cumin, but a different type of plant entirely. There are some geographic differences between various types of cumin – we use Indian cumin almost exclusively in this country. I am led to believe that the other form of cumin does have a highly distinctive taste and much higher oil content. I would be happy to try out the differences for myself… but unfortunately, the world’s other leading cumin center happens to be Iran, a country that the US doesn’t do a whole lot of trade with.

We haven’t talked a whole lot about spice purchasing and storage, thus far, partly because I’ve been racing to keep up with the blog and partly because the subject just hasn’t come up. However, now is a great time to start having that conversation. If you go all the way back here you’ll find that the definition of a spice is some non-leafy part of a plant that contains volatile, flavorful essential oils. In the case of cumin, that non-leafy part is the berry of a parsley-like plant. (People generally refer to whole cumin berries as cumin seeds, which is not technically correct, but they look at you funny when you point out that they’re technically wrong. Ingrates.)

For now, I’m going to focus on one word out of the phrase “Volatile, flavorful essential oils” – volatile. In all spices, by definition, the oils bearing the flavor and aroma of the plant has a tendency to vaporize. Poof. Which means what you’re left with, after a fairly short amount of time, is a bunch of powder that doesn’t really add much at all to a dish. I’m sure all of us have that jar of cinnamon that has been sitting in the back of the cabinet since 1994 and pretty much tastes like sawdust by now. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. The rule of thumb is that whole (unground) spices have an ideal shelf life of about two years, and ground spices about six months.

This leads us to two conclusions. First, it is better to buy spices in smaller quantities; second, that it’s better to buy spices whole. Until I started this project, I was always a big fan of buying spices in bulk – it’s cheaper, and it means I have to go to the supermarket less frequently. The problem is, of course, by the time you get to the bottom of that pound of cinnamon, you’re just adding sawdust to your oatmeal. It’s worth the time and effort to find a local spice market and buy your spices by the ounce – or, to do so over the internet. You gain two things – first, control over how much you’re buying and second, a better idea of how fresh everything is.

Now, this leads to problems of its own – storage, as well as extra effort. The amount of effort you want to put in to getting high-quality ingredients is up to you; I mean, let’s be honest here. We’re not talking about the difference between an awful dish and an amazing one; we’re talking about a minor difference. Sure, stale cumin may taste terrible compared to fresh cumin, but once that teaspoon of cumin is spread out among a dish that serves four, we’re talking about a difference between pretty good and great, not bad and great. Now, if you’re talking about a dish that really includes only one spice, or a spice that you’re adding directly into something, freshness may well be the difference between bad and good. If you’ve got a specialty spice merchant that’s easy for you to get to – or at least easy enough to visit once every few months – I highly suggest buying there, rather than the supermarket. If that’s not the case, most people get along fine buying McCormick’s spices.

As far as storage goes, that’s something I intend to talk about at length at a later date.

Back to the second conclusion - that it’s better to buy whole spices than it is to buy ground. They last longer – hopefully the reason why is obvious – and many whole spices have uses of their own; for example, whole cumin seeds are an ingredient in many dishes. And, of course, you can grind most whole spices yourself. (This doesn’t apply to everything – plenty of spices need to be dried and powdered rather than merely ground; onion, garlic, ginger, and turmeric off the top of my head aren’t really something you turn from the whole form to the ground form on your own.) Alton’s suggestion is to keep a small coffee grinder handy to use on spices; Victoria and I own a mortar and pestle, which we occasionally use, but most of the time the coffee grinder produces better results, faster, and with much less effort on our part.

So, ideally, we’re going to work with cumin seeds (berries) that were picked sometime within the last two years, and grind them as necessary. Nota bene - cumin seeds should ideally be roasted before they’re ground to reach full potency. Before you shove them in the coffee grinder, warm up a frying pan to medium heat, and give the cumin seeds 3-4 minutes, stirring constantly. You’ll know when they’re ready because the color darkens and an aroma of cumin wafts. Let them cool down, and only then grind them. NOW we’ve got perfect freshly-ground cumin. (Again – it’s not that you’re going to get crappy, terrible cumin and ruin your food if you just chuck it into the grinder… but it’ll be better if you go through the extra effort. Cook up whatever you think you’ll need for the next three months or so at once, then store the rest.)

Any questions? If not, join me next time, as we make some really, really delicious hummus.

Turmeric Wrap

2010-02-12T01:00:00.000-08:00

Actually, I'm not making a wrap - I'm drawing Week Turmeric to a close. I never did a generic “This is your turmeric” entry, so I’ll use this one as a place to share some things about turmeric that have been wandering around my head.

1: What is turmeric, anyway?

One thing I really need to do - and please feel free to send me suggestions - is come up with a standard list of background questions on each spice that I can go over. I'm not talking all the history stuff; I'm talking the practical things, like whether there are different forms you can get the spice in, and where you might have to go to get it. The kind of thing I did extensively for salt... and honestly, burned myself out a little bit on.

Luckily for me, turmeric is a bit boring in that regard. Turmeric is a rhizome - the horizontal underground stem of a plant which sending shoots upwards and roots downward. If you've ever seen whole ginger root, it's basically the same thing, except turmeric is less fractal and more orange.

Technically, turmeric does have different variations - but most of us will never have any use for anything except turmeric powder. There is also white turmeric, which is used in some parts of southeast Asia - but it doesn't taste as good, so it doesn't get used much. Then there's the raw turmeric root, which you can use just like you can use ginger root. The thing is - and I honestly haven't been able to figure out why - we don't. You can buy turmeric root online, but even big spice merchants don't really have much of it; there's just not much call for it. Poking around online, it honestly seems that nobody has the slightest clue what to do with it, except "use a microplane to grate it". IE, turn it into a powder. So, we use the powdered form, and that's about it.

Turmeric's nickname is "Indian saffron", and that gives you an idea of the high regard that people hold it in. After all, saffron is the most expensive spice in the world; an ounce of good saffron costs more than a share of Apple stock; three ounces of top-quality stuff are a good trade for an ounce of gold.

I'm not going to lie to you - I am probably not going to be doing a saffron week.

Turmeric also seems to be approximately as medicinal as water from the Holy Grail. It's been shown in studies to fight everything from acne to uveitis (inflammation of the eyes) with stops at joint pain, arthritis, about ninety forms of cancer, and even HIV. (Actually, alphabetically the farthest down I got was "viral infections", but honestly, it was cooler to write uveitis.)

Excuse me, I need to readjust my IV turmeric drip. That's better.

2: Science gets its due

How were the turmeric stuffed mushrooms? Really boring, actually; I wasn’t much of a fan. Turmeric is a deep bass note, the kind of thing that you don’t notice while it’s there, and might not even notice consciously when its gone. You just notice that something is missing, that the music doesn’t flow as well, that there’s nothing at the bottom for everything else to build upon. But at the same time, a foundation on its own isn’t that interesting. Nobody ever got up on stage with their bass guitar and started belting out tunes.

Well, I’m sure that tons of people have. But nobody ever got famous that way, is really what I mean. There aren’t a ton of famous bass solos in the history of rock.

That’s turmeric stuffed mushrooms – a guy sitting at a local bar on open mike night with his friggin’ bass. Sure, the verses really come across clearly, but when the chorus comes around, and the music is supposed to do something on its own, there’s just nothing. The turmeric really brought out the flavor of the other ingredients… but I was left asking, “yeah? What else?” Nothing sang.

I guess it didn’t really occur to me until this moment just how valuable an idea these mushrooms are. I mean, the purpose of this blog is to learn about the uses of various spices. I’ve been cooking with turmeric for a week, and it wasn’t until I started writing about why I was disappointed with the mushrooms that I realized that I had simply learned when to use turmeric, not why. But the why is in the paragraph above. Turmeric is a foundation; a rich, earthy bass note that can form a brilliant foundation for a medley of spices. On its own, it’s going to leave you somewhat hollow, but team it with the right support, and it’s absolutely brilliant.

3: I probably should have said this at the beginning of the week.

Turmeric gets on everything. The bad news is that it’s used a dye, as well as a spice, so it sticks around. One of my cutting boards has a yellowish cast to it now, as well as one of my plastic mixing bowls. The good news is that it’s a dye, yes, but it’s a fairly lousy dye. It’s not particularly lightfast, which means that it fades fairly easily when exposed to light. But, since my cutting boards don’t exactly spend a lot of time out in the sun, I’m not really counting on that effect.

The upshot of this all is be careful when cooking with turmeric. Mix in glass or ceramic vessels, and don’t leave something covered in turmeric on anything that can absorb the color for any length of time. At the same time, as fair as dyes go, it’s a fairly delicious dye. Those pictures of yellow rice that I had up the other day? Remember, that started out as ordinary white rice. The rich yellow color was all from the turmeric. I can definitely see using turmeric as a food coloring. So does the food industry; turmeric is a big part of what gives the yellow color to yellow mustard. If you're seeing a bright yellow color in food, chances are turmeric isn't far away.

4: Further experiments for the reader.

Not every song wants a squealy guitar. Not every song wants a fiddle or a trumpet, and songs that don’t want something that’s going to stand front and center like that are probably going to be ruined by its inclusion. But you know what? It’s really hard to ruin something by adding a bass line. And I think you could probably put turmeric in a bunch of fairly odd places without harming the flavor at all. Desserts, for instance.

I can actually see using turmeric as a coloring in something like cupcakes or frosting without it setting off any sensory alarm bells. The same is quite probably true about spongy cakes in general; if you want to give something a rich yellow color, you could probably do it with a bit of turmeric, and just let the flavor blend into the background.

I’m not, to be perfectly honest, a huge cake person; I’m much more of a pie guy. But Joe sent me a recipe for Sfouf, a middle eastern almond cake, that uses turmeric: http://mideastfood.about.com/od/dessertssweetspastries/r/sfoufrecipe.htm. I can see this really working well together - in this case, the turmeric enhancing the flavor of the almonds. Where I really think it would shine, though, would be in a super-sweet deserts like baklava, where the turmeric would add great color, but where the earthiness would also blend well with the main flavors of the dish.

Hmm. Turmeric in baklava sounds great. If anyone decides to try it, please email me to tell me how it works out.

As closes Turmeric, so opens Cumin. See you all on Monday!

Vegetarian Mulligatawny Soup

2010-02-11T00:13:00.000-08:00

Victoria and I were talking about cookbooks.

We've got a whole shelf of them taking up room in our tiny little kitchen. By tiny, I mean tiny... and by shelf, I mean piece of wood laid over the radiator because we desperately need the storage space. In the nearly nine months we've been living here now, I have used precisely two of those books - Alton Brown's More Food, specifically the two pages on buttermilk pancakes. I have also used the thirty-two page pamphlet that came with our bread machine and gives various recipes for use with it. Oh, and I've got a Lebanese cookbook I'll look at once in a blue moon.

The thing is, we live in the age of the Internet, and to be perfectly honest, I'm just not sure what role cookbooks are supposed to be playing in my life. There are some things that new media just doesn't strike me as right for; I don't imagine ever curling up with a Kindle late at night in bed. But at the same time, it is absolutely unimaginable in the age of Internet that someone would want to use reference material that is not only non-searchable, poorly indexed, and doesn't update itself. Even a little bit. I don't know if you realize this, but if you're a published, you can't even issue a patch for a book that's got an error... it just remains busted forever, unless your customer buys a whole new one. I mean, how does that make any sense? [1]

Recipes are essentially reference materials, and reference materials are what the internet is good at. Let's say for the sake of argument that the Encyclopedia Britannica is an order of magnitude more accurate than Wikipedia. (An assertion which I would hotly dispute, if that were my point.) The fact that Wikipedia has got full-text searching, hyperlinks, and 100x the data would still make it the obvious choice by a wide margin. The only exception would be when I needed to find one, and exactly one, article, I knew exactly what it was, and it was on a major subject. (Victoria and I just finished watching Torchwood Series 3, and I sat down and spent a half an hour reading Wikipedia's vast article on the Time Lords, the race of which Dr. Who is a member. Britannica just can't hope to match that level of nerdiness.)

I guess that recipes work the same way. It's work keeping cookbooks - at least high-quality ones - around, if you feel there will be times that you need to know how to make buttermilk pancackes, and don't feel like messing around. You want a recipe that will make great buttermilk pancakes, that you can have full faith in. I'm going to trust Alton Brown's book way more than I'm going to trust CookinLovinDad1975@gmail. But when I'm not looking for that exact thing, what does a cookbook really do for me? Well, I'm back to improvising again... and if I'm doing that, I'd prefer to look at a half-dozen recipes, read through comment threads, etc. In any case, our kitchen felt cramped by a shelf of recipe books that are unsearchable and whose contents are rarely obvious, so Victoria and I decided to clear most of them out last weekend. This is what we let stick around.

For example, Law and Economics by Cooter & Ulen - I have no idea even what cuisine that's supposed to be about, let alone what recipes are in it.

So when, two days after this great purging, my friend Laura was nice enough to give me an Indian cookbook to use while I'm going through turmeric, cumin, and the various other spices that Indian cooking uses heavily. I was halfway through all the stuff I just said above, when I looked down at my hand. I've been inspired by Sarah Palin lately, and I try to keep some general notes scribbled down, just in case. Well, my hand said "be less of an asshole all the time" so, rather than explaining to my friend in detail why her very nice gesture was totally pointless, I said "thank you very much! I'm sure it'll turn out to be useful!."

And it was, but for different reasons. Where cookbooks can be most useful is when they're not really cookbooks, but cooking manuals - where they give instructions about the method and theory, rather than simply lists of recipes. And, in the beginning, this book had a great glossary of ingredients and concepts important to Indian cooking - stuff I didn't know, and wouldn't have been likely to bump into any other way. I can see myself getting more books like that... but the list of recipe thing is just a dodo.

And this is a big reason why: two days later, I decided that I'd make some Mulligatawny soup. It's one of my favorite soups, I know it's fairly turmeric-y, and it's soup season, anyway. So I broke out the book, looked up the recipe... and it led off with a half-pound of ground lamb.

Now, I was pretty sure I'd have everything I needed for Mulligatawny soup... but I darn tootin' didn't have a half pound of ground lamb sitting around. Because first, I would have ate it - lamb is delicious, and I don't make nearly as much of it as I should - and second, because my wife is a freakin' vegetarian. Which I thought Indian Cooking mostly was, as well! I mean, what the heck?

Anyway, I did my best to work with this 'book' thing. I went back to the index, and searched for vegetarian Mulligatawny soup. Nothing. I tried some different search terms - vegan - meatless - still nothing. I tried misspellings... nada. I figured the book might be having some problems, so I closed it, put it down on the table, slowly counted to ten, and then re-opened it. I looked for a place to post "NEED VEG MULIG SOUP RECIPE PLS" in the book, but I couldn't figure out where in the book the forum section was. No matter what I did, I couldn't seem to fix this "not having the recipe I wanted" bug.

So, I went to Internet and Googled "Vegetarian Mulligatawny soup" and got tons of hits. However, within five minutes, I realized these two things:

1. Most of these recipes were, in fact, the exact same recipe, just cut-and-pasted to be entered into a bunch of different sites, and
2. That recipe was really bad.

Actually, that's an English nerd's "bad". there. I mean, the recipe made perfectly fine soup - it was just incredibly poorly written. All the ideas were there, sure... but if you think a recipe that has you put in a "caroot" can possibly be good, well, then, we're going to have problems.

http://www.indianfoodcooking.com/indian-vegetarian-mulligatawny-soup-recepies.html is a good example of the recipe, but like I said, it's easy to find - half of the entries on the first two pages of a Google search are just this same text.

"One each Tomato", indeed.

One fairly serious non-grammatical quibble. Chick peas aren't even listed on the ingredients. To a chick-pea soup. (Who's more the fool - the fool, or the fool who follows him? I mean, I'm ripping on this recipe... but I cooked it, didn't I?) Also, dried chick-peas are a huge pain in the arse to work with. They took me at least twice the expected amount of time to cook until soft. Were I doing this again, I would probably use canned beans instead of dried.

Vegetarian Mulligatawny Soup

1 cup (8 oz) dried chick peas (garbanzos), or two 15 oz cans

1 Medium onion, chopped fine
2 tablespoons Ghee

1 Asian pepper
1 pinch Cayenne pepper
1 tablespoon Turmeric
1 teapoon Coriander

4 cups vegetable stock
Salt to taste
1 medium carrot, diced
1 large potato, cubed
1 green bell pepper, chopped
1 tomato, chopped
1 cup coconut milk
2 tablespoons lemon juice
2 teaspoons cilantro/parsley

First, get the chick peas ready. If they're dried, that means cooking them 'till they're nice and soft - like I said, it took me almost two hours, so throw these on ahead of time. Then chop up all the veggies. You don't need to go crazy here, because everything is going into a blender as soon as it's all cooked, so if the potatoes are a bit chunky, who cares.

As for the vegetable stock, you can either make your own or get it out of a can - that's what I did. Honestly, though, if I had it to do all over again - as long as I was spending hours cooking the chick peas, I might as well have done some veggie stock. Using the canned boullion stuff put more salt into the soup than I would have liked.

I didn't know what ghee was until recently - it's basically butter with a bunch of the water boiled out, so what you've got is greasier and doesn't need refrigeration. It's a perfectly fine fat for sauteing things in... but if you don't have ghee, just use butter or olive oil. It's not a big deal.

Anyway, take a big soup-pot and saute up those onions - about five minutes - then add in the spices and keep going for another minute or two. (because of theme and all, I added in some extra turmeric, and took out some coriander - I switched which one got a teaspoon and which one a tablespoon.) Remember, heat releases flavor - I would guess that the reason to throw the spices in the hot now is to get whatever chemical reaction that we interpret as "yumminess" going at full kilter. So, the spices go in with the onions.

Give the spices about two minutes, then toss in the broth, along with all the veggies. Bring it to a boil, and let it simmer for 10-15 minutes. Drain your now-soft chick peas and toss them in, along with a cup of coconut milk. (The original recipe calls for shredded coconut, as well... but what the hell?!? Ruin a good soup, why don't you?) Give it another five minutes, then kill the heat and let it cool. When it's cool enough to work with, take a blender to it. If you've got a wand blender, go nuts; if not, toss it in the blender for about 5 pulses, enough that it looks smooth but not too smooth. You want there to be a decent amount of texture.

Return it to the pot, and add the lemon and most of the cilantro, and mix it up. Now would be a good time to check the taste, and balance it out by adding salt/pepper/lemon juice as needed. Turn on the heat and let it warm up - not quite to a simmer, though. Serve using the remainder of the cilantro as a garnish.

I loved it. It wasn't a big deal to make, and it really is one of my favorite soups. It came out rich and flavorful; I didn't feel like adding lamb, coconut, or whatever would have done anything but detract from the taste. This recipe made about enough for six people, so we were able to have a good number of meals off of this. Again, though... don't forget to take that red pepper out before you serve everything.

Oh, by the way - for those of you that have only heard about what DC has been like this week, this is what I see when I open the door to my balcony:

several common household items thrown in, for size reference.

That snowdrift is two feet taller than I am. My grill is under there somewhere! Waaaah!

[1] One of the things that I found most fascinating when we were learning to use the law library was the extent to which the legal field has adapted over the years to deal with these necessary limitations on printed media. To take a simple example - you're arguing a case in front of the Supreme Court. You need to know any cases that might set precedent. United States Reports - the official history of the SCOTUS's cases - takes up somewhere in the neighborhood of five hundred volumes, and we're not talking small books. Once you find a case that looks good, you need to go through the whole thing AGAIN to find any other cases that might comment on or alter the case you're reading. Then you have to do the same thing for THOSE cases... and so on and so forth.

Legal books have "pocket parts" - a little pocket in the back of the book for updates, which get published as necessary. That way, you can tell that a particular case is not good law any more without having to search through thousands of books.

In any case... the advent of the electronic database has vastly simplified legal research. I honestly can't imagine trying to study law without computer-based searching. The companies that actually create and maintain these databases charge dollars a minute - and up to $120 to run a single query - because the alternative to that $120 query is to spend eight hours of a first-year attorney's time trying to find the same info, and that's gonna cost a lot more.

Kashmiri Fried Rice and Salmon with Turmeric and Garlic - Part 3

2010-02-10T01:00:00.000-08:00

A different person would have skipped the "early experimentation" bits, where I tried to cook this and got it wrong. I'm certainly dedicated to showing you the warts and all, because this is supposed to be a learning process, and it is very cynical of you to be thinking "by doing it this way, he managed to stretch one blog post out into three."

So the next day, I was feeling a lot better - Benjamin and I hadn't been fighting over what we wanted to do all day. We mutually decided that what we wanted to do was sit in his playpen, play with his toys, read to him, and cuddle him. I have to give it to him - the kid is already a convincing arguer. He made it clear that the day before, I had tried to do it my way, and it had been soul-crushing... so why not try doing things his way? Wouldn't that work better?

What I had wanted to say was "Assuming that my goal in life is either 'housewife' or 'baby life support system', yes, that works better." What I actually said was, " Chapter One. The Bride. The year Buttercup was born, the most beautiful woman in the world was a French scullery maid named Annette." All in all, I've had worse days.

When dinner time rolled around, I thought "I still have a bunch of fish left over. I still have a bunch of rice left over. I think I can fix the problems that I had yesterday, and I have a wonderful and supportive wife who is okay if we have the same dinner two nights in a row for the sake of a good blog post." (Which is true. I almost never get hit these days when dinner isn't good enough.)

Again, I wish that I could overstrike in the title bar, because while I had plenty of red snapper and tuna, I was a little short in the salmon department. (The tuna had been decidedly inferior as sushi tuna, but it looked like great cookin' tuna.) The red snapper was a filet, the tuna was a small steak with some sushi-sized pieces left over.

So, I went about fixing the mistakes of the night before. I prepped the fish first, then took a fifteen minute break. This time, rather than using fresh garlic, I used powered garlic with some garlic salt to boot, and threw in a tiny bit of the Kala Namak salt along with the turmeric. I gave the fish a good rub on both sides and threw it back in the fridge while I started on the rice.

The rice was fine last night, so I didn't really feel the need to make any changes. I cooked it for slightly less time than I did last night, because... well, because I had an idea. Rice gets fried, rice goes into a prep bowl, and rather than getting another cooking vessel dirty I just kept the wok on the heat. Besides... I had an idea.

Measure out a half cup of coconut milk; add some pepper and the chiles. By now the fish has had a half hour to get used to its new life partners, turmeric and garlic. Wok is hot again. It gets some oil; the fish gets two minutes per side. I decide to get fancy and try to keep the little bits of tuna higher up on the wok so they don't scorch. My success was decidedly mixed. Between sides, I dropped the heat a bit - it would still be hot enough to sear the second side, but would bleed off a little bit of heat before the coconut milk.

Now, last time, the coconut milk had boiled immediately, and I had poured water in to prevent it from burning, which washed out the taste. This time, I was ready for it. My idea was this; coconut milk goes in. Coconut milk starts boiling. Now, I took a handful of the rice and tossed it in the pot. Between the lower heat, the rice, and me realizing that this is what happens to coconut milk, everything works out perfectly. The fish gets about five more minutes cooking in the milk, then I toss in the rest of the rice. (I'm going to mix it up with the sauce the second I get it to the table anyway, so why not just do it in the pot?)

I need to learn to be a better food photographer if I'm going to be doing this for a year...

This looked delicious on the plate, but that picture kinda looks like a fairly unappealing, undifferentiated lump to me. Oh well. Do either of these pictures look any better?

These are the same picture... for the one on the bottom, I let the computer's auto image correct feature mess with the brightness and everything. Notice the hot pepper right in the middle of the fish... that got removed right after I took the picture. Anyway, feedback on the pictures is appreciated.

It took two tries, but this came out exactly the way that I wanted it to, and it tasted great. It was an incredibly tasty dish, was fairly easy to make, and used up a bunch of leftovers.

For the record, here is the final recipe that I made.

Ingredients:

1 cup day old rice
.75 tsp turmeric, or enough to give the rice a yellowish cast
1 small onion, chopped mediumly
Peanut oil

Slightly more than a pound of tuna and red snapper
1 teaspoon turmeric
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon garlic salt
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
Some more peanut oil (it was already out)

1/2 cup coconut milk
A few grinds fresh pepper
One hot asian chili

Combine the turmeric, garlic powder, garlic salt, and kosher salt in a bowl, and rub in on the fish. Set the fish aside for a half hour at least.

Heat the wok, put in two tablespoons of oil or so and spread it around. It will of course pool back up; don't let this discourage you. When the oil is at "fry" toss in the onion. Cook it for about two minutes, or less if it's getting burned. Duh. Toss in the rice; fry for about five minutes, moving constantly. Remove the rice to a prep bowl, wipe out the wok, and put it back on the fire.

Reheat the wok. While it is warming, measure out the coconut milk and add the pepper and chili. Put some more oil in the wok, and fry the fish for two minutes per side. In between sides, turn the heat down to medium. When the second side is done, add the coconut milk. Lift the fish so that the milk can get under and around it. When the coconut milk starts to boil, toss in a bit of the rice to absorb some of the heat. Cook the fish for about four minutes, or until it starts to flake. Toss in the rest of the rice, mix well, and let cook for one more minute. Remove to a plate, eat, then write a blog post about it.

Tomorrow: Vegetarian Mulligatawny Soup

Kashmiri Fried Rice and Salmon with Turmeric and Garlic - Part 2

2010-02-09T01:00:00.000-08:00

Last time, on The Year of Living Spicily:

After a sushi dinner for a friend's birthday, Aaron found himself with a bunch of leftover fish and a bunch of leftover rice. (Not sushi rice, actually, but rice from an earlier meal.) For reasons best ignored, he decided to take the easy way out and just follow some recipes. Yesterday, he talked about the fish he made, which turned out fairly mediocre because of a problem with the spicing and a mistake he made when cooking. Today he'll talk about the rice, which (spoiler alert!) come out really well, and tomorrow he'll talk about what he did the next day, when he realized that he STILL had a bunch of leftover fish and rice, and was pretty sure he could fix the mistakes he made the first time around.

Also, yesterday he referred to himself as "I"... it seems that today he's referring to himself as "he". Tomorrow, maybe he'll just say "Aaron", as in "AARON SMASH!" or "AARON LIGHTLY BRAISE PRAWNS EN CROUTE!"

I wonder what prawns en croute are? I hope they get braised, or Aaron is going to feel really ignorant.

You know, I love the idea of the Hulk as a chef. What's not to like? You've got huge, huge hands with a tiny, tiny spatula. You've got the Green Goliath in a goofy chef's hat and a "KISS CHEF!" apron. You've got sous-chefs cowering in terror any time the slightest thing goes wrong. And, inevitably, you've got the Hulk destroying the kitchen.

Oh! Oh! Oh! And then, and then, you've got Hulk calming down, putting his hand over his mouth, and saying "OH NO! HULK'S SOUFFLE!", delicately tiptoeing over to a miraculously undamaged oven, opening it with the gentlest of touches, and finding his souffle magically unharmed. At which point Hulk will sigh, lean against a counter, which will shift because he's a huge monster, and a tiny, tiny measuring spoon will tinkle to the floor, making the slightest of noises... and causing the souffle to loudly deflate.

Which of course causes the Hulk to go on another rampage.

I would watch a weekly cooking show starring the Hulk religiously.

OH MY GOD. It could be "Gamma-Ray Cooking with Bruce Banner", a Good Eats clone where the brilliant Dr. Bruce Banner explains to us the science behind cooking. Of course, what the fools at the Food Network DIDN'T know when they signed their new star was that Dr. Bruce Banner is the puny human form of THE INCREDIBLE HULK. During the first episode, something went wrong, it got caught on camera, they retitled the show, and now HULK COOK! has the highest ratings - and insurance costs - of any cooking show in history. Airing Wednesdays at 10, only on The Food Network.

What the hell was I talking about? Watergate or something? Oh, yeah. Fried rice. I bet that's going to be way more interesting than a cooking show starring The Hulk. I tell you what, after spending an hour thinking about how awesome it would be to have the job of building a Hulk-resistant kitchen, I'm really eager to tell you the story of how I fried some damned rice.

wheeee. fried rice.

I'm not saying it was bad. Actually, it was really good, for totally non-Hulk prepared foodstuffs. Like I said yesterday, fried rice is much easier to make than you'd think, and a really delicious way to deal with leftover rice, which is otherwise fairly yucky. If you've got a wok (like I do) but are fairly intimidated by it (like I am) it's also a really good introduction to the differences between cooking on a wok and cooking on the pots and pans we're used to.

I'm sorry... just give me a minute. I'm still mostly thinking about how awesome The Hulk is. Here's the link to the recipe in the meantime.

http://www.ehow.com/how_2177319_kashmir-turmeric-fried-rice.html

Actually, now that I go back and read the recipe, I think the whole premise of this meal - that I was too tired to think and just blindly followed the recipe - was a bit wrong.

Sorry, what I meant to say was "PUNY RECIPE LEAVE HULK ALONE! HULK SMASH RECIPE! RAAAAGH!"

What I learned in my previous experiments in fried ricery is that you want fried rice to have spent the night in the refrigerator. That gives it some time to dry out - it doesn't cook up as well if it's wet, and it definitely loses some of its texture. (The first time I tried fried rice, it was with fresh-cooked rice. It wasn't bad, but it definitely wasn't really fried rice.) I'm also going to guess that heat is an issue as well; with steamy-hot rice there's going to be a limited amount of additional heat you can put in before you start wrecking it; with cold rice, you can really throw some heat into it. The recipe as written uses a regular frying pan, which just doesn't get as hot as a wok, and doesn't have nearly as much surface area - in other words, it isn't nearly as good at transferring a lot of heat into something that you can spread out (such as rice) as a wok is. Long story short? I used a wok.

The thing about The Hulk is - and work with me here - he smashes stuff real good. I mean, The Hulk is the strongest there is! And you've got to respect that. Because if you don't respect it... well, the madder Hulk gets, the stronger Hulk gets. There's just something that speaks to the child in all of us in that.

So, my final recipe, based on the one above, is this:

Chop up an onion. Take some day (or more) old rice. Mix in turmeric until it is nice and yellow. (About .75 tsp turmeric per cup of rice. Or, just eyeball it.) This will be a little difficult - the rice is going to be solid, nasty, and sticky - so get a big bowl, and rather than try to stir, you may want to use a spatula and cut the powder into the rice. Don't go crazy if you're not getting even distribution - once it gets in the oil, it'll mix more easily. Get your wok fired up, when it's nice and hot - when a droplet of water shimmies and shakes its way across the surface - hit it with some oil. This recipe calls for canola, which is the average-type vegetable oil you should have. You can also use sesame or peanut oil - high smoke points is what we're looking for. Toss in the onion; give it a minute or two. When you get bored looking at onion, toss the rice in there. Use your cooking implement of choice to spread the rice around as much as possible, but not too high up the wok... you want it in the hotter bottom part.

I mean, Hulk is no Batman - but here's the thing. You can put on a cowl and a costume and a utility belt, and you still don't really feel like Batman. And I don't mean just because you're a pudgy nerd and are not quite at that "peak of human perfection" physique-wise - I mean, so okay, you've got your costume on, dude. You look like Batman. Now do something that Batman would do. See? You can't. Moping around in a cave all day does NOT count. You know what? You suck as Batman.

Go put on some inflatable Hulk Hands. (TM.) Look at yourself in the mirror - you look NOTHING like the Hulk. But you know what? You can now go around smashing the crap out of all your parents' stuff, and you can feel just as awesome as Hulk.

One of the neat things that experienced wok chefs (admittedly, on professional stove, which put out more heat than yours or mine) can do is use the shape of the wok to manage items that need different amounts of heat. The closer you get to the center, obviously, the hotter it gets... so you can keep things that need to be cooler higher up, while you blast the stuff that really wants the heat. Neither I nor my stove are capable of anything like that.

So, basically... fry the rice. When it's a nice even yellow color, and is just starting to brown - five minutes or less, if you've got a wok and a hot stove, maybe more if you're cooking not in a wok and on an electric range - you're done. The recipe suggests onion, tomato, cucumber, and coriander as garnish; since I was serving the fish curry I made on top of it, I just put it on a plate and poured the fish and the sauce on top of it. Like I said, I wasn't impressed with how the fish came out, but the rice was really stellar. This is definitely something that I'll be adding to my general repertoire (my god, that word took me three full minutes to spell) although the fact that it requires making the rice the day before means that it'll probably get made to use up leftover rice, not because I had the foresight to make the rice the day before.

Hmm... thinking about the "mixing powdered turmeric through sticky dried rice" problem - it would probably work just fine to put the oil in the wok, then put the turmeric in the oil, then put the rice in. But then, what of the onions?

HULK SMASH PUNY ONIONS!

Tomorrow: part three, featuring some pictures, less Hulk, and fish that has been upgraded from mediocre to delicious.

Kashmiri Fried Rice and Salmon with Turmeric and Garlic - Part 1

2010-02-08T01:00:00.000-08:00

Yesterday[1] was what we call a “bad baby day”. Not that Benjamin was bad – he really is just about the greatest baby ever - but, as I said the other day, he can make it really, really difficult for me to get anything done. Here's my deal. I have some hard-to-diagnose form of attention deficit disorder. Think of it like having a busted gearbox in my head... if any of you ride bicycles, or use manual transmissions. I need to use analogies that refer to technology in more common use. Anyway, it's a lot of effort for me to get going on something, and once I am going - even going on a thing I enjoy, like writing this blog - it is effort for me to stay on it if I lose that focus.

Before you say "I know - that's called working, everyone has that problem" the point I'm trying to make is that after a fairly short time trying to focus on something, I start feeling fairly intense physical signs of fatigue - tiredness, headaches, irritability - like I had just gone through fairly intense physical exertion. Once I get focused, I don't have that problem any more... until something shiny catches the corner of my eye, I get distracted, and I start the whole process all over again.

So for me, even more than for most people, trying to work and deal with a baby is really exhausting, because I never get to that comfortable 'clicked in' stage, I'm always in the exhausting 'trying to get focused' stage. Or the 'dealing with a baby' stage, which is also fairly exhausting. Or, worst of all, the 'just got focused and now I'm getting pulled away from what I was focused on' stage - one of the hallmarks of ADD is a paradoxical overfocus. Once you get focused on something, it's really hard to pull yourself away - in fact, just as exhausting as trying to get focused in the first place, and far, far more irritating, because usually it's someone or something else pulling you away... something to focus that irritation at.

So, some days Benjamin and I have a happy rhythm, where I get some work done, spend some time playing with him, and we're both happy. Some days, though, he doesn't really feel like playing in his playpen on his own, or he's fussy because something is bothering him. If I'm smart, on those days, I just give in and spend the day hanging out and reading to him. Some days, though, I'm not smart... and I wind up, as I said, cycling between the three things I mentioned in the last paragraph - trying to focus, trying to unfocus, and dealing with a baby. My brain is generally good for about two hours of this before I have my own meltdown, go out on the balcony and scream so I don't wind up screaming at the baby, and decide I might as well just play video games for the rest of the afternoon as I nurse my headache.

So on this particular day, the last thing I was up for when dinnertime rolled around was a wondrous journey through the mystic realms of kitchen experimentation. I knew what I had - leftover fish from the sushi we had made the other night and leftover rice from the five salt dinner. I knew what I wanted to do with them - add turmeric. I really didn't feel like having to think. So I googled "turmeric salmon" and "turmeric fried rice", clicked a few links, and this is what I wound up with.

http://www.tastebook.com/recipes/1068269-Salmon-with-Garlic-and-Turmeric

http://www.ehow.com/how_2177319_kashmir-turmeric-fried-rice.html

Both of them looked delicious, simple, and used only ingredients that I already had in the house.

This is what it sounds like when I talk. “Hi, I’m Aaron, mi mi mi mi mi, spirit of adventure, mi mi mi, enjoy the journey, mi mi mi. But I'm not gonna, because I'm tired. Meh.” But still, like I said, good and fairly easy recipes. Definitely a few things that were worth keeping an eye on, though.

Zeroth, I'm really bad skinning salmon. I imagine it's pretty easy to get a feel for, if you've got a dozen fillets in a row to practice on... but doing it every once in a while just means that I'm always ~~butchering~~ mangling the fish. (I guess a butcher would be a good one for making proper, precise cuts through a piece of meat, so that word probably doesn't convey what I want it to here.)

First, I really think whoever wrote this recipe didn't actually cook it, at least not in this particular form. Why? Well, here's a hint - try "mixing the salt, turmeric, and garlic in a bowl" yourself. What you'll wind up with, as I did, is a bunch of garlic covered in salt and turmeric. Then, when you go to put it on the fish, what you get is a piece of fish with some spiced garlic bits on it, when what you want is spiced fish. I don't see a way to avoid this, unless you want to use a blender on puree for the garlic, so I recommend garlic powder instead. I guess you could also use the salt and turmeric as a rub, then hit the fish with the garlic.

If you're fairly new to cooking with coconut milk, as I am, you might also run into the second problem I had. This recipe doesn't mention that when you put coconut milk in a pan that you've just been searing something in, things are going to get... exciting. And, to answer your question - yes, by "exciting" I do mean "the coconut milk is going to start boiling and spattering almost immediately." How did you know that was going to happen? You smart.

Well, I didn't, and I panicked. Well, maybe panicked is the wrong word - I'm generally not a panicky type person - but I did go into damage control mode, which meant that to counter what seemed like the immediate danger - the coconut milk burning and ruining my dinner - I did the obvious thing, which was to add some water into the pan. That settled everything down - but it was obvious when we ate the final product that it had been watered down, which I didn't think about at the time. This dish takes much more of its flavor than I expected from the coconut milk, and adding the water tanked the flavor to a much larger extent than I would have expected.

Third - and this is really, really important. I mean REALLY important. If you're using dried Asian peppers in this dish, fish them out before your wife - who never orders Asian food with even a little bit of spice in it, and does not recognize them as adding a lot of flavor to a dish but being burning death if eaten - bites into one.

Seriously - you owe me one for that. Actually, it's aiight - I got your back.

Huh... the last direction in this recipe is to "pour the curry over the fish." Now, there weren't a whole lot of options here, so it's pretty obvious what to do - but I never actually knew that the word "curry" just means "sauce".

So tomorrow, we'll talk fried rice, which is quick becoming on of my favorite dishes to make - I used to throw out a ton of leftover rice, because I hate rice when it gets dried and chunked up. Quick preview: Two things to know about fried rice are that it's really easy to make, and it uses day-old rice. Yum!

I need to come up with a good sign-off. "Until next time, keep doing that thing that you like doing so much. No, not that thing, the other one. Yeah, that one. Yay!"

Could probably use some work.

[1] Yesterday being a relative term, now that I've started posting these on a scheduled basis, rather than as soon as I finish them up.

Quick & Easy Lunch - Cheese Steak

2010-02-02T00:00:00.000-08:00

As far as I can tell, Blogspot doesn't let you bold, italicize, or strikethrough words in the titles of posts. Which is a shame, because this is the second time I've wanted to. If anyone has any idea how to do this, please give me a buzz.

The proper title for this post should have been:

Quick & Easy Lunch - ~~Cheese~~ Turmeric Steak

Cheese steaks are one of my favorite lunches. Even now that I'm on a low-carb diet, and generally don't want to eat rolls, there is plenty of enjoyable lunchiness to be had with a cheese steak. All you need to do is leave out the hoagie roll (or, if you're one of those types, wrap it up in a big lettuce leaf. I have occasionally been one of those types.) and you're good to go.

So, I'm looking through my fridge and I see the following:

One (1) pot roast
One (1) bowl of chopped onion left over from dinner last night
One (1) green bell pepper
Several (3-n) mushrooms
One (1) bag of shredded cheddar

The pepper has seen better days, and it's time to use it. The pot roast has seen MUCH better days - I defrosted it to salt-crust, until I decided prime rib would be a better idea. It needs to get used today or get thrown out.

Note to people - Some food is obviously bad - when something is white and fuzzy, it is Bad. Some food is obviously good; when an apple has a firm, smooth skin and is heavy for its size [1], it is Good. And there's a whole world in between. Sometimes I know I'm lazier than I should be - I see a soft spot on a apple, and I automatically chuck it out. At times like that, I appreciate Victoria being a hippie - she'll fish it out, wash it thoroughly, cut the bad bit out, and eat the rest. Wasting 98% of an apple because 2% of it is bad is dumb. (I'm pretty particular about apples - I really enjoy the texture, the crunch that you get when you bite into one, and biting into a soft apple for me is like grabbing a glass of OJ when your taste buds expect milk - it turns something that should be delicious into something fairly disgusting.)

It's worth performing triage on almost any food. I had a piece of meat that was, as I said, past its prime. Not ideal. There were some fairly ugly looking bits on it - but not moldy bits. Also not ideal. So I activated my incredibly well-designed spoiled food detector and applied it. The meat still smelled normal. Good! I got out the cleaver, chopped off the bad bits, and had a perfectly usable piece of meat.

My point is, don't be afraid to use your nose, and don't assume that one dried-out bit on a piece of meat means that you've got a dead roast. One bad apple does not spoil the whole barrel. [2] (At the same time, if your nose does set off alarm bells, don't be afraid to chuck it.)

I found out recently that most supermarkets donate the produce and prepared food that's not attractive enough to sell any more, but which is still good enough to eat. This makes me really, really happy - it's easy enough to cut off the bad bits from vegetables, and I had always been horrified at all the stuff that never gets sold just getting wasted.

Not sure why we needed that whole aside, but there it is. So I've finished cleaning off this pot roast, I'm prepping it to chuck in the crock pot, but I'm fairly certain I'm not going to be able to hold out four hours for lunch. And I remember all the other stuff I had noted in my ingredients list.

At this point, I'd love to be like my hero, Alton Brown, (he's so dreamy!) and say "a pot roast makes great cheese steak fodder, because for a cheese steak, you want a moderately fatty cut - but it doesn't exactly need to be the top-quality part of the steak, because it's getting mixed in with a ton of spices and other ingredients anyway." But I don't really have any authority to say something like that - I haven't even done a taste test on my own, let alone with other people. Still, my gut tells me that the steak in cheese steak is like the tequila in a margarita. [3]

I've still got a cleaver in my hand and a powerful hunger in mah belly, so I start shaving the meat. (For an authentic cheesesteak, you really want your meat shaved so thin that only a deli-slicer can really do it. I settle for what I can do with my hands and a knife. Pro tip - it is MUCH easier to thinly-slice meat when it's frozen... if you do this often it's probably worth chopping up a frozen steak.) I get myself a nice lunch-sized portion of meat, some sliced-up onions, peppers, and mushrooms (fairly chunky pieces) and get a fryin' pan going with a little bit of oil. When it's sizzling real nice, (I'd love to get me an actual deli-style grill in the kitchen) I make some room and toss the steak on, along with a pinch of Kosher and a grind of pepper. The whole process, from the time the pan starts sizzling to the time lunch is on your plate, should take less than five minutes.

Four minutes in, time for the thing that makes this a cheese steak. Now, wars have been fought over the proper cheese to put on a cheesesteak, but to be honest, I don't care that much. There are a lot of great choices; right now, I've got Cheddar so that's what's going on. I reach for the cheese, and...

And I notice that there's a jar of turmeric sitting right there on the counter.

Here's my problem. I've come to really like turmeric over the last few days. But if there's one thing that I really wouldn't say about it, it would be "turmeric goes well with cheese." Frankly, I just can't imagine mixing cheddar and turmeric. I wish I knew enough about my own taste buds to tell you why, but for now you're just going to have to trust me that I can't imagine a turmeric cheese steak tasting anything but terrible. Heck, it sounds terrible - and I don't mean "sounds like it would taste terrible", I mean "the word turmeric and the word cheese do not combine in a way which is at all pleasing to the ear."

So I'm faced, basically, with Sophie's Choice right here. On one hand, I've got this blog, and Science, embodied by a jar of turmeric. On the other hand, I've got cheese, which is pretty much the well from which all that is good in this world springs. (Look it up.) Well, Gentle Reader, I hope you are happy to find out that I chose you, over basically my own soul.

And what do I have to show for it?

Actually, this was a really good lunch. I really didn't expect the turmeric to go as well with red meat as it goes with fish and rice, but as it turns out, it really brought out the flavor of this particular mixture of ingredients; the mushrooms in particular really stood out. I don't know if it's because they absorbed more of the earthy flavor of the turmeric, or simply because they mix better with turmeric's taste, but they really popped in this dish.

I really wish I had a wine-lover's vocabulary to use when it comes to spices; it's practically impossible for me to describe the way turmeric tastes. The only word I've really got is earthy. I'm not saying "turmeric is really hard to describe", I'm saying "my vocabulary is not up to the task of describing this relatively simple thing." Still, what I really felt was that the taste of the spice did a great job of mediating between the other four ingredients. Rather than four different tastes, slathered in cheese (which I LOVE, don't get me wrong) the addition of the turmeric made the whole thing more like a dish, four ingredients contributing to a single taste. Does that make sense?

Anyone got any suggestions for developing that (for lack of better words... which is the whole problem here, right?) nasal vocabulary? I would like to be able to describe things in slightly more depth than I am currently able to.

All in all, this turned out to be a serendipitous success, and definitely something I would try again. On purpose, this time. Maybe over rice.

[1] "Heavy for its size" is a concept that took me a while to wrap my mind around, so it's possible that there are those of you in more or less the same boat. Here's the easiest example. Go out and buy an apple. A nice ripe Honeycrisp. Oh wait, they're out of season now. Damn. Now I want an apple.
Where was I?

Right. Leave it in the sun for a few days - it gets soft in bits, it gets shriveled up - but these obvious signs of yuckiness aside, when you pick it up, it's now lighter than you'd expect. Some of the juicy deliciousness has escaped, and it is now Bad. See? That's an apple that is light for its size. So, all other things being equal, if two apples look about the same, and are about the same size, but one is noticeably heavier - that is probably the better one. Make sense?

[2] This is a neat saying. Back in the day, refrigeration was expensive or impossible, and apples are a seasonal fruit. So apple growers would seal apples up in watertight barrels, and drop 'em in the river over the winter. The bottom of an icy river is just about the right temperature to keep them good until spring - just barely above freezing. One problem, though - an apple that has already started to go bad emits ethylene, and ethylene accelerates ripening. So either you're a brilliant apple-storing genius who is using the environment to protect your goods... or you've just dropped your apples into a ready-made spoilage device for four months. You won't find out until spring, either way. Good stuff!

[3] Enough with the footnotes already. Okay - so Food Science and actual studies tell us that there is no point to using high-quality tequila in a margarita. Quite the opposite, in fact. Higher-quality liquors are smoother, have less 'bite'. Put an expensive tequila in a margarita, and the smoother taste tends to get drowned in the lime - people don't get to enjoy the expensive flavor, and at the same time, they don't get the 'bite' that they're expecting to tell them that there's alcohol there. However, CHEAP tequilas do both jobs fine - they stand out, because for $10 a bottle you're not getting subtle flavor, and they've got bite to spare. Go expensive for shots, but don't bother for mixed drinks.

A quick what's up...

2010-02-01T04:45:00.000-08:00

Hey, guys. So right now I'm having some baby problems. No, don't worry, Benjamin's fine. I'm the one having problems. Well, I guess we both are. He's having some tummy/teething issues, and it's been fairly difficult for me to get any work done. I'm not the most... focused... person in the world, and there is, as it turns out, a hard limit to the number of times I can go through a "sit down a try to work, get about two minutes in, get called away by a baby's mumping" cycle before my brain is reduced to a quivering lump of jelly.

Which is okay. Here is my plan. Over this week, I'm going to slowly post the remnants of Week Two, while working on Week Three. Then, next week, Week Three should go up as normal while I work on Week Four, etc, etc. This is something I should have done from the beginning, giving myself a little bit of padding so that if I hit speed bumps, it doesn't interrupt the flow of the blog.

My apologies for the lack of posts. Hopefully, from now on, they'll come fairly regularly at about one a day, rather than in waves.

How did I miss it?!?

2010-01-27T01:04:00.000-08:00

Katy Ridgway told me that she's really disappointed that week two is turmeric. Not because she doesn't like turmeric... but because I could have said "Week Twomeric" and didn't.

I'm disappointed in myself. I feel like I really let everyone down.

Turmeric Eggs

2010-01-27T01:01:00.000-08:00

In response to my first turmeric post yesterday, Mike passed along this link to a NY Times article: (Registration may be required, who knows.)

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/30/the-11-best-foods-you-arent-eating/?em

Unrelatedly, Neil sent me the following via chat:

"Fuck meat. Eggs are the perfect food. Goodbye."

Which leads me to two questions: First, should I tone down the profanity that I typically use while writing? (Probably yes. I'm a dad now. I need to learn to stop swearing.) And second, why did he leave it at "goodbye"? That's so wussy, especially when he could have said something like THAT IS ALL or AND I AM OUT.

Anyway, between the Times article and Neil's obvious (though milquetoast) push, I figured I needed to make eggs with turmeric for breakfast.

Turmeric is complex stuff - I don't really know how to describe the taste. I don't even really know if I like it - but I enjoy it, if that makes any sense. I enjoy the way that I can feel it rolling over my tongue, lighting up different taste buds - first the back of my tongue, then the left side, then the back again. I'd love to see what it looks like, if the nerves were wires, crackling with lightning all the way into my brain...

Eggs. Eggs are what started all of this, actually - eggs are the first thing I ever really cooked. It's a good story - remind me to tell it some time. For now, let's take five large eggs - three for me, two for Victoria - and toss them in a mixing bowl. (I use a two-cup Pyrex measuring cup.) Add in a glug of milk (a glug [I think this comes from Bill Cosby] is the amount of milk that comes out between the time you tip the bottle over and the time it makes that glug noise.) and a pinch of kosher salt. Then a half-tablespoon of turmeric. While this is all happening, get a pan warming on the stovetop, high heat, and maybe chop up a few mushrooms, if you've got them handy.

Get out a fork and mix up the eggs. Watch out - the turmeric really clumped up when I was mixing, and I don't know how to stop that from happening. Sift it, maybe, or simply don't drop the whole amount at once into the mixture. Make sure the eggs get broken up and everything gets mixed, then toss the whole mess (mushrooms first, so they get coated in the egg mixture) into the pan. Get out a spatula, and just make everything stays moving. If a skin forms on the bottom of the pan, scrape it off; what you want is to get even heat and let the eggs firm up. Should take about two or three minutes. Take the eggs off the heat slightly before they're at your preferred level of firmness - they'll still cook for a while on the plate.

Voila - scrambled eggs. Easiest hot breakfast in the universe. The turmeric gives it a nice orange color - turmeric is a great food coloring - and a mellow, earthy flavor, as well. I almost never make eggs without cheese, but that didn't seem like the thing to do here. (Actually, I tend to consider eggs that don't include at least three types of vegetable and two types of cheese a bit underprepared, but that's neither here or there.) All things considered, a really nice way to spice up a simple dish.

Tomorrow... I'll talk about the dinner I made tonight, Kashmiri rice and salmon with turmeric in a coconut milk sauce.

Getting lost (and a call for contributions)

2010-01-25T20:31:00.000-08:00

If you’ve ever argued with me – and if you’re reading this, let’s not kid ourselves, you have – you might have noticed that I’ve got a thing for analogies. I like analogies. I find them to be an incredibly useful rhetorical device. Analogies can make things clearer to the person you’re talking to, sure – but they can make things clearer to yourself, as well. You’re gaining two things – an easier way to look at a particular subject, primarily, but just as importantly, the idea that these two things are similar. If that similarity breaks down - if your analogy turns out to be inapt - then that can reveal a great deal about your original subject; likely, things that you had missed, the first time around.

I’m not sure if this is making much sense… let me find an analogy for you.

I cook, in a lot of ways, in the same way I learn a new area. When I’m living somewhere new, I spend a lot of time getting lost. Not simply because I don’t know my way around; I get lost on purpose, as a method of learning. I’ll pick somewhere big and obvious that I want to go – the mall, the Washington Monument – and just go. No directions, no nothing, just hop on my motorcycle and do what feels right. (And when you’re on a Harley, baby, it all feels right.) Pick a time when there’s no traffic, nothing else to do – where you can just drive, take in the roads, get a feel for the lefts and rights, for the way the city streets curve, for where the big roads take you and where they don’t. If you never get there, who cares? As long as you can find your way home again and start over, that’s all you need. Getting lost does two things that getting where you’re going never can, and I don’t know which one is more important. Getting lost on purpose teaches you how to get found, when you’ve gotten lost not on purpose. And getting lost often introduces you to amazing things, things that you would never see if you were just heading from point A to point B.

When I’m cooking something new, I’ll come up with an idea. Most of the time, that idea will be based off of something I’ve eaten before, or at least heard about. I’ll look through my toolbox, and try to figure out if I’ve got what I need to get from here to there. Is the place I’m going big enough to see from where I am? It’s still rare for me that the answer to that question is “yes” – that I can just come up with a recipe in my head for something new. Most of the time, I’ll search Internet for hints. I’ll do a quick Google search, and take a look at a few recipes. Most of the time, all I’m really looking for are the broad strokes – the major directions – because if I follow the directions to the letter, I’m likely to get a perfect, delicious dish.

I’m unlikely to get lost, in other words.

Making dishes wrong is far, far more educational than making them right, in more or less the same way that getting lost is more educational than getting to your destination. (Unless, I suppose, you’re heading to a school, library, museum, or that sort of place.) (And you’re the type of person who gets more benefit out of those things than out of experiential learning.) (And you were going to be so late that if you got lost, you weren’t going to make it on time.) Pointing yourself in a direction and winging it means that sometimes you’ll wind up with food that tastes terrible (or even worse, food that tastes boring) but sometimes you’ll wind up with something that tastes amazing. And when you make the dish again, you’ll be able to correct your errors – much more useful, in the long run, than never having made them at all.

Even more than that, getting lost is exciting. It’s scary, no doubt – especially when you’ve got a half-dozen people coming over for dinner, and you don’t really know if you’ve cooked anything that’s actually worth eating. But at the same time, there’s a tingle that goes through my system every time I figure something out, or every time I think “I bet it would taste even better if I…” It's worth occasionally having mushy cashews.

So I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again. This blog is open to anyone and everyone who feels like contributing – and I’ll let you define how you’d like to contribute. I’d love to have people writing guest entries, or even a weekly column, but if you’ve got something else in mind that you think would be fun – get in touch! I’d love to hear from you. In the meantime, I hope you’re enjoying watching me get lost.

Week 2 - Turmeric

2010-01-25T12:32:00.000-08:00

So last week, I was looking through my spices for spices, and I thought, “Turmeric. I’ve got this big jar of it, and really have no idea what the heck it is.” It goes in Indian food. That’s why I have it, and that’s pretty much the only thing I know about it.

Then I thought, “wait – don’t I have a blog for precisely this reason?”

I’m not joking, either. One of the advantages of having a terrible memory is that you occasionally surprise yourself like that.

Up until then, I had been spending a lot of time waffling about what I should do next. Should it be something else critical, along the lines of salt? Sugar? Pepper? (No. Very no. Week one took three weeks in large part because salt is an immense topic. I need to pick something that’s reasonable.) (And pepper is probably at least two weeks, maybe as much as a month – a week for black peppercorns, and then I’ll look and see if the other colors are deserving of weeks to themselves, or should just be handled en masse.)

At this point it seems like a good idea to get down to business as usual, or at least figure out what business as usual will be. This week I’m just gonna pick something nice and normal, cook a few dishes, make a few funny quips, and try not to get sucked in too deep. (Fair warning – if it turns out that, upon examination, turmeric is as rich in history and usage as salt, has as many variations and requires the same kind of in-depth understanding… I’m going to quit.)

I also like the idea of doing spices in themed groupings – so I’ll probably wind up, over the next few weeks, doing a bunch of the spices that are commonly used in Indian dishes, and trying out a bunch of Indian stuff, in addition to doing my best to find dishes that show off each spice’s individuality.
In a lot of cases, of course, there won't be a dish that really focuses on spices like, say, turmeric - because spices are usually used in conjunction with particular other spices, just like music tends to happen in chords, rather than individual notes.

I’m not going to cook anything for at least a day or two, because honestly – between the dinner on Friday and a birthday dinner we made last night (sushi for my friend Yousef’s thirty-fifth… I need to find a better source for sushi-grade fish around here, but all in all the meal was great) I’ve got to clear out some of these leftovers. But that gives me some time to figure out exactly what turmeric is, where it comes from, and what it does - as well as some thinking about how I can make sure this blog remains a reasonable amount of work for me, and a reasonable amount of reading for you.

Five Salt Dinner 4 -- Salt-Crusted Red Snapper

2010-01-24T12:35:00.000-08:00

Hi blog readers, this is Victoria.

As you know by now, my husband is a city boy who shrieks like a sissy when confronted with a harmless one-pound fish. Fortunately for him, I spent years working on living history farms; plowing with a team of oxen, milking cows and goats, stuffing sausage casings, and plucking and gutting ducks. I have never cleaned or gutted a fish, however, so I was relieved to hear that he had bought one that was already prepared. I got home from work, still amused by the panicked phone call in which he begged me to “deal with the fish.” I was even more amused to realize that it was basically a large red minnow.

Gross? Definitely. Scary? Not even a little. I showed Mr. Snapper to our nine-month-old son, Benjamin, and he just laughed.

Unfortunately, Aaron hadn’t realized that although the vendor at the fish market had assured him that the fish was cleaned and gutted, it hadn’t had the scales removed, and our recipe called for a cleaned and scaled fish. Aaron hadn’t been able to bring himself to look closely at it (or to bring himself close enough to the fish to take a look) and he assumed it had been scaled. I picked it up and realized instantly that it hadn’t. So task one was learning how to scale a fish.

Fortunately, the internet gave me instructions.

The instructions included: “You will want to do this outside, or in a place where you can clean up easily -- scales will fly everywhere. I learned this the hard way: I scaled many fish in an old apartment of mine, only to find scales attached to the ceiling when I moved out, years later.”

After reading these instructions, I took Mr. Snapper out to the balcony, placed him on some wax paper, and started scraping firmly from tail to head, i.e. against the direction of the scales. The internet was not kidding about scales flying everywhere – they literally went flying in a four-foot range and in many random directions. If you ever try this, remember to keep your mouth closed! Also, wear a high-necked shirt. I was itchy later that evening and discovered that a fish scale had flown down my shirt and lodged under my bra. Uncomfortable as well as yucky!

The important thing when scaling the fish is to achieve full coverage (or uncoverage, really). Run your fingers over the body of the fish to make sure you haven’t missed anywhere, like behind its ears or under its little armpits (finpits?). Any stubborn scales can just be plucked out with your fingers. I didn’t get too picky about the part closest to the head, which I had no intention of eating anyway.

Success! I feel like a pioneer woman!

Once I realized how easy this process is, I resolved to go to the fish market and buy whole fish on a regular basis and to learn how to clean and gut them as well. My husband is going to be SO happy!

Now that the fish was finally ready, I cut some slits in the skin, rubbed olive oil on both sides, and sprinkled it liberally with Old Bay seasoning. I equal my husband in general over-enthusiasm, and used far too much Old Bay, but it didn’t matter because it wasn’t hard to scrape it off before eating the final product.

The second challenge was adjusting the proportions and the timing. The recipe that Aaron found online was for a bulky (I almost wrote “beefy”) 6.5 pound fish, and our Mr. Snapper was a classic one-pound weakling. I bet the other fish picked on him in school.

Ha! “in school” -- get it?

I prepared the salt crust, which called for mixing a large amount of kosher salt with chopped fresh parsley, basil, tarragon, freshly-ground black pepper, orange zest, lemon zest, a little orange juice, and some lemon juice. Since this was just flavoring the salt crust, I figured the portions didn’t matter too much.

The timing was more of a problem, and I resorted to looking for recipes for salt-encrusted fish that were much smaller than the one in the recipe Aaron had recommended. I decided that 20 minutes would probably work.

Unlike the recipe for the salt crust for the roast, this recipe did not call for egg whites – probably because the fish is flat and could be easily coated with a top and a bottom, without worrying about the sides standing up on their own. The recipe assured me that I could leave the head and tail uncovered, which made me feel like I was tucking Mr. Snapper into a little bed. Time for Goodnight Moon . . .

Goodnight little fishie...

After 20 minutes, we pulled Mr. Snapper out of the oven. He looked pretty much the same.

I gingerly tried cracking his salt crust with a hammer, hoping for the same dramatic effect Aaron had achieved with the roast. There was an unresounding smush as the hammer sank slightly into the salt, and I realized that the egg whites turn the crust into, well, a CRUST. Sigh.

If I ever salt encrust a fish again, I will use egg white just for the gratification of being able to crack the crust open with a hammer.

Anyway, I was able to lift the salt crust off mostly in large-ish pieces, and to sweep off the remaining salt with a pastry brush. Then I was faced with a whole fish, apparently cooked.

Um, what next?

Since we’ve never cooked a whole fish before, I wasn’t sure what to do next . . . Well, actually I knew that I needed to cut it apart in some special way that would leave the bones behind and preserve the meat for serving. To the internet again!

The internet said: “To serve, slide a spatula under a section that had been scored and simply lift it out and onto a plate. For the section closest to the head, move the spatula into the top of the fish over the ribs, which start below the backbone, then around the top and down toward the ribs in a semicircular motion. This ensures a boneless piece.”

Sound great!

Only, it turns out that was one of those “easy to describe, difficult to do” things. I ended up with a lot of pieces of fish, and quite a few of them still had bones in them. Grrr. I love fish, but I HATE fish bones. Obviously, this will take more practice.

This is not easy.

The internet also said: “Oh, and don't forget the cheeks of the fish, which are my favorite part. They will be orbs of yummy fish right under each eye. And the tails, if not burnt black, are crunchy and nutty-tasting. You can also pick at the meat between the ribs, as well as in the belly.”

To which I responded: “No frickin’ way am I eating fish cheeks!” Now I’m grossed out too! Maybe Aaron had a point after all.

On a happier note, the fish was delicious: flaky, moist and perfectly cooked. I shredded the leftover pieces onto a salad for lunch today, and discovered that the spiciness of the Old Bay was a great complement to the lettuce and spinach.

But the result was pretty tasty!

My conclusion: it was a lot of work for a good, but not spectacular, dish o’ fish. Maybe I wouldn’t have felt that way if I hadn’t been learning so many new skills at the same time. I’ll try cooking and serving whole fish a few more times, then try it again.

Five salt dinner 2.3 - Salt-Crusted Prime Rib Finale

2010-01-23T17:45:00.000-08:00

I had expected the prime rib to take about four hours, based on the weight. However, I was judging doneness based on the internal temperature, rather than time, and three hours into the process it hit 130 degrees - the bottom end of medium rare, for prime rib. (As an aside, this is the first time I have used the thermometer for any large project, and I absolutely loved it. I never had to open the oven, touch the meat, or do anything else that might disturb the cooking, and I could feel comfortable the whole time that I knew exactly what was going on.)

There was definitely a problem, though - carryover heat. The purpose of the salt crust is to absorb the heat of the oven and re-transfer it to the meat in a controlled fashion. And while the salt never got particularly hot (it was warm to the touch out of the oven) it kept cooking that meat for about an hour after I took it out of the oven. I was chewing my fingernails, as I watched the thermometer creep from 130 (when I took it out) all the way up to 150 (when I finally served it.) Part of the problem there is the fact that I had thought it would take about four hours - so I put it in at 3:00, planning on taking it out at 7:00, resting it for a half hour and serving it at 7:30. Instead, I took it out at 6:00, and it sat for an hour and a half.

Oh, also - I totally screwed up the placement of the roast - whenever you're cooking any sort of roast, the fatty part needs to be on top, so the fat can drip down during cooking. I'm not sure HOW I could have worked that out - the roast's shape would have made it really difficult to coat in the salt mixture if I turned it the other direction - but I wasn't thinking when I set this up, and put the fat on the bottom. So, if you do this yourself, don't be dumb like me.

In any case, it came out fine - a bit overdone (I think rare or maybe medium rare are really the only temperatures that do prime rib justice; this was solidly in the medium range, with a pinkish center. (This picture makes it look more overdone than it actually was, though.)

Guess what? It still tasted amazing, though.

But wait! I'm skipping right past the fun part!

Honestly, if you look at the first picture in this post, you'll notice that the crust had fallen apart towards the bottom of the pan - if I had wanted to, I could have just lifted the top crust off of the meat. But this was so much cooler.

Carving was also an issue; I've never cooked a prime rib before, and I wasn't familiar with how the bones are configured. What I had was three ribs off of a cow, connected by a big piece of what one assumes is vertebra, slightly deeper in the meat.

While I was dithering and trying to form a carving plan, my friend Laura stepped up to the plate and started slicing. She worked the knife around the vertebrae, creating opening up a space so that when she parallel to the ribs, she could then pull the whole bony section right off. (It's still sitting in my fridge. When my wife leaves, and I feel like I am safe acting like a caveman, I am going to pick those bones clean.)

All in all, I really liked the salt crust - I would definitely do this again, circumstances permitting. I think the presentation is really cool, the crust does a good job of keeping the meat evenly cooked, traps juices in and really lets the natural flavor of this great cut of meat come out. If I did it again, I would definitely try the crust I suggested in an earlier part of this. Also, I would take it out of the oven at 115 or 120, depending on how well done I wanted it. It was a great centerpiece to a really nice meal... and as a bonus, I've got about two prime rib lunches left over!

Five salt dinner 3 - Stuffed Mushrooms

2010-01-23T16:15:00.000-08:00

Oookay... So I was going to do salt-crusted red snapper next. Then I took the fish out of the bag to work on it. Then I shrieked like a little girl, and ran across the room to get away from the bag with the GIANT FISH EYE staring at me.

I am a city boy at heart. I do not want to be close to nature; I don't want to be part of the food cycle. I want my meat in fillets, steaks, or other forms that don't remind me at all of what they once were. What I do NOT want is a GIANT FISH (and by giant, I mean literally the smallest red snapper the market had) that is likely to start flopping around any second. (Despite being dead and gutted.)

Are you trying to tell me that thing doesn't freak you out at all?

I really wish I could describe how freaked out I am right now. I was barely able to get the fish back into the bag and into the fridge. I really, really hope Victoria is willing to deal with that thing.

You know what the funny thing is? I KNOW all this about myself - yet I bought a whole red snapper anyway.

Well, I'd better get working on something else, then...

Five salt dinner 3 - ~~Salt-Crusted Red Snapper~~ Stuffed Mushrooms

(Picking this entry up the next day - I just didn't have time to keep blogging and still get dinner on the table at a reasonable hour.)

As I said earlier, in the interest of science, I'm going to be making the following stuffed mushrooms every week - the only alteration being the spice I add for flavoring. It's a simple recipe, the point being to have something yummy, but which doesn't overwhelm the flavor of the spice. I had intended to make it exactly the same way every week - but honestly, at least in the beginning, I'm not going to be able to stop myself from tinkering. The mushrooms tend to come out a bit more watery than I would prefer. More on that later.

Also, I like to say mushrump a instead of mushroom. I do it enough that Victoria bought me a stuffed hedgehog and named him Mushrump. (What? It makes sense. His girlfriend is Pinecone, obviously.) Here is a picture of Mushrump - doesn't he make my baby look cute?

Seriously... I am shameless.

Right. Mushrooms.

Okay, so the parts:

Mushrooms, spinach, a baking pan, some salt, that's it. Well, since I'm cooking for eight this evening, and I've got plenty of mushrooms, I decided to spice things up a bit - I had an extra chorizo in the fridge, so I fried it up and threw it in the mix.

De-stem the mushrooms, and put them in the baking tray. Take the stems, and add an equal volume of spinach. Then, chop the hell out of them. My favorite tool for going nuts on stuff like this is a knife I found out last night is called a Mezza Luna - a curved knife with a handle on both ends. It's really good at mincing things, and it's really fun to use.

Cackling evilly is not a requirement when you use this thing, but every little bit helps.

After I chopped everything up, I decided I had too much stem, not enough spinach, so I threw in another half-handful or so. Half of this got enbowled at this point. I chucked the chorizo in the pile, kept chopping for a bit. Eventually, I wound up with this.

Now, as I said earlier, the last few times the mushrooms have been a little too much... let's say juicy. Not bad - but a bit too much water in my mouth when I bite down. I've learned a bit about the cooking uses of salt, recently - and so I decided to sprinkle some kosher salt on the mushrooms, figuring that it would pull some of the water out of them.

In to the oven for seven minutes - and when I pulled them off, it was pretty clear that water had been pulled out - the salt on the bottom of the tray had been dissolved, then the water it dissolved in evaporated.

Perfect! Flipped 'em over, (to be honest, I don't know why I was cooking them face-down then flipping them... I'll try it the other way next time and see if anything different happens.) stuffed 'em with the mushroom and spinach mix, covered 'em with a little bit of cheese (a parmesan/asiago mix) and threw them back in for seven minutes.

Result:

They look better than they tasted. Not that they tasted bad - actually, they tasted really good - but to me, at least, that picture looks like some kind of Platonic ideal of stuffed mushrooms. I'm drooling looking at that picture.

They were definitely less watery than they were last time, but I think there's still room for improvement. Anyone have any suggestions?

Pro Tip:

2010-01-22T13:29:00.000-08:00

Don't let a cement-like mixture of egg and salt harden on your countertop, unless you're looking for a workout.

Don't ask how I know this.

Five salt dinner 2.2 - Salt-Crusted Prime Rib 2

2010-01-22T13:26:00.000-08:00

(If you couldn't tell by the title, this is the third post in a series about the dinner I'm cooking this evening.)

When we last left our hero, he was having two problems - first, his salt mixture was not a good enough consistency to stick to the sides of the roast, and second, the amount of salt was probably insufficient to coat the entire roast.

I tried some half-assery for a while - piling the salt up, scraping some off the bottom... nothing really worked particularly well. Not only that, but the more I looked at the crust, the more I realized that I really expected something a bit more solid - the rock salt left a bunch of openings on the surface.

What was really called for here was some sort of spackle. I don't own any edible spackle, which means that this was a job for makin' it up - something that I enjoy doing. Okay, theory - if rock salt + egg are supposed to make my "cement", kosher salt + egg should make a decent spackle. Only one way to find out - otherwise I'm heading to the supermarket for another box of rock salt.

I took the whites of two more eggs, (running out of eggs!) and added salt until it turned into a paste. I started out with a fairly large amount...

And kept mixing, adding, mixing, adding, until I got the consistency I wanted. What I wanted, as it turns out, was about a pound and a quarter of kosher salt and two egg whites. At that point, the mixture was firm enough that it was capable of standing on its own. I made a snowball, went and washed my hands, and when I came back it was still standing.

Never let it be said that I haven't made a snowball out of salt.

Now, it was time to start spackling. Everywhere that looked like it needed more crust got some salt. I finished up with what I had made, and decided I still needed a little more, partly for aesthetic purposes, partly for cooking ones. I got out two more eggs, and mixed in the last of the box of kosher salt.

Don't eat the yellow snow.

Remind me never to do anything for aesthetic purposes - I had gotten some yolk in the mix, and as a result... well, you can see for yourself. In the end, this is what I wound up with:

I will be the first to admit that it is not the prettiest thing that I have ever seen. But still, once it got into the oven, I felt hopeful about the eventual result.

I'll know in about four hours!

If I had this to do over again, I would start with eight eggs, three pounds of kosher salt and three pounds of rock salt, and mix in extra kosher as necessary. I feel like that way you'd get the consistency of the kosher salt, but at the same time the solidity and volume of the rock salt. As it is, I've basically got a layer of kosher covering a layer of rock, which doesn't seem efficient.

I've also got a screaming baby in the other room. Not upset, not angry - just a baby who has decided that now is screaming time. This is why I haven't been posting much. Well, four dishes to go - I'll keep updating as things go in the oven.

Coming, my little master...

Five salt dinner 2.1 - Salt-Crusted Prime Rib 1

2010-01-22T12:52:00.000-08:00

Warts and all cooking, folks, that's what you'll get when you roll with me. This is the story of how I screwed up the main course. I'll tell you in about five hours if what I did to fix it actually worked.

When it comes to meat, I'm one of God's grillers. I like the grill. Meat? Fire. Fire? Meat. They love each other, I love both of them, and without a whole lot of effort you can make something that generally tastes amazing. So the opportunity cost of cooking meat NOT on the grill is high. It's hard, and the results are uncertain. However, in keeping with the theme of the week, I figured I needed to do something other than just slap a little kosher salt on a tenderloin and throw it on the grill. So I decided to salt-crust a prime rib.

Now, salt crusting something is different from salt encrusting something, in the same way a jewel encrusted sword is different from one surrounded in a giant diamond. As I talked about the other day, when you're cooking something IN salt, you're using the salt as a medium, not as a flavoring. Let me show you.

Here are my working parts:

If you ever do this, do me a favor and actually take the time to wrap the edges of the foil around the pan.

Trust me - it'll be worth the effort.

I've got a 3-bone prime rib, four pounds of rock salt, the whites of four eggs, several mixing bowls, a pan lined with heavy foil, a little bowl full of salt and pepper, and a digital probe thermometer. (The eggs are in the bowl nested in the larger one. I have a picture that actually allows you to see the eggs... but I noticed that picture also features my socks on the floor in the background. The kitchen seemed like a better call.)

Okay. Step one is easy - that little bowl is full of sea salt and fresh ground pepper. Apply liberally.

There are those who would say I do almost everything liberally.

Step two, we're making the crust. Now, the recipe that I read called for five CUPS of egg whites, beaten stiff. (For those who don't know what that means - it does not mean that the eggs are BDSM freaks. For this recipe, it's sufficient to just go at them with a fork until they're frothy.) That couldn't possibly be right, so I started with the whites of four eggs - about half a cup - and eventually added another four in.

This is my picture of eggs and rock salt.

Now, add the two together, a bit at a time, and mix.

NOTE: Rock salt is basically two things - a rock, and salt. It's hard, and it's sharp, and it's salty. Here's what mixing hard sharpy salt rocks with your hand feels like:

OW.

Put on a glove. Like this.

I learn these things the hard way so that you don't have to, folks!

Your goal here is to get a consistency that you can basically pack a snowball with. My problem was, the best I got to was this:

Wet and sticky, but not quite where I wanted to be. I figured it was probably going to be enough, so I decided to get the party started. First, you lay the bottom part of the crust down in the roasting pan:

Then, put the meat down, and pack the salt mixture all around it.

Before you start on the sides, insert the meat thermometer, then pack the salt around it.

Now, here's where my problems started. I was wrong - that wet, gloppy mass of rock salt WASN'T, in fact, strong enough to stick to the sides of the roast; most of it wound up down in the pan. And four pounds of rock salt wasn't really going to be enough to coat the whole piece of meat. Unfortunately for you, my son just woke up - and from the smell, he's been dreaming about toxic waste. In part 2, I'll tell you what I did to solve those problems.

Oh dear God, Benjamin.