Actually, I'm not making a wrap - I'm drawing Week Turmeric to a close. I never did a generic “This is your turmeric” entry, so I’ll use this one as a place to share some things about turmeric that have been wandering around my head.
1: What is turmeric, anyway?
One thing I really need to do - and please feel free to send me suggestions - is come up with a standard list of background questions on each spice that I can go over. I'm not talking all the history stuff; I'm talking the practical things, like whether there are different forms you can get the spice in, and where you might have to go to get it. The kind of thing I did extensively for salt... and honestly, burned myself out a little bit on.
Luckily for me, turmeric is a bit boring in that regard. Turmeric is a rhizome - the horizontal underground stem of a plant which sending shoots upwards and roots downward. If you've ever seen whole ginger root, it's basically the same thing, except turmeric is less fractal and more orange.
Technically, turmeric does have different variations - but most of us will never have any use for anything except turmeric powder. There is also white turmeric, which is used in some parts of southeast Asia - but it doesn't taste as good, so it doesn't get used much. Then there's the raw turmeric root, which you can use just like you can use ginger root. The thing is - and I honestly haven't been able to figure out why - we don't. You can buy turmeric root online, but even big spice merchants don't really have much of it; there's just not much call for it. Poking around online, it honestly seems that nobody has the slightest clue what to do with it, except "use a microplane to grate it". IE, turn it into a powder. So, we use the powdered form, and that's about it.
Turmeric's nickname is "Indian saffron", and that gives you an idea of the high regard that people hold it in. After all, saffron is the most expensive spice in the world; an ounce of good saffron costs more than a share of Apple stock; three ounces of top-quality stuff are a good trade for an ounce of gold.
I'm not going to lie to you - I am probably not going to be doing a saffron week.
Turmeric also seems to be approximately as medicinal as water from the Holy Grail. It's been shown in studies to fight everything from acne to uveitis (inflammation of the eyes) with stops at joint pain, arthritis, about ninety forms of cancer, and even HIV. (Actually, alphabetically the farthest down I got was "viral infections", but honestly, it was cooler to write uveitis.)
Excuse me, I need to readjust my IV turmeric drip. That's better.
2: Science gets its due
How were the turmeric stuffed mushrooms? Really boring, actually; I wasn’t much of a fan. Turmeric is a deep bass note, the kind of thing that you don’t notice while it’s there, and might not even notice consciously when its gone. You just notice that something is missing, that the music doesn’t flow as well, that there’s nothing at the bottom for everything else to build upon. But at the same time, a foundation on its own isn’t that interesting. Nobody ever got up on stage with their bass guitar and started belting out tunes.
Well, I’m sure that tons of people have. But nobody ever got famous that way, is really what I mean. There aren’t a ton of famous bass solos in the history of rock.
That’s turmeric stuffed mushrooms – a guy sitting at a local bar on open mike night with his friggin’ bass. Sure, the verses really come across clearly, but when the chorus comes around, and the music is supposed to do something on its own, there’s just nothing. The turmeric really brought out the flavor of the other ingredients… but I was left asking, “yeah? What else?” Nothing sang.
I guess it didn’t really occur to me until this moment just how valuable an idea these mushrooms are. I mean, the purpose of this blog is to learn about the uses of various spices. I’ve been cooking with turmeric for a week, and it wasn’t until I started writing about why I was disappointed with the mushrooms that I realized that I had simply learned when to use turmeric, not why. But the why is in the paragraph above. Turmeric is a foundation; a rich, earthy bass note that can form a brilliant foundation for a medley of spices. On its own, it’s going to leave you somewhat hollow, but team it with the right support, and it’s absolutely brilliant.
3: I probably should have said this at the beginning of the week.
Turmeric gets on everything. The bad news is that it’s used a dye, as well as a spice, so it sticks around. One of my cutting boards has a yellowish cast to it now, as well as one of my plastic mixing bowls. The good news is that it’s a dye, yes, but it’s a fairly lousy dye. It’s not particularly lightfast, which means that it fades fairly easily when exposed to light. But, since my cutting boards don’t exactly spend a lot of time out in the sun, I’m not really counting on that effect.
The upshot of this all is be careful when cooking with turmeric. Mix in glass or ceramic vessels, and don’t leave something covered in turmeric on anything that can absorb the color for any length of time. At the same time, as fair as dyes go, it’s a fairly delicious dye. Those pictures of yellow rice that I had up the other day? Remember, that started out as ordinary white rice. The rich yellow color was all from the turmeric. I can definitely see using turmeric as a food coloring. So does the food industry; turmeric is a big part of what gives the yellow color to yellow mustard. If you're seeing a bright yellow color in food, chances are turmeric isn't far away.
4: Further experiments for the reader.
Not every song wants a squealy guitar. Not every song wants a fiddle or a trumpet, and songs that don’t want something that’s going to stand front and center like that are probably going to be ruined by its inclusion. But you know what? It’s really hard to ruin something by adding a bass line. And I think you could probably put turmeric in a bunch of fairly odd places without harming the flavor at all. Desserts, for instance.
I can actually see using turmeric as a coloring in something like cupcakes or frosting without it setting off any sensory alarm bells. The same is quite probably true about spongy cakes in general; if you want to give something a rich yellow color, you could probably do it with a bit of turmeric, and just let the flavor blend into the background.
I’m not, to be perfectly honest, a huge cake person; I’m much more of a pie guy. But Joe sent me a recipe for Sfouf, a middle eastern almond cake, that uses turmeric: http://mideastfood.about.com/od/dessertssweetspastries/r/sfoufrecipe.htm. I can see this really working well together - in this case, the turmeric enhancing the flavor of the almonds. Where I really think it would shine, though, would be in a super-sweet deserts like baklava, where the turmeric would add great color, but where the earthiness would also blend well with the main flavors of the dish.
Hmm. Turmeric in baklava sounds great. If anyone decides to try it, please email me to tell me how it works out.
As closes Turmeric, so opens Cumin. See you all on Monday!
Friday, February 12, 2010
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Vegetarian Mulligatawny Soup
Victoria and I were talking about cookbooks.
We've got a whole shelf of them taking up room in our tiny little kitchen. By tiny, I mean tiny... and by shelf, I mean piece of wood laid over the radiator because we desperately need the storage space. In the nearly nine months we've been living here now, I have used precisely two of those books - Alton Brown's More Food, specifically the two pages on buttermilk pancakes. I have also used the thirty-two page pamphlet that came with our bread machine and gives various recipes for use with it. Oh, and I've got a Lebanese cookbook I'll look at once in a blue moon.
The thing is, we live in the age of the Internet, and to be perfectly honest, I'm just not sure what role cookbooks are supposed to be playing in my life. There are some things that new media just doesn't strike me as right for; I don't imagine ever curling up with a Kindle late at night in bed. But at the same time, it is absolutely unimaginable in the age of Internet that someone would want to use reference material that is not only non-searchable, poorly indexed, and doesn't update itself. Even a little bit. I don't know if you realize this, but if you're a published, you can't even issue a patch for a book that's got an error... it just remains busted forever, unless your customer buys a whole new one. I mean, how does that make any sense? [1]
Recipes are essentially reference materials, and reference materials are what the internet is good at. Let's say for the sake of argument that the Encyclopedia Britannica is an order of magnitude more accurate than Wikipedia. (An assertion which I would hotly dispute, if that were my point.) The fact that Wikipedia has got full-text searching, hyperlinks, and 100x the data would still make it the obvious choice by a wide margin. The only exception would be when I needed to find one, and exactly one, article, I knew exactly what it was, and it was on a major subject. (Victoria and I just finished watching Torchwood Series 3, and I sat down and spent a half an hour reading Wikipedia's vast article on the Time Lords, the race of which Dr. Who is a member. Britannica just can't hope to match that level of nerdiness.)
I guess that recipes work the same way. It's work keeping cookbooks - at least high-quality ones - around, if you feel there will be times that you need to know how to make buttermilk pancackes, and don't feel like messing around. You want a recipe that will make great buttermilk pancakes, that you can have full faith in. I'm going to trust Alton Brown's book way more than I'm going to trust CookinLovinDad1975@gmail. But when I'm not looking for that exact thing, what does a cookbook really do for me? Well, I'm back to improvising again... and if I'm doing that, I'd prefer to look at a half-dozen recipes, read through comment threads, etc. In any case, our kitchen felt cramped by a shelf of recipe books that are unsearchable and whose contents are rarely obvious, so Victoria and I decided to clear most of them out last weekend. This is what we let stick around.
So when, two days after this great purging, my friend Laura was nice enough to give me an Indian cookbook to use while I'm going through turmeric, cumin, and the various other spices that Indian cooking uses heavily. I was halfway through all the stuff I just said above, when I looked down at my hand. I've been inspired by Sarah Palin lately, and I try to keep some general notes scribbled down, just in case. Well, my hand said "be less of an asshole all the time" so, rather than explaining to my friend in detail why her very nice gesture was totally pointless, I said "thank you very much! I'm sure it'll turn out to be useful!."
And it was, but for different reasons. Where cookbooks can be most useful is when they're not really cookbooks, but cooking manuals - where they give instructions about the method and theory, rather than simply lists of recipes. And, in the beginning, this book had a great glossary of ingredients and concepts important to Indian cooking - stuff I didn't know, and wouldn't have been likely to bump into any other way. I can see myself getting more books like that... but the list of recipe thing is just a dodo.
And this is a big reason why: two days later, I decided that I'd make some Mulligatawny soup. It's one of my favorite soups, I know it's fairly turmeric-y, and it's soup season, anyway. So I broke out the book, looked up the recipe... and it led off with a half-pound of ground lamb.
Now, I was pretty sure I'd have everything I needed for Mulligatawny soup... but I darn tootin' didn't have a half pound of ground lamb sitting around. Because first, I would have ate it - lamb is delicious, and I don't make nearly as much of it as I should - and second, because my wife is a freakin' vegetarian. Which I thought Indian Cooking mostly was, as well! I mean, what the heck?
Anyway, I did my best to work with this 'book' thing. I went back to the index, and searched for vegetarian Mulligatawny soup. Nothing. I tried some different search terms - vegan - meatless - still nothing. I tried misspellings... nada. I figured the book might be having some problems, so I closed it, put it down on the table, slowly counted to ten, and then re-opened it. I looked for a place to post "NEED VEG MULIG SOUP RECIPE PLS" in the book, but I couldn't figure out where in the book the forum section was. No matter what I did, I couldn't seem to fix this "not having the recipe I wanted" bug.
So, I went to Internet and Googled "Vegetarian Mulligatawny soup" and got tons of hits. However, within five minutes, I realized these two things:
1. Most of these recipes were, in fact, the exact same recipe, just cut-and-pasted to be entered into a bunch of different sites, and
2. That recipe was really bad.
Actually, that's an English nerd's "bad". there. I mean, the recipe made perfectly fine soup - it was just incredibly poorly written. All the ideas were there, sure... but if you think a recipe that has you put in a "caroot" can possibly be good, well, then, we're going to have problems.
http://www.indianfoodcooking.com/indian-vegetarian-mulligatawny-soup-recepies.html is a good example of the recipe, but like I said, it's easy to find - half of the entries on the first two pages of a Google search are just this same text.
"One each Tomato", indeed.
One fairly serious non-grammatical quibble. Chick peas aren't even listed on the ingredients. To a chick-pea soup. (Who's more the fool - the fool, or the fool who follows him? I mean, I'm ripping on this recipe... but I cooked it, didn't I?) Also, dried chick-peas are a huge pain in the arse to work with. They took me at least twice the expected amount of time to cook until soft. Were I doing this again, I would probably use canned beans instead of dried.
Vegetarian Mulligatawny Soup
1 cup (8 oz) dried chick peas (garbanzos), or two 15 oz cans
1 Medium onion, chopped fine
2 tablespoons Ghee
1 Asian pepper
1 pinch Cayenne pepper
1 tablespoon Turmeric
1 teapoon Coriander
4 cups vegetable stock
Salt to taste
1 medium carrot, diced
1 large potato, cubed
1 green bell pepper, chopped
1 tomato, chopped
1 cup coconut milk
2 tablespoons lemon juice
2 teaspoons cilantro/parsley
First, get the chick peas ready. If they're dried, that means cooking them 'till they're nice and soft - like I said, it took me almost two hours, so throw these on ahead of time. Then chop up all the veggies. You don't need to go crazy here, because everything is going into a blender as soon as it's all cooked, so if the potatoes are a bit chunky, who cares.
As for the vegetable stock, you can either make your own or get it out of a can - that's what I did. Honestly, though, if I had it to do all over again - as long as I was spending hours cooking the chick peas, I might as well have done some veggie stock. Using the canned boullion stuff put more salt into the soup than I would have liked.
I didn't know what ghee was until recently - it's basically butter with a bunch of the water boiled out, so what you've got is greasier and doesn't need refrigeration. It's a perfectly fine fat for sauteing things in... but if you don't have ghee, just use butter or olive oil. It's not a big deal.
Anyway, take a big soup-pot and saute up those onions - about five minutes - then add in the spices and keep going for another minute or two. (because of theme and all, I added in some extra turmeric, and took out some coriander - I switched which one got a teaspoon and which one a tablespoon.) Remember, heat releases flavor - I would guess that the reason to throw the spices in the hot now is to get whatever chemical reaction that we interpret as "yumminess" going at full kilter. So, the spices go in with the onions.
Give the spices about two minutes, then toss in the broth, along with all the veggies. Bring it to a boil, and let it simmer for 10-15 minutes. Drain your now-soft chick peas and toss them in, along with a cup of coconut milk. (The original recipe calls for shredded coconut, as well... but what the hell?!? Ruin a good soup, why don't you?) Give it another five minutes, then kill the heat and let it cool. When it's cool enough to work with, take a blender to it. If you've got a wand blender, go nuts; if not, toss it in the blender for about 5 pulses, enough that it looks smooth but not too smooth. You want there to be a decent amount of texture.
Return it to the pot, and add the lemon and most of the cilantro, and mix it up. Now would be a good time to check the taste, and balance it out by adding salt/pepper/lemon juice as needed. Turn on the heat and let it warm up - not quite to a simmer, though. Serve using the remainder of the cilantro as a garnish.
I loved it. It wasn't a big deal to make, and it really is one of my favorite soups. It came out rich and flavorful; I didn't feel like adding lamb, coconut, or whatever would have done anything but detract from the taste. This recipe made about enough for six people, so we were able to have a good number of meals off of this. Again, though... don't forget to take that red pepper out before you serve everything.
Oh, by the way - for those of you that have only heard about what DC has been like this week, this is what I see when I open the door to my balcony:
[1] One of the things that I found most fascinating when we were learning to use the law library was the extent to which the legal field has adapted over the years to deal with these necessary limitations on printed media. To take a simple example - you're arguing a case in front of the Supreme Court. You need to know any cases that might set precedent. United States Reports - the official history of the SCOTUS's cases - takes up somewhere in the neighborhood of five hundred volumes, and we're not talking small books. Once you find a case that looks good, you need to go through the whole thing AGAIN to find any other cases that might comment on or alter the case you're reading. Then you have to do the same thing for THOSE cases... and so on and so forth.
Legal books have "pocket parts" - a little pocket in the back of the book for updates, which get published as necessary. That way, you can tell that a particular case is not good law any more without having to search through thousands of books.
In any case... the advent of the electronic database has vastly simplified legal research. I honestly can't imagine trying to study law without computer-based searching. The companies that actually create and maintain these databases charge dollars a minute - and up to $120 to run a single query - because the alternative to that $120 query is to spend eight hours of a first-year attorney's time trying to find the same info, and that's gonna cost a lot more.
We've got a whole shelf of them taking up room in our tiny little kitchen. By tiny, I mean tiny... and by shelf, I mean piece of wood laid over the radiator because we desperately need the storage space. In the nearly nine months we've been living here now, I have used precisely two of those books - Alton Brown's More Food, specifically the two pages on buttermilk pancakes. I have also used the thirty-two page pamphlet that came with our bread machine and gives various recipes for use with it. Oh, and I've got a Lebanese cookbook I'll look at once in a blue moon.
The thing is, we live in the age of the Internet, and to be perfectly honest, I'm just not sure what role cookbooks are supposed to be playing in my life. There are some things that new media just doesn't strike me as right for; I don't imagine ever curling up with a Kindle late at night in bed. But at the same time, it is absolutely unimaginable in the age of Internet that someone would want to use reference material that is not only non-searchable, poorly indexed, and doesn't update itself. Even a little bit. I don't know if you realize this, but if you're a published, you can't even issue a patch for a book that's got an error... it just remains busted forever, unless your customer buys a whole new one. I mean, how does that make any sense? [1]
Recipes are essentially reference materials, and reference materials are what the internet is good at. Let's say for the sake of argument that the Encyclopedia Britannica is an order of magnitude more accurate than Wikipedia. (An assertion which I would hotly dispute, if that were my point.) The fact that Wikipedia has got full-text searching, hyperlinks, and 100x the data would still make it the obvious choice by a wide margin. The only exception would be when I needed to find one, and exactly one, article, I knew exactly what it was, and it was on a major subject. (Victoria and I just finished watching Torchwood Series 3, and I sat down and spent a half an hour reading Wikipedia's vast article on the Time Lords, the race of which Dr. Who is a member. Britannica just can't hope to match that level of nerdiness.)
I guess that recipes work the same way. It's work keeping cookbooks - at least high-quality ones - around, if you feel there will be times that you need to know how to make buttermilk pancackes, and don't feel like messing around. You want a recipe that will make great buttermilk pancakes, that you can have full faith in. I'm going to trust Alton Brown's book way more than I'm going to trust CookinLovinDad1975@gmail. But when I'm not looking for that exact thing, what does a cookbook really do for me? Well, I'm back to improvising again... and if I'm doing that, I'd prefer to look at a half-dozen recipes, read through comment threads, etc. In any case, our kitchen felt cramped by a shelf of recipe books that are unsearchable and whose contents are rarely obvious, so Victoria and I decided to clear most of them out last weekend. This is what we let stick around.
For example, Law and Economics by Cooter & Ulen - I have no idea even what cuisine that's supposed to be about, let alone what recipes are in it.
So when, two days after this great purging, my friend Laura was nice enough to give me an Indian cookbook to use while I'm going through turmeric, cumin, and the various other spices that Indian cooking uses heavily. I was halfway through all the stuff I just said above, when I looked down at my hand. I've been inspired by Sarah Palin lately, and I try to keep some general notes scribbled down, just in case. Well, my hand said "be less of an asshole all the time" so, rather than explaining to my friend in detail why her very nice gesture was totally pointless, I said "thank you very much! I'm sure it'll turn out to be useful!."
And it was, but for different reasons. Where cookbooks can be most useful is when they're not really cookbooks, but cooking manuals - where they give instructions about the method and theory, rather than simply lists of recipes. And, in the beginning, this book had a great glossary of ingredients and concepts important to Indian cooking - stuff I didn't know, and wouldn't have been likely to bump into any other way. I can see myself getting more books like that... but the list of recipe thing is just a dodo.
And this is a big reason why: two days later, I decided that I'd make some Mulligatawny soup. It's one of my favorite soups, I know it's fairly turmeric-y, and it's soup season, anyway. So I broke out the book, looked up the recipe... and it led off with a half-pound of ground lamb.
Now, I was pretty sure I'd have everything I needed for Mulligatawny soup... but I darn tootin' didn't have a half pound of ground lamb sitting around. Because first, I would have ate it - lamb is delicious, and I don't make nearly as much of it as I should - and second, because my wife is a freakin' vegetarian. Which I thought Indian Cooking mostly was, as well! I mean, what the heck?
Anyway, I did my best to work with this 'book' thing. I went back to the index, and searched for vegetarian Mulligatawny soup. Nothing. I tried some different search terms - vegan - meatless - still nothing. I tried misspellings... nada. I figured the book might be having some problems, so I closed it, put it down on the table, slowly counted to ten, and then re-opened it. I looked for a place to post "NEED VEG MULIG SOUP RECIPE PLS" in the book, but I couldn't figure out where in the book the forum section was. No matter what I did, I couldn't seem to fix this "not having the recipe I wanted" bug.
So, I went to Internet and Googled "Vegetarian Mulligatawny soup" and got tons of hits. However, within five minutes, I realized these two things:
1. Most of these recipes were, in fact, the exact same recipe, just cut-and-pasted to be entered into a bunch of different sites, and
2. That recipe was really bad.
Actually, that's an English nerd's "bad". there. I mean, the recipe made perfectly fine soup - it was just incredibly poorly written. All the ideas were there, sure... but if you think a recipe that has you put in a "caroot" can possibly be good, well, then, we're going to have problems.
http://www.indianfoodcooking.com/indian-vegetarian-mulligatawny-soup-recepies.html is a good example of the recipe, but like I said, it's easy to find - half of the entries on the first two pages of a Google search are just this same text.
"One each Tomato", indeed.
One fairly serious non-grammatical quibble. Chick peas aren't even listed on the ingredients. To a chick-pea soup. (Who's more the fool - the fool, or the fool who follows him? I mean, I'm ripping on this recipe... but I cooked it, didn't I?) Also, dried chick-peas are a huge pain in the arse to work with. They took me at least twice the expected amount of time to cook until soft. Were I doing this again, I would probably use canned beans instead of dried.
Vegetarian Mulligatawny Soup
1 cup (8 oz) dried chick peas (garbanzos), or two 15 oz cans
1 Medium onion, chopped fine
2 tablespoons Ghee
1 Asian pepper
1 pinch Cayenne pepper
1 tablespoon Turmeric
1 teapoon Coriander
4 cups vegetable stock
Salt to taste
1 medium carrot, diced
1 large potato, cubed
1 green bell pepper, chopped
1 tomato, chopped
1 cup coconut milk
2 tablespoons lemon juice
2 teaspoons cilantro/parsley
First, get the chick peas ready. If they're dried, that means cooking them 'till they're nice and soft - like I said, it took me almost two hours, so throw these on ahead of time. Then chop up all the veggies. You don't need to go crazy here, because everything is going into a blender as soon as it's all cooked, so if the potatoes are a bit chunky, who cares.
As for the vegetable stock, you can either make your own or get it out of a can - that's what I did. Honestly, though, if I had it to do all over again - as long as I was spending hours cooking the chick peas, I might as well have done some veggie stock. Using the canned boullion stuff put more salt into the soup than I would have liked.
I didn't know what ghee was until recently - it's basically butter with a bunch of the water boiled out, so what you've got is greasier and doesn't need refrigeration. It's a perfectly fine fat for sauteing things in... but if you don't have ghee, just use butter or olive oil. It's not a big deal.
Anyway, take a big soup-pot and saute up those onions - about five minutes - then add in the spices and keep going for another minute or two. (because of theme and all, I added in some extra turmeric, and took out some coriander - I switched which one got a teaspoon and which one a tablespoon.) Remember, heat releases flavor - I would guess that the reason to throw the spices in the hot now is to get whatever chemical reaction that we interpret as "yumminess" going at full kilter. So, the spices go in with the onions.
Give the spices about two minutes, then toss in the broth, along with all the veggies. Bring it to a boil, and let it simmer for 10-15 minutes. Drain your now-soft chick peas and toss them in, along with a cup of coconut milk. (The original recipe calls for shredded coconut, as well... but what the hell?!? Ruin a good soup, why don't you?) Give it another five minutes, then kill the heat and let it cool. When it's cool enough to work with, take a blender to it. If you've got a wand blender, go nuts; if not, toss it in the blender for about 5 pulses, enough that it looks smooth but not too smooth. You want there to be a decent amount of texture.
Return it to the pot, and add the lemon and most of the cilantro, and mix it up. Now would be a good time to check the taste, and balance it out by adding salt/pepper/lemon juice as needed. Turn on the heat and let it warm up - not quite to a simmer, though. Serve using the remainder of the cilantro as a garnish.
I loved it. It wasn't a big deal to make, and it really is one of my favorite soups. It came out rich and flavorful; I didn't feel like adding lamb, coconut, or whatever would have done anything but detract from the taste. This recipe made about enough for six people, so we were able to have a good number of meals off of this. Again, though... don't forget to take that red pepper out before you serve everything.
Oh, by the way - for those of you that have only heard about what DC has been like this week, this is what I see when I open the door to my balcony:
several common household items thrown in, for size reference.
That snowdrift is two feet taller than I am. My grill is under there somewhere! Waaaah!
[1] One of the things that I found most fascinating when we were learning to use the law library was the extent to which the legal field has adapted over the years to deal with these necessary limitations on printed media. To take a simple example - you're arguing a case in front of the Supreme Court. You need to know any cases that might set precedent. United States Reports - the official history of the SCOTUS's cases - takes up somewhere in the neighborhood of five hundred volumes, and we're not talking small books. Once you find a case that looks good, you need to go through the whole thing AGAIN to find any other cases that might comment on or alter the case you're reading. Then you have to do the same thing for THOSE cases... and so on and so forth.
Legal books have "pocket parts" - a little pocket in the back of the book for updates, which get published as necessary. That way, you can tell that a particular case is not good law any more without having to search through thousands of books.
In any case... the advent of the electronic database has vastly simplified legal research. I honestly can't imagine trying to study law without computer-based searching. The companies that actually create and maintain these databases charge dollars a minute - and up to $120 to run a single query - because the alternative to that $120 query is to spend eight hours of a first-year attorney's time trying to find the same info, and that's gonna cost a lot more.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Kashmiri Fried Rice and Salmon with Turmeric and Garlic - Part 3
A different person would have skipped the "early experimentation" bits, where I tried to cook this and got it wrong. I'm certainly dedicated to showing you the warts and all, because this is supposed to be a learning process, and it is very cynical of you to be thinking "by doing it this way, he managed to stretch one blog post out into three."
So the next day, I was feeling a lot better - Benjamin and I hadn't been fighting over what we wanted to do all day. We mutually decided that what we wanted to do was sit in his playpen, play with his toys, read to him, and cuddle him. I have to give it to him - the kid is already a convincing arguer. He made it clear that the day before, I had tried to do it my way, and it had been soul-crushing... so why not try doing things his way? Wouldn't that work better?
What I had wanted to say was "Assuming that my goal in life is either 'housewife' or 'baby life support system', yes, that works better." What I actually said was, " Chapter One. The Bride. The year Buttercup was born, the most beautiful woman in the world was a French scullery maid named Annette." All in all, I've had worse days.
When dinner time rolled around, I thought "I still have a bunch of fish left over. I still have a bunch of rice left over. I think I can fix the problems that I had yesterday, and I have a wonderful and supportive wife who is okay if we have the same dinner two nights in a row for the sake of a good blog post." (Which is true. I almost never get hit these days when dinner isn't good enough.)
Again, I wish that I could overstrike in the title bar, because while I had plenty of red snapper and tuna, I was a little short in the salmon department. (The tuna had been decidedly inferior as sushi tuna, but it looked like great cookin' tuna.) The red snapper was a filet, the tuna was a small steak with some sushi-sized pieces left over.
So, I went about fixing the mistakes of the night before. I prepped the fish first, then took a fifteen minute break. This time, rather than using fresh garlic, I used powered garlic with some garlic salt to boot, and threw in a tiny bit of the Kala Namak salt along with the turmeric. I gave the fish a good rub on both sides and threw it back in the fridge while I started on the rice.
The rice was fine last night, so I didn't really feel the need to make any changes. I cooked it for slightly less time than I did last night, because... well, because I had an idea. Rice gets fried, rice goes into a prep bowl, and rather than getting another cooking vessel dirty I just kept the wok on the heat. Besides... I had an idea.
Measure out a half cup of coconut milk; add some pepper and the chiles. By now the fish has had a half hour to get used to its new life partners, turmeric and garlic. Wok is hot again. It gets some oil; the fish gets two minutes per side. I decide to get fancy and try to keep the little bits of tuna higher up on the wok so they don't scorch. My success was decidedly mixed. Between sides, I dropped the heat a bit - it would still be hot enough to sear the second side, but would bleed off a little bit of heat before the coconut milk.
Now, last time, the coconut milk had boiled immediately, and I had poured water in to prevent it from burning, which washed out the taste. This time, I was ready for it. My idea was this; coconut milk goes in. Coconut milk starts boiling. Now, I took a handful of the rice and tossed it in the pot. Between the lower heat, the rice, and me realizing that this is what happens to coconut milk, everything works out perfectly. The fish gets about five more minutes cooking in the milk, then I toss in the rest of the rice. (I'm going to mix it up with the sauce the second I get it to the table anyway, so why not just do it in the pot?)
It took two tries, but this came out exactly the way that I wanted it to, and it tasted great. It was an incredibly tasty dish, was fairly easy to make, and used up a bunch of leftovers.
For the record, here is the final recipe that I made.
Ingredients:
1 cup day old rice
.75 tsp turmeric, or enough to give the rice a yellowish cast
1 small onion, chopped mediumly
Peanut oil
Slightly more than a pound of tuna and red snapper
1 teaspoon turmeric
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon garlic salt
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
Some more peanut oil (it was already out)
1/2 cup coconut milk
A few grinds fresh pepper
One hot asian chili
Combine the turmeric, garlic powder, garlic salt, and kosher salt in a bowl, and rub in on the fish. Set the fish aside for a half hour at least.
Heat the wok, put in two tablespoons of oil or so and spread it around. It will of course pool back up; don't let this discourage you. When the oil is at "fry" toss in the onion. Cook it for about two minutes, or less if it's getting burned. Duh. Toss in the rice; fry for about five minutes, moving constantly. Remove the rice to a prep bowl, wipe out the wok, and put it back on the fire.
Reheat the wok. While it is warming, measure out the coconut milk and add the pepper and chili. Put some more oil in the wok, and fry the fish for two minutes per side. In between sides, turn the heat down to medium. When the second side is done, add the coconut milk. Lift the fish so that the milk can get under and around it. When the coconut milk starts to boil, toss in a bit of the rice to absorb some of the heat. Cook the fish for about four minutes, or until it starts to flake. Toss in the rest of the rice, mix well, and let cook for one more minute. Remove to a plate, eat, then write a blog post about it.
Tomorrow: Vegetarian Mulligatawny Soup
So the next day, I was feeling a lot better - Benjamin and I hadn't been fighting over what we wanted to do all day. We mutually decided that what we wanted to do was sit in his playpen, play with his toys, read to him, and cuddle him. I have to give it to him - the kid is already a convincing arguer. He made it clear that the day before, I had tried to do it my way, and it had been soul-crushing... so why not try doing things his way? Wouldn't that work better?
What I had wanted to say was "Assuming that my goal in life is either 'housewife' or 'baby life support system', yes, that works better." What I actually said was, " Chapter One. The Bride. The year Buttercup was born, the most beautiful woman in the world was a French scullery maid named Annette." All in all, I've had worse days.
When dinner time rolled around, I thought "I still have a bunch of fish left over. I still have a bunch of rice left over. I think I can fix the problems that I had yesterday, and I have a wonderful and supportive wife who is okay if we have the same dinner two nights in a row for the sake of a good blog post." (Which is true. I almost never get hit these days when dinner isn't good enough.)
Again, I wish that I could overstrike in the title bar, because while I had plenty of red snapper and tuna, I was a little short in the salmon department. (The tuna had been decidedly inferior as sushi tuna, but it looked like great cookin' tuna.) The red snapper was a filet, the tuna was a small steak with some sushi-sized pieces left over.
So, I went about fixing the mistakes of the night before. I prepped the fish first, then took a fifteen minute break. This time, rather than using fresh garlic, I used powered garlic with some garlic salt to boot, and threw in a tiny bit of the Kala Namak salt along with the turmeric. I gave the fish a good rub on both sides and threw it back in the fridge while I started on the rice.
The rice was fine last night, so I didn't really feel the need to make any changes. I cooked it for slightly less time than I did last night, because... well, because I had an idea. Rice gets fried, rice goes into a prep bowl, and rather than getting another cooking vessel dirty I just kept the wok on the heat. Besides... I had an idea.
Measure out a half cup of coconut milk; add some pepper and the chiles. By now the fish has had a half hour to get used to its new life partners, turmeric and garlic. Wok is hot again. It gets some oil; the fish gets two minutes per side. I decide to get fancy and try to keep the little bits of tuna higher up on the wok so they don't scorch. My success was decidedly mixed. Between sides, I dropped the heat a bit - it would still be hot enough to sear the second side, but would bleed off a little bit of heat before the coconut milk.
Now, last time, the coconut milk had boiled immediately, and I had poured water in to prevent it from burning, which washed out the taste. This time, I was ready for it. My idea was this; coconut milk goes in. Coconut milk starts boiling. Now, I took a handful of the rice and tossed it in the pot. Between the lower heat, the rice, and me realizing that this is what happens to coconut milk, everything works out perfectly. The fish gets about five more minutes cooking in the milk, then I toss in the rest of the rice. (I'm going to mix it up with the sauce the second I get it to the table anyway, so why not just do it in the pot?)
I need to learn to be a better food photographer if I'm going to be doing this for a year...
This looked delicious on the plate, but that picture kinda looks like a fairly unappealing, undifferentiated lump to me. Oh well. Do either of these pictures look any better?
These are the same picture... for the one on the bottom, I let the computer's auto image correct feature mess with the brightness and everything. Notice the hot pepper right in the middle of the fish... that got removed right after I took the picture. Anyway, feedback on the pictures is appreciated.
For the record, here is the final recipe that I made.
Ingredients:
1 cup day old rice
.75 tsp turmeric, or enough to give the rice a yellowish cast
1 small onion, chopped mediumly
Peanut oil
Slightly more than a pound of tuna and red snapper
1 teaspoon turmeric
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon garlic salt
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
Some more peanut oil (it was already out)
1/2 cup coconut milk
A few grinds fresh pepper
One hot asian chili
Combine the turmeric, garlic powder, garlic salt, and kosher salt in a bowl, and rub in on the fish. Set the fish aside for a half hour at least.
Heat the wok, put in two tablespoons of oil or so and spread it around. It will of course pool back up; don't let this discourage you. When the oil is at "fry" toss in the onion. Cook it for about two minutes, or less if it's getting burned. Duh. Toss in the rice; fry for about five minutes, moving constantly. Remove the rice to a prep bowl, wipe out the wok, and put it back on the fire.
Reheat the wok. While it is warming, measure out the coconut milk and add the pepper and chili. Put some more oil in the wok, and fry the fish for two minutes per side. In between sides, turn the heat down to medium. When the second side is done, add the coconut milk. Lift the fish so that the milk can get under and around it. When the coconut milk starts to boil, toss in a bit of the rice to absorb some of the heat. Cook the fish for about four minutes, or until it starts to flake. Toss in the rest of the rice, mix well, and let cook for one more minute. Remove to a plate, eat, then write a blog post about it.
Tomorrow: Vegetarian Mulligatawny Soup
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Kashmiri Fried Rice and Salmon with Turmeric and Garlic - Part 2
Last time, on The Year of Living Spicily:
After a sushi dinner for a friend's birthday, Aaron found himself with a bunch of leftover fish and a bunch of leftover rice. (Not sushi rice, actually, but rice from an earlier meal.) For reasons best ignored, he decided to take the easy way out and just follow some recipes. Yesterday, he talked about the fish he made, which turned out fairly mediocre because of a problem with the spicing and a mistake he made when cooking. Today he'll talk about the rice, which (spoiler alert!) come out really well, and tomorrow he'll talk about what he did the next day, when he realized that he STILL had a bunch of leftover fish and rice, and was pretty sure he could fix the mistakes he made the first time around.
Also, yesterday he referred to himself as "I"... it seems that today he's referring to himself as "he". Tomorrow, maybe he'll just say "Aaron", as in "AARON SMASH!" or "AARON LIGHTLY BRAISE PRAWNS EN CROUTE!"
I wonder what prawns en croute are? I hope they get braised, or Aaron is going to feel really ignorant.
You know, I love the idea of the Hulk as a chef. What's not to like? You've got huge, huge hands with a tiny, tiny spatula. You've got the Green Goliath in a goofy chef's hat and a "KISS CHEF!" apron. You've got sous-chefs cowering in terror any time the slightest thing goes wrong. And, inevitably, you've got the Hulk destroying the kitchen.
Oh! Oh! Oh! And then, and then, you've got Hulk calming down, putting his hand over his mouth, and saying "OH NO! HULK'S SOUFFLE!", delicately tiptoeing over to a miraculously undamaged oven, opening it with the gentlest of touches, and finding his souffle magically unharmed. At which point Hulk will sigh, lean against a counter, which will shift because he's a huge monster, and a tiny, tiny measuring spoon will tinkle to the floor, making the slightest of noises... and causing the souffle to loudly deflate.
Which of course causes the Hulk to go on another rampage.
I would watch a weekly cooking show starring the Hulk religiously.
OH MY GOD. It could be "Gamma-Ray Cooking with Bruce Banner", a Good Eats clone where the brilliant Dr. Bruce Banner explains to us the science behind cooking. Of course, what the fools at the Food Network DIDN'T know when they signed their new star was that Dr. Bruce Banner is the puny human form of THE INCREDIBLE HULK. During the first episode, something went wrong, it got caught on camera, they retitled the show, and now HULK COOK! has the highest ratings - and insurance costs - of any cooking show in history. Airing Wednesdays at 10, only on The Food Network.
What the hell was I talking about? Watergate or something? Oh, yeah. Fried rice. I bet that's going to be way more interesting than a cooking show starring The Hulk. I tell you what, after spending an hour thinking about how awesome it would be to have the job of building a Hulk-resistant kitchen, I'm really eager to tell you the story of how I fried some damned rice.
wheeee. fried rice.
I'm not saying it was bad. Actually, it was really good, for totally non-Hulk prepared foodstuffs. Like I said yesterday, fried rice is much easier to make than you'd think, and a really delicious way to deal with leftover rice, which is otherwise fairly yucky. If you've got a wok (like I do) but are fairly intimidated by it (like I am) it's also a really good introduction to the differences between cooking on a wok and cooking on the pots and pans we're used to.
I'm sorry... just give me a minute. I'm still mostly thinking about how awesome The Hulk is. Here's the link to the recipe in the meantime.
http://www.ehow.com/how_2177319_kashmir-turmeric-fried-rice.html
Actually, now that I go back and read the recipe, I think the whole premise of this meal - that I was too tired to think and just blindly followed the recipe - was a bit wrong.
Sorry, what I meant to say was "PUNY RECIPE LEAVE HULK ALONE! HULK SMASH RECIPE! RAAAAGH!"
What I learned in my previous experiments in fried ricery is that you want fried rice to have spent the night in the refrigerator. That gives it some time to dry out - it doesn't cook up as well if it's wet, and it definitely loses some of its texture. (The first time I tried fried rice, it was with fresh-cooked rice. It wasn't bad, but it definitely wasn't really fried rice.) I'm also going to guess that heat is an issue as well; with steamy-hot rice there's going to be a limited amount of additional heat you can put in before you start wrecking it; with cold rice, you can really throw some heat into it. The recipe as written uses a regular frying pan, which just doesn't get as hot as a wok, and doesn't have nearly as much surface area - in other words, it isn't nearly as good at transferring a lot of heat into something that you can spread out (such as rice) as a wok is. Long story short? I used a wok.
The thing about The Hulk is - and work with me here - he smashes stuff real good. I mean, The Hulk is the strongest there is! And you've got to respect that. Because if you don't respect it... well, the madder Hulk gets, the stronger Hulk gets. There's just something that speaks to the child in all of us in that.
So, my final recipe, based on the one above, is this:
Chop up an onion. Take some day (or more) old rice. Mix in turmeric until it is nice and yellow. (About .75 tsp turmeric per cup of rice. Or, just eyeball it.) This will be a little difficult - the rice is going to be solid, nasty, and sticky - so get a big bowl, and rather than try to stir, you may want to use a spatula and cut the powder into the rice. Don't go crazy if you're not getting even distribution - once it gets in the oil, it'll mix more easily. Get your wok fired up, when it's nice and hot - when a droplet of water shimmies and shakes its way across the surface - hit it with some oil. This recipe calls for canola, which is the average-type vegetable oil you should have. You can also use sesame or peanut oil - high smoke points is what we're looking for. Toss in the onion; give it a minute or two. When you get bored looking at onion, toss the rice in there. Use your cooking implement of choice to spread the rice around as much as possible, but not too high up the wok... you want it in the hotter bottom part.
I mean, Hulk is no Batman - but here's the thing. You can put on a cowl and a costume and a utility belt, and you still don't really feel like Batman. And I don't mean just because you're a pudgy nerd and are not quite at that "peak of human perfection" physique-wise - I mean, so okay, you've got your costume on, dude. You look like Batman. Now do something that Batman would do. See? You can't. Moping around in a cave all day does NOT count. You know what? You suck as Batman.
Go put on some inflatable Hulk Hands. (TM.) Look at yourself in the mirror - you look NOTHING like the Hulk. But you know what? You can now go around smashing the crap out of all your parents' stuff, and you can feel just as awesome as Hulk.
One of the neat things that experienced wok chefs (admittedly, on professional stove, which put out more heat than yours or mine) can do is use the shape of the wok to manage items that need different amounts of heat. The closer you get to the center, obviously, the hotter it gets... so you can keep things that need to be cooler higher up, while you blast the stuff that really wants the heat. Neither I nor my stove are capable of anything like that.
So, basically... fry the rice. When it's a nice even yellow color, and is just starting to brown - five minutes or less, if you've got a wok and a hot stove, maybe more if you're cooking not in a wok and on an electric range - you're done. The recipe suggests onion, tomato, cucumber, and coriander as garnish; since I was serving the fish curry I made on top of it, I just put it on a plate and poured the fish and the sauce on top of it. Like I said, I wasn't impressed with how the fish came out, but the rice was really stellar. This is definitely something that I'll be adding to my general repertoire (my god, that word took me three full minutes to spell) although the fact that it requires making the rice the day before means that it'll probably get made to use up leftover rice, not because I had the foresight to make the rice the day before.
Hmm... thinking about the "mixing powdered turmeric through sticky dried rice" problem - it would probably work just fine to put the oil in the wok, then put the turmeric in the oil, then put the rice in. But then, what of the onions?
HULK SMASH PUNY ONIONS!
Tomorrow: part three, featuring some pictures, less Hulk, and fish that has been upgraded from mediocre to delicious.
After a sushi dinner for a friend's birthday, Aaron found himself with a bunch of leftover fish and a bunch of leftover rice. (Not sushi rice, actually, but rice from an earlier meal.) For reasons best ignored, he decided to take the easy way out and just follow some recipes. Yesterday, he talked about the fish he made, which turned out fairly mediocre because of a problem with the spicing and a mistake he made when cooking. Today he'll talk about the rice, which (spoiler alert!) come out really well, and tomorrow he'll talk about what he did the next day, when he realized that he STILL had a bunch of leftover fish and rice, and was pretty sure he could fix the mistakes he made the first time around.
Also, yesterday he referred to himself as "I"... it seems that today he's referring to himself as "he". Tomorrow, maybe he'll just say "Aaron", as in "AARON SMASH!" or "AARON LIGHTLY BRAISE PRAWNS EN CROUTE!"
I wonder what prawns en croute are? I hope they get braised, or Aaron is going to feel really ignorant.
You know, I love the idea of the Hulk as a chef. What's not to like? You've got huge, huge hands with a tiny, tiny spatula. You've got the Green Goliath in a goofy chef's hat and a "KISS CHEF!" apron. You've got sous-chefs cowering in terror any time the slightest thing goes wrong. And, inevitably, you've got the Hulk destroying the kitchen.
Oh! Oh! Oh! And then, and then, you've got Hulk calming down, putting his hand over his mouth, and saying "OH NO! HULK'S SOUFFLE!", delicately tiptoeing over to a miraculously undamaged oven, opening it with the gentlest of touches, and finding his souffle magically unharmed. At which point Hulk will sigh, lean against a counter, which will shift because he's a huge monster, and a tiny, tiny measuring spoon will tinkle to the floor, making the slightest of noises... and causing the souffle to loudly deflate.
Which of course causes the Hulk to go on another rampage.
I would watch a weekly cooking show starring the Hulk religiously.
OH MY GOD. It could be "Gamma-Ray Cooking with Bruce Banner", a Good Eats clone where the brilliant Dr. Bruce Banner explains to us the science behind cooking. Of course, what the fools at the Food Network DIDN'T know when they signed their new star was that Dr. Bruce Banner is the puny human form of THE INCREDIBLE HULK. During the first episode, something went wrong, it got caught on camera, they retitled the show, and now HULK COOK! has the highest ratings - and insurance costs - of any cooking show in history. Airing Wednesdays at 10, only on The Food Network.
What the hell was I talking about? Watergate or something? Oh, yeah. Fried rice. I bet that's going to be way more interesting than a cooking show starring The Hulk. I tell you what, after spending an hour thinking about how awesome it would be to have the job of building a Hulk-resistant kitchen, I'm really eager to tell you the story of how I fried some damned rice.
wheeee. fried rice.
I'm not saying it was bad. Actually, it was really good, for totally non-Hulk prepared foodstuffs. Like I said yesterday, fried rice is much easier to make than you'd think, and a really delicious way to deal with leftover rice, which is otherwise fairly yucky. If you've got a wok (like I do) but are fairly intimidated by it (like I am) it's also a really good introduction to the differences between cooking on a wok and cooking on the pots and pans we're used to.
I'm sorry... just give me a minute. I'm still mostly thinking about how awesome The Hulk is. Here's the link to the recipe in the meantime.
http://www.ehow.com/how_2177319_kashmir-turmeric-fried-rice.html
Actually, now that I go back and read the recipe, I think the whole premise of this meal - that I was too tired to think and just blindly followed the recipe - was a bit wrong.
Sorry, what I meant to say was "PUNY RECIPE LEAVE HULK ALONE! HULK SMASH RECIPE! RAAAAGH!"
What I learned in my previous experiments in fried ricery is that you want fried rice to have spent the night in the refrigerator. That gives it some time to dry out - it doesn't cook up as well if it's wet, and it definitely loses some of its texture. (The first time I tried fried rice, it was with fresh-cooked rice. It wasn't bad, but it definitely wasn't really fried rice.) I'm also going to guess that heat is an issue as well; with steamy-hot rice there's going to be a limited amount of additional heat you can put in before you start wrecking it; with cold rice, you can really throw some heat into it. The recipe as written uses a regular frying pan, which just doesn't get as hot as a wok, and doesn't have nearly as much surface area - in other words, it isn't nearly as good at transferring a lot of heat into something that you can spread out (such as rice) as a wok is. Long story short? I used a wok.
The thing about The Hulk is - and work with me here - he smashes stuff real good. I mean, The Hulk is the strongest there is! And you've got to respect that. Because if you don't respect it... well, the madder Hulk gets, the stronger Hulk gets. There's just something that speaks to the child in all of us in that.
So, my final recipe, based on the one above, is this:
Chop up an onion. Take some day (or more) old rice. Mix in turmeric until it is nice and yellow. (About .75 tsp turmeric per cup of rice. Or, just eyeball it.) This will be a little difficult - the rice is going to be solid, nasty, and sticky - so get a big bowl, and rather than try to stir, you may want to use a spatula and cut the powder into the rice. Don't go crazy if you're not getting even distribution - once it gets in the oil, it'll mix more easily. Get your wok fired up, when it's nice and hot - when a droplet of water shimmies and shakes its way across the surface - hit it with some oil. This recipe calls for canola, which is the average-type vegetable oil you should have. You can also use sesame or peanut oil - high smoke points is what we're looking for. Toss in the onion; give it a minute or two. When you get bored looking at onion, toss the rice in there. Use your cooking implement of choice to spread the rice around as much as possible, but not too high up the wok... you want it in the hotter bottom part.
I mean, Hulk is no Batman - but here's the thing. You can put on a cowl and a costume and a utility belt, and you still don't really feel like Batman. And I don't mean just because you're a pudgy nerd and are not quite at that "peak of human perfection" physique-wise - I mean, so okay, you've got your costume on, dude. You look like Batman. Now do something that Batman would do. See? You can't. Moping around in a cave all day does NOT count. You know what? You suck as Batman.
Go put on some inflatable Hulk Hands. (TM.) Look at yourself in the mirror - you look NOTHING like the Hulk. But you know what? You can now go around smashing the crap out of all your parents' stuff, and you can feel just as awesome as Hulk.
One of the neat things that experienced wok chefs (admittedly, on professional stove, which put out more heat than yours or mine) can do is use the shape of the wok to manage items that need different amounts of heat. The closer you get to the center, obviously, the hotter it gets... so you can keep things that need to be cooler higher up, while you blast the stuff that really wants the heat. Neither I nor my stove are capable of anything like that.
So, basically... fry the rice. When it's a nice even yellow color, and is just starting to brown - five minutes or less, if you've got a wok and a hot stove, maybe more if you're cooking not in a wok and on an electric range - you're done. The recipe suggests onion, tomato, cucumber, and coriander as garnish; since I was serving the fish curry I made on top of it, I just put it on a plate and poured the fish and the sauce on top of it. Like I said, I wasn't impressed with how the fish came out, but the rice was really stellar. This is definitely something that I'll be adding to my general repertoire (my god, that word took me three full minutes to spell) although the fact that it requires making the rice the day before means that it'll probably get made to use up leftover rice, not because I had the foresight to make the rice the day before.
Hmm... thinking about the "mixing powdered turmeric through sticky dried rice" problem - it would probably work just fine to put the oil in the wok, then put the turmeric in the oil, then put the rice in. But then, what of the onions?
HULK SMASH PUNY ONIONS!
Tomorrow: part three, featuring some pictures, less Hulk, and fish that has been upgraded from mediocre to delicious.
Monday, February 8, 2010
Kashmiri Fried Rice and Salmon with Turmeric and Garlic - Part 1
Yesterday[1] was what we call a “bad baby day”. Not that Benjamin was bad – he really is just about the greatest baby ever - but, as I said the other day, he can make it really, really difficult for me to get anything done. Here's my deal. I have some hard-to-diagnose form of attention deficit disorder. Think of it like having a busted gearbox in my head... if any of you ride bicycles, or use manual transmissions. I need to use analogies that refer to technology in more common use. Anyway, it's a lot of effort for me to get going on something, and once I am going - even going on a thing I enjoy, like writing this blog - it is effort for me to stay on it if I lose that focus.
Before you say "I know - that's called working, everyone has that problem" the point I'm trying to make is that after a fairly short time trying to focus on something, I start feeling fairly intense physical signs of fatigue - tiredness, headaches, irritability - like I had just gone through fairly intense physical exertion. Once I get focused, I don't have that problem any more... until something shiny catches the corner of my eye, I get distracted, and I start the whole process all over again.
So for me, even more than for most people, trying to work and deal with a baby is really exhausting, because I never get to that comfortable 'clicked in' stage, I'm always in the exhausting 'trying to get focused' stage. Or the 'dealing with a baby' stage, which is also fairly exhausting. Or, worst of all, the 'just got focused and now I'm getting pulled away from what I was focused on' stage - one of the hallmarks of ADD is a paradoxical overfocus. Once you get focused on something, it's really hard to pull yourself away - in fact, just as exhausting as trying to get focused in the first place, and far, far more irritating, because usually it's someone or something else pulling you away... something to focus that irritation at.
So, some days Benjamin and I have a happy rhythm, where I get some work done, spend some time playing with him, and we're both happy. Some days, though, he doesn't really feel like playing in his playpen on his own, or he's fussy because something is bothering him. If I'm smart, on those days, I just give in and spend the day hanging out and reading to him. Some days, though, I'm not smart... and I wind up, as I said, cycling between the three things I mentioned in the last paragraph - trying to focus, trying to unfocus, and dealing with a baby. My brain is generally good for about two hours of this before I have my own meltdown, go out on the balcony and scream so I don't wind up screaming at the baby, and decide I might as well just play video games for the rest of the afternoon as I nurse my headache.
So on this particular day, the last thing I was up for when dinnertime rolled around was a wondrous journey through the mystic realms of kitchen experimentation. I knew what I had - leftover fish from the sushi we had made the other night and leftover rice from the five salt dinner. I knew what I wanted to do with them - add turmeric. I really didn't feel like having to think. So I googled "turmeric salmon" and "turmeric fried rice", clicked a few links, and this is what I wound up with.
http://www.tastebook.com/recipes/1068269-Salmon-with-Garlic-and-Turmeric
http://www.ehow.com/how_2177319_kashmir-turmeric-fried-rice.html
Both of them looked delicious, simple, and used only ingredients that I already had in the house.
This is what it sounds like when I talk. “Hi, I’m Aaron, mi mi mi mi mi, spirit of adventure, mi mi mi, enjoy the journey, mi mi mi. But I'm not gonna, because I'm tired. Meh.” But still, like I said, good and fairly easy recipes. Definitely a few things that were worth keeping an eye on, though.
Zeroth, I'm really bad skinning salmon. I imagine it's pretty easy to get a feel for, if you've got a dozen fillets in a row to practice on... but doing it every once in a while just means that I'm alwaysbutchering mangling the fish. (I guess a butcher would be a good one for making proper, precise cuts through a piece of meat, so that word probably doesn't convey what I want it to here.)
First, I really think whoever wrote this recipe didn't actually cook it, at least not in this particular form. Why? Well, here's a hint - try "mixing the salt, turmeric, and garlic in a bowl" yourself. What you'll wind up with, as I did, is a bunch of garlic covered in salt and turmeric. Then, when you go to put it on the fish, what you get is a piece of fish with some spiced garlic bits on it, when what you want is spiced fish. I don't see a way to avoid this, unless you want to use a blender on puree for the garlic, so I recommend garlic powder instead. I guess you could also use the salt and turmeric as a rub, then hit the fish with the garlic.
If you're fairly new to cooking with coconut milk, as I am, you might also run into the second problem I had. This recipe doesn't mention that when you put coconut milk in a pan that you've just been searing something in, things are going to get... exciting. And, to answer your question - yes, by "exciting" I do mean "the coconut milk is going to start boiling and spattering almost immediately." How did you know that was going to happen? You smart.
Well, I didn't, and I panicked. Well, maybe panicked is the wrong word - I'm generally not a panicky type person - but I did go into damage control mode, which meant that to counter what seemed like the immediate danger - the coconut milk burning and ruining my dinner - I did the obvious thing, which was to add some water into the pan. That settled everything down - but it was obvious when we ate the final product that it had been watered down, which I didn't think about at the time. This dish takes much more of its flavor than I expected from the coconut milk, and adding the water tanked the flavor to a much larger extent than I would have expected.
Third - and this is really, really important. I mean REALLY important. If you're using dried Asian peppers in this dish, fish them out before your wife - who never orders Asian food with even a little bit of spice in it, and does not recognize them as adding a lot of flavor to a dish but being burning death if eaten - bites into one.
Seriously - you owe me one for that. Actually, it's aiight - I got your back.
Huh... the last direction in this recipe is to "pour the curry over the fish." Now, there weren't a whole lot of options here, so it's pretty obvious what to do - but I never actually knew that the word "curry" just means "sauce".
So tomorrow, we'll talk fried rice, which is quick becoming on of my favorite dishes to make - I used to throw out a ton of leftover rice, because I hate rice when it gets dried and chunked up. Quick preview: Two things to know about fried rice are that it's really easy to make, and it uses day-old rice. Yum!
I need to come up with a good sign-off. "Until next time, keep doing that thing that you like doing so much. No, not that thing, the other one. Yeah, that one. Yay!"
Could probably use some work.
[1] Yesterday being a relative term, now that I've started posting these on a scheduled basis, rather than as soon as I finish them up.
Before you say "I know - that's called working, everyone has that problem" the point I'm trying to make is that after a fairly short time trying to focus on something, I start feeling fairly intense physical signs of fatigue - tiredness, headaches, irritability - like I had just gone through fairly intense physical exertion. Once I get focused, I don't have that problem any more... until something shiny catches the corner of my eye, I get distracted, and I start the whole process all over again.
So for me, even more than for most people, trying to work and deal with a baby is really exhausting, because I never get to that comfortable 'clicked in' stage, I'm always in the exhausting 'trying to get focused' stage. Or the 'dealing with a baby' stage, which is also fairly exhausting. Or, worst of all, the 'just got focused and now I'm getting pulled away from what I was focused on' stage - one of the hallmarks of ADD is a paradoxical overfocus. Once you get focused on something, it's really hard to pull yourself away - in fact, just as exhausting as trying to get focused in the first place, and far, far more irritating, because usually it's someone or something else pulling you away... something to focus that irritation at.
So, some days Benjamin and I have a happy rhythm, where I get some work done, spend some time playing with him, and we're both happy. Some days, though, he doesn't really feel like playing in his playpen on his own, or he's fussy because something is bothering him. If I'm smart, on those days, I just give in and spend the day hanging out and reading to him. Some days, though, I'm not smart... and I wind up, as I said, cycling between the three things I mentioned in the last paragraph - trying to focus, trying to unfocus, and dealing with a baby. My brain is generally good for about two hours of this before I have my own meltdown, go out on the balcony and scream so I don't wind up screaming at the baby, and decide I might as well just play video games for the rest of the afternoon as I nurse my headache.
So on this particular day, the last thing I was up for when dinnertime rolled around was a wondrous journey through the mystic realms of kitchen experimentation. I knew what I had - leftover fish from the sushi we had made the other night and leftover rice from the five salt dinner. I knew what I wanted to do with them - add turmeric. I really didn't feel like having to think. So I googled "turmeric salmon" and "turmeric fried rice", clicked a few links, and this is what I wound up with.
http://www.tastebook.com/recipes/1068269-Salmon-with-Garlic-and-Turmeric
http://www.ehow.com/how_2177319_kashmir-turmeric-fried-rice.html
Both of them looked delicious, simple, and used only ingredients that I already had in the house.
This is what it sounds like when I talk. “Hi, I’m Aaron, mi mi mi mi mi, spirit of adventure, mi mi mi, enjoy the journey, mi mi mi. But I'm not gonna, because I'm tired. Meh.” But still, like I said, good and fairly easy recipes. Definitely a few things that were worth keeping an eye on, though.
Zeroth, I'm really bad skinning salmon. I imagine it's pretty easy to get a feel for, if you've got a dozen fillets in a row to practice on... but doing it every once in a while just means that I'm always
First, I really think whoever wrote this recipe didn't actually cook it, at least not in this particular form. Why? Well, here's a hint - try "mixing the salt, turmeric, and garlic in a bowl" yourself. What you'll wind up with, as I did, is a bunch of garlic covered in salt and turmeric. Then, when you go to put it on the fish, what you get is a piece of fish with some spiced garlic bits on it, when what you want is spiced fish. I don't see a way to avoid this, unless you want to use a blender on puree for the garlic, so I recommend garlic powder instead. I guess you could also use the salt and turmeric as a rub, then hit the fish with the garlic.
If you're fairly new to cooking with coconut milk, as I am, you might also run into the second problem I had. This recipe doesn't mention that when you put coconut milk in a pan that you've just been searing something in, things are going to get... exciting. And, to answer your question - yes, by "exciting" I do mean "the coconut milk is going to start boiling and spattering almost immediately." How did you know that was going to happen? You smart.
Well, I didn't, and I panicked. Well, maybe panicked is the wrong word - I'm generally not a panicky type person - but I did go into damage control mode, which meant that to counter what seemed like the immediate danger - the coconut milk burning and ruining my dinner - I did the obvious thing, which was to add some water into the pan. That settled everything down - but it was obvious when we ate the final product that it had been watered down, which I didn't think about at the time. This dish takes much more of its flavor than I expected from the coconut milk, and adding the water tanked the flavor to a much larger extent than I would have expected.
Third - and this is really, really important. I mean REALLY important. If you're using dried Asian peppers in this dish, fish them out before your wife - who never orders Asian food with even a little bit of spice in it, and does not recognize them as adding a lot of flavor to a dish but being burning death if eaten - bites into one.
Seriously - you owe me one for that. Actually, it's aiight - I got your back.
Huh... the last direction in this recipe is to "pour the curry over the fish." Now, there weren't a whole lot of options here, so it's pretty obvious what to do - but I never actually knew that the word "curry" just means "sauce".
So tomorrow, we'll talk fried rice, which is quick becoming on of my favorite dishes to make - I used to throw out a ton of leftover rice, because I hate rice when it gets dried and chunked up. Quick preview: Two things to know about fried rice are that it's really easy to make, and it uses day-old rice. Yum!
I need to come up with a good sign-off. "Until next time, keep doing that thing that you like doing so much. No, not that thing, the other one. Yeah, that one. Yay!"
Could probably use some work.
[1] Yesterday being a relative term, now that I've started posting these on a scheduled basis, rather than as soon as I finish them up.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Quick & Easy Lunch - Cheese Steak
As far as I can tell, Blogspot doesn't let you bold, italicize, or strikethrough words in the titles of posts. Which is a shame, because this is the second time I've wanted to. If anyone has any idea how to do this, please give me a buzz.
The proper title for this post should have been:
Quick & Easy Lunch -Cheese Turmeric Steak
Cheese steaks are one of my favorite lunches. Even now that I'm on a low-carb diet, and generally don't want to eat rolls, there is plenty of enjoyable lunchiness to be had with a cheese steak. All you need to do is leave out the hoagie roll (or, if you're one of those types, wrap it up in a big lettuce leaf. I have occasionally been one of those types.) and you're good to go.
So, I'm looking through my fridge and I see the following:
One (1) pot roast
One (1) bowl of chopped onion left over from dinner last night
One (1) green bell pepper
Several (3-n) mushrooms
One (1) bag of shredded cheddar
The pepper has seen better days, and it's time to use it. The pot roast has seen MUCH better days - I defrosted it to salt-crust, until I decided prime rib would be a better idea. It needs to get used today or get thrown out.
Note to people - Some food is obviously bad - when something is white and fuzzy, it is Bad. Some food is obviously good; when an apple has a firm, smooth skin and is heavy for its size [1], it is Good. And there's a whole world in between. Sometimes I know I'm lazier than I should be - I see a soft spot on a apple, and I automatically chuck it out. At times like that, I appreciate Victoria being a hippie - she'll fish it out, wash it thoroughly, cut the bad bit out, and eat the rest. Wasting 98% of an apple because 2% of it is bad is dumb. (I'm pretty particular about apples - I really enjoy the texture, the crunch that you get when you bite into one, and biting into a soft apple for me is like grabbing a glass of OJ when your taste buds expect milk - it turns something that should be delicious into something fairly disgusting.)
It's worth performing triage on almost any food. I had a piece of meat that was, as I said, past its prime. Not ideal. There were some fairly ugly looking bits on it - but not moldy bits. Also not ideal. So I activated my incredibly well-designed spoiled food detector and applied it. The meat still smelled normal. Good! I got out the cleaver, chopped off the bad bits, and had a perfectly usable piece of meat.
My point is, don't be afraid to use your nose, and don't assume that one dried-out bit on a piece of meat means that you've got a dead roast. One bad apple does not spoil the whole barrel. [2] (At the same time, if your nose does set off alarm bells, don't be afraid to chuck it.)
I found out recently that most supermarkets donate the produce and prepared food that's not attractive enough to sell any more, but which is still good enough to eat. This makes me really, really happy - it's easy enough to cut off the bad bits from vegetables, and I had always been horrified at all the stuff that never gets sold just getting wasted.
Not sure why we needed that whole aside, but there it is. So I've finished cleaning off this pot roast, I'm prepping it to chuck in the crock pot, but I'm fairly certain I'm not going to be able to hold out four hours for lunch. And I remember all the other stuff I had noted in my ingredients list.
At this point, I'd love to be like my hero, Alton Brown, (he's so dreamy!) and say "a pot roast makes great cheese steak fodder, because for a cheese steak, you want a moderately fatty cut - but it doesn't exactly need to be the top-quality part of the steak, because it's getting mixed in with a ton of spices and other ingredients anyway." But I don't really have any authority to say something like that - I haven't even done a taste test on my own, let alone with other people. Still, my gut tells me that the steak in cheese steak is like the tequila in a margarita. [3]
I've still got a cleaver in my hand and a powerful hunger in mah belly, so I start shaving the meat. (For an authentic cheesesteak, you really want your meat shaved so thin that only a deli-slicer can really do it. I settle for what I can do with my hands and a knife. Pro tip - it is MUCH easier to thinly-slice meat when it's frozen... if you do this often it's probably worth chopping up a frozen steak.) I get myself a nice lunch-sized portion of meat, some sliced-up onions, peppers, and mushrooms (fairly chunky pieces) and get a fryin' pan going with a little bit of oil. When it's sizzling real nice, (I'd love to get me an actual deli-style grill in the kitchen) I make some room and toss the steak on, along with a pinch of Kosher and a grind of pepper. The whole process, from the time the pan starts sizzling to the time lunch is on your plate, should take less than five minutes.
Four minutes in, time for the thing that makes this a cheese steak. Now, wars have been fought over the proper cheese to put on a cheesesteak, but to be honest, I don't care that much. There are a lot of great choices; right now, I've got Cheddar so that's what's going on. I reach for the cheese, and...
And I notice that there's a jar of turmeric sitting right there on the counter.
Here's my problem. I've come to really like turmeric over the last few days. But if there's one thing that I really wouldn't say about it, it would be "turmeric goes well with cheese." Frankly, I just can't imagine mixing cheddar and turmeric. I wish I knew enough about my own taste buds to tell you why, but for now you're just going to have to trust me that I can't imagine a turmeric cheese steak tasting anything but terrible. Heck, it sounds terrible - and I don't mean "sounds like it would taste terrible", I mean "the word turmeric and the word cheese do not combine in a way which is at all pleasing to the ear."
So I'm faced, basically, with Sophie's Choice right here. On one hand, I've got this blog, and Science, embodied by a jar of turmeric. On the other hand, I've got cheese, which is pretty much the well from which all that is good in this world springs. (Look it up.) Well, Gentle Reader, I hope you are happy to find out that I chose you, over basically my own soul.
And what do I have to show for it?
Actually, this was a really good lunch. I really didn't expect the turmeric to go as well with red meat as it goes with fish and rice, but as it turns out, it really brought out the flavor of this particular mixture of ingredients; the mushrooms in particular really stood out. I don't know if it's because they absorbed more of the earthy flavor of the turmeric, or simply because they mix better with turmeric's taste, but they really popped in this dish.
I really wish I had a wine-lover's vocabulary to use when it comes to spices; it's practically impossible for me to describe the way turmeric tastes. The only word I've really got is earthy. I'm not saying "turmeric is really hard to describe", I'm saying "my vocabulary is not up to the task of describing this relatively simple thing." Still, what I really felt was that the taste of the spice did a great job of mediating between the other four ingredients. Rather than four different tastes, slathered in cheese (which I LOVE, don't get me wrong) the addition of the turmeric made the whole thing more like a dish, four ingredients contributing to a single taste. Does that make sense?
Anyone got any suggestions for developing that (for lack of better words... which is the whole problem here, right?) nasal vocabulary? I would like to be able to describe things in slightly more depth than I am currently able to.
All in all, this turned out to be a serendipitous success, and definitely something I would try again. On purpose, this time. Maybe over rice.
[1] "Heavy for its size" is a concept that took me a while to wrap my mind around, so it's possible that there are those of you in more or less the same boat. Here's the easiest example. Go out and buy an apple. A nice ripe Honeycrisp. Oh wait, they're out of season now. Damn. Now I want an apple.
Where was I?
Right. Leave it in the sun for a few days - it gets soft in bits, it gets shriveled up - but these obvious signs of yuckiness aside, when you pick it up, it's now lighter than you'd expect. Some of the juicy deliciousness has escaped, and it is now Bad. See? That's an apple that is light for its size. So, all other things being equal, if two apples look about the same, and are about the same size, but one is noticeably heavier - that is probably the better one. Make sense?
[2] This is a neat saying. Back in the day, refrigeration was expensive or impossible, and apples are a seasonal fruit. So apple growers would seal apples up in watertight barrels, and drop 'em in the river over the winter. The bottom of an icy river is just about the right temperature to keep them good until spring - just barely above freezing. One problem, though - an apple that has already started to go bad emits ethylene, and ethylene accelerates ripening. So either you're a brilliant apple-storing genius who is using the environment to protect your goods... or you've just dropped your apples into a ready-made spoilage device for four months. You won't find out until spring, either way. Good stuff!
[3] Enough with the footnotes already. Okay - so Food Science and actual studies tell us that there is no point to using high-quality tequila in a margarita. Quite the opposite, in fact. Higher-quality liquors are smoother, have less 'bite'. Put an expensive tequila in a margarita, and the smoother taste tends to get drowned in the lime - people don't get to enjoy the expensive flavor, and at the same time, they don't get the 'bite' that they're expecting to tell them that there's alcohol there. However, CHEAP tequilas do both jobs fine - they stand out, because for $10 a bottle you're not getting subtle flavor, and they've got bite to spare. Go expensive for shots, but don't bother for mixed drinks.
The proper title for this post should have been:
Quick & Easy Lunch -
Cheese steaks are one of my favorite lunches. Even now that I'm on a low-carb diet, and generally don't want to eat rolls, there is plenty of enjoyable lunchiness to be had with a cheese steak. All you need to do is leave out the hoagie roll (or, if you're one of those types, wrap it up in a big lettuce leaf. I have occasionally been one of those types.) and you're good to go.
So, I'm looking through my fridge and I see the following:
One (1) pot roast
One (1) bowl of chopped onion left over from dinner last night
One (1) green bell pepper
Several (3-n) mushrooms
One (1) bag of shredded cheddar
The pepper has seen better days, and it's time to use it. The pot roast has seen MUCH better days - I defrosted it to salt-crust, until I decided prime rib would be a better idea. It needs to get used today or get thrown out.
Note to people - Some food is obviously bad - when something is white and fuzzy, it is Bad. Some food is obviously good; when an apple has a firm, smooth skin and is heavy for its size [1], it is Good. And there's a whole world in between. Sometimes I know I'm lazier than I should be - I see a soft spot on a apple, and I automatically chuck it out. At times like that, I appreciate Victoria being a hippie - she'll fish it out, wash it thoroughly, cut the bad bit out, and eat the rest. Wasting 98% of an apple because 2% of it is bad is dumb. (I'm pretty particular about apples - I really enjoy the texture, the crunch that you get when you bite into one, and biting into a soft apple for me is like grabbing a glass of OJ when your taste buds expect milk - it turns something that should be delicious into something fairly disgusting.)
It's worth performing triage on almost any food. I had a piece of meat that was, as I said, past its prime. Not ideal. There were some fairly ugly looking bits on it - but not moldy bits. Also not ideal. So I activated my incredibly well-designed spoiled food detector and applied it. The meat still smelled normal. Good! I got out the cleaver, chopped off the bad bits, and had a perfectly usable piece of meat.
My point is, don't be afraid to use your nose, and don't assume that one dried-out bit on a piece of meat means that you've got a dead roast. One bad apple does not spoil the whole barrel. [2] (At the same time, if your nose does set off alarm bells, don't be afraid to chuck it.)
I found out recently that most supermarkets donate the produce and prepared food that's not attractive enough to sell any more, but which is still good enough to eat. This makes me really, really happy - it's easy enough to cut off the bad bits from vegetables, and I had always been horrified at all the stuff that never gets sold just getting wasted.
Not sure why we needed that whole aside, but there it is. So I've finished cleaning off this pot roast, I'm prepping it to chuck in the crock pot, but I'm fairly certain I'm not going to be able to hold out four hours for lunch. And I remember all the other stuff I had noted in my ingredients list.
At this point, I'd love to be like my hero, Alton Brown, (he's so dreamy!) and say "a pot roast makes great cheese steak fodder, because for a cheese steak, you want a moderately fatty cut - but it doesn't exactly need to be the top-quality part of the steak, because it's getting mixed in with a ton of spices and other ingredients anyway." But I don't really have any authority to say something like that - I haven't even done a taste test on my own, let alone with other people. Still, my gut tells me that the steak in cheese steak is like the tequila in a margarita. [3]
I've still got a cleaver in my hand and a powerful hunger in mah belly, so I start shaving the meat. (For an authentic cheesesteak, you really want your meat shaved so thin that only a deli-slicer can really do it. I settle for what I can do with my hands and a knife. Pro tip - it is MUCH easier to thinly-slice meat when it's frozen... if you do this often it's probably worth chopping up a frozen steak.) I get myself a nice lunch-sized portion of meat, some sliced-up onions, peppers, and mushrooms (fairly chunky pieces) and get a fryin' pan going with a little bit of oil. When it's sizzling real nice, (I'd love to get me an actual deli-style grill in the kitchen) I make some room and toss the steak on, along with a pinch of Kosher and a grind of pepper. The whole process, from the time the pan starts sizzling to the time lunch is on your plate, should take less than five minutes.
Four minutes in, time for the thing that makes this a cheese steak. Now, wars have been fought over the proper cheese to put on a cheesesteak, but to be honest, I don't care that much. There are a lot of great choices; right now, I've got Cheddar so that's what's going on. I reach for the cheese, and...
And I notice that there's a jar of turmeric sitting right there on the counter.
Here's my problem. I've come to really like turmeric over the last few days. But if there's one thing that I really wouldn't say about it, it would be "turmeric goes well with cheese." Frankly, I just can't imagine mixing cheddar and turmeric. I wish I knew enough about my own taste buds to tell you why, but for now you're just going to have to trust me that I can't imagine a turmeric cheese steak tasting anything but terrible. Heck, it sounds terrible - and I don't mean "sounds like it would taste terrible", I mean "the word turmeric and the word cheese do not combine in a way which is at all pleasing to the ear."
So I'm faced, basically, with Sophie's Choice right here. On one hand, I've got this blog, and Science, embodied by a jar of turmeric. On the other hand, I've got cheese, which is pretty much the well from which all that is good in this world springs. (Look it up.) Well, Gentle Reader, I hope you are happy to find out that I chose you, over basically my own soul.
And what do I have to show for it?
Actually, this was a really good lunch. I really didn't expect the turmeric to go as well with red meat as it goes with fish and rice, but as it turns out, it really brought out the flavor of this particular mixture of ingredients; the mushrooms in particular really stood out. I don't know if it's because they absorbed more of the earthy flavor of the turmeric, or simply because they mix better with turmeric's taste, but they really popped in this dish.
I really wish I had a wine-lover's vocabulary to use when it comes to spices; it's practically impossible for me to describe the way turmeric tastes. The only word I've really got is earthy. I'm not saying "turmeric is really hard to describe", I'm saying "my vocabulary is not up to the task of describing this relatively simple thing." Still, what I really felt was that the taste of the spice did a great job of mediating between the other four ingredients. Rather than four different tastes, slathered in cheese (which I LOVE, don't get me wrong) the addition of the turmeric made the whole thing more like a dish, four ingredients contributing to a single taste. Does that make sense?
Anyone got any suggestions for developing that (for lack of better words... which is the whole problem here, right?) nasal vocabulary? I would like to be able to describe things in slightly more depth than I am currently able to.
All in all, this turned out to be a serendipitous success, and definitely something I would try again. On purpose, this time. Maybe over rice.
[1] "Heavy for its size" is a concept that took me a while to wrap my mind around, so it's possible that there are those of you in more or less the same boat. Here's the easiest example. Go out and buy an apple. A nice ripe Honeycrisp. Oh wait, they're out of season now. Damn. Now I want an apple.
Where was I?
Right. Leave it in the sun for a few days - it gets soft in bits, it gets shriveled up - but these obvious signs of yuckiness aside, when you pick it up, it's now lighter than you'd expect. Some of the juicy deliciousness has escaped, and it is now Bad. See? That's an apple that is light for its size. So, all other things being equal, if two apples look about the same, and are about the same size, but one is noticeably heavier - that is probably the better one. Make sense?
[2] This is a neat saying. Back in the day, refrigeration was expensive or impossible, and apples are a seasonal fruit. So apple growers would seal apples up in watertight barrels, and drop 'em in the river over the winter. The bottom of an icy river is just about the right temperature to keep them good until spring - just barely above freezing. One problem, though - an apple that has already started to go bad emits ethylene, and ethylene accelerates ripening. So either you're a brilliant apple-storing genius who is using the environment to protect your goods... or you've just dropped your apples into a ready-made spoilage device for four months. You won't find out until spring, either way. Good stuff!
[3] Enough with the footnotes already. Okay - so Food Science and actual studies tell us that there is no point to using high-quality tequila in a margarita. Quite the opposite, in fact. Higher-quality liquors are smoother, have less 'bite'. Put an expensive tequila in a margarita, and the smoother taste tends to get drowned in the lime - people don't get to enjoy the expensive flavor, and at the same time, they don't get the 'bite' that they're expecting to tell them that there's alcohol there. However, CHEAP tequilas do both jobs fine - they stand out, because for $10 a bottle you're not getting subtle flavor, and they've got bite to spare. Go expensive for shots, but don't bother for mixed drinks.
Monday, February 1, 2010
A quick what's up...
Hey, guys. So right now I'm having some baby problems. No, don't worry, Benjamin's fine. I'm the one having problems. Well, I guess we both are. He's having some tummy/teething issues, and it's been fairly difficult for me to get any work done. I'm not the most... focused... person in the world, and there is, as it turns out, a hard limit to the number of times I can go through a "sit down a try to work, get about two minutes in, get called away by a baby's mumping" cycle before my brain is reduced to a quivering lump of jelly.
Which is okay. Here is my plan. Over this week, I'm going to slowly post the remnants of Week Two, while working on Week Three. Then, next week, Week Three should go up as normal while I work on Week Four, etc, etc. This is something I should have done from the beginning, giving myself a little bit of padding so that if I hit speed bumps, it doesn't interrupt the flow of the blog.
My apologies for the lack of posts. Hopefully, from now on, they'll come fairly regularly at about one a day, rather than in waves.
Which is okay. Here is my plan. Over this week, I'm going to slowly post the remnants of Week Two, while working on Week Three. Then, next week, Week Three should go up as normal while I work on Week Four, etc, etc. This is something I should have done from the beginning, giving myself a little bit of padding so that if I hit speed bumps, it doesn't interrupt the flow of the blog.
My apologies for the lack of posts. Hopefully, from now on, they'll come fairly regularly at about one a day, rather than in waves.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)