Fennel Wrap-up

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.

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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.