FoodBat

Bacon, Sausage and Shortrib Cassoulet with Rancho Gordo Yellow Beans

2011-11-15T13:05:00.000-08:00

Oh hi, everyone!
It's been a while since I last posted on here. Come to think of it, its been a while since I posted on East West Pastry, too. Whoops. A lot happened that made me really not want to blog, although I never stopped cooking, tweeting, or being weird, as I'm sure many of you have noticed. Two big things that happened: I got laid off at my only-okay job, and managed to snag a pretty damn good one where I get to design stuff all day. Awesome! Unfortunately it doesn't leave me a lot of time for blog posting, but nothing new there, I suppose.

This Saturday I was attempting to simultaneously make something for a dinner party and clean out my freezer/pantry at the same time, my goal to use as much frozen meat and other stuff lying around as I could manage in one go. I decided on a sort of cassoulet, using bacon, andouille sausage and english short rib on the bone. The reason I went cassoulet and not just a regular stew was that I had a pound of dried beans and as of yet had not had the opportunity to use them.

Some random thoughts about beans.
I was going to do a dedicated illustration, but then I got distracted...

Rancho Gordo yellow-eye beans are what I had on hand, but whether your beans are fancy or unfancy, learning how to use dried beans is something everyone should try.
I'd grown up on canned beans and strange as it sounds, never had the opportunity to actually make something bean-y from the dried product.
Dried beans are far more time intensive than simply opening a can, but the benefits are great - you get direct control over the taste of the bean and the level of sodium. Also, it's cheap. Unless you get Rancho Gordo beans- but then you pay for the novelty of heirloom, right?

Who can say whether its because I used fancy beans or because I simply mastered how to cook them properly, but either way, this bean and meat stew is great - like a cross between a meaty beef stew and the best chili you've ever had.
Good enough that I had to come back after several months and post, just so that I could share the recipe. Enjoy!

Bacon, Sausage and Shortrib Cassoulet with Rancho Gordo Yellow-Eye Beans

Beans:

Rancho gordo yellow-eye beans, 16oz – soaked for at least anhour, more preferable.
One onion, sliced in half and each half skewered with aclove
Three cloves garlic
Dried thyme, dried parsley, ½ tsp each, one bay leaf
Water to cover

Meat:

2 andouille sausages
5 portions of English short rib on the bone (bonus ifbutcher can separate meat from bone and chunk the meat for you)
4 slices of bacon, cut into lardons

Flavor-builders:

1 green bell pepper, diced fine
1 onion, diced fine
2 small carrots, diced fine
1 stalk celery, diced fine
3 cloves garlic, peeled
Creole seasoning (paprika, onion powder, garlic powder,celery salt, salt, pepper, thyme, cayenne pepper) – to taste

Sauce:

Splash of red wine
1 large can of diced tomatoes, in juice
1 tsp tomato paste

Combine the bean stuff in a pot and bring to a boil – lowerto a simmer once there and let simmer for an hour to an hour and a half, oruntil the beans are just about done. ‘about done’ is when they are edible, still a little mealy.
While the beans are boiling, prepare the meat. Prep yourshort-ribs by sprinkling salt and pepper on both sides (and dredge in flour ifyou desire). Add grape-seed oil to a large Dutch oven and bring to high heat.Working in batches, brown the short rib and bones, making sure to get a goodsear on both sides. Be sure not to crowd the pot. Remove to a plate and reservefor later. Prick the sausages with a fork and brown on all sides, then cut intofourths and reserve.
Add the bacon lardons to the pot and fry the bacon, stirringconstantly so nothing burns. Once the bacon is well along, turn down the heatto medium and add the flavor-builders and spices, along with some salt andpepper. Cook, stirring often, until the vegetables have softened and cookeddown.
Add a splash of red wine when it starts to look dry, scraping andstirring up everything that’s stuck to the bottom of the pot.
When the mixturebegins to boil, add the tomatoes and tomato paste. Bring to simmer and cook forabout 10 minutes or until the mix is reduced slightly.
Pre-heat your oven to 300 degrees.
When the beans are done, strain the beans over a bowl toretain the bean broth, then put the beans in a bowl and remove the onion, bayleaf, and little bits of bean skin that are easy to remove. Save the beanbroth.
Stir the beans into your tomato mixture. Add the meat backinto the pot, pushing everything down into the bean and sauce so that all themeat is more or less covered. Add enough of the bean broth to cover all.
Bake, covered, in a 300 degree oven for about 3 hours oruntil the meat is falling off the bone.

New project!

2011-05-24T09:46:00.000-07:00

Another year, another side project.
This one is really cool, though, something I've been kicking around for a while.
You know the drill: instead of reading me here on Foodbat, check out my new site, East West Pastry.
Hopefully this one will stick around and be more than just a design/coding exercise, because it's something I'm actually super interested in and have been for a long time.

See you there!

Fear and pork chops

2011-03-12T15:39:00.000-08:00

I went into this month's Charcutepalooza challenge, the brining challenge, with an entirely different notion of what I would do. The technique of brining meat - that is, letting it sit for a time in a salty, flavored liquid - can be applied to so many materials, everything from whole chickens to sides of beef. I originally planned on making corned beef, which sounded not only fun and interesting but delicious.

Then, out of the blue, my good friend Ayn called to tell me she was making pickled beef tongue for the challenge, but bought two, and ooh, weren't they a bit big, and would I want one?

How can one say no?

We met for cocktails, and I was handed a non-descript bi-rite bag. I had serious deja-vu of a similar hand-off I'd had with Ben of YFBC only a few months before, of a roasted pig head in a Trader Joe's bag. Only that time, I was doing the handing off, not the taking, and didn't actually have to think about what I'd do with the thing afterwards.

I open the bag. The tongue looked back at me.

And...well. I chickened out. It's in my freezer. I don't know what to do with it. Maybe I'll make lengua tacos.

It's not the idea of working with a three pound cow tongue that freaks me out. Ayn made corned beef tongue, and it doesn't look like too scary a process.

Its the idea of making a pickled cow tongue, and then getting my husband to eat it.

This is the other side of exploratory food, and maybe not everyone cares about it. Heck, I usually don't care about it, and most times the things I make are awesome and delicious enough that it doesn't matter. But somehow, something told me that this would pass a line.

So. I made pork chops.

Pork chops are a challenge for me, even though that's probably not the case for most 'normal' people. I didn't grow up eating pork, aside from guiltily made side of microwave bacon every so often. We didn't keep kosher, really, we just...didn't eat it.
My first pork chop, in fact, was eaten at my mother in law's perhaps two years ago. And...um..it wasn't great. (Don't tell my husband, okay?)

So, not ONLY have I personally never made a pork chop, nor have much experience eating them, but they are a favorite 'mom's cooking' dish of my husbands. No pressure, right?

Not only did these turn out great - juicy and flavorful with a good sear - but they were dead easy. I even had time to make sides, which doesn't happen a whole lot in our house.

I'd never made these before, but you bet I'll make em again.

Apple-brined pork chops

I bought two bone-in pork chops, just over an inch thick each. If you are cooking for more, double the amount of brine. Brine is a basic recipe (based on Dean and Deluca's ) with my flavorings added.

The brine:

4 cups water
1/8 cup kosher salt
1.5 teaspoons sugar
3 bay leaves, crushed
2 cloves
large pinch of cardamom seeds
2 dried birdseye chillis
2 teaspoons black peppercorns
1 clove garlic, smashed
3 sage leaves, crushed
1 apple, chopped (don't bother coring)

In a medium saucepan, bring the water, salt, and sugar to a boil.
Add the aromatics: bay, cloves, cardamom, pepper, chilli, garlic and sage. Bring to a simmer and let it go on for about 10 minutes.
Cool completely.

Process:

Prepare the receptacle. Since I only did two porkchops, I was able to brine in a doubled up ziploc baggie, but if you plan on making more, you may need a tupperware or something.
Add the pork chops and brine to the receptacle, along with the chopped apple.
Brine for two hours, a bit longer if your pork chops are very thick.
Remove the pork chops from the brine, and wash them very well.
Pat them dry and chill in the fridge, covered by some plastic wrap if you wish, for anywhere from 15 minutes to a day. (I actually brined mine the night before and for the next evening)

To cook:

Bring the oven to 350 degrees.
Get a oven safe pan (I use my handy le creuset skillet) and get it very hot over high heat.
add about a tablespoon of vegetable or grapeseed oil just to coat.
Sear the pork chops on either side (about a minute on either side). Turn the blower on, things might get smoky.
Put in the oven for about 10-15 minutes, or until the internal temperature is about 135 degrees.
Remove from the oven, cover and let rest for about 15 minutes.

Serve with whatever you like - I ended up sauteeing mushrooms in the pan juices and a bit of butter, and made garlic spinach and roasted potatoes.

I'm glad I tackled this particular challenge. Uh, now to do about the tongue in my freezer...

On the feeding and care of gamers.

2011-03-07T16:57:00.000-08:00

We are a household of gamers.

This brings up a few interesting things that you don't notice in a 'normal' household. The plethora of tiny, plastic alien figurines. That each of us answers to a couple of different names, not necessarily the ones we were born with. That neither of our favorite animals are real. (Mine's a squig, his is Shai-hulud.) And that we gain pleasure from sitting in front of a screen, talking with and fighting imaginary monsters with people we've never met.

Around the house, you'll see dishes halfway done (my place in the queue is ready, will do these later!). Laundry left untended. And, as it is now with RIFT coming out and both of us engrossed in the game, total dependency on snacks.

Gamers need snacks to survive. They must be of a specific sort, requiring little to no cooking as well as the ability to be eaten with one hand. This tends to lead to junk food.

Case in point: I arrived home last week after leaving the husband alone for a weekend with our brand new game, I find:

one pizza box
two boxes of pop-tarts
an empty bag of lays potato chips
one frozen shephards pie
one bag of pizza rolls
one cannister of frozen chocolate chip cookie dough

These are things that don't normally exist in our household, but then we've been without a really addicting game for a while. This cannot hold.

I've started to brainstorm on healthy gaming snacks.
Once again, parameters are:

- must be able to eat with one hand

- simple; little to no cooking required

So far I've come up with pretty much the menu you'd feed a little kid:

Blueberries
Carrot and celery sticks
pretzel thins with hummus
String cheese
Popcorn
Sliced turkey or salami
Cheerios or other dry cereal
apple slices
Almonds

This is working so far, but Husband is getting bored with these, and that's never a good sign.

If there are any other gamers in the woodworks, I'd love to hear some further ideas. That, or it's back to indian takeout.

(also, obligatory plug: RIFT is a fantastic game, and if you want to join us, we're on Reclaimer owning face in PVP.)

Belly of the beast: Bacon challenge!

2011-02-15T23:20:00.000-08:00

I am not often inspired by restaurant food.

This is mostly because, when I go out to eat, it’s some cheap hole in the wall that makes the sort of ethnic food that I’m not prepared to make at home.

This is an exception: at Metropolitan Grill in Seattle - our extremely expensive celebratory dinner place of choice - there was an interesting side dish available: bacon with Meyer lemon caramel and sweet onions. The combination was something I’d heard before, but the preparation was what was really interesting to me: the bacon was thick cut, and I mean THICK, like three quarters of an inch thick. and crispy, glazed with this sweet lemon caramel, and drenched in large rings of caramelized onions. Like...wow.

So when, for this month’s #charcutepalooza challenge, we had the opportunity to make fresh bacon, this was immediately what leaped to mind.

I used ruhlman’s method for making fresh bacon, so I won’t bother to post the recipe here; his is excellent.

I WILL say that I was shocked by how easy, how simple it was to pull off.
Probably, the week of curing time and 2.5 hours of roasting notwithstanding, maybe half an hour of work.

My preparation, inspired by the Met, uses blood oranges instead of Meyer lemons because I didn’t feel like going to the store.

Blood orange caramel glaze:

1.25 cups sugar
.5 tsp lemon juice
1/4 plus 2 tablespoons water
1 cup blood orange juice
.25 tsp freshly ground black pepper
pinch of kosher salt

In a heavy-bottomed saucepan, bring the lemon juice, sugar, and water to a rapid boil.
Lower the heat to a rolling boil and cook until the mixture to a golden brown. DO NOT STIR.
Remove from the heat and slowwwwly add the blood orange juice.
Once the mixture calms down, return to heat, whisk together and add the salt and pepper.
Bring back to a boil, then remove from heat entirely and let cool.

Caramelized sweet onions:

Sweet onions (maui, vidalia) cut into large rings
1 tsp bacon grease
1 tsp butter
salt and pepper
pinch sugar

melt the bacon grease and butter together.
Add the onions, salt, pepper and sugar.
Cook the onions over medium high heat until mostly translucent and browned on the edges.
Lower the heat and cook until caramelized.

The bacon:

Set the oven to 450 degrees.

Cut the bacon about 3/4 of an inch thick. Lay on tinfoil on a sheet pan so that the glaze doesn't get everywhere.

Cook for 10 minutes.

Glaze on a bit of the caramel sauce, then flip.

Cook another 10 minutes, glaze on some more sauce and cook another minute.

Assemble: Onions, then bacon, then some drizzled sauce. I had some skin that I crisped up as well.

Enjoy!

Secret weapons.

2011-02-05T22:02:00.000-08:00

I must be getting better.
Although I'm not entirely out of the weeds yet on my back injury, something must be going right, because I've started to cook again.

I made a beef stew this week, and it was delicious, and we ate it over egg noodles, and my husband licked the bowl.

This post is not about that.

It's about secret weapons.
Secret ingredients: that thing which makes a recipe a well-needed tweak, maximizes flavor and gives the dish a certain, I don't know what.

The reason I've been thinking about this is that I made the aforementioned beef stew, and while it WAS good, something was just a bit off. I chalked it up to the fact that I didn't have any red wine handy to de-glaze the pot, nor had anything for liquid other than some boxed chicken stock. Obviously, something was lacking.

Salt? No, there was plenty.
Acid, then? Adding cider vinegar or lemon would have taken it in the wrong direction; it was already too bright. No, no, what it needed was the exact opposite, some depth. But how?
The entire point of me making this pot of stuff was that I really, really didn't want to leave the apartment for things not on hand. Which, sadly included tomato paste, my go-to for depth.

QUICK, I thought. TO THE INTERNET!

Twitter suggested a number of ingredients that might round out the flavor and add some richness, depth and, well, beefyness. I would say umami, except I think umami is a stupid sounding word and one that's annoyingly overused.

What worked, in the end, to turn my blandish beef stew into something utterly delectable?
one squirt of ketchup. One bay leaf. Three drops of soy sauce. One tiny drop of fish sauce.
The end result tasted like none of these things; it only tasted beefy and incredible.

THATS what I mean by secret weapons.

Now that I know the soy/fish sauce thing, I'm never going back. (thanks to Ron Zimmerman, @herbguy, for that little trick)

I've compiled a few secret weapons, perhaps not so secret now.

Baked goods and other things -

Tea masala
Cardamom
Ginger-brew (essentially ginger sugar)
Chinese slab brown sugar
espresso powder
Sadaf cardamom tea (to replace liquid) or Good Earth herbal tea
Bacon grease (savory pastries)
Greek yogurt
Hawaiian sea salt

Spice:

Yank Sing chili sauce (either the oil off the top or a bit of the mixed in detritus)
Sriracha
Garam masala
Dave's Insanity ghost pepper sauce (never more than a drop!)

Brightening:

Cider vinegar
Fresh lemon or lime juice
leftover white wine
Tabasco

Deepening:

Tomato paste
Black soy sauce
Fish sauce
Parmesan rind
ketchup
dutch-process cocoa powder

I'm sure there are a ton more - after all, everyone has a favorite secret weapon.

Anyone willing to share some of theirs?

A pain in the ass. (and ankle, calf, thigh and hip, amirite)

2011-01-18T22:58:00.000-08:00

You may have noticed that there hasn't been a recipe posted on here in a while.

There is a very good reason for this.
In late November, a muscle in my right hip area began to pinch a very important and long-running nerve - the sciatic nerve, the one that runs from your tail-bone down the leg to the back of your ankle. Sciatica. Its the sort of thing your grandmother gets. For me, a spring chicken with a life to lead, it's both extremely painful and extremely annoying.

The last few months have been life-changing. I walk with a limp now. I attend to my posture. I sit on an exercise ball at work. I have become attuned to the twinges, the warning signs, and I keep my bottle of ibuprofen close to me.

And I can't stand in one place for more than about seven minutes without experiencing excruciating pain.

Through deep stretching, core work and learning my own body, I am making my way back to health. There are days when I can work all day, walk a mile, and do a gym session and feel completely normal.

That is, until I attempt to cook.

The combination of standing in one place and bending to attend to ones work, whether that is chopping a carrot or whisking together a sauce, is nearly impossible right now.

I've learned to be incredibly efficient in the kitchen, working in sprints: seven minutes prepping mise en place, then half an hour on the couch. Seven minutes to cook, rinse repeat. It makes dinner take a while.

I've found techniques that are compatible with this style of cooking, but mostly it means that we eat take-out or leftovers of take-out almost every night. A life I don't like. Pounds I don't need, certainly.

All I can hope is that this doesn't last forever, and that at some point in the future I can get back to cooking on a regular basis, finding joy in the act instead of pain. If anyone's reading that deals with a similar problem, I'd love to hear from you.

In the meantime, don't expect the posts to stop, but also don't expect a ton of recipes for a while.
Unless, of course, they only take seven minutes.

What NOT to buy a cook for Christmas

2010-12-09T14:56:00.000-08:00

Now, I should probably mention I'm Jewish, even though this is a Christmas post.

This is for a few reasons: Hanukkah is over as of tomorrow and I figure any useless 'foodie' gifts for us Jews have been given already. Also, I know we're in the minority here (it's kind of our thing) and the majority of you will be celebrating your holiday a few weeks from now.

I figure, for some of you, there is still time to save yourselves and the ones you love.

Saved, from giving and getting stupid, useless crap that will eventually be sold in a garage sale.

This is the time of year where many people shop in desperation, and stores respond accordingly. If you are or have cooks and food folks in your life, you'll find a wealth of incredibly stupid crap to tempt you as possible presents.

RESIST THE URGE, shoppers. There are plenty of gifts out there that are in a similar price range and actually will be used by the recipient.

I preface this list with the following: obviously it is the thought that counts on any gift, whether you'll actually use it or not. If you happen to get stupid crap for Christmas this year, YOU ARE STILL REQUIRED TO SMILE AUTHENTICALLY AND SAY THANK YOU. And possibly send a note afterwards if your family does that sort of thing.

That said, here goes:

What Not To Get a Cook for Christmas

Unitaskers:

These are the bane of many a cook. It's sooo easy to mindlessly give one of these as a present. They are objects that say, 'I have a vague idea of your interests, so here is this thing, that is bright, colorful, possibly made of silicon and not too expensive.' They take up counter and drawer space, and are rarely used. A lot of the tasks these things claim to do can be accomplished just as easily with a good kitchen knife or an item they probably already have. So unless the person in question pits a WHOLE LOT of cherries, like, ALL THE TIME, they don't need a cherry pitter.

Examples:

~~Everything~~ Pretty much everything on the gadget wall at William Sonoma and/or the bargain bin at Sur La Table.

If you insist on getting some kind of kitchen gadget, go for something that the person will find a use for, every day. Wooden spoons, paring knives, a nice digital scale, good microwave and dishwasher safe mixing bowls. On the more expensive side, everyone loves a heavy (and oven safe) skillet, like the kind Le Creuset makes.
I prefer a good 10-12 incher. (That's what she said?)

Here's a few I like that are in the same price range as unitasker crap:

Cookbooks:

This is a tricky one. Cookbooks are a lot like regular books; on one hand, the recipient might have his or her world opened up to a new author or genre they had no idea they liked; on the other, if they have professed their hatred of romance novels in the past and you get them a romance novel, chances are they'll never read it.

Reviews are key here, as is a slightly deeper understanding of the person you are giving the cookbook to.
Is that Rachel Ray cookbook REALLY going to fit the gourmet adventurer in your life?

Also, cookbooks are difficult because there is the possibility they will have that one already.

I really don't like to give or receive cookbooks unless there has been some sort of communication involved about what is expected, however discreetly.

There's just too wide a range of taste. I have an informal wishlist of cookbooks I really, really want, and I expect most other cooks do too. There really is no reason to make a shot in the dark on this; if you plan on buying someone a cookbook for Christmas, go ahead and find out what's on that list and not waste your money.

Or, I guess you could get them a gift card, although that's kind of a bullshit gift in my opinion.

Food:

Unless the food product in question is REALLY, REALLY cool - like a whole truffle, or a slab of himalayan pink salt, or something - I feel like giving someone food for Christmas is kind of the ultimate 'meh' gift.

It says, "Hey, I don't really know what to get you, or care that much really, but I know you like food, so here's a summer sausage/tubofpopcorn/boxofchocolate, you fatass."

Food baskets are a really easy thing to send someone who lives across the country or that you don't know very well, and everyone loves those catalogues with boxes full of fruit and crap, but, really? Spend that money on something good, even for someone you don't know all that well.

The exception to this is wine, or other large bottles of booze. Unless they don't like booze or are in AA, in which case it's not a good idea either.

The other exception is things that are handmade, since that means you put more than a moment of thought into the gift. But a tub of popcorn from Costco or 20 dollars worth of random food from Trader Joes is a lame present, any way you cut it. Even a gift card to said store would be better.

So, what DO you get a cook for Christmas?

A good gift. A gift that had more than 30 seconds of thought put into it. Or, hell, just ask them, as people do with gifts in my family.

Ask yourself, even if you don't really cook: would *I* enjoy having this? Would I use it on a regular basis? Would I be interested in this?

Lets save ourselves from stupid crap this year, shall we? Give with with heart, and mindfulness, and everyone will have a happier holiday.

This little piggy, part two

2010-11-22T20:55:00.000-08:00

So people have said I should probably do some kind of follow-up post about how the actual pig roasting went.

Roast pig. This picture doesn't
nearly do it justice.

Guys, roast suckling pig is freakin' delicious.

We roasted the front half on Saturday, glazed every half hour while cooking with a mixture of vegetable oil, soy sauce, cayenne pepper, calamansi (sour orange) juice and salt. Cooking took about 5 hours in all, probably longer than necessary due to a faulty meat thermometer which couldn't decide when the thing was done.

The soy sauce gave the skin of the pig a lovely deep red color, and the skin was crisp with an underside of melting fat. The meat fell off the bone.

In other words, it was awesome. And totally worth all the trouble.

We took this to a party, sheltering Mr. Pig from the torrential rains on Saturday Night. We knew very few people at this party, but somehow arriving with platter-ful of pig seems to cure that particular problem.

The next day, we roasted the back half of the pig, this time basting in Ad Hoc's Sweet and Spicy rub, which is brown sugar based. This was mixed with some vegetable oil to make liquid, and applied once every 45 minutes. The skin wasn't AS crispy, but the meat was fantastic.

For the back half, I also placed cut sweet potatoes, Yukon golds, apples and onions in the bottom of the pan to roast in the drippings. Mmm. Drippings.

Now all that's left is a ton of roast pork leftovers and a roast pig head.
I should probably do something with the head, but frankly, I'm exhausted and ready to wash my hands of the whole process.

The leftover pork, though...well, lets just say I have PLANS. *evil laugh*

This little piggy

2010-11-20T14:33:00.000-08:00

Warning: This post contains pictures and video that may be offensive to people that are lame and/or animal lovers like my sister. (Sorry Jamie)

So my husband decided it would be fun to get a suckling pig for this party we are going to.

So, feeling especially lucky that we live in a place where we can do this sort of thing relatively easily, I order one, from my butcher. (I have a butcher. See what I mean?)

Okay, we thought, little piggy, this is going to be great, we'll try and do it in the turkey fryer.

Well. Not so little, it turns out.

Kind of actually a big piggy.

No, not a 150 pound hog by any means, but certainly, as it turns out, too big to fit in our turkey fryer. Or our oven. Or anywhere really.

So, my husband has the brilliant idea of taking it to the butcher, and having him cut the thing in half. We have no idea if this is a good idea or not, but, well..

We brine the bifurcated pig overnight in a brine of water, cider vinegar, apples onions, kosher salt and brown sugar, and let it sit in ice in this giant plastic tub that I bought.

We decide to do the front half one day for the party, and the back half the day after for ourselves.

The next morning, as we turn the oven on and prep the thing for cooking, we notice the eyeballs are still in. Apparently, this is something the butcher was supposed to remove.

Whoops.

Also, there is NO WHERE ON THE ENTIRE INTERNETS that tell you how to remove eyeballs from a socket, which at any time before this I would have said was a good thing, but now is rather annoying.

Naturally, I made him do it. And videotaped. While I looked away and made squeamish noises.

This video is extremely gross - don't watch unless you are interested in the process or like that kind of thing. People have told me its actually not as bad as they thought. It helps that my husband is an extremely pragmatic sort of guy.

After the pig is prepped, you're supposed to make some very shallow cuts in the skin so it doesn't explode (good times!).

Prop it up in a roasting pan and protect the delicate, delicious ears with tinfoil.

We put some onions and apples in the pan for aromatics.

We covered it in a mixture of vegetable oil, soy sauce, cayenne, salt, pepper and calamansi (sour orage) juice, saving the extra for basting.

30 minutes at 400 degrees, then lower the heat to 350. Baste every half hour or so, until the meat reads at least 165 in every part of the pig.

We are roasting it now; the apartment is filled with a delicious savory, porky smell. I really hope things turn out okay.

Green beans with bacon - Ditch the casserole!

2010-11-18T11:44:00.000-08:00

Screw green bean casserole. It's gross. Actually green bean casserole at Thanksgiving was one of the main reasons it took me 26 years to realize that I actually like green beans. Don't subject yet another generation to the same pain I did, okay? Serve this at thanksgiving instead.

The key is using beans that are actually good. I used haricot vert as they are nice and crunchy, but if you have the pleasure of a farmers market near you, it's pretty easy to find blue lake, yellow wax or purple beans and those will work just as well.
If you don't have a farmers market near you or don't have access to beans, use your own judgement. Just make sure they are young, which means nice and skinny with snappy pods, not fat and full of beans. Safeway sells bagged organic haricot vert which worked out just fine.

FOR GODS SAKE, don't use canned green beans.

Green beans with bacon

1 tablespoon butter
3 pieces thick cut bacon, chopped into little bits
half of a sweet onion, finely diced
one clove of garlic, smashed
one pound fresh green beans, washed and with the tips snapped off
1 tsp red pepper flakes
a drizzle of olive oil
the zest of one lemon
half a lemons worth of juice

Melt the butter in a heavy pan over medium-high heat.
Add the bacon and cook for a few minutes until it begins to crisp, then add the onion and garlic. Cook until the onion is soft, about 10 minutes.
Add the green beans and toss to coat with the onion, bacon and butter mixture. Add a little olive oil if it looks dry.
Add the red pepper flakes, lemon zest and lemon juice.
Continue to cook, stirring often, until the green beans are crisp-tender, about 5-10 minutes depending on what sort of beans you got. Tasting is key!
Add salt and pepper to your liking.

We Fry a Turkey.

2010-11-15T23:18:00.000-08:00

"You won what?"
"Turkey fryer," I said, for what was at least the seventh time in the conversation.
"So..it fries things? Turkeys?"
"Yes. No. Its Infra-red. So there's no oil involved. I suppose it can also fry other things than turkeys."
"How does it fry things without oil? Is it still fried at that point? Wouldn't that make it a turkey broiler?"
"Um.."

I am the proud and entirely random recipient of a Charbroil oil-less infra-red turkey fryer. And a Flip video camera, presumably so whoever drives me to the hospital with a horrible turkey-related injury can post something hilarious on YouTube.
(Full Disclosure: I got these things as part of the Foodbuzz Tastemaker program.)

The initial problem with the turkey fryer is that it's A) large and B) runs on a propane tank, which makes trying it out in my apartment kind of problematic.

Luckily for me, my mother just moved to a lovely new house in Truckee, a scant three and a half hours away, and shes got more than enough room for this thing and any turkey-induced explosions that may occur.

The fryer has served as an occasional-table in my hallway for the past several weeks, until this past weekend where we finally found the time and space in which to use it, at my mom's new place.

Did I mention that like 7 members of my family were there, expecting delicious turkey? No pressure.

Look! We made videos! Including a rare appearance by Husband and his AWESOME FACIAL HAIR.

We ended up pulling an full thanksgiving dinner entirely out of our asses in about 6 hours, which is something to be pretty proud of (See: How to Pull an Entire Thanksgiving Dinner Out of Your Ass, post forthcoming).

True to our own thanksgiving tradition, we had a turkey-off: my mother's turkey, a 20 pounder with sausage and cranberry stuffing that took the full 6 hours to cook, and mine, which took just under 90 minutes.

Moms included an herb rub and about a million pounds of butter to keep the bird moist ; mine was simply rubbed in vegetable oil and the chili-rosemary herb rub that came with the turkey fryer.

Verdict?
Both turkeys were pretty good, but mine, considering there was next to no prep involved and we made it while getting the mashed potatoes and gravy ready, was the clear winner. The turkey came out crispy and golden brown, with not a bit dry and evenly cooked all the way down - a feat for an oven roasted turkey.

Nothing exploded. No one got horribly scarred with hot oil. No basting, or covering the thing with foil, or worrying about bits drying out. It was far and away the fastest and easiest turkey I've ever made.

Also, here is my mother performing the turkey dance.

Fish. Tacos.

2010-11-06T12:00:00.001-07:00

From the Alaska seafood panel at food buzz fest.

Bacon Cookies with Salted Caramel

2010-10-31T21:42:00.000-07:00

Bacon cookies! (apologies for bad lighting)

This is like the entire internet in one single spectacularly, deliciously messed up cookie.

The internet loves spicy things, and japanese things, and spicy Japanese things. (represented here by the Shichimi Togarashi Seven Spice mix). The internet loves salted caramel stuff, and LOVES bacon. All I'm missing are some LOLcats.

I made these for a Halloween party tonight and its interesting to see where people fall on the whole 'bacon cookie' issue. Some people were like, "bacon..cookie. no." Others: "BACON COOKIE HELL YES."

I admit, they sound kind of wierd, especially with all the random things in them. but they really are good. They hit all the spicy-smoky-sweet-salty-buttery areas.

Seven spice Bacon Shortbread with Salted Caramel

Cookie:

I used ruhlman's ratio for basic cookie dough, with some adjustments as I found it a little dry and wanted a more cohesive dough.

The ratio is 1 part sugar to 2 parts fat to 3 parts flour. I was very skeptical about this, never having baked without a recipe, until I tried it - and I can honestly say it works!

3 oz brown sugar
1 oz white sugar
8 oz salted butter
1 tsp bacon grease
12 oz flour
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp seven spice mix AKA Shichimi Togarashi red pepper mix
2 tsp water (or as needed)
3 pieces crispy bacon, chopped fine

Cream the butter and sugar together.
Add the egg and vanilla and mix.
Add the flour, spice powder. It will be VERY dry so add water as necessary - you want it to just come together into a crumbly dough.
Form into a log and wrap tightly in saran wrap, and chill in the fridge until you are ready to make cookies.
When you're ready to bake, slice the log of dough into thin, flat discs, or you can probably roll it out and cut them if you so desire.
Bake at 350 for about 13 minutes or until just beginning to turn golden at the edges.

Salted Caramel topping:

You can make actual caramel, but as I was pressed for time I used dulce de leche that I had made earlier in the week. Making dulce de leche is DEAD EASY. As in, you really don't need to do anything other than make sure the cans don't explode. This is best and easiest accomplished with a slow cooker.

Dulce de leche is basically a can of sweetened condensed milk, cooked low and slow until the sugars caramelize.

Take your can(s) of sweetened condensed milk, remove the labels, cover completely with water and cook on low in a slow cooker for 8-12 hours.

To assemble:

Take a cookie, frost with dulce de leche and sprinkle sea-salt on top. Alternatively, you could make sandwich cookies with the dulce de leche and sea salt in the middle, and maybe a sprinkle of pepper powder on top.

How to inventory your kitchen like a geek, online

2010-10-26T13:41:00.000-07:00

I may have mentioned that I have a lot of random stuff in my kitchen. I am distracted by shiny objects, and by shiny objects I mean obscure baking materials in Asian markets. Or types of jam I've never before encountered.

This, paired with the fact that my kitchen is the size of a matchbox, and also paired with the fact that my husband and I often don't get home before 10pm and therefore tend to eat a lot of takeout and simple meals during the week, means a lot of overflowing cabinets.

I've been meaning to do a full inventory of my pantry, fridge and freezer for a while now. Problem is, I'm a geek, and making a list on a piece of paper and sticking it to the fridge just isn't going to do it for me.

I'm seeking a very specific inventory solution with this project:

I desire not only to maintain an inventory of my pantry, fridge and freezer, but to be able to do so online and across all of my devices.
I should be able to take notes on items if I want to, as well as associate recipes to said items.
I should be able to search for an ingredient and by ingredient type, and easily check off an ingredient when it's no longer around.
I should also be able to export lists of ingredients to various media (email, apps etc) for shopping purposes.

There are a billion billion note-taking and list making solutions out there, but surprisingly enough very few of them do exactly what I'm looking for. Many are only apps for example, and don't sync with an online system. Likewise there are online systems that don't sync with all my devices. There are TONS of grocery shopping list solutions out there, but strangely enough many don't let you write notes, sort, or associate tags.

Here are a few of the main contenders I've found for this project. Doing this kind of made me go down the rabbit hole as far as task and list management software in general, so hopefully you guys will find this helpful even if you don't desire to inventory your kitchen like a total nerd.

Google Tasks:

Part of my problem stems from the fact that I own both an iPad (which I use for recipe database and cooking) as well as an android phone, and I've come to realize that apple is surprisingly (or, unsurprisingly I suppose) Google-unfriendly. This means using something like Google Tasks for list-making is great for syncing to Chrome and Firefox and Android, but runs you into issues for apple devices, because surprisingly few of them run Gtasks.

If you don't care about appeasing Apple, inventory management in Gtasks works by creating a separate list for each part of the pantry, adding a list item for each ingredient.

This system works just fine if a simple list is all you need. You can easily see what you have, and write a note if you need one.
Gtasks is awesome because its, well, google, which means its integrated with everything from Android apps of every flavor to browser integration and gmail.
Unfortunately there is a lot of functionality missing here. Namely, being able to filter, sort, or tag things. My biggest annoyance was the apparent inability to only display certain lists on the task-list widgets for gtasks on my phone. I want to see my to-dos in g-tasks, not necessarily the fridge list.

EverNote:

I briefly flirted with Evernote, mostly because of the claim of being able to take a picture and searching by any text in that picture, which comes in really handy for recipes. They also have a really nice web-clip extension in Firefox and chrome, as well as being found on pretty much any mobile device.

This paired with being able to tag, search and visually pair notes meant EverNote was initially a contender for this project.

Unfortunately, everything is pretty clunky in practice, particularly in the mobile area. You have to sign in all over the place, stuff doesn't sync properly, and it takes a long time to enter in notes. Also, for some reason it's rather hard to call up notes from the android app that were not taken actually WITH the phone.
I never got as far as a test inventory with this one.

Catch:

Catch, AKA 3banana, AKA Snaptic, seems a lot like EverNote if EverNote got together with Twitter and produced some kind of horrible elephant-bird hybrid monster.
By this I mean that Catch, like Evernote, is a note-keeper available pretty much everywhere it seems. Its on Android, iphone/ipad, online, and has firefox and chrome extensions. It also has a web clipper, and the apps allow you to add in pictures, bar codes, etc. It seems a lot simpler than Evernote, but also a LOT faster.

Like Twitter, tagging is king in Catch. Tag stuff like you do in Twitter with a hash-tag and search by said hash-tag.

This is kind of fun and (for me) extremely intuitive. I can see where this would come in really handy. For example, I find an interesting recipe online - I can web-clip the recipe and associate the ingredients with hash-tags, which I can then call up to see if I have the ingredients on hand.
I can associate things by their location in the kitchen, their type (canned good, etc), which is nice.
One area where Catch fails for this particular project would be ongoing management of items once everything is in there. For example, if you run out of milk, you would have to search for milk and either change that note to "No milk" or delete it completely, and then add it again when you do have milk.

This is problematic. While I may consider Catch as my answer to Evernote's clunkiness when it comes to saving recipes and random thoughts, I'm not sure if this is going to be the best solution to the kitchen inventory thing.

ToodleDo:

Powerful program, stupid name.
ToodleDo is another in the cloud, online task-management system that can be found pretty much universally (android, ipad, chrome/FF integration, gmail integration, widgets, etc etc). The Firefox extension is particularly nice, as it allows you to highlight text, right click, and create a task with that text as the note. Pretty nice. There is also VERY deep sorting, filtering, and prioritizing functionality. The UI is kind of ugly, but who cares, really?

I liked ToodleDo so much I talked my work into buying me the Pro account for use outside of this project. As in, like, for work. (I needed a task management system for work. BADLY. I am happy now.)

Actually, the functionality in Pro lends itself pretty damn nicely to the kitchen inventory thing, because Pro lets you create subtasks within a list. For a measly 15 dollars a year, it's worth it.

click to enlarge

Toodledo lets you seperate your tasks into Contexts (Home and Work, very handy), as well as associating folders for each project and overarching goals.
So, I have under Home context, my Kitchen Inventory folder with a list for Pantry and Fridge, with ingredients as sub-tasks. I've put the priority as -1 negative so that the inventory doesn't show up on my actual to-do lists for Home. I can add notes. I can also sort this any number of ways, or search by tag (you'll notice I have tagged the type of ingredient). I can ALSO put a date on things here, so when my milk expires (Nov 10!) I can, if I want, get a reminder.

These are all just sample inventories to show how I would set things up in each program. I haven't actually gotten around to ACTUALLY inventory-ing anything yet, because every time I do I spend hours in the app store and online to find the perfect program.

I'm pretty sure ToodleDo is the way to go for this for my particular needs, but only because of the pro account upgrade.

I'm actually sad that someone hasn't come out with a really fantastic kitchen inventory solution yet. It makes me wish I was an app developer and programmer, because someone could really make a killing here. Are you listening, Paprika?

Weigh in, if you like - I'd love to hear if there's something better out there.

FoodNinja entries

2010-10-25T22:22:00.000-07:00

My entries for the FoodNinja contest thing.
I have come to realize the following:

I get wierd when I draw late at night.

And I'm still a bit crap at drawing on the iPad. BUT I LOVE IT.

Review: Buitoni frozen pasta, with Lobster.

2010-10-22T20:08:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, the late great writer David Foster Wallace was called upon by a prominent food magazine (which is now also, sadly, deceased) to cover the annual Maine Lobster Festival.

The resultant article, Consider the Lobster, remains one of the most brilliant food-related writings of all time. The piece, beginning innocently enough with an actual description of the festival and its goings on and degenerating into a long bemused foray into whether lobsters feel pain in true DFW ultra-notated fashion, is simply exquisite.

It's my favorite food essay of all time for two reasons:
I love David Foster Wallace, and I also love lobsters.

I love their clicky-clacky claws.
I love their googly eyes on stalks peeking every which way.
I even love their spidery little legs, which is really a departure for me as I abhor spiders themselves.

I love lobsters so much, in fact, that I can never, ever bring myself to cook one.
Last time I was presented with a live lobster, I named him Mr. Pinchy and lovingly brought him home with me to California, where he was promptly eaten as soon as my back was turned.

So when I was presented with a very nice coupon for a free meal of Buitoni Lobster Ravioli, (full disclosure, thanks FoodBuzz), I thought, well, why not, I don't often get the chance to eat lobster anything, and certainly not for free. That and the fact that I'm rather consistently on 3.5 hours of sleep a night means that something I can make in 5 minutes, for once, had a certain kind of appeal.

Frozen pasta normally represents all that I hate about the world of processed food: the overly bright lights of the Safeway I rarely walk the halls of; the stink of desperation that lingers in the frozen food aisle. The fact that pasta is by essence something one can make, from ones pantry, in the space of 5 minutes anyway, with a delicious sauce to boot. The wierd plastic bag of sauce that you boil with the pasta instead. It feels so alien to me.

However..

....this frozen dinner is surprisingly good. The pasta is toothsome, the sauce is not overly salty and the filling has nice chunks of meat in it, neither mealy nor squishy.

I was fully prepared to hate this, but I find that I can't.

Perhaps the lobsters, whether they feel pain or not, are turning over now in their watery graves at the fact that something containing (HOW MUCH?) ridiculous amounts of sodium and probably lots of preservatives could, in fact, be pretty good.
Perhaps they will do the same in my stomach later, who knows.

But..and I can't believe I'm saying this...I'd buy this again.

Insomnia and Pumpkin Cake

2010-10-20T06:35:00.000-07:00

For the last several weeks, my nights have been an indiscriminate haze of asleep and awake.

If you haven't followed along on twitter, roughly three weeks ago I developed, completely out of the blue, a large blind spot in the central vision of my right eye. This, while a disturbing and frightening experience (especially considering I kind of need my eyes to do my job) actually turned out to be completely cured by the medication I was put on.

The problem now, is, of course, the medication.

This particular medication is well known, a wonder drug. It's prescribed, and seems to alleviate, any number of maladies, including my particular one. It is also notorious for it's side effects. Things like: panic attacks; constantly feeling on edge and anxious; violent mood swings; heart palpitations; cold sweats; being constantly hungry; retaining water, and, my favorite, an inability to sleep more than a couple of hours at a time.

Which brings me to this very early morning.

I've actually been up for several hours already, after coming awake following a horrible nightmare involving croissants.

It wasn't even a particularly scary dream - no fanged croissants chasing me down long, dark flights of stairs. No clawed, hairy croissants leaping out of bushes. As a nightmare, it was pretty lame.

In fact it centered on my inability to bake, and anxiety around integral things to the process of making something like a croissant, things like timing and butter.

As I said...lame.

So here I am, hours before I need to be awake, but wide awake all the same.

The Tartine Bakery Book was the cause of said nightmare. I got it in the mail last night, and, rather stupidly in hindsight, decided to read through it before hitting the sack. Although, who could blame me? The recipes are absolutely delicious sounding, the pictures beautiful. For someone who is by nature not a baker, I am absolutely fascinated with books on baking in hopes that all those fantastic techniques and recipes will somehow change me fundamentally and one day i'll be able to just crank out a laminated dough like it's no thing.

I decided to come to terms with my baking nightmare. No, not by making croissants - I'm not COMPLETELY insane, not yet. But, to bake from this book. I have several hours to kill anyway.

I decided to make Tartine's pumpkin tea cake, and if the batter has any indication, its going to be pretty damn good.

Pumpkin Tea Cake

adapted from Tartine Bakery Book

1 2/3 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/5 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tbsp ground cinnamon
2 tsp nutmeg, freshly grated
1/4 tsp ground cloves
9 oz pumpkin puree (about 1 cup plus 2 tbsp)
1/2 cup whole milk greek yogurt
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 1/3 cups sugar
1/4 tsp kosher salt
3 eggs
2 tbsp sugar for topping
large handful raw pepitas for topping (optional)

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees.
Lightly butter a 9x5 inch loaf pan.
Sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves in a mixing bowl and set aside.
Whisk together the pumpkin puree, oil, sugar and salt until well mixed.
Add one egg at a time, mixing well to incorporate it completely before adding the next.
Scrape down the sides of the bowl with your whisk.
Add the flour mixture and whisk together, GENTLY, just until combined, then continue to mix just until the batter becomes smooth. It should have the consistency of a thick puree.
Transfer the batter to the loaf pan and sprinkle on the sugar and pepitas.
Bake until a toothpick inserted into the middle comes out clean, about an hour.
Let the pan cool about 20 minutes, then invert onto a wire rack, turn right side up, and let it cool the rest of the way. Serve at room temperature.

Green Za'Taar: Afghan-style eggplant with lamb and yogurt sauce

2010-10-03T23:24:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I see something I'm unfamiliar with in the grocery store and I just get inspired.

Okay, not sometimes. Truth is that my kitchen is filled with all kinds of weird, impulse-buy crap.

I love ethnic ingredients and can't help but buy all sorts of things I'd probably never use in my normal cooking. Considering that I have Indian, Filipino, Japanese, Chinese, Turkish and Middle Eastern markets not too far from me, I now have random ethnic food items coming out of my ears (or at least my pantry, fridge, and freezer).

I'm making a concentrated effort to go through my woefully over-packed kitchen and actually make use of these items.

Here's one of them:

This is a dish inspired by buranee banjuran, an Afghan dish of baked eggplant with a meat sauce and yogurt on top.

The secret ingredient in this recipe is green za'taar, a spice blend found in many middle eastern dishes. Za'taar is a mix of thyme, oregano, sesame seeds, and sumac (a lemony-tasting spice). You can find it in ethnic grocery stores and spice places - I use the Sadaf brand.
Use the long chinese eggplants as opposed to the big globe ones you find.

Afghan-style eggplant with lamb and yogurt sauce
2 medium Chinese eggplants, sliced into 1 inch thick rounds
large handful cherry tomatoes
1/2 cup olive oil
green za'taar spice blend
1/2 lb ground lamb
1 tbsp grapeseed or other veg oil
1 medium onion, diced
2 cloves of garlic, smashed
1 8oz can of tomato sauce
Spices, to taste: tumeric, chilli, cumin, coriander, za'taar

Yogurt sauce:

1 cup thick greek whole-milk yogurt
salt, pepper, za'taar, paprika, onion salt (to taste)

Set the oven to 350 degrees.
Toss the sliced eggplant and cherry tomatoes with the olive oil, za'taar, salt and pepper, coating everything well. Layer in a square baking dish and put it in the oven to start baking while you make the sauce.
In a hot skillet, add the grapeseed oil. When the oil starts to shimmer, add the lamb and brown well. Let the meat brown on each side before you break it up into smaller chunks.
Season the meat with salt, pepper, and za'taar.
When the meat is browned well, add the onion and garlic along with the tumeric, chilli, cumin and coriander. (this is to ones own liking, but mine come out to about 1/4 teaspoon each.)
Lower the heat to medium and cook until the onions are translucent, frequently stirring so nothing burns.
Add tomato sauce and mix well, being sure to scrape up the lovely bits that have stuck to the bottom of the skillet. Cook for about a minute.
Take the baking dish out of the oven and add the meat sauce on top of the eggplant and tomatoes. Cover with aluminum foil and return to the oven to bake until the eggplant is easily pierced with a fork.

For the yogurt sauce:

Blend yogurt with onion salt, paprika, za'taar, and salt/pepper to taste.

Serve over basmati rice with a generous dollop of yogurt sauce.

The unauthentic classic: Tikka masala.

2010-09-26T00:27:00.000-07:00

Tikka Masala is my husband's favorite thing on the face of the planet.

For the uninitiated, Tikka Masala - be it chicken, veggie, mushroom or paneer- is a classic curry of dubious Indian descent. One might say that it's really a British classic more than an Indian one, as anyone who has eaten a curry takeout or gotten pub food whist in that nation can attest.

It is a safe assumption to say that it is eaten in our house in some form at least once a week.

It is the dish that my husband and I bonded over, had our first dates over. It was the recipe (and accompanying spice mix) we gave out as favors at our wedding.

Needless to say, when we eat Indian food, (which is quite often) Tikka Masala has become my husband's benchmark for whether we ever shall return to the restaurant.

You can explain up and down to B. that Tikka Masala is unlikely to be actually found in India, and that it's doubly unlikely for most Indian restaurants to specialize in it rather than, like, the food they actually cook.

Nevertheless...

It might not be an authentic classic, but in our house, it is certainly a classic dish.

When we moved away from San Diego and B's favorite-ever Indian restaurant, it was pretty much required that I figure out the recipe. Being a white Jewish girl from California and having no experience with Indian cuisine (other than, obviously, eating it) it was a long and tedious process to recreate the restaurant version. The result is arguably better than anything we can find in the many places that we've lived since.

There are many elements to a perfect Tikka Masala, which really is just a spiced tomato cream sauce. Not too creamy; not overly tomato-y; definitely none of that tomato-sauce acid bite. A perfect balance of spices. Not sweet. Spicy, but not so spicy that it kills the flavor. Definitely no onion. And the secret ingredient: dried fenugreek leaves, which can be found at most ethnic grocery stores.

Chicken Tikka Masala is the well-known classic, to be sure, but it is really the sauce that makes it for us. I've put it on paneer made from leftover milk (paneer is simply milk+heat+lemon juice+gravity). Great on simply rice or veggies. If I were ever to follow the call to arms against the great Gray Squirrel that's being held in Great Britain right now and serve me up a varmint, I'd probably put it in a Tikka Masala to ensure B. would eat it.

Here's my recipe for the sauce.

J&B's Tikka Masala

Spice Mix: For all of these, spices freshly ground if you have the ability to do so.

1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp ground coriander
1/2 tsp garam masala
1 tsp sugar
1/2 tsp tumeric
1/4 tsp ground hot chilli powder or cayenne pepper (less if you're a wuss)

For the Sauce:

1 12 oz can of tomato sauce (make sure its not "italian' tomato sauce - no basil!)
1 cup of heavy cream
1 teaspoon of chopped dried fenugreek leaves
1 tablespoon coconut oil or veg oil
Chopped cilantro (optional)

Also: anything you want in the curry, cooked separately - grilled veggies, fried paneer, shredded roasted squirrel..

In a large heavy skillet over medium heat, melt the coconut oil and bring it to a shimmer (look at the surface of the oil and you'll see what I mean).
Add the spice mix and quickly fry it, moving it around in the oil for 10 seconds.
Add the tomato sauce. Stir vigorously for 1 minute, making sure the spice mix is totally incorporated.
Lower the heat and add the heavy cream, slowly in a drizzle while stirring with the other hand so that it becomes one.
Add the dried fenugreek, along with any mix-ins you desire.
Bring to a simmer and cook 20 minutes or so or until the curry has reached a nice, thick consistency.
Sprinkle some chopped cilantro on top if you want to be fancy, unless you think cilantro tastes like soap. Hater.

Serve over rice, vegetables, with naan bread, on your comrade's foot if you are stranded in the Andes and are forced to eat your team-mates, whatever. It makes everything taste good.

Go put on Red Dwarf, and enjoy yourself.

Project Food Blog: How to turn off the Auto-tweets of doom

2010-09-21T16:59:00.000-07:00

EDIT: word from foodbuzz is that the tweets are intentional, not automatic. Which means, people doing them are doing them on purpose. *facepalm* Anyway removing this post as to not be confusing.

Cheers!

~Jenn

Chicken and Dumplings.

2010-09-18T12:45:00.000-07:00

This scribble has deep philosophical meaning tied to this
topic. Probably. I draw good on my iPad.

I grew up thinking that my mom was one heck of a cook.
She certainly didn't fail to put dinner on the table every night - which I've found, as I struggle to do the same in my own life, is no small feat. The food was good. We ate it.
As I, little bird that I am, flew off into the world, I found myself calling her every so often for advice to try and recreate those meals that I had had so often as a kid. Stuffed Shells. Manicotti. Turkey and Mashed Potatoes. Pot Pie. Chicken and Dumplings.
I was disappointed to hear that the answer, on the whole, was some version of the following:
"Oh, you know, I just got it off the back of the Bisquick box."

With maturity comes disillusionment. Mama's cooking, like many american women in her generation, was mostly off the back of a soup can.
For a while, I felt robbed. I'd hear about someone else's Jewish or Italian or Chinese mother and the mysteries that they worked each night in the kitchen - the lore passed on from generation to generation. I didn't have a cuisine like that. I didn't have a food background at all. Or at least I felt so at the time.

I've since come to realize that soup-can, back of box cooking has a place in american food history just like everything else. No, it isn't from scratch. Yes, it represents an entire generation of women who never really learned how to cook. But those women did the best they could, and managed to feed my generation of future cooks anyway.

I live in a household of two, where each of us work late and dinner is something cobbled together at 11pm many nights. Yes, I cook from scratch, but it's every couple of days and supplemented by takeout and pantry foraging. I could never imagine doing it on a daily basis to feed a family of 5 - not on my schedule. So perhaps there's something to be said for the short-cuts, the quick-fixes.

Except in one case.
Chicken stock.

I've rambled on about chicken stock before on this blog, so I'll keep it short. There is never, ever, any excuse to use boxed chicken stock, ever.
You make a chicken for dinner, or you pick a rotisserie chicken up at the grocery store. You cut off the meat to eat that night. Then you put the carcass in a pot with a carrot, an onion with the skin on, and a piece of celery if you have one. You cover it with water. You put the heat on low and let it simmer until its time to go to bed. You put the pot in the fridge. You take it out whenever - the next day, a few days from then - you heat it back up, you strain it into another pot, let it cool, and you freeze it in baggies. Done. Pretty much impossible to fuck up.

My mothers recipe for Chicken and Dumplings includes boxed Swanson's chicken stock, chicken, potatoes, carrots, and Bisquick mix.
I made my own chicken stock from the leftover carcass of a rotisserie chicken.
Oh, but Jennifer, you say, why would you EVER not roast your own chicken? Its soo easy!
Well, it is easy. And if I was home at a reasonable hour, I would. But I don't - I get home at 9pm or so most nights. Cooking a chicken is mostly unattended, but it still takes an hour, and you have to, like, be there for that. Making chicken stock for later on, unlike roasting a chicken, is something you can do post or during dinner. Big difference.

ANYWAY -
As I've said, I will take short cuts on some things, and on others I never shall. But on this particular dish, I will admit to this: the dumplings are, despite myself, made from Bisquick.
I can, and have, made dumpling mix from scratch, but it never tastes the same as the one I grew up with. So despite my aversion, I have to go back to the Bisquick Box.

Mmm, chemicals.

Mom's Chicken and Dumplings with Short-Cuts and Long-Cuts like a Hipster Hairstyle:

Stew:

3 cups homemade chicken stock
3 russet potatoes, peeled and diced
2 large carrots, peeled and chopped
2 cups worth of shredded chicken
1 teaspoon flour
splash of milk

Dumplings:

2 cups Bisquick
2/3 cup milk

Add the potatoes and carrots to the stock and bring to a boil, then lower the heat to a simmer.
When the potatoes and carrots are soft, add the chicken.
whisk the flour and milk together in a cup to make a slurry (so that there are no lumps) - add to the stew to thicken.
Season the stew to taste.
Mix together the Bisquick mix and milk to make a soft dough. Use a spoon to gently (GENTLY!) drop on top of the stew. Cook for 10 minutes uncovered, 10 minutes covered.

Serve with something green to counterbalance such heavy food. Eat. Reminisce about childhood. Feel slightly bad about using Bisquick.

(Confused? Thought that you'd be reading an entry about how awesome I am for Project Food Blog? Sorry but I just don't roll like that. This entry is very indicative of my blog and my style - honest, straight up, wierd and totally random, with strange scribbles and rambling rants. And delicious recipes, I promise. Welcome. If you like it, please Vote for Me. )

How to make your honey cake not suck

2010-09-08T23:08:00.000-07:00

Happy Jew Year, everybody. This one snuck up on us, didn't it?
It's recently come to my attention that a lot of people absolutely hate honey cake. (see Serious Eats this week, recent twitter conversations, etc.) I find this very, very sad as I love the stuff - but then, as the bad Jew that I am, I didn't grow up with the manischewitzs boxed crap. I only seriously started eating honey cake a few years ago when I became a regular at the piroshky and russian bakery place in Seattle, and then put my own recipe together when I moved away and couldn't get the good stuff. But APPARENTLY, honey cake is usually too dry, too crumbly, too sweet or too honey-ey. Really people, honey-ey? You seem to like honey in pretty much everything else, jeez.

How to make honey cake not suck:

1 - Think the technique for muffins. Muhhhhhhfinnnnns. What do we do with muffins, boys and girls? Thats right, we don't over-mix them. Because it makes them tough. Like bad honeycake.

2 - Maximize the moistness. Again, muffins are a good reference point. (Lay off, okay? I like muffins. They're like the only thing I can bake well) AKA, Fat. Oil works but so does plain whole milk yogurt, and I use half and half of each.

I made a plum cake for last Rosh Hashanah while guest posting over at Cook Local, which uses the honey cake recipe. This year, my Jew Year's resolution is to try and lose some of this weight that I gained since moving to San Francisco, so no gooey caramelly plum topping for me. Damn you, San Fran, and your tasty eats!

This honey cake is moist, and yes, it IS sweet but that's kind of the point of honey cake. There's good spice, but not too much. It would be great with whipped cream, and yes, if you want to make the caramel from the plum cake recipe, that works too. On the side for me, please.

Honey Cake
Adapted from several russian-style recipes and Smitten Kitchen for basic dry-wet ratio
This cake uses strongly brewed tea instead of coffee - I use Sadaf cardamom tea, cos that's what we drink in my house. Good earth or tiger tea would do beautifully too.

3 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
3 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
1 tsp powdered ginger
1 tsp tea masala
1/2 cup plain Greek yogurt
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 cup amber honey
1 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
3 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup strongly brewed sweet-spicy tea
juice of one orange
1/3 cup chopped crystallized ginger (optional)

Preheat oven to 350°F.
In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and spices.
In another bowl, whisk together yogurt, oil, honey, white sugar, brown sugars, eggs, vanilla, tea, and orange juice. PRO TIP - measure your oil before your honey, so the honey doesn't stick to the measuring cup.
Add dry ingredients to the wet. Using a strong wire whisk or in an electric mixer on slow speed, stir together well to make a thick, well-blended batter, making sure that no ingredients are stuck to the bottom.
Grease two loaf pans, or cake pans, or muffin pans, or whatever. Bake until a knife inserted in the middle comes out clean (about 40 minutes by my oven for loaf pans) - let cool. This is actually better the next day if you can wait that long...

Deep Dark Gingerbread

2010-09-03T15:19:00.000-07:00

(Faithfully re-posted from the other blog project. Expect more original postings on here very soon - I've pretty much learned what I needed to know about Wordpress. Viva la Blogger!)

I know I'm out of season on this one, but this past week I had the most insatiable craving for gingerbread. Maybe its because the weather is indistinguishable from mid winter in downtown San Francisco right now.
Sadly its apparently summer everywhere else, which means it's damn near impossible to find this thing that I'm craving.
What does one do in this situation, other than sit around and cry hungrily and probably eat a lot of other baked goods to try and fill the void?
Sometimes, you just have to take matters into your own hands.
I am not great at baking. I recently made a batch of chocolate chip cookies so bad that my husband recommended we just toss them rather than subject ourselves to the horror of eating them. (Thx ego boost, honey!)
Like always I try to attempt recipes using stuff I randomly have in my house - in this case, blackstrap molasses, avocado honey, and leftover ginger syrup from an attempt to make ginger beer not too long ago. And tea masala, because it goes well in everything.
But I have to say that this attempt at gingerbread turned out well. Its not as sweet as what you'd find at a cafe. Its dark, and sticky, and spicy, and almost bitter in the same way that good chocolate is. It would be heavenly with vanilla ice cream (or the tail end of a carton of heavy cream that I whipped up).
This would be even better if you have crystalized ginger on hand (like 1/4 of a cup, roughly chopped.)
Deep Dark Gingerbread
adapted from the gingerbread recipe in "Canning for a New Generation" by Liana Krissoff

2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
2 teaspoons english mustard powder (the kind that comes in a yellow box)
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1 teaspoon tea masala (sorry, I put it in everything!)
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temp
1/2 cup sugar
1 large egg, room temp
3/4 cup blackstrap molasses
1/4 cup good dark honey
1/4 cup ginger beer, or ginger syrup if you have any, or preserved ginger in its syrup, or crystallized ginger chopped.
3/4 cup hot water

preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
line a square baking pan with tinfoil, or generously butter a loaf pan.
sift the dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, spices) into a medium bowl.
with an electric mixer or stand mixer, cream together butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
add the egg and molasses and honey, and beat for 5 to 8 minutes until the color lightens.
beat in the ginger stuff, whatever you're using.
Add the flour mixture a third at a time, beating in throughly, and alternate with a third of the hot water.
Scrape the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 35 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.
Let it cool for 15 minutes or so..

- this is a good time to whip up some cream, or pick up ice cream at the store.
(AKA something where you aren't so distracted by the smell that you can't wait until it's cooled. This is a lot better when it's totally cooled or just barely warm - I think it's even better the next day.)
Other stuff that goes amazingly with gingerbread:
- pears or quinces poached in spice and vanilla syrup
- plums in caramel sauce
- anything creamy - ginger ice cream, a bourbon-spiked creme anglais, a ginger or cinnamon flavored whipped cream.
- lemon or grapefruit curd
What? Just because I'm not the worlds best baker, doesn't mean I don't have the palate. Oh for a pastry chef at my command.
(maybe I can press my husband into service)

International food bloggers conference

2010-09-02T12:35:00.000-07:00

(I'm not sure where the international part comes from. Maybe someone at IFBC came from Canada or something. But likely its just there for the SEO.)

This conference taught me a few things I wasn't previously aware of.

First, that I dislike large crowds. The whole weekend was one long battle against claustrophobia - the constant press of 250 people in too small a space, the exhaustion of trying to stay peppy and funny and schmooze with people when all I really want to do is run away screaming.

Second, that apparently I'm not cut out to be a food blogger. I don't take pictures of things I'm eating. I don't care about seo or copyright issues or getting a book deal. I am pretty sure no one reads this thing, and you know, I'm okay with that.

Third, that I am far more interested in meeting people, and eating/cooking food with people, and talking about food with people, than I am about pontificating on the subject in the silence of my mind. Which is probably why twitter appeals so much.

Fourth, that I am a champion of the semi-colon. (its the shorter-than-a-period, longer-than-a-comma, punctuation of the people; it's infinitely adaptable to its surroundings, like a chameleon against wallpaper.)

It took meeting a bunch of other food bloggers to make me realize how little I am actually interested in leveraging my blog and how much I'm interested in everything else that comes with the territory. The question is, can you have the one without the other?
I think it's pretty clear that the reason I keep this thing is because if I didn't, I would forget all my recipes, and I like being able to find them somewhere online without a lot of search. Plus, I can easily share them this way too. Am I interested in being a big-time blogger, the kind for which writing is no longer a joy but a chore, the kind who worries about whether they're going to get on Tastespotting or not this week?
Well, no. I'm not interested in the slightest.

Anyway, the weekend was enlightening, and overall a pretty good (if exhausting) time.
I met a whole ton of lovely people.
I snarked.
I talked about food.
I ate some awesome things, none of which were provided by the conference. (Seriously. I never thought that I'd be constantly starving at a food conference. There were some good dishes, just too little.)
I got to see some interesting panels; recipe writing, not for the content but because of the AWESOME semi-colon discussion (Go Amy!); Penny De Los Santos lovely and inspiring photo session, which made me want to start putting food cartoons up here again; and the food tech session (The HD video part, not the selling us on a book we'll never buy part).
I was disappointed by the clearance rack quality of the swag bag items after hearing about last year's awesome stuff, although I held on to that truffle sausage and it WAS all free so I can't complain.

I'm a little disappointed and slightly worried, actually, by the fact that every recap I've seen of IFBC talks like it shat rainbows. Maybe it really is just me that felt this way.
The truth was, there was a lot of very poor execution on the part of the organizers in the conference, and it seemed like they were unprepared to handle 250 people at pretty much every event. I personally felt kind of marginalized as a hobby blogger and wish they'd focused more on food and less on making money.

Anyway, now that you're throughly depressed, I want to stress that this is my personal opinion and it's extremely obvious that the majority of attendees had a wicked good time. And, for the most part, so did I.

It was awesome to be in Seattle, it was awesome to see my friends, and it was AWESOME to finally attend the 100-mile dinner at the Herbfarm Sunday night and get drunk on excellent food and wine.

As for next year, unless things change dramatically I think it was made obvious that I am not the audience this conference is geared to. Oh well!

Spicy Corn and Peach Salad

2010-08-06T09:42:00.000-07:00

The great test between blogger and other platforms continues.
So far I've learned that posting on Tumblr is a joy, but its near impossible for people to find your blog. The SEO on WordPress is far better, but I'm still debating on whether all the extra effort is worth it.

As promised, posting my recipes on both sites until everything is sorted.

Spicy Corn and Peach Salad (posted originally on WTF do I make with this? )

I served this as a warm salad, but I’m sure it would be just as good cold.

4 ears of corn, shucked
1 peach, preferably a low acid white peach like a Frail Beauty, diced
1 large or 3 baby red onions, sliced thinly
2 jalapenos, seeded and finely diced
a splash of apple cider vinegar
1 tablespoon butter

- remove the kernels from the ears of corn. This is best handled by running a sharp knife down the corn cob in a wide bowl, then turn the back of the knife towards the corn and run the knife down it again, to get the ‘cream’ of the corn.

- combine the corn, jalapeno, peach and add a splash of vinegar. Salt and pepper to taste.

- In a heavy skillet, melt the butter. If you desire to add more kick to the corn, add some cayenne pepper (just a dash) to the melted butter.

- Add the onion and a pinch of kosher salt.

- Sauté the red onion in the butter for a few minutes, until just softened.

-Add the corn mixture and cook until heated through.

This could also benefit from some ingredients added after cooking, which I didn’t have on hand, such as some blueberries, maybe some cilantro if you like that sort of thing.

Once again, a new blog project

2010-07-30T11:37:00.000-07:00

Hey folks - you may have notice that it's been a bit quiet over here.
I've been testing different blogging platforms as of late, and rather than mess around with Foodbat I've decided to use as my tester a new blog, called WTF Do I Make with This? which focuses on ways to use the leftovers, impulse buys, and random food that tends to pile up in the kitchen of anyone with culinary curiosity.

Inevitably I'm sure I'll come back to Foodbat, as I always do. WTFDOM is among other things a project to help me learn Wordpress and CSS styling, and whether it will blossom into a successful food blog remains to be seen. In the meantime, posts on WTFDOM will also be reflected on Foodbat, so follow along on either.

~Jenn

Odds and ends: Pork fried rice

2010-07-25T08:10:00.000-07:00

As many eaters of Indian and Chinese takeout will tell you, there is always more rice than necessary. It hangs out, forgotten, in its little container at the back of the fridge, until it turns into a dry, sad little block of white that even the most intrepid won't want to bring to the office to nuke for lunch. Or, if you are trying to save money like we are currently, the same can be said of the leftover dried out rice at the bottom of the rice cooker, that part thats kind of stuck to the pot.
Resist the urge to throw this unwanted rice away! Thems good eats, with a little know-how. It's a great way to use up your leftovers, and a cheap meal to boot.
Fried rice is awesome because there is no wrong thing to put into it. Wilting veggies, leftover ham, bacon, chicken, sausage, whatever. You can even make hot dog fried rice.
I mean, if you want to. I wouldn't.

I only had about two cups worth of leftover rice this time around, so need plenty of other things to fill it up. I decided to try my hand at char-siu pork (chinese BBQ pork) to add in with the rice, since I was at the butcher anyway and pork butt is pretty cheap.

Char-siu style pork:

6 pieces of pork butt, trimmed and cut 1 inch thick

Marinade:

1/4 cup hoisin sauce

1.5 Tablespoons minced garlic

1.5 Tablespoons ketchup

1 tablespoon dark soy sauce

a splash of Mirin (sweet rice wine)

a squirt of sriracha

1/4 teaspoon chinese five-spice powder

Mix the marinade ingredients together in a large bowl.

Add the slices of pork, making sure to cover completely in the marinade.

Let the pork marinade in the fridge for at least an hour, turning once to make sure everything is covered.

Set your oven to 350 degrees.

Line a pan with foil - the sauce carmelizes and is extremely hard to clean off of pans.

Remove the pork from the marinade, letting it drip off, and bake for 25 minutes on each side, or until the internal temperature of the meat reaches 160 degrees.

Let the meat rest for about 10 minutes, then slice very thinly. You can either add it to the rice near the end, or lay on top of the finished fried rice.

For the Fried Rice:

whatever vegetables you like, diced finely. Zucchini, peppers, edamame, peas, water chestnuts, carrots, bean sprouts, thin slices of ginger are all good things to add.

Anything else you want in the rice (like leftover protein), chopped up small.

one onion, diced finely

2 cloves minced garlic

three eggs, beaten

Leftover rice

oil (I used coconut)

five-spice powder

soy sauce

sesame oil to finish

Bring a heavy skillet (or wok, if you have one) to medium high heat.

Add the cooking oil - I used coconut oil. When it starts to shimmer, add the onion and then the garlic. Sprinkle over kosher salt and a bit of five-spice.

Cook the onion, stirring occasionally, until soft.

Add the vegetables and stir until crisp- tender, a few minutes.

Move the onion and veggies to one side of the skillet and add the beaten eggs to the other side, tilting the pan back and forth to over the bottom. Think like making an omelet. after 30 seconds of this, stir up the egg to scramble, then tilt the pan again so the liquid egg runs off to the bottom, and repeat. The trick is to get a nice crepe-like scrambled egg to add into the mix.

Once the egg is just about cooked, add the rice, a little soy sauce, and a little sesame oil. Stir so everything is mixed up in the pan. Cook two minutes or until the rice is heated through.

Add the char-siu pork, on top or mixed in, and enjoy your cheap, delicious meal!

How to pit a crap ton of cherries

2010-07-20T02:07:00.000-07:00

My good buddy Aynsavoy asked me last week about what to do with a whole bunch of cherries that had gotten past their prime, but weren't moldy or worth throwing away.

I suggested pitting them and making some sort of sauce for pork or duck, as "roast and puree" is pretty good advice for any stone fruit in that stage. Now, after a week away on vacation in Hawaii, I've come home to a fridge full of produce in a similar state, including a great big bowl of slightly wrinkled, wilty cherries. MMMM.

Cherries are delicious when eaten whole and fresh, and that's the state that I best like them in. I'm sure I'm not alone there. However, the secret motivation behind my usually eating cherries as themselves is that pitting them is a huge pain in the ass.

Unfortunately, when cherries are no longer perfect for eating, there's no other option if you want to use them in something.

I suppose you can pony up and buy a gadget to pit them, but then you'll have spent 30 bucks on something that will sit around and take up drawer space 10 months out of the year. Truth is that you can pit those delicious little bastards with all manner of implements you already have lying around.

Remember, always wear an apron or the shirt of someone you hate when you pit cherries, because by the end you'll look like Dexter on a bad day.

The general idea, when pitting cherries, is to relieve the cherry of it's pit without completely mangling the sweet, sweet flesh. The amount of mangling you can get away with depends on what you're making. If you plan to puree the cherries, or use in a sauce, then who cares- you might as well just slice them and dig the pit out with your fingernails. If you want to make a cherry tart, or pickles, or something where looks count, your technique may require more delicacy.

There are two main ways to go about this.

The first way is to choose some phallic-type object, and spear the cherry, pushing the pit out the other end.

This way works well for keeping the cherry whole but depending on the cherry you may get some tearing, but it's pretty fast. Do this with your cherry hand over a small bowl in the sink to catch the pits so that they don't go all over the place, or you can place the cherry over an empty bottle so that the pit falls inside. Some people use a chopstick, but I like using the pointy end of a beater blade (like the kind you stick in an electric hand mixer), as it has not only a better handhold but the metal bump halfway up, where the beater would normally go into the hand mixer, helps push the pit out. Any reasonably long pointy object will do, just nothing sharp enough to hurt yourself if things go awry.

The stick and bottle technique is as follows:
- curl your thumb and forefinger around the cherry, holding tightly.
- rest that hand on the bottle, positioning the cherry over the open top.
- with your chopstick or other pointy implement, spear the cherry through the top of the bottle. If you do it right, the pit falls neatly out of the cherry and into the container. Yay, no mess!
- repeat, possibly humming Randy Newman's "theme from Scarface."

Go, Scarface, Go!

The second method is to wrangle the pit out with a curved bit of metal, like a hairpin or paper clip. The bonus to this being that you only leave an entry hole in the cherry, which looks nicer, but the process takes quite a bit longer. Push your (CLEAN!) hairpin in the top with the bent end, open the hole a little, then use the end to free the stone and pop it out. It takes a few tries. Possibly many tries.

Usually people are better with one technique over the other. Stick and bottle works best for me.

Now, what to do with your pile of pitless cherries?

Well, since they aren't eating-pretty, they'll benefit most from heat. You could roast and puree for a fruit soup or sauce, or to make into sorbet. Maybe use in a sweet and savory rice dish. You could probably be okay doing a pie, or a tart, or press them into rising focaccia. Add to muffins. Or just freeze them until you decide, since you're going to be cooking them anyway.

Best Most Perfect Waffles Known TO MAN.

2010-06-19T12:17:00.000-07:00

The problem with a lot of waffle recipes is that there’s so many things that can go wrong. They’re too crispy, or not crispy enough - too tender, too soggy, blah blah blah.

This is the best, most perfect waffle recipe, ever.

EVVEERRR.

It’s adapted from the overnight waffle recipe devised by good buddies over at cook local. While their version is excellent, the waffles are super airy - which is great, but I like a little bit more substance to mine. Also, their recipe calls for the first part of the batter to sit out overnight, but I never plan that far in advance for anything. Instead, these sit for only an hour or two, so you can make them when you get up, go do stuff that’s fun for a while, then come back and eat waffles when everyone else is awake.

This recipe combines the awesomeness of yeasted waffles that sit out with the ever present problem of things going south in the fridge after you bought a bunch of fruit but never got around to eating it all week because you ended up eating out every night instead of cooking. (whoops?)

I present:

[print_this]

Best most perfect waffles known to man, in the history of the universe, that also just happens to use up the last bit of milk that just went sour.

Adapted from THIS RECIPE at Cook Local, which is also pretty awesome.

Part 1:

2.5 tsp active dry yeast
1/2 warm water
1.5 cups sour milk (or regular milk if you drink it in time), slightly warmed
1/2 cup melted butter
1-2 Tbsp sugar
1 tsp salt
2 cups flour
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp tea masala (optional)

Part 2:

2 eggs, beaten
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp baking soda

Part 1 -

add the warm water to the bowl you’re going to have your batter in and sprinkle the yeast into it.

In a small saucepan, melt the butter over medium low and add the milk once it’s melted. Test the temperature with your finger - you want it just past lukewarm. DON’T LET IT GET TOO HOT (it’ll kill the yeast). If it DOES feel too hot, leave it off the burner to cool.

Combine sugar, flour, salt and spices in a bowl.

To the yeast-water mixture, add the milk and butter and dry ingredients. Cover and let the bowl sit out on the counter while you go do some fun things for a few hours. There isn’t a set time here - the longer you leave the mixture the more airy the waffles will get.

Part 2 - Whenever you’re ready for waffles, heat up the waffle iron and fold in the part 2 stuff to the mix. Also, chop up whatever fruit you had lying around (I had strawberries and raspberries on their last legs)

From there, you’re in the hands of your waffle maker. We fill these with chopped fruit and eat them like big fruity waffly tacos.

[/print_this]

Roasted Stone Fruit Squish

2010-06-05T10:48:00.000-07:00

Stone fruit season in full force now, with various sorts of cherries, peaches and apricots piled high, and I couldnt help myself but to stuff my bags with them at Alemany this morning.

What I didnt count on was more than a few of those fruits being so burstingly ripe that they did just that - burst. In my bag.

Nothing pisses me off more than fruit that goes into my bag looking nice and round and coming out looking, well. Oblong.

(actually many things piss me off more, but nothing else has come up yet this morning)

Anyway. Fruit enthusiasts like myself (Should I refer to my self in such a way? It sounds…dirty) know that bruised and broken fruit must be culled from the rest of the group immediately so that the malady does not spread. And by malady I mean that all that lovely (probably expensive) fruit you just bought getting moldy by the next day.

Squishy fruit no longer looks nice and it a big messy to eat out of hand, but the flavor is still great - especially when the squish part has happened recently.

Here’s one thing you can do with squishy fruit: Make a squish. It sounds gross but tastes wonderful. Roasting fruit brings out a whole new side of the flavor.

This would be really good on yogurt or scones, but to my shame, I ate it as is.

Yes, there is a kick from the cayenne, don’t be a wuss. (but omit it if you are.)

Roasted Stone Fruit Squish:

Bruised or broken peaches, nectarines, apricots, de-stoned and chopped. I kept the skins on because I’m lazy.

5 mint leaves, chopped into leetle bits

Mint sugar (mint+raw sugar, pulsed in a blender) to coat- or honey works too if you’re not a wierd food nerd like me that has that sort of thing lying around.

Lemon juice, cayenne pepper to taste.

Mix together.

Cover a baking pan with tinfoil and lay the mass out on the pan. Bake at 350 until the whole thing becomes a gooey, yummy mass.

If you don’t want to roast it, this is very good cold as a fruit salad, but as the fruit will be squishy I’d add nice looking fruit like sliced strawberries, raspberries, mango or grapes to supplement.

Yummy Sunday: Slow-cooked eggs on onions with fresh cheese quesadilla

2010-05-30T12:03:00.000-07:00

This recipe uses the fresh cheese I made in my last post, but you could substitute any soft fresh cheese (goat or whatever)

Eggs on onions are my go-to sunday breakfast, mostly because they don’t take any higher cognitive thinking whatsoever to make. This makes enough for two people.

Use the freshest eggs you can get - the yolk on older eggs will break if the burner on your stove is uneven (like mine) and then this dish just won’t work.

Ingredients for Eggs:

one sweet onion, thinly sliced

4 fresh eggs (preferably free range)

Salt, pepper

Ingredients for quesadilla:

Flour tortillas

Labneh (or other fresh cheese), including the herbed olive oil it was packed in. If you didnt make cheese, you can use just a teaspoon of olive oil with some salt and pepper or herbs mixed in.

In a heavy skillet, melt a tablespoon of butter and a little dab of bacon grease if you have any lying around.

Add the onions with a pinch of kosher salt and cook until translucent.

With a spatula, smush the onions down until they cover the bottom of the pan and turn the heat to medium low. Carefully crack the eggs on top of the onions. Try not to let the eggs touch.

While the eggs are cooking, heat another skillet on medium.

Smear a bit of the cheese (not too much) on a tortilla, and drip a teaspoon of the olive oil into the pan. Fold the tortilla in half around the cheese and fry until both sides are brown.

set aside. I made about 2 of these per person.

The eggs are done when the whites are no longer runny, but before the yolk is completely set.

I use the quesadilla as a platform for the ensuing yummy onion and egg mass. Hot sauce is a winner too.

Leftover yogurt? Make cheese!

2010-05-22T18:21:00.000-07:00

Specifically Labneh, a mediterranean soft cheese that tastes like a more pungent cream cheese.

My husband buys these massive tubs of yogurt and then forgets about them, so I need to figure out ways to use up the extra yogurt.

I had Labneh rolled in sumac and thyme a at Hank Shaw’s Lamb Butchering Demo few weekends ago, and it was freakin’ great. So great, in fact, that I had to try making it myself.

What you need is:

a tub of plain yogurt, preferably whole milk and with no extra crap in it (no pectin, chemicals, etc)

a 15 in square of cheesecloth

a salad spinner

The salad spinner is an experiement - I went to MakerFaire today and saw all kinds of amazing DIY stuff, so I’m inspired. The most annoying part of making fresh cheese is waiting for the liquid to drip out so that you’re waiting with a solid mass, so I’m trying to speed up the process.

- Line a colander with cheesecloth

- dump the yogurt into the center of the cloth, and fold up the edges into a bag.

- tie the bag you’ve made with some kitchen twine, make sure it’s secure.

Place in the salad spinner, and let ‘er rip! Stop every so often to make sure the bag doesn’t tear.

You want almost all of the liquid to drain, so either keep spinning or you can leave the spinner in the fridge overnight. If you do, its a good idea to put some kind of weight on top of the cheese to keep the pressure on.

Once the liquid is out, roll your new cheese into balls and roll in herbs.

I plan to use a mix of ground sumac (a middle eastern spice with a lemony flavor), fresh and dried thyme, to try and recreate the one I had.

Preserve the cheese in a jar filled with olive oil - it should keep for a good long while, but I’m sure it will get eaten long before you have to worry about it!

Fun with Geraniums

2010-05-20T17:07:00.000-07:00

If you want to get technical, scented geraniums aren’t, actually, but are rather pelargoniums. Not that you care, because scented geraniums are awesome. They are heavily perfumed and come in literally hundreds of different ‘flavors’, smelling like anything from citrus to nutmeg. Not only do tbey smell nice but they’re edible, too, which opens up all kinds of culinary possibilities. You can infuse the leaves into vodka or simple syrup; pulverize with sugar, muddle in a drink or line baking pans for cakes and cookies. I havent tried savory applications yet and I wouldnt eat the leaves whole.

Attar Rose Geranium ‘Dust’

10 youngish attar rose geranium leaves, throughly washed and dried.

1 cup of sugar.

1 vitamix or other very powerful blender.

Blend together until the resulting powder looks like something you’d snort.

DON”T SNORT IT.

Lovely when used to rim drinks, sprinkledon whipped cream and strawberries, or used to make rose frosting.

A plea to cookbook publishers:

2010-05-17T22:10:00.000-07:00

Please please please please please stop making lovely, informative cookbooks that can only be easily read on a fucking coffee-table. Its not fair to us who aren’t just there for the food porn.

I’m looking at you, Ad Hoc at Home, from which I had to COPY DOWN RECIPES INTO A SMALLER BOOK because the sheer size and weight of the tome had no place to rest in my little kitchen.

At least the great cookbooks of yore, and even the very sizeable How to Cook Everything is compact enough to put on one of those cookbook holder things.

I’m looking at you, Oh so Lovely My Nepenthe and Falling Cloudberries, with your beautiful pictures and lovely memories, and recipes I would cook from IF ONLY YOUR FUCKING PAGES STAYED OPEN.

I mean, really?

And oh, Besh, my favorite. I can’t wait to cook from your book, but first I shall have to take a nap, because the effort of merely trying to hold your cookbook and leaf through its recipes is making me Le Tired.

I reiterate:

Publishers, Designers, Cookbook Writers: Pictures and Hardcovers are very, very nice. But don’t lose sight of what a cookbook is originally meant for - to be used.

Now if you excuse me, I’m going to pump up my biceps so that I can read Blackberry Farm in bed.

My Nepenthe – initial thoughts.

2010-05-13T21:38:00.000-07:00

I just got My Nepenthe in the mail in anticipation of the cookbook club we are starting.

I have not yet read the book in detail nor cooked from it, just flipped through and noted the recipes.

As a child of the central california coast, Big sur has a special place in my heart as well as the Nepenthe restaurant - it was a family favorite place to stop on those long, lazy trips up the coast.
Yet as much as I am a lover of Big Sur and Nepenthe, my initial feelings regarding the cookbook are of disappointment. First off, make no mistake - My Nepenthe is not really a cookbook as much as it is a memoir with some recipes here are there. Which is fine, if you are the sort of cookbook reader that likes a good story- personally, I like my cookbooks with recipes in them. The design of the book is beautiful and is heavily reminiscent of another cookbook memoir, Falling Cloudberries (which makes sense as they are from the same publisher). The recipes look good, and of course I won’t know until I cook any of them, but nothing really seems out of the scope of something I would dream up in the kitchen myself. Perhaps thats just because the style of the book is very close to the way I myself cook - simple flavors, lots of fresh produce, nothing very fancy in terms of technique. It’s a bit sad, really, because one of the things I look for in a cookbook are new ideas in flavor and technique and figuring out how I can apply them to my own style. At least at a glance, this book provides nothing new for me.
I’m hoping that once I read the book in greater depth that it will prove me wrong. On initial glance, though, the primary concern is that Steele’s Nepenthe is rather too close to my own, at least in the recipe department. And oh, I wish there were more of them.

Brown Sugar Banana Muffins

2010-05-09T21:55:00.000-07:00

There are a million and one versions of banana bread out there. This one is decently moist, low in fat, pleasantly spiced and not too sweet. There’s a nice hit of spice and crunch from the sugar chips, plus a hit of chocolate that not overwhelming as it often is in banana bread. I made these into muffins but you could just as easily make a tea bread - layer the chips in the middle and sprinkle on top.

Sugar chips:

one slab of brown sugar

good cocoa powder

1 tsp cinnamon

Stick the sugar in a baggie and hit repeatedly with the blunt object of your choice to break into chips. Add cinnamon and cocoa powder to cover.

Batter:

2 c. flour

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp baking powder

1 tsp tea masala (cardamom/black pepper/ginger/cinnamon/clove)

1 cup packed brown sugar (the regular kind, not slab)

3 bananas, pureed to baby food consistancy.

2 eggs

dribble of vanilla extract

1/4 cup veg. oil

1/4 cup plain yogurt

Mix ingredients Muffin Method style. (Dry ingredients mixed in a bowl, wet ingredients mixed in a bowl. uh, sugar is a wet ingredient by the way. Also, beat your eggs before you add them to the wet.Wet into dry and fold together. Be gentle - you want to keep air in it.)

Once you’ve got a batter, grease your muffin pans and add a spoonful to each. Layer in some sugar chips, then another spoonful of batter to cover. Sprinkle a few chips on top.

Bake at 350 until a toothpick comes out clean when inserted into the center of one. It will be a hell of a lot quicker if you’re making mini muffins, and longer if you decided to make tea bread. Regular muffins take maybe 12 minutes in my oven.

Grapefruit Curd

2010-04-30T18:51:00.000-07:00

6T butter, unsalted room temp

1 cup sugar

2 eggs

2 egg yolks

1 cup Grapefruit Juice but you could use lemon too, zest of the fruit as well.

Beat butter and sugar 2 minutes. Slowly add the eggs and yolks - mix in each as its added. Mix in the juice.

Its going to look really fucking bad, just bear with.

Cook over low heat, stirring constantly, and it will smooth out. FOR GODS SAKE DON’T LET IT BOIL! Keep going until temperature hits 170 degrees, then take off the heat and let it cool to do with what you will.

Good on toast, tarts, eating straight, whatever.

Quickpickled strawberries

2010-04-30T18:34:00.000-07:00

Top, slice and dice the strawberries (cut in half, then across)

cover with a tablespoon of sugar to coat,

a large pinch of kosher salt

a pinch of freshly ground black pepper

Let it sit for a minute

Toss with Basalmic vinegar - a mix of white and red is what I did. Not too much but enough to coat.

Let it marinate for 5 minutes, then try it. Add more sugar if necessary.

This would be awesome as the star in a salad with spinach, apple, goat cheese and pecans.

Things in Stuff, Part 1: Asian Dumplings + Soup of Awesome

2010-02-14T10:43:00.000-08:00

I've always semi-lamented the fact that I never came from a strong cooking cultural heritage. Like many Americans I never learned to make pasta or shape chapati at my grandmother's side - I've mostly had to make my own way and muddle through whatever I'm interested in. So, it's not surprising that I remain fascinated by any kind of heritage food - the sort of food you learn from that (for me, nonexistent) Nonna or Popo.

Dumplings fall in that category. For me, a dumpling was something you made out of bisquick and dropped into chicken stew. Not to blast my mom's Chicken and Dumplings, which were an awesome and integral part of my nutrition growing up - but I know that there is so much more to the category.

Asian Dumplings by Andrea Nguyen gives a fantastic overview of the world of dumplings as far as China, Japan, Korea and Southeast Asia are concerned - from the dim sum favorites that I love to Tibetan Momos -which I've never heard of, but sound delicious. Most of all, Andrea walks you through making various kinds of dumpling wrappers from scratch and shaping by hand. Apparently she also has a very informative website, Asian Dumpling Tips.

This is an entirely new area for me, but by the second day I was making dumpling dough and shaping wrappers with confidence enough to start applying them to my own recipes.

A few things I learned, and wanted to pass on so that you don't make the same mistakes:

- You need a small straight rolling pin for making wrappers. A regular size rolling pin is cumbersome and doesn't do the job. I ended up buying a 1 inch diameter, 8 in long fondant rolling pin at Sur la Table for 7 bucks which worked perfectly - plus it came with the added bonus of 1/16th inch removable bands so that you get a consistent thickness.

- You DON'T need a tortilla press, or the entire plastic/heavy object setup that the author suggests for flattening bits of dough in preparation for rolling them out. Maybe if you are making a ton of dumplings. For the amount I make, I have these things called hands, and I am not afraid to use them. There is a particular twist of the wrist and smacking of palms involved in turning a lump of dough into a flat, circular disc, but it is easy to accomplish. Maybe the setup is necessary for dumpling doughs other than the ones I made, but for the basic dumpling dough, it is unnecessary.

I advise making either the wrapper dough or the filling, or both, in advance, so that when it's time to eat you don't have a hungry husband whining about it not being done yet for an extra 45 minutes.

For the dumplings in my soup, I used the first recipe in the book, pork and napa cabbage boiled dumplings (jiaozi). I made a few tweaks to the recipe, including adding some tumeric to the dough for a nice color, and substituting shrimp for half the pork.

This recipe would have taken a lot less time if I had not rather stupidly decided to peel and de-poopshoot-ify a half pound of shrimp instead of just buying them ready to go. If you get the filling and wrappers ready to go the day before, you can assemble dumplings while the soup is heating up and it takes about half an hour all told.

You WILL have leftover filling. I froze mine, but you could easily double the recipe for the wrappers and just make extra dumplings to freeze.

Makes 32 dumplings plus leftover filling

Pork and Napa Cabbage Water Dumplings
Adapted from Asian Dumplings by Andrea Nguyen
Wrapper
10 oz. (about 2 cups) unbleached all purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon ground tumeric, for color
3/4 cup just-boiled water (as in, boil the water, then let it stand for about a minute before you measure)

Filling
2 cups lightly packed finely chopped napa cabbage (about 7 oz)
kosher salt
1 Tablespoon freshly minced ginger
4 chinese chives or scallions, minced (white and green parts)
1 spring onion, minced (white and green parts)
1 spring garlic, minced (white and green parts)
1/3 pound ground pork, (fattier is better) coarsely chopped to loosen
1/2 pound fresh shrimp, peeled and deveined, chopped
pepper
1/4 cup good chicken stock
small splash of Mirin rice wine
1 1/2 tablespoons light soy sauce
1 tablespoon grapeseed or canola oil
1 1/2 tablespoons toasted sesame oil

Wrapper dough:Measure out the flour into a large bowl. Dribble in the hot water a little bit at a time while stirring the dough, until all the water is incorporated. It should be shaggy but not too dry and come together when you pinch a bit in your fingers. Mix until it becomes one mass, then turn out onto a floured counter and knead for a few minutes.
The result should feel smooth, not too dry or too sticky. Poke the dough with a finger - if the depression slowly fills back, you're golden.
Put the dough in a ziploc bag and press the air out, then seal and leave on the counter for 15 minutes to two hours, until the dough is soft and pliable.

Filling:Put the cabbage in a bowl with a healthy pinch of kosher salt, and toss to cover. Set aside for about 15 minutes to draw the moisture out. Drain in a mesh strainer, flush with water and drain again. I actually did this procedure twice to remove extra water from the cabbage. After rinsing again, take cabbage by the handful and squeeze it hard to get as much excess water out as possible, then put into a large bowl. You should have about 1/2 a cup of firmly packed cabbage.

Add the ginger, chives, onion, garlic, pork and shrimp. Use a fork to lightly mash the ingredients together.

Stir together some salt, pepper, the soy sauce, chicken stock, rice wine and oils. Pour over the meat and cabbage and stir together into a thick, cohesive mixture.
Cover and set aside at room temperature for 30 minutes, or refridgerate overnight (but bring back to room temp. before making the dumplings)

To make wrappers:Turn out the dough onto a lightly floured surface (you might need to turn the bag inside out if the dough is sticky).
Divide in half and set half aside - roll the other half into a long snake about 1 inch around. Divide this into 16 peices ( cut in half, then quarter, then eight, then sixteen, for even pieces). Flour lightly each piece if you need to, but the dough should not be overly sticky.

Take a piece in your hands, smushing slightly into a squat shape - then with your hands, shape into a flat circle. There is a twist of the wrist involved to get it circular - don't worry though, an oblong dumpling tastes just as good.

Put the disk on the floured board and use your small rolling pin to roll the wrapper out into a circle. This is best accompished by holding an edge with one hand and rolling the pin with the flat of your other hand. Use the hand holding the wrapper to turn the wrapper as you roll it out, for even edges. This takes a bit of practice but you should end up with a round, thin wrapper (maybe 1/16 of an inch).

Assembly:Hold the wrapper in one hand and put a little bit of meat mixture into the middle with a spoon. Be careful not to overfill your dumpling!
There are many different ways to shape a dumpling, but the easiest is to simply fold the wrapper up like a taco around the filling, and seal the edges with your fingers. Unlike store bought wrappers, you do not need water or anything else to seal the two sides together - just pinch with your fingers.
For a nice tortellini-type shape, grab the two end points of this half-moon shaped dumpling and bring them around to meet in the middle, and seal the two ends together.

Place on parchment paper as you work, covered with a paper towel so they don't dry out. If you plan to freeze them or refrigerate overnight, flour the paper so they don't stick.

You can panfry your dumplings, boil them in water (they're done when they float) or, as I did, make...

Soup of Awesome - a southeast Asian flavored soup with jaozi dumplings

Base:
stalk lemongrass
1/2 cup chopped chinese chives (white and green bits)
1/4 cup chopped spring garlic (white and green bits)
about 6 crimini mushrooms, cleaned and sliced
toasted sesame oil
grapeseed or other flavorless oil

Good chicken stock, Homemade if possible - 1 quart

16 finished jao-zi (give filling, wrapper and how to)

Finishers: chili oil, rice/champagne vinegar, lemon juice, cilantro, salt/pepper

Get a drizzle of sesame and about a tablespoon of grapeseed oil going in a large stockpot. when the oil is sizzling add the rest of the base ingredients. quick-fry for a few minutes.
Add the chicken stock and season to taste.

Once the soup boils, lower to a simmer and carefully slip in the wontons. nudge them a little so they don't stick together.
Wontons are done when they float, and look a bit puffed up and glossy.

Finish the soup to taste with salt/pepper, lemon/lime, vinegar, and chili oil. garnish with torn cilantro leaves.

Huh.

2010-01-27T23:40:00.000-08:00

So I got an email from a fellow blogger tonight, asking me to submit four or so paragraphs on FoodBat and what kind of blog it is, and my history. I've come to realize that I really have no idea on either front anymore.
Foodbat doesn't really have a niche, unless "food I make that I bother to write about" is a niche, which it isn't. I like local food, but not to the point of spending lots of money for it. I shop at farmers markets because it's cheap, and the produce is fresh and far more interesting than what you would find elsewhere. It has nothing to do with any food-oriented political ideals, because honestly If think it's all kind of bullshit and I don't really care anymore. Is this blog about farmers market cooking? Well, no. I use lots of spices and flavor building blocks, and that often includes stuff that came from far away.

Writing down recipes is a pain in the ass, and not something I find fun especially since I so rarely use them myself. I understand writing Radish + salt + sugar + vinegar = pickle isn't super helpful to many people. (Which is probably why I tweet rather than post most of the time.)
I enjoy taking pictures, but can't be bothered in most cases while I'm cooking, and certainly not the elaborate setup that seems to be required for food blogs these days. (Seriously, its gotten to the point of where people seem to be photographers and food stylists over cooks). My food is delicious, but it doesn't always look that way.
Cooking is an act of meditation for me; reaching for a camera to document something is not. Because of this, I'm likely never to get read, which is a shame - although I honestly blame no one for not wanting to read my rambles.
So, basically, this is a food blog that isn't.

It's a little embarrassing - I post here because I like to post here, and put down recipes when I'm in the mood, but outside of that I don't really associate myself as being a food blogger. Technically I'm more of a food tweeter, but the word 'tweeter' sounds like a word you'd use to describe a meth user or something, so I don't use that term.
I live my thoughts publicly, and maybe that's the exhibitionist in me, but I function on the premise that the majority of whoever reads my thoughts and tweets and whatever doesn't really care, and therefore I don't either.

(Except my dad, who without fail mentions something I talk about in a post or tweet every time he calls to show how much he cares, even though he knows it's kind of awkward. Hi dad.)

As far as my history - It's been boiled down at this point to the cities I've lived, where I worked, where I went to school, etc etc etc. The sum of which, I've moved every few years to a different city starting around eighteen. Itchy feet syndrome. Oh, and that I moved from a place I loved to a place I don't and can't wait to get back there.
My story is more than this, to be sure, but it is not part of the story that I put forth publicly. I think there is plenty enough out there as it is.

Suffice to say - I have no idea what to tell this woman.

Notes from the fancy food show

2010-01-22T18:20:00.000-08:00

Sorry folks, don't really have a ton of pictures - because A) I only had my phone and B) was always walking around with someone who had a big honkin' camera and I didn't want to intrude.

Some notes.
Met Yod Sawa of Chomple very randomly in the press room, who by the way has surprisingly small and delicate hands for a man. Thought I'd share.

There were far too many items for me to talk about all of them - the fancy food show was packed, and huge, and full of stuff. However, I'll take a stab at my top 10 highlights:

1. Smoked Olive Oil
I must have brought everyone I ran into at NASFT to this booth at some point. Sonoma was the favorite - smooth and delightfully smoky without being harsh or overpowering. These guys are going to be huge - expect to see them in lots of food mags this year.

2. Secret Stash Salts
Okay, I'm also a friend of Janna so I may be a bit biased, but really, these salts are super awesome and many people who do not know them also agree. There were plenty of truffle salts at the show, but damn, chorizo salt...bloody mary salt...cardamom almond salt..Secret stash got it goin on.

3. Savory Macarons
Not everyone liked these, but I maintain that they simply didn't get a good one. A few booths were giving out various flavors of savory macarons, which leads me to believe that we'll see this as trend this year. Personal favorite was honey macaron with goat cheese and pepper/cumin dusting on top. Lovely.

4. Happy Goat caramels
I love caramel. I love goats. What could be better?
Seriously though, goat caramel is the bomb. I often have problems with goat milk dairy products, as they usually taste like...well, goat. These don't taste like goat. They taste like yum.

5. uhh...it's all becoming a blur..oh wait! Deb deb rub rub.
Aside from an awesome, awesome T-shirt (think something about rubbing..out? or..on? oh boy.)
DDRR has some tasty spice rubs for various meats and fishes. They also have the best spice packaging ever. Their beef rub for example is called Moo Rub and features a dewy-eyed, slightly nervous looking cartoon cow.
Don't worry, cute Mr. Cow, I will make you taste nice.

6. Black Garlic
Black Garlic is regular garlic that has been submitted to water-boarding, sensory deprivation and isolation until it becomes a quivering mass of jelly.
It takes on a caramel aspect, a bite akin to dried fruit and turns utter black - really unlike anything else I've had.
You can use it for all sorts of things, but the most surprising use at the show was as a very interesting energy drink. I got a head of it as a sample, and will have to figure out something to do with it.

7. Um. Can the rest of these be taken up by cheese? Because there was a whole crap ton of cheese.
Too many for me to remember. But there were some very good ones, including a softer cheese with mustard seeds which would be stellar on a sandwich.

8. Oh. Drinks. Lots of interesting ones.
Kili Gold Ginger Bag (probably to be found in your local asian market) - nice ginger tea, no steeping (its granules that you add to water). Was very nice both hot and iced, and sweetly gingery without being sugary.
HonestTea is coming out with Kombucha, which I'd never had before but liked, despite the fact that SOMETHING swimming around the bottle went down my throat before I could identify it.
Lots of interesting new teas, which I got samples of but haven't tried yet. As long as they are better than Eggnoggnininin I'm sure they'll do fine.

9. A ridiculous amount of chocolate.
In all honesty, I could not tell you about the chocolates, because they all kind of went into one big calorie-heavy blur for me. I will tell you that Vosges had some absolutely delicious stuff, including a curry ice cream, bacon toffee ice-cream which was very nicely not-too-bacon-y,
and some fantastic hot chocolate with lemon verbena in it. Oh yeah, and chocolate bars.
Including mushroom chocolate bars. (Still no badger or snake chocolate bars.)

10. And last but not least...BaconSalt.
And Bacon LipBalm. And Envelopes. I don't remember the last time I used an envelope other than to pay off one of my bills, but I'm sure that my landlord will appreciate his bacon-scented rent check this month.
Apparently they also had bacon ranch dressing powder, but I didn't try that. I did however try the bacon-flavored popcorn which did not in fact taste of bacon, but was lovely otherwise.
BaconSalt also gets brownie points for being one of the few vendors in the whole show that gave a damn about social media, which was very refreshing.

I don't want to get too much into it because honestly it's not my place, but bloggers were treated rather poorly this year - both by many vendors and by those running the fancy food show. Maybe it was because I didn't have my big honkin' camera. Mention what you write for and noses headed skyward.
Like it or not, this is the new face of the press - better get used to it. I'm very sorry that old media is dying, but don't be bitter, please.

Winter fancy food show 2010

2010-01-17T08:37:00.001-08:00

I'm covering the first day of the fancy food show today live via twitter! Expecting to see a lot of cool stuff. Never been before so should be interesting.

Watch my feed via this website or follow me on twitter for pics and notes from the best of the show!

The good and the bad

2009-12-30T09:50:00.000-08:00

Well, it's been a while since my last post, for which I apologize. I've been writing for Cook Local Bay Area for the past few months, and it's been interesting getting that off the ground.

The bad news is that due to time issues with my new job and life in general, I find that I simply don't have enough time to keep up a regular posting schedule and run the site.

I will be passing on CLBA to another - we are currently seeking guest writers, if anyone is interested. Its been fun and I wish I could juggle everything, but sadly I'd rather see if thrive under someone who has the bandwidth than struggle under my limited resources.

The good news is that I will be back on Foodbat and giving it some much needed love.

Check out Cook Local Bay Area to see what I've been up to since September, and stay tuned for more good stuff on here.

The secret is out!

2009-10-01T10:15:00.000-07:00

Yes, its true - I've been working on a new project, and I can finally talk about it.
The friendly folks at Cook Local are expanding to the Bay Area, and have asked me to come on as editor and run the site as well as produce all content.

This is very exciting - John and Patricia have done great things in the northwest and have made a name for themselves, and it's going to be awesome to do the same in my new home under the Cook Local brand.

I'm not closing down Foodbat so no worries - if I have recipes for posts that don't showcase local ingredients as a majority, they will be going on here. There might also be some overlap from time to time.

I'll also be tweeting as CookLocalSF as well as from my Jeters account.

Check out the new site! It looks awesome and this should prove to be a really fun project.
Cook Local - Bay Area

Meal for one: black bean chili

2009-09-30T16:52:00.000-07:00

I'm Sick. It sucks. I have a pretty good immune system so something like this hits maybe once every six months, maybe less. You know the kind - the sore throat that turns into sniffles that turns into that chest cough that won't go away. Yeah, fun. Today is my sick day. It is the day where I don't change out of my pajamas, where I get to be alone to sniffle and cough and fall asleep on the couch while watching The Biggest Loser.
The problem with being sick - especially when there is no one around to take care of you during the day - is that ultimately you get hungry. Hungry, not for peanut butter on toast or something that you could whip together out of leftovers in the fridge, but for REAL food. Comfort food. Chili.
But chili takes hours...right?
This is not the kind of chili you lovingly simmer for hours - it is the kind you throw together on the fly from stuff lying around, because simply nothing else will do. It's not the worlds best chili. But, hey, its pretty good, and it took about fifteen minutes to make.

half yellow onion, roughly chopped
1 can black beans, drained/rinsed
1 serrano pepper, minced and seeds removed
2 small heirloom tomatoes, chopped
spices to taste: cumin, coriander, ginger, hot chilli, tumeric, cumin seeds
spoonful of tomato paste
lemon wedge
roughly a cup of chicken stock

In a heavy saucepan, heat up some olive oil and add the onion. make a hole in the middle of the onions and add your spices - fry for about 30 seconds then mix with the onion. Cook for 4-5 minutes or until the onions become translucent.
Add tomatoes and Serrano pepper, cook for a few minutes until tomato starts to break down. add spoonful of tomato paste and half the chicken stock. After a minute, add the beans.
simmer until the liquid is nearly gone and the onions are soft. Mash slightly with a potato masher to break up some of the beans, then add the other half of the chicken stock and stir.

when the chili is back up to temperature, serve. I like to season at the end with juice from a lemon wedge, maybe some cilantro or extra cayenne mixed in at the end. Spicy food is great for stuffy heads.

Goodbye to the northwest

2009-09-24T13:23:00.000-07:00

Those who know me have found that I always like to eat and live local - shopping at farmers markets, foraging around the neighborhood, growing my own and discovering all of the interesting little intricacies of life in Seattle and the northwest. Where the best croissant is. Where the blackberries and sweet peas grow wild on my street. Stuff like that.

It turns out that when one makes an effort to live local, it is much harder to uproot oneself.

For the last several years, I have moved to a new city every two years or so- for college, for jobs, for love. It is with great regret that I find myself moving once again, to San Fransisco this time. In the last few years I have completely fallen in love with the northwest, and despite the fact that many of my childhood friends and all of my family live in the bay area, this move is particularly painful.

I really hope that my husband and I find ourselves in the northwest again, someday.

I should be excited for many things that come with living in california - backyard lemons, for one. A much wider variety at farmers markets. A year-round growing season. Nearly perfect weather (where I am living, anyway). Great restaurants within walking distance.

It's not Seattle, though.
You might hear about Seattle N-ice, but the truth is that Seattlites have a heart and soul that you don't miss until you move somewhere else. They are profoundly connected, to the earth, to the seasons, and to each other. I'm going to miss it. I am already.

Let's put it this way - I've moved to a place on the peninsula with endless sunshine and big front yards, and I'm the only one growing anything that wasn't landscaped by somebody else.

I plan to give it the old college try as far as reconnecting - and I daresay that once I am settled living local is going to be a heck of a lot easier than it was in Seattle, for the reasons I mentioned above. At least I'll have oranges this winter.

Mark my words though, PNW folks - it may be a while. But, I'll be back.

The never-ending cycle of Leftovers

2009-08-11T16:53:00.000-07:00

So, as some of you may know I am currently in between jobs at the moment. Everyone has their own approach to dealing with this change in schedule and particularly the huge amount of free time that is suddenly available. Some go on long walks, play video games, work out or simply mope around and be depressed. I especially want to avoid that last one, so I keep busy. I cook.

Being unemployed also brings to attention the need to slash our budget wherever possible, and make do on much less (if we want to make our rent, anyway). So, this week has become a Saga of Leftovers - I take a chicken, a stale loaf of bread, and the contents of my fridge, and see how far I can take it. These two main components are not only cheap but serve as the foundation for several fine meals for two people - the trick is using every bit, maximizing flavor and adapting it to what's on hand. Our grandparents had this technique down pat, and I get the feeling that my generation is re-discovering these talents.

Just as a note, I grow herbs, zucchini and tomatoes, so for me those items are free - I would probably do something else if I didn't have them. The other stuff can be bought cheaply - a few onions, a carrot, a lemon.
These are the actual meals I've made this week - it doesn't count the mini-meals that were made of cold chicken.

Meal one:
Roast chicken and dripping bread.
This turns out a really gorgeous roast chicken with plenty of flavor, and a minimal amount of work - no turning, no basting is necessary. The onions become part crispy, part melty and the bread becomes pure rich and toasty goodness, too rich in fact to eat at one sitting. That's okay - the leftover bread and drippings become part of the next meal. This is best done in an oven safe skillet or other vessel that will fit in the refridgerator.

Heat your oven to 425 degrees.
Take a whole chicken (don't forget to remove the liver and giblets inside), pat dry inside and out, and rub generously with pepper and kosher salt. Prick the skin over the fat deposits with a knife. Run your finger under the skin of the chicken breast to loosen it (be sure not to tear anything), and stuff a sprig of rosemary up each side. Stuff with a lemon cut in half, some kosher salt, and some rosemary, and put in the fridge to hang out until you are ready to cook.

Slice up about half a loaf worth of stale bread into cubes - a crusty loaf like sourdough works well but any bread will work. Also, slice up half an onion. Line your roasting pan (I use an enameled cast iron skillet which works wonderfully, because it's the perfect size and because washing roasting pans is a pain in the ass) with the bread and onions.
Place the chicken on top of the bread. Slather the chicken all over with about two tablespoons worth of softened butter, and roast for about an hour fifteen, or until the temperature in the thickest part of the thigh reads 175 degrees.
Check after about half an hour in to cooking - if the pieces of bread are beginning to look pretty toasted, you can lower the temperature to 375 - be aware that the cooking time will be longer.

Serve the chicken with part of the bread and some of those crispy onions. Whatever you do, DON'T WASH THE PAN. All of those drippings and pieces of bread and onion are the foundation for the next meal - cover the pan and stash in the fridge for the next day.

After the chicken is eaten, remove the rest of the meat and store it in the fridge, as well as the chicken carcass - these will form the base for soup later on.

Meal two:
Dripping gravy over egg noodles
This gravy is rich, delicious, and seriously easy - almost all you need is already in the pan. the leftover dripping bread bits act as a thickener for the gravy.

get salted water boiling for the noodles.
heat up your dripping pan, scraping up all those bits from the bottom. Add a chopped up peeled tomato, some vegetables if you want - I added a sliced zucchini to it as well. The tomato should have enough juice to deglaze the pan, but if not add a tablespoon or so of the boiling water. bring the mixture to a simmer.
Once the noodles are boiling for about a minute, add about a cup and a half of the pasta water to the gravy mixture. Bring back to a simmer, still stirring and scraping the dripping pan. It should take about 7-10 minutes to thicken (it should be thick enough to cover the back of a spoon). Drain the noodles, and serve with the sauce.

Meal Three (and basis for more): Spicy chicken and vegetable soup
This meal uses stock from the carcass, and whatever leftover chicken meat you have.
Chicken stock.
One should never throw away the leftovers of a roasted bird if one can possibly help it - not when making stock is so easy and can form the basis of so many other meals. Just cover the chicken carcass with water in a stock pot, and throw in whatever else you have lying around - a carrot that's withering, a leftover bit of onion and onion top, maybe some oregano or parsley from the garden.
I made a spicy soup from part of the stock, but I have several quarts left that I will either build into other soups this week, or freeze for use later. My husband likes to just season it and drink it straight.
This is a perfect example of a fridge and pantry meal - a lot of the stuff I used can be substituted for whatever you have around. I'm the sort of person who saves her bacon grease, but butter or olive oil is also fine.

Spicy chicken soup:

take three tomatoes and two hot peppers such as serrano or jalapeno (or for me the little ones in my garden), and put them in a pan under the broiler until thier skin blisters and they are easily peeled. This takes about 5-7 minutes. Peel the tomatoes and peppers (don't forget to remove the seeds from the peppers as well).

Bloom your spices in a bit of oil in your hot stockpot. I made a spice mix of cayenne, cumin, coriander, garam masala and hot chili, but use whatever you have on hand. fry the spices for no longer than thirty seconds.
Chop a sweet onion and sautee in your stock pot in some oil, butter or bacon grease. I also added a piece of cooked bacon I had in the fridge for some extra smokeyness. add salt and pepper and cook until the onions are soft and golden. Add the tomatoes and peppers to the mix, along with a sprig of oregano if you have one, or a shake of dried. Add four cups of the stock, along with your the leftover chicken meat and whatever vegetables you like - zucchini or other squash works well. Stir in about a teaspoonful of tomato paste.
Bring the soup to a simmer and let it go for about an hour and a half or so, until the soup is slightly thickened and the flavors are melded together. You can always season it to taste, but if you must, do it at the end about ten minutes before you serve, as flavors concentrate while a soup is simmering.

It is possible to eat (VERY) well, for the better part of a week, on only a few dollars worth of ingredients. Time is the major factor, and care- and while I may not have a lot of anything else, time I have in spades at the moment. I'm making well use of it, and keeping sane.

BBA: Bagels

2009-06-15T23:39:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I have to apologize - I got caught up in this challenge and completely failed to document any of the things I've made so far. As my first bread (anadama) was an utter failure, and my second (Artos) was only so-so, I feared that none of my endeavors would end up being post-worthy.

Enter Bagels.

These bagels are Good. As in, you can't buy anything close (at least in Seattle) kind of good. As in, I might open up a bagel cart and devote the rest of my life to making them good.

As part of the challenge, I wanted to tackle another area of baking that I'd always wondered about and semi-feared, which is cultivating wild yeast in a sourdough starter. It always seemed like something tricky and difficult. Turns out, not so much. A scale helps. All you really need is a portion of water and flour in equal parts (I kickstarted mine with part rye flour and part bread flour), keep it out on the counter, and feed every 12 hours. I followed directions from WildYeastBlog. Sure enough, within a few days I had a bubbly mass of yeasty little monsters, ready for breadmaking. I named him Bob.

Bob lives in my fridge when I'm not using him for delicious sourdough things. Under chill he only needs to be fed once a week or so. (I've decided yeast cultures are male, despite off-color jokes you could make to the contrary - they smell, and they fart alot)

I've modified the Peter Reinhart BBA challenge bagel recipe to incorporate Bob. Sorry for giving weight instead of volume, but seriously, buying a scale has changed the way I bake. No more measuring! Yay!

Salt and Poppy Bagels

Starter:
35 oz starter with sourdough (about 200g of pure sourdough starter fed with equal parts bread flour and lukewarm water to equal 35oz, goosed with a teaspoon of active dry yeast and left to rise on the counter in a large bowl for at least an hour)

Dough:
17 oz (3.75 cups roughly) bread flour
.7 oz (3 tsp) of salt (I use kosher)
.5 oz (1 tbsp) of honey

To finish:
a pot of water
1 tbsp of baking soda
1 egg, beaten (egg wash)
poppyseeds and kosher salt

Once the sponge has gotten nice and bubbly (should take just over an hour), add the flour, salt and honey, and mix up until the ingredients form a ball. The dough will be very dry and shaggy at first - if you mix with wet hands you'll add just enough moisture to bring it all together. The product will be VERY stiff, as in probably break your stand mixer stiff - if you did use a stand mixer up til this point, I recommend switching to your hands.

transfer the dough to the counter and knead until the dough is satiny and pliable, but not sticky or tacky. add a few drops of water if it seems too dry (for example if it breaks easily when you stretch a piece between your fingers) or sprinkle on some flour if the dough is too sticky.

Once the dough is ready, devide into 4.5 oz pieces for large bagels, or 2.4 oz pieces for small ones.
Form the pieces into rolls and cover with a damp towel. Rest for 20 minutes (both of you!)

Line a pan with baking parchment or silpat, and spray with oil. Shape the bagels. I do this by sticking my thumb in the middle to make the hole, then working my way around with both hands to make a good "O" shape. You can also make a snake with the dough and wrap it around your fist, pinching the end to fasten.

place the shaped pieces on the pan, mist the tops of the bagels with oil, cover with plastic wrap, and let them rise for another 20 minutes.
Next, it's time for the float test - fill a small bowl with water and put in one of the bagels. if it floats immediately, they're good to go. If the bagel sinks, more proofing is needed - try again every 10 to 20 minutes. Once your bagels pass the float test, pop the pan in the fridge until you're ready to boil and bake them. I suggest waiting at least overnight, but they should be okay in there for three days.

When you are ready to bake the bagels, set your oven to 500 degrees and get a pot of water boiling (the wider the pot, the better). Once the water is boiling, add 1 tbsp of baking soda. It will stop boiling for a moment. This is normal.
Working in batches, boil the bagels a minute on each side (you can extend the time to make the bagel more chewy, but I dont recommend too long). Once a bagel is out of the water bath, immediately brush on some egg wash and sprinkle the salt and poppyseed mixture over the top.

When all the bagels are boiled, bake for five minutes, then rotate the pan 180 degrees, lower the temperature to 450, and bake for another five to eight minutes or until the bagels are golden brown. Let them cool for 15 minutes at least. They are worth the wait!

Mm. Bagels.

On Bread and Challenges

2009-05-17T22:21:00.000-07:00

My first major bread-related memory involves my first trip to Paris, as I'm sure it does for many well-travelled foodies out there.

Mine probably deviates a bit though - it is of sitting in my hotel room, too afraid to go out into the city, eating my way through a loaf of bread so delicious that even as I cry my eyes out I am unable to stop consuming it.
I was eighteen, travelling with another young female friend, and we were both terrified of Parisians. I should mention that on the first day a rather nasty specimen of a Frenchman had followed us a good eight blocks asking loudly for a blowjob from we "American Whores," so our experience had not been good. In fact, the entire three days we were there were mostly spent in the hotel room, watching horrible french television, venturing only as far as the bakery down the street. That bread was the single memorable thing about Paris for us- of sitting on our hotel bed consuming great chunks of it. It was that experience that really opened my eyes to how incredible bread can be.
(FYI I've since been back and although it wasn't as horrible, I still can't stand that city and the demeanor of its inhabitants to strangers. Sorry foodies.)

For the majority of my life I felt that really good bread was something I could never myself make - that bread making was some occult process that I could never hope to master. It is the antithesis of the way I normally cook,off the recipe, on the fly. All that weighing, math, patience, steps to follow - I'm not good with these things.

Well, I've decided to face my fear of bread baking and master the style of cooking that I am weakest at.
PinchMySalt has started a Bread Bakers Challenge, in which we work our way through every recipe in the Bread Bakers Apprentice, a fantastic book on baking by a guy who knows what he's talking about. I feel this is one of my culinary fears, something I should get over. Bread is essentially flour, water, and yeast - it is something people have made for thousands of years, and there is no reason why I should hold it on a pedestal. I'm entirely sure the first few attempts will be utter disasters, but this is something I should face.

Foodbat digs creature out of sand, eats it: Razor clams!

2009-04-28T19:11:00.000-07:00

This past weekend I got the opportunity to do something singularly northwesty - dig for razor clams! I had never done anything even approaching something like this, so when Naomi of GastroGnome invited me to go, I jumped at the chance. Neither of us had any idea of what we were doing, but we did have a clam gun, and it sounded like an interesting experience, so why not?

We left at an ungodly early hour on sunday morning, and after getting lost somewhere around Aberdeen finally made it to Copalis beach. The state only opens certain beaches for clamming at certain days of the year, coinciding with very low tides. The season opened at 8am so we had to make sure to be there in time.

Other clammers were scattered up and down the tide flats, digging and seemingly plucking clams from the sand as easily as picking apples from a laden tree. Easy, right? We found a divot in the sand and stuck in the clam gun, which is essentially a piece of PVC pipe with handles. Push in, pull out, all the sand slides back out of the pipe and into the hole. No clam. Try again, hole fails, no clam. We are obviously Doing It Wrong.

We end up wandering around at the surfline for about 45 minutes, looking like fools among all the people happily digging up thier little mollusks. We had an Epic Clam Fail on our hands - a two and a half hour drive out, and it was clear that we had wasted our time and were going to drive back empty handed due to our noobishness.

After yet another failed attempt, Naomi noticed the little hole on top of the pipe, and wondered if maybe it was supposed to be covered. Eureka! We push in the gun, cover the hole and...SUCTION! A large divot of sand comes out with the gun. And there, in the hole - yes, a little thingy, poking out! I squeal like a little girl and grab for it. I go in up to my elbow, and come out with our first clam!
We dance around in excitement. There is this amazing rush of euphoria that comes from erasing the barrier erected by restaurants, supermarkets and other middlemen of the human food chain, pulling something wriggling out of the ground to be eaten. We certainly felt it.

From there, it was easy, more or less. Look for a divot. Dig in the clam gun. Cover the hole, pull out the sand, grab the clam. We each got our limit of fifteen, and headed home with the load.

I've done some foraging before, but this was hands down the most fun and rewarding venture I've ever had doing it.

Once my clams were home, I washed them of sand as best as I could and put them in a bowl under some wet paper towels. I was a little nervous about the next part, and was exhausted anyway, so clams went in the fridge for the night.

I should probably mention that cleaning razor clams bears very little resemblance to cleaning the hardshell clams that most of us think of when we think of clams - with hard shells, all you have to do is rinse off the outside and steam them until thier shells come open. Not so with razor clams - these suckers are BIG, and cleaning them is a process that requires, well, shelling and butchering the thing. I already am pretty squeaming about killing things - I don't kill spiders, I avoid ants, I carefully move snails to another part of the yard. (Thank god I dont have to deal with roaches). Clams don't whimper or make any sound, but they do pull back when you touch them, and wriggle. Anyway, I'd grown a little attached to my clams, so the thought of killing them weighed heavily upon me.

When the time came the following night, and the clams were in a colander in my sink, I ended up coming to terms with what was about to happen by saying a little prayer for them. I understand it's pretty rediculous, but it helped me feel better.
It went something like this:

O Razor Clams,
Please forgive me for bringing about your demise,
but unfortunately, you are Delicious
and would probably die pretty soon anyway.
I hope that until now your clammy lives have been pretty good
and that if you reincarnate you come back as something that doesn't get eaten
or at least live a bit longer.
Amen.

Actually it went on for quite a bit longer than that but my husband told me to quit stalling and get it over with already.

Here is how you clean a razor clam:

First, pour boiling water over them for no longer than five seconds. Immediately rinse in cold water. If its any longer the flesh will be tough. this should make the shells pop open and help release the clam from the shell.

Using a spoon or your fingers, shuck the clam from its shell. make sure to cut through the four muscles that are attaching the thing and not tear them.

With a pair of scissors, snip the end of the neck part off. I should probably mention that even after they die, mollusks have automatic twich responses - so yes, it will pull back and wriggle in your hand as you are cutting it. THIS IS INCREDIBLY FREAKY. You just have to squeal when appropriate and deal with it as best as you can. They really are dead at this point.

Cut up the zipper and up the ventricle. then located the second ventricle (there will be a little hole) and cut up that as well. the idea is to butterfly the thing so that it lays flat.

make a cut across the dark bit in the center, and gently pull the digger (thats the foot thing) away from the body.

scrape off any dark bits - the gills in this case - from the body, and put aside in a bowl of water.

Make a diagonal cut across the dark bit of the digger. there will be a little glassy thing in the middle that pops out - pull it out and toss it.

butterfly the digger as you did the body, removing any dark bits and pulling out the small intestine (you know, the poop shoot). I recommend doing all this under running water. The fluffly looking stuff should stay on.

I think the most disturbing part of this was not the little (nonharmful) crabs that would scuttle out of the clamshell, or the way the thing wriggled in my hands long after it was dead. Rather, it was the fact that after squealing and squirming through the first couple of clams, I started thinking less about what I was doing and more about how my back hurt, or whatever else came into my head. At one point I even started singing a song about clam poopshoots. How quickly we become numb!

Anyway, I didn't take any pictures of the fried clams I made, but they were delicious. You can find a similar recipe here or on GastroGnome's excellent post on her experience.
I made sure to freeze most of them for chowder or frying later on in the year. Anyway, if you are in the northwest, razorclamming is a ton of fun and well worth the work for this delicacy.

You can read all about razor clams and how to dig for them, as well as where to buy a license, on the Washington State Fishing page.

Zukey Muffins

2009-04-13T18:01:00.000-07:00

Apparently I'm the only one in my household who likes zucchini, so when we get any in the CSA box it's always a matter of sneaking it into something my husband enjoys. (grating it, freezing it in baggies and sneaking it into pasta sauce is my go-to.)
So on the day before Easter, when I'm asked to bring something to dinner and we have a few rapidly wilting zukes in the fridge, I decided to try and sneak them into something delicious, something that would even get past the notoriously picky tastes of my husband and a few members of his family. I love banana bread and carrot cake, and the zucchini breads of my past seemed to fit the bill of something to do with zucchini that didn't remind of, well, zucchini.
And who doesn't like a muffin?
One thing about any kind of fruit or veggie-enhanced quickbread is that they require quite a bit of fat to remain moist. Usually this is solved by adding a lot of oil to the recipe, nearly a cup or more. In quickbreads its usually safe to substitute up to half of the oil with yogurt or applesauce - I used whole milk plain yogurt, which worked out fabulously. I also played fast and loose with the spices and flavors, as I like to do - in this case it worked out.
Ginger Brew is a digestive that is found at asian supermarkets, (full name is Ludy's Ginger Brew Salabrat), which gives a sweet spicy kick to baked goods. As far as I'm aware, its pretty much just powdered ginger mixed with sugar, and you can subsitute as such.

Zukey Muffins - makes about 24

3 eggs
1 3/4 sugar, minus 1 tablespoon if you put in ginger brew
1/2 cup oil
1/2 cup yogurt (plain, whole milk)
2 grated zucchinis (medium) - make sure you squeeze out as much water as you can from the grated product
2 tsp vanilla extract
3 cups all purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt (heaping if youre using kosher salt)
3 tsp cinnamon
1/8 tsp nutmeg
1 tbsp good cocoa powder
1 tbsp ginger brew (or 1 tsp ginger)
1 cup chocolate chips

Beat eggs in a bowl with a whisk until light in color, maybe 3 minutes of hard whiskin'.
Add sugar, oil, yogurt, vanilla, and zucchini, making sure each ingredient is combined before you add the next.
Combine together dry ingredients (flour, spices, gingerbrew, baking soda/powder, cocoa, salt) and add to the egg mixture.
Gently fold until mixed - you want to be careful here not to overmix, just go until the dry ingredients are incoporated. Fold in chocolate chips.

Bake at 350 degrees for about 20 minutes - make sure to flip around the muffin tins at 10 so that it bakes evenly.

Seriously, these are good - and will win over even those who say "blech - zucchini!"

Produce throwdown, part 2 : CSA vs Farmers Market

2009-04-06T09:48:00.001-07:00

OK, well this part didnt go so well for an obvious reason - my CSA supplements thier produce with stuff from California during the winter, so many items did not have a counterpart currently available at the farmers market. One trend was clear - farmers market prices are slightly higher than PCC prices, which are to be expected, but not significantly higher for many items. Whats really needed is a farmers market comparison later in the season, but it is safe to assume that a CSA will still be the winner in price.

Heres the breakdown of what is currently available from the farmers as compared to PCC prices:

Fuji Apples - $2.75/lb (1.49 at PCC)
Carrots - $3 a bunch (1.99 at PCC)
Arugula - $2.49 a bunch (3.00 at PCC)
Leeks - $3 a/lb (2.99 at PCC)
Potatoes - $2.75/lb (1.49 at PCC)
Tuscan Kale - $$3 a bunch (2.49 at PCC)

Now, I'd like to add that just because going the CSA route is the cheapest for the produce you get, it doesn't necessarily mean that it is the best one. We are blessed in Seattle to have fantastic farmers markets which offer items beyond produce (such as the Seabreeze Farms raw milk that I'm addicted to). Being able to buy directly from farmers and meet them face to face is priceless, and aside from that it's a great social outing and integral part of my weekend.

Will joining a CSA prevent me from going to the farmers market on a weekly basis? Frankly, no.

What it does do is solve a personal problem, which is that I hate spending cash and therefore often find myself passing on buying enough produce to last me through the week. Instead, I buy milk, and maybe some apples or leeks, or maybe eggs, and spend the rest of the time walking and looking and bemoaning the price.

Joining a CSA or organic delivery service ensures that you WILL have the produce and will use it despite all attempts to sabotage yourself. And you'll probably get some good deals to boot.
I'll stick with my CSA (or possibly try out Full Circle Farms to compare) for a while, but will go to the farmers market anyway to supplement. I'll keep you posted on what happens.

Produce Throwdown, Part 1: CSA vs PCC

2009-03-31T19:28:00.000-07:00

I'm a lazy blogger. Okay, I said it. (although I do liveblog lunch every so often.)
I don't meticulously write down recipes, take pretty photos, or update my readers (HA!) daily on the fabulousness of my culinary lifestyle. Well, not on this blog anyway- twitter is another matter.

I do get pretty obsessive about certain things, one of which is frugality, especially when it comes to food. I'm the girl that takes 3 hours to go grocery shopping because I am deciding which of the 35 boxes of cereal will give me the most (financial, spiritual, culinary, volumetric) value.

Anyway, I recently signed up for a CSA in an effort to bring more fruits and veggies into my life, and immediately became obsessed as to whether paying 35 dollars a box was really the most frugal option. Visiting the farmers market every Saturday has become a ritual, and I'm a regular shopper at my lovely local PCC natural market - is going CSA really the best option?

Anyway, normally I would keep this kind of personal obsession...well, personal, but as several people online expressed interest, I've posted the bout for all to see.

IN THIS CORNER....
New Roots Organics

New Roots is not strictly a CSA, but rather an organic delivery service that sources from several local farms in Washington such as Frog Song Farm and Dry Slough Orchard. I wanted to try them out for thier variety, the fact that you don't have to buy a whole season in advance and the fact that they deliver to your door. They drop off a big rubbermaid tub of food at your doorstep on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, depending on what you sign up for. The price of a regular box is 35 dollars, which is on par which what most CSA boxes cost around here for those who are more virtuous than I and only get single-farm CSA subscriptions.
New Roots, like many CSA-type operations, sources california produce during the winter, which is why I have zucchini and oranges in my box.

AND IN THIS CORNER...
PCC Natural Markets
PCC is a Washington chain of natural foods stores, known for generally being awesome. They have a very wide selection of Organic and local produce, a bulk section, a big prepared foods deli, and lots of natural food type groceries of stuff that doesn't contain trans fats. I should also add that they have a great customer service presence on twitter (Hi, @Pcc!) that will give you price quotes and answer your grocery questions. They run on the pricey side, but that is standard for a natural foods store (although I have not personally done a price comparison with whole foods.) I've chosen them as my CSA's contender as it looks like they use the same wholesaler/sourcing for many items.

THE BOX:

LEEEEEEETTS GET READY TO RUMBLLLLLLE!!!

COST - PCC: 41.09
(I have used prices of Organic produce only as all New Roots produce is organic)

COST - CSA: 35 Dollars

Okay, CSA wins this one. (although, admittedly, not by much.) Add to this the cost of gas driving to the store, plus the cost of all the extra stuff you probably would buy (bar of theo chocolate, that vegan gingersnap, etc).
However, If I was going to the grocery store I probably would not pick all this stuff up, especially the items out of my comfort zone, like kale. Also, its not like I'm going to stop going to the market for other stuff.

Tune in Saturday for Part Two of produce throwdown - CSA vs Farmers Market! (I'm VERY interested in this one, as the fate of my continued CSA membership rests on it.)

New Project: Downtown Seattle Lunch Blog

2009-02-19T13:09:00.000-08:00

Just wanted to post that I am working on a new mini project - Downtown Seattle Lunch Blog. I'm sick of having to google around every day at lunch to get ideas for takeout within a 6 block radius. There are plenty of offerings in downtown Seattle, but because many of them cater exclusively to takeout lunch for workers, are hole in the walls, or are in food courts, no one covers them. I plan to document what I get, how much it cost, and whether it's worth a return trip. I'll also compare it with similar offerings in the area.

Its going to be kind of bare bones as its more for myself than anyone else, but if you would like to read it, be my guest =)

http://downtownseattlelunch.wordpress.com/

Stay tuned for FoodBat Designs!

2009-01-13T00:01:00.000-08:00

So, in the new year I've resolved to get back into illustration and design again - I've been seriously slacking, and the photohackery I do for a living doesn't cut it creatively. Eventually there will be a new blog just for new drawings and images, but since I don't have it running just yet, I'm going to debut this here.

I made this just in time for Obama's inauguration next week, and it's available on all kinds of merch at my store on Cafepress. I can't help but chuckle whenever I look at it. I'm totally going to toon out all incumbent political figures so I have a willing cast for the horrible ideas in my head.

*cough*

Anyway:

Happy New Year!

2009-01-08T13:39:00.000-08:00

OK, I am aware that it has been the new year for a week already. I am also aware that I haven't posted in a while. There are a few new posts in the works from before the holidays, but I just haven't gotten the time to finish them. No, really.

A few new things:

Firstly, I have a (very small, basic) Cafepress store now, which should get bigger and more impressive over time. What it means is that the cute little drawings you occasionally see on here will be for sale on merch. (including the much asked for Cthulhu mini-pin.) For now, it is here.

Secondly, my twitter friend @TheFoodGeek wrote a great article addressing my questions about toffee (namely my familys famous christmas toffee, of which I cannot divulge the recipe), and why it sometimes breaks before cooling for no apparent reason. And, what do you know, it's on FineCooking.com! Congrats to @thefoodgeek for blogging for them now, and, this makes me famous..right?

Check out the article at Fine Cooking Blogs.

Lard: No Longer Just for Tubs and Asses

2008-11-23T19:17:00.000-08:00

Lard. Ohh yes.
I’m not talking about the weight that may have accumulated on your thighs over the past few months (ok, who are we kidding, since last Halloween).

I’m talking delicious rendered down pig-fat (preferably from around the kidneys). For you pie-makers, lard is key for a tender, flavorful pie crust. Substitute lard for shortening in a recipe, or half of the amount of butter.
You may be thinking, what, butter isn't good enough? Am I that insecure in my street cred as a foodie that I need to aim for these kind of bragging rights?

Truth is, Lard is a mysterious ingredient for many of us who grew up with substitutions like Crisco. These days it’s often associated with Mexican cooking in america and not beyond that. It fell out of favor several decades ago along with bacon grease, suet and schmalz.
Now, as low-fat diets faze out, and we find out more about good and bad fats in our foods, lard and other animal fats are making a comeback in the home. Heck, Lard might even end up being good for us.
For now, working with, and especially rendering one’s own lard, elicits the response of "Wow..thats Hardcore," pretty much without fail.
Being a new-comer to the pig in general (I grew up Jewish but not kosher, which means we did have bacon rarely but I never had an intimate relashionship with pork and pig-parts), lard was doubly mysterious to me. Once I read up on it, I knew I had to try it, and the best way to experience the proper stuff is to make your own.

The truth is that rendering your own lard is easy, and if you are planning on using lard in your baking, it's recommended. Most of the lard you find in stores has been partially hydrogenized to make it shelf stable, which means it's just as full of trans fats as that Crisco. Unless you have access to a specialty source, its far healthier and cheaper to simply make your own.
Leaf lard, which is used in pastry, should not be confused with manteca, which is the lard found in the refigerated section of mexican grocery stores. Manteca is from a different part of the pig, and has a much stronger flavor. It's great for a pot of beans, but doesn't work well for sweet pastry or biscuits.
You can purchase leaf lard from your butcher, or if you are lucky enough to have a seller of berkshire or mangalisa pork at your farmers market, get it from them. (And if you are in Seattle, I very much recommend stopping by Wooley Pigs in the U-district saturday farmers market, where you can buy mangalitsa leaf lard for about 5 dollars)

How to render lard:

First, look over the lump of fat in front of you and trim off any meat that you see. Cut the fat into chunks.
Make sure you use a heavy-bottomed pan for rendering (I use my dutch oven). Heat the lard over low heat, stirring frequently. Some people recommend rendering in the oven but I get too paranoid that the fat will burn (and believe me, you do not want this). Keep an eye on the temperature - as the water evaporates, you may need to turn the heat down so that nothing scorches.
This process is going to take a while- at least an hour if not more. As the fat liquifies, bits will rise to the top. These are cracklins. Some people like to save and eat them, but I'm not a fan. Anyway, as the cracklins lose thier fat they should sink to the bottom.

Once the lard is liquid, run it through a fine strainer to catch any solids. Let it cool.

Now at this point, you can either simply pour the liquid fat into a glass container and keep in the fridge once its cooled. I like to have mine in neat sticks for cooking though, so if you want your lard in sticks, take a large baking pan (like the kind you would make lasagna in) and cover the inside with at least three layers of saran wrap. pour the lard into the baking pan and set it in the fridge to harden overnight.

Once the fat is hardened, you should be able to lift it out with the saran wrap easily. Cut it into sticks, and wrap in several more layers of saran wrap. Store in the freezer.

Baking Day: Cranberry Gingerbread Gems

2008-11-17T19:09:00.000-08:00

Tis the Season to eat cookies!

On my Mothers side of the family, there is a tradition of the Holiday Baking day (also, the famous holiday turkey cook-off, but, that's another post). My Grandma-Great, Wylie, had a Baking Day as part of her regular week like many women of her generation, and although she passed on when I was small, every now and again my mother or grand-mother will wax eloquent about her famous cherry pies.

As time went on (as it does), Baking Day went from being a weekly to an annual event.

I remember as a kid, all of us gathering together in our kitchen- grandma, aunts, all the cousins, my sister and brother and friends, to bake pies and make toffee and craft cookies. My mother had a huge stack of favorite recipes and baking pamphlets gathered over the years which she would xerox and hand to everyone to figure out what we wanted to make. Gingerbread figures to be decorated and used as edible ornaments were a standby, along with many batches of English Toffee to send as Christmas presents for relatives abroad. (Sorry guys, that recipe is secret.)

Over the years, the divorces, the jobs and the process of generally growing up, all of those aunts, cousins, siblings and friends have grown apart in distance, although not in spirit. The house I grew up in belongs to my dad now, and the only cook in it is my sister who still lives at home. We live streets, cities, states away from one another. As the years go on it grows harder and harder to get everyone together for the various holidays.

Baking Day does happen though, every year, through thick and thin.

These Cranberry Gingerbread Gems are a Baking Day favorite of mine, and one which I always associate with this time of year. In the past few years I've adapted the cookie to be smaller, crisp, and even more addictive - I usually put ten or so in a small cellophane bag with a ribbon to give to co-workers.
These cookies have a grown-up twist, maximizing spice and using blackstrap molasses, which comes from the third boiling of cane sugar and is a darker, bitter cousin to the usual. I roll my Gems in Ludy's Ginger Brew Salabrat , which can be found in asian markets in the tea section - which, by the by, on its own is lovely mixed with hot water as a digestive. Cut it with sugar if you can't stand the heat.
If you can't find Ginger Brew, white sugar mixed with a bit of ground ginger will approximate.

Cranberry Ginger Gems

Ingredients:

3/4 cup butter, softened
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup blackstrap molasses (regular works fine too, but the bitterness helps balance the sweet)
1 egg
2-1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon cloves
1/2 teaspoon ginger
1/3 teaspoon kosher salt
1 cup dried cranberries
1 cup chopped crystallized ginger
Ginger brew mixed with sugar (or white sugar mixed with 1/4tsp ground ginger)

Directions:
FYI, I use a stand mixer for this, and if you have one I recommend it.

Cream together butter and sugar. (Basically blend them together until the mixture is light in color and fluffy.) Add the molasses and egg; blend well.

Combine the dry ingredients in a bowl - flour, baking soda, spices, and salt. I use a fork to fluff up the flour but using a sifter works too. Add dry ingredients to the wet - I recommend doing this a bit at a time, and if you are using a stand mixer, pause between additions. The dough will get very stiff.

Fold in cranberries and crystallized ginger bits.
Cover, and refrigerate until very firm - I didn't use the dough until the next day, but a few hours at least should do it.

Heat the oven to 350 F, and prep a shallow dish with ginger-sugar mixture.

Now, you can shape these a few ways. If you want normal size cookies, simply shape into 1-inch balls and roll in the sugar. However, part of the charm of these cookies is how small, crispy and utterly addictive they are - and I would sure feel a lot more guilty eating regular size cookies.

To make small cookies, take a scoop of dough and roll it in your hands into a snake.
(Yes, it's going to look like a winner of the dog-turd lookalike contest. Get over it.)

Roll the snake in sugar, then take a sharp knife and cut into pieces about a half inch thick. Press slightly to reshape into a circle if nessesary.

I use a sil-pat on a baking sheet when I make these because it pretty much negates any pan cleanup, but parchment or a greased cookie sheet works well too. Place the mini-cookies about an inch apart.
Bake for no more than 10 minutes at 350 degrees - I like to check around 6 minutes in. A cookie should feel set but not stiff - if it feels sturdy in the oven, they are probably overdone.
Cool on a rack for a few minutes (if they last that long!)

Foodbat is back!

2008-11-17T18:24:00.000-08:00

Yes, its true - I'm back! After a long, long time of not posting. Mostly due to the fact that Warhammer came out and I've been playing entirely too much of it. Not to say that I haven't been cooking quite a bit.
America has hit a recession, and its definately showing in the food world, especially in seeing a resurgence in the 'old ways.' Growing and processing our own food, baking bread, making jam and applesauce, rendering lard, canning, root-cellaring - things our grandmothers did as routine are suddenly hip again.
Personally, I welcome it! In an age of industrial food, these are techniques that may become lost if we don't keep them alive and pass them down to later generations.
The other thing this fall is that Twitter has finally hit its stride, for both community and company. If you haven't checked out Twitter, I recommend it - it's a bit like plugging directly into the Hive Mind. There is a huge food community on it as well - check out Sweetfood's blog for an awesome list.
Anyway, no pretty pictures just yet but I will be posting in the coming days, droppin' some knowledge on what I've been cooking and new foods, techniques, and recipes. I'm totally on the "old ways is new" bandwagon. Well, old ways, new technology. How about you?

Under Construction!

2008-09-25T12:30:00.000-07:00

Foodbat is going under construction! We will come back soon with a new look and lots of pretty new pictures. Cheers!

I have conquered the mighty pepper

2008-09-20T23:28:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to let everyone know that tonight was the first time I managed to successfully blister, roast and peel a pepper without copious amounts of fail.We just mysteriously had everything we needed to make fajitas tonight.

It was also one of those rare moments in the kitchen where both of us cooked together, not at each others throats. I think this is one of those things you have to learn when you get married. It definitely makes the process easier to have an extra hand, even if that hand has horrible knife skills and is impervious to advice.

He made the chicken while I removed corn from its stalk and minced jalapeno; he set the broiler for the pepper; I insisted that yes, the pepper is supposed to be blackened on the outside, and successfully skinned, peeled, seeded and chopped said pepper properly for the first time ever;
I chopped the onion; I cried; he sauteed it; he cried.

We stirred, we spiced, we heated tortillas, and generally had an excellent meal.

This is the kind of situation I have been striving more in my effort to cook more at home. On past tries, it has been rare that one of us does not leave the kitchen in an effort to maintain composure, or sanity. It is probably one of the few things we fight over. I love to cook, and we both love to eat - tonight I felt that yes, we can both exist on the same side of the kitchen door, and in harmony.

and, oh yeah, I FINALLY conquered the skinning of peppers! Booyah!

Starch

2008-09-17T23:01:00.002-07:00

I had a very interesting day today - for starters, after a harried night of knowing I had lost my purse like an idiot, not to mention losing all of the gift certificates we got as wedding presents, I was pleasantly surprised this morning by a call from building security - someone had turned in my purse, with everything inside it. My faith in the basic kindness and goodness of people has been restored!

After such a stressful night, its not surprising that I went straight for the comfort food: Pizza and pasta. On Cherry St. in downtown Seattle is a little cafe that I stumbled across today for lunch, thinking that it was the restaurant that is in fact next door to it. The food was good although sadly overpriced, but what really struck me was the menu: pasta, whatever cut was made that day, prepared in myriad ways. One element, extended in so many delicious directions. (By the way, if you go to Cafe Bengoli, get meatballs)

Tonight, my husband and I sat down to dinner, again seeking comfort. We decided to try out Tutta Bella, a Neopolitan style pizza joint by our home. Again, I was struck by how a simple starchy base can be taken in so many directions, given so many different tastes. Our quatro stagioni pizza was decorated in quadrants, each representing a season and each with a distinctive taste - earthy mushrooms, sweet roasted peppers, savory prosciutto and roasted onion, salty rosemary ham. The crispy-yet-chewy, slightly salty crust ran through it all, acting as the unifying element.

I fully admit that it had been a long and stressful day for me. I had to work late to make up the hours i'd missed running around with security and getting in to downtown. I ended up taking the wrong bus home and nearly got squished by man who smelled like piss and was easily twice my size. I started off the meal as a not very nice person. Starch, though, worked it's wonders. By the end of the meal, we ate tiramisu together, happy in our fullness, loving people again.

Whether it is flatbread, pasta, rice, or potato, it seems that starch is forgotton, taken for granted - and in this day and age, deliberately avoided thanks to carb phobia.Today, I appreciated it's role in the dish in a way that I usually don't consider.

Late night wierdness

2008-09-17T23:01:00.001-07:00

Aaaaaaaaand the corn goes:

And the pig goes:

And the man goes:

And Cthulhu goes:

Chicken!

2008-09-12T20:51:00.001-07:00

I'm pretty sure a lot of people don't view chicken as seasonal, any more than beef or pasta or any other staple of the western diet. It's true, I use chicken year-round.
Yet early fall is a time that makes me think of chicken, for two reasons: the Jewish high holy days, and the inevitable end-of-summer cold or flu.

I admit that I am not the most observant of Jews - in my family, it is more what you are rather than how you act, like being Polish or Italian. I certainly don't keep kosher, although I have never been comfortable with handling pig products. Most of the time I don't think about it, except for twice a year - Passover and the high holy days, when suddenly I become obsessed with kugel, brisket, egg noodles and - yes - chicken soup.

Chicken and Jewish food - and Ashkenazi (thats Eastern European as opposed to Mediterranian Sephardic) Jewish culture in particular -have a special relationship. Chickens feature in traditions such as Kapparot, a pre-Yom Kippur ritual in which a chicken is swung three times around the head (I swear, I have never taken part!).
Chicken is a primary mover of Ashkenazi Jewish food, probably stemming from the chicken being one of the easiest things to raise and slaughter in the often very cramped community of the ghetto. Chicken livers for chopped liver, and especially the chicken fat, for frying latkes, making matzoh balls, and gleaming in golden droplets upon chicken soup. We used to be able to buy it in the kosher section, but now if I want chicken fat I have to go ahead and roast a chicken.

I am a firm believer that chicken fat is a wonder food. Chicken soup certainly does wonders for the immune system.

Lots of posts have been made on the incredible dollar-stretching capacity of the roasted chicken, so I probably don't need to go into it here. Suffice to say, you've got dinner for at the very least a week, and after all that, zip up that carcass in a plastic baggie and freeze it for whenever you need more chicken stock. Which, by the way, is incredibly easy and cheap to make (heck, you can even do it in a slow cooker) and you can freeze it in easy portions.

Or, you can make some kickass cold-busting soup.

pre-frozen chicken stock, or stock made from strach:
---> chicken carcass + water+ half onion+ carrot + celery, parsley, salt, pepper, simmer on low until carcass falls apart. strain, pour back into pot.

Add veggies of choice (celery and carrot and lots of onion for me) and cook on low until carrots are soft. Season to taste.
Boil up some egg noodles in a separate pot (FYI, NEVER NEVER EVER cook noodles IN your soup. I learned this the hard way.) Or, make matzoh balls. Lots of recipes can be found online, but chicken fat is a must and seltzer is the secret ingredient =)

Noodles or matzoh balls go in the bowl first, then soup. This is simple and good, good stuff. There is no excuse for Campbell's.

Beet bites!

2008-09-04T21:50:00.000-07:00

So, beets are an scary veggie in my house. I never grew up with them, and my husband has bad memories of steamed beets and cold purple things that looked eerily like canned cranberry sauce.
They are everywhere in the farmers market right now, and when I saw a bunch of golden beets I thought, this is my chance to make things right and have us join the world of beet-eaters.

I believe the main reason that many people are hesitant to work with beets stems from thier tendancy to stain hands, clothes, counter-tops, etc. This is due to betain pigments, which are water-soluble.
There are a few ways to get around this: what most people do to handle beets is to scrub them, wrap in tinfoil and bake, then slice and use for whatever. The other way is to look for golden beets (like I used) which (supposedly) have less propensity to get stain-y juice everywhere. I sliced mine raw on a paper plate with no accidents.

Thanks to twitterbuddy Kcline I had an idea of what to do, something that looked like this.
I laid them flat, basted with pepper, salt and olive oil (standard for a vegetable I don't know how to cook) and roasted.
I know beets and goat cheese supposedly do well together, so I mixed some pesto and goat cheese together and schmeared it between slices of beet. What I got was not...pretty per se, but beet slices covered in gooey melted pesto-y goat cheese were delicious.
And my husband went for second servings.

One veggie down, a world more to go.

Sad apples!

2008-08-31T18:59:00.000-07:00

Husband has the flu, and both of us were feeling generally ick, so I made a good deal of comfort food this week. Eggplant is now officially a comfort food, by the way, at least for me - garlic oiled and broiled with parmesan grated on top, eaten with fingers.

Anyway, part of feeling ick entailed not being able to hit up the farmers market this week, so when I got hit with the incredible urge to make apple crisp this weekend, I was left to fend at the supermarket.

How strange that such an institution seems so foreign to me these days. Ever since the grocery strikes in California a few years ago shopping at large grocery chains leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Bad service, high prices, and an increasing awareness of how processed and removed everything is.
Anyway, I head to the produce section. Beautiful apples, shining and sparkling in the fluorescent lighting, stacked in neat pyramids. Organic. Lovely.

New Zealand.

What?

Chile.

Whats the point of getting an organic apple if it's shipped from (literally!) the other side of the world?
I live in Washington. You know. Apple country. I mean, heck, I'm from California and maybe we are spoiled by a year-long growing season. But really? Yes, it's early for apples. But still.

I manage to find a USA apple in the non-organic section. I guess the whole organic movement is a mystery to me as it applies to supermarkets. This is why I shop at the farmers market now.

So in the interest of seasonality and local responsibility, apples will not be included in this week's three ingredients.

BTW, this is a new thing because I realized I'm in a culinary rut, and hopefully will give posts more structure. Each week, I've promised myself I am going to pick three (hopefully seasonal) ingredients or a technique I haven't mastered, and explore them. Hopefully this will not only make me a more experienced and knowledgeable cook, but fuel our drive to make dinner at home.

The apple crisp was delicious, by the way, as were the extra streusel crispies I tried out my new Sil-Pat on. Maybe when it's apple season for realizies I'll post the recipe.

However, chicken soup is fair game as far as I'm concerned. More later.

Eggplant

2008-08-28T22:06:00.000-07:00

For most of my life, eggplant was something brown, fried, covered in parmesan and served on pasta. Or in college, said brown disks bought from trader joes, where they waited in my freezer to be drowned in tomato sauce for a quick lunch.

I'm guessing that many others have a similar experience and, therefore, treat the eggplant in its natural form as something alien, as I did. Smooth, shiny and improbably purple-skinned, the Eggplant in my book is one of the tamer "Things I don't automatically pick up at the market."

To my detriment. Now that I've found them I can make up for lost time.

The eggplant is a member of the nightshade family, along with potatoes, tomatoes and bell peppers (which is probably why these ingredients work so well together) . In fact, when first introduced to Europe, tomatoes took an unusually long time to become accepted as edible due to its resemblance to belladonna or Deadly Nightshade.

Unlike the tomato, Eggplants are native to the Old World, and are found in Southeast Asia and India. They come in all kinds of shapes and colors outside of what is normally found in the supermarket - anywhere from long, thin and purple, to tiny egg-shaped 'graffiti' purple-and-white striped, to pure white or green.

As far as storage goes, like other tropical plants, eggplant should NEVER be stored in the freezer. Oh, it might look okay on the outside, but the flesh will get soft, watery and bitter within a few days.

The BEST thing about eggplant, though, is the incredible texture it can take on, due to the structure of its flesh. Eggplant has a lot of air pockets in the flesh,which makes it spongy. The flesh collapses as cell walls break down during cooking and it reduces quite a bit in volume. Whats left is this beautifully creamy stuff that can be pureed into dips and sauces, baked or fried to create a crisp crust and a melting interior, or fantastic simply grilled or broiled. The spongy structure also means that eggplant will greedily suck up any oil basted on it during cooking, which can make the finished product wonderfully rich.

There is really only one step for veggie prep here which is needed for larger eggplants, which is that slices should be salted and left to sit for a few minutes before use. Large eggplants contain brown seeds that have a bitter taste, and salting will draw moisture out, balancing the bitterness. It also will give the slices better structure upon cooking due to less moisture.

Since I'm new to this beautiful veggie, my preparations are pretty simple:
slice lengthwise about a half-inch thick, baste with a mixture of olive oil, salt, pepper and minced garlic, and pop under the broiler. check every few minutes to flip and re-baste, until browned on both sides. Eat. (maybe stuff some tomatoes with garlic and fresh mozzerella, and broil them alongside!)

Ok, and sometimes batter, fry, drown in tomato sauce and put on pasta.

Guess that literary reference

2008-08-26T23:02:00.000-07:00

Because I was too sick to cook...I give you monkeys instead.

Cheers

Forest Fruit

2008-08-23T09:30:00.000-07:00

Here in the north west, it's almost end of the season for red currants and gooseberries - so grab them and make jam while you can =)

I think a lot of people are daunted by the idea of making jam - but I think it is less the fear of getting spattered by molten-sugar napalm, and more the whole scary canning process. I know I am.

However, you don't need need to go through the whole spiel of canning if you have some room in your freezer. Not only does freezer jam bypass the jars and the sterilization and the custom equipment, but also sugar needs only to be to taste.

Here's what I did for my jam - note that I only made enough for me and that I'm not planning to freeze such a small amount, but it freezes well.

half pint gooseberries
half pint red currants
sugar to taste
half fresh squeezed lemon (or squeeze of lemon concentrate plus a little water)

Wash fruit - pull currants off the stalk and top n' tail your gooseberries.

Put in a small saucepan and crush with a fork or back of a wooden spoon. add lemon, and sugar to taste. bring heat to medium high and cook, stirring constantly, until sugar is dissolved and everything is liquid-y. you might want to taste again here and add more sugar until it suits your taste: gooseberries are quite tart and you might need quite a bit (I like my jam tart though)

put the heat on low and let it reduce, stirring occasionally (like every minute or so) until the fruit is broken up and the mixture is thickened.

pour into a strainer over a bowl and force it through with the back of a spoon until all that is left is seeds and pulp and things. pour the strained mixture into a tupperware and pop it in the fridge. It should coagulate overnight into a stable jelly.

Today, I put it on french toast with a smear of nutella and a tiny bit of kosher salt (mixed with the nutella ; believe me on this one!)

Couscous

2008-08-22T22:00:00.000-07:00

Last night was the first cooking class in a while, and I had a blast! I'd forgotten how much fun those things can be. Topic was morroccan food, which is awesome because it's totally out of my comfort zone. I'm really trying to cook new things and learn new techniques, because as I become more knowledgable about the why of things I've noticed that I often don't have the physical experience to back it up.

Last night was another new one for me - I got over my hesitance to work with couscous. It always seemed that either it would form up in a mass or be the pasta equivalent of sand, and I wasn't quite sure how to cook it.

Never fear, our teacher told us the trick to perfect couscous and I was floored by how simple and easy it was.
Here's how you do it:
measure out your couscous into a bowl, then pour in a bit of olive oil. Get in there with your fingers and coat it all up by rubbing the pasta through your hands like you are trying to warm them up. pour in your hot liquid - this should be enough to rise about a half inch over the couscous. It should be a flavorful liquid like stock, or in the case of the salad I made, dried fruit briefly simmered in water.
Tightly cover the bowl with plastic wrap so that no steam escapes, and leave it to go finish up whatever else you need to do. it should be ready in about 15-20 minutes. You'll know when you can squeeze a bit and it holds together, but also easily breaks apart when you rub your fingers.

BTW, I don't believe in exact recipes unless its for an exact science like pastry or bread. But here's the dish I made in the class, modified- I just eyeballed stuff:

Couscous Salad
The couscous:
1.5 cups couscous
2 T extra virgin olive oil
2 cups water
handful of dates, chopped up
handful of dried apricots, chopped up
handful of golden or regular raisins
approx 1 tsp tumeric, fresh if you can get it. use less if you have powdered.

The vinaigrette:
juice of two oranges, plus zest
juice of two lemons, plus zest
1 finger of fresh ginger, grated
2 T extra virgin olive oil
salt and pepper
cinnamon, cumin, coriander, generous dash/to taste
large gob of honey

The mix-ins:
1/2 cup pistachios, toasted and chopped
half yellow bell pepper and half red bell pepper, diced
1/2 cup chopped fresh cilantro
1 red onion, diced

Add dried fruit to water, bring to a boil.
add tumeric to the dry couscous. rub with oil. Once dry fruit/water mixture boils, pour into couscous, mix up and cover tightly with plastic wrap, set aside.

while the couscous is steaming, mix up the vinaigrette. salt and pepper to taste.

Couscous should be done after about 15-20 minutes, use the test as mentioned above. Fluff up with a fork so that the grains are seperated.
Mix in the mix-ins, pour the vinaigrette over and mix throughly. serve =)

I know I need pictures - had less time than I thought I did this week. I'm no good at uploading photos.

Cheers

Egg

2008-08-21T08:11:00.000-07:00

I poached my first egg yesterday. Yeah, you heard me.

It's strange to think in this day and age we tend to think far more than we do.
I mean, I knew how to poach an egg - acidifying the water to help coagulate, making sure the water stays at a simmer so as not to break everything up, breaking into a cup first to make sure the yolk doesn't come apart. I've had eggs benedict. Although, admittedly, the egg was often smothered with hollandaise and so I didn't really think about it.

Anyway, I had a hankering for said dish yesterday and it was not until i'd purchased everything and heated up the water until I realized that Ive never actually done this before.

anyway. Muffin. Bacon. Eggs. messed the first a bit, perfected technique with the other two. deglazed the pan with a bit of butter in lieu of hollandaise because I didn't want to dirty another dish.
mm, ham-butter.

The egg is such a perfect package of protein, and can be made so many ways - my go-to is usually scrambled or omelet. Yet eating poached eggs without a thick sauce to distract was a new experience for me - white, airy casing, runny middle that creates its own sauce. No stringy whatsits like when scrambled or flabby white like fried.

I can't imagine why it took me so long.

Rained cats and dogs yesterday so unfortunately didn't hit the farmers market. However, got produce in the fridge and lots of blackberries and that should hold me out until saturday. Need to eat all this melon.
Attending a moroccan cooking class tonight, so maybe I can work some of my produce into more things I don't yet know how to cook.

Coffee

2008-08-20T11:40:00.000-07:00

Think of this as a pre-first post since I don't have everything together yet.
Heard this on the radio last night, and loved it - particularly the characters relationship with food and how it seems like the office environment and social connection revolves around it.
Pardon in advance for length. I want to do illustrations for this, maybe tonight.

Cheers

From Wiretap, Man Vs. Himself - 10-18-2006:

In the bathroom at the office, he places his hands under the faucet. The water is supposed to start automatically, but no water comes.
He switches to another sink, but still, nothing.
Finally, at the third sink, he succeeds at convincing the water faucet that he exists.
He washes his hands, and goes over to the dryer.
Again, nothing.
It’s like I’m a Hologram, he thinks.
He fears that the automatic hand-dryer in his office bathroom understands him better than anyone else.
You’re not really here, it is saying to him.
You may think you are – but you aren’t.
On the way back to his desk, wiping his hands against his pants, he repeats to himself:
I am. I am. I am.

One of her favorite things to do at the office is to spend the morning drinking so much coffee
that by lunchtime she is shaky and weak as possible.
She feels it brings a new dimension into her day, because she cannot be both physically uncomfortable and bored at the same time.
At the coffee machine, she tries to sell her friend Erica on the technique.
Taking messages, she says, and just holding a conversation become really challenging.
It pulls you in to everything, and it makes you so hungry that eating lunch becomes a deeply satisfying experience.
In the afternoon, she pulls cat hair from her skirt and puts one into each envelope she stuffs.
She takes her shoes off under her desk, and kneads the carpeting with her toes.

At the office, he used to check his email about every half hour or so.
But then, he started checking it every fifteen minutes.
Then, every five.
Then he started checking it every two minutes.
Then one minute.
And now, lately, he checks his email every ten seconds.
He has no idea what he is hoping to find in there. What could he possibly find?
He knows that no matter the message, it will not be enough.
An email from a long lost girlfriend,
His real father,
A dead grandmother?

He knows it would not make a difference if he received an email from God Himself – a subject line that read, You Must Change Your Life.
He would open God’s email, read it, and check again for something new
Ten seconds later.

On Tuesday, she eats lunch at a cafeteria-style deli, two blocks from the office.
She shares a table with two well groomed and conservatively dressed female professionals.
Although the seating area is packed, and they are surrounded by strangers, one of the women complains openly about her husband’s growing disintrest in her body.
I’ve been afraid this would happen ever since we started going out, the woman says. Barry used to be a total animal. Now he hardly knows I’m around.
She tries to picture Barry in her mind. She imagines him in a pink polo shirt, penny loafers, and a gold bracelet with the name ‘Barry’ engraved on it.
She imagines him avoiding his wife by spending long hours in the garage, gluing childhood toys together.
She looks from one woman to the other, as she picks walnuts out of her salad.
Then she thinks, I can’t imagine that happening to me.
I mean, I’m sure it will happen. Someday.
But I just can’t imagine it.

Like always, he eats his lunch at his cubicle, looking at his favorite websites.
He imagines what it might be like to go to some pornographic website, just as a joke.
He imagines looking at the naked pictures while eating his turkey sandwich.
He imagines the look on the faces of his co-workers, as they see what he is doing.
He imagines the sound of his managers voice, asking him what was going on, and being completely unable to answer him.

Thursday, there is a party for someone leaving the office.
She always goes to all the office parties she can, even when she hardly knows anyone.
She enjoys trying to determine how well-liked the guest of honor is, by the turnout, quality of food,
Number of signatures and personalize messages on the card,
And overall party vibe.
She also enjoys eavesdropping on the most socially awkward looking employees.
As she serves herself a dollop of ice cream, she overhears two guys talking about watching old seasons of TV shows on DVD,
how fantastic it is to enjoy a whole season in one shot.
They make it sound like opium.
She thinks about telling them she just got a great one –
A DVD of a shortly-ran TV show, about a woman who has a rare condition that forces her
To laugh when she’s sad, and cry when she’s happy.
But she says nothing.
As always, she keeps her best and brightest thoughts to herself.

He’s gotten into the habit of getting a muffin at three o’clock.
He leaves the office and goes to a little place in the food court.
The teenage girls who work there wear bonnets.
The bonnets make them look like depressed sunflowers.
He has never been the kind of guy to eat muffins,
But he finds himself looking forward to them, all morning and afternoon.
Muffins are like cake, he thinks, but without any of the festiveness.
You don’t need an occasion, or a companion, to eat a muffin.
I am becoming a Muffin Man, he thinks.

Friday morning she realizes that if she doesn’t do something drastic, she’s going to lose her mind.
She’s hung over and hungry, and shaky from coffee,
And slowly the idea comes to her that she has this job because this is the job she deserves.
She has no real talents.
To make herself feel better, she take several pens from her desk drawer and puts them in her bag.
She digs around and finds a ruler, and steals that too.
Then she fantasizes about eating one of the lunches she’s always asked to order for the executives.
She’ll tell whoever it’s for that the delivery guy never showed;
Then she’ll take it to the food court
And spend about forty-five minutes slowly savoring their lunch.
Or she’ll eat it at her desk, so that maybe someone will notice.
And fire her.

When he walks into the office lunchroom and goes to pour himself a cup of coffee,
And sees that the communal coffee machine is empty,
He knows that the next seven minutes of his life will be accounted for.
He throws out the old filter, and gets a new one.
He gets the scoop,
And scoops out the beans from the bag in the bottom cupboard.
And he grinds the beans, puts in the fresh filter,
Pours the water, and turns the machine on.
It is the most socially mindful and satisfying part of his day.
He believes that actually admitting this to himself is meaningful.
It either means that he is finally becoming more honest with himself, about his feelings,
Or that he has entirely abandoned his own sense of pride.
He brews the coffee,
Vacillating between the two.

After lunch, which she’s eaten alone at the deli near the office,
She goes to a liquor store and buys a little airline-sized bottle of Early Times bourbon.
She doesn’t feel like drinking so much as she feels like drinking on the job,
As a way of asserting to the job her freedom.
You cannot make me not do what I want to do.
You cannot make me not have fun.
Once back at her desk, she slips the little bottle into her pocket, and walks to the lunchroom for coffee to mix with.
She enters hurriedly, but stops short a few steps in.
There is a man at the coffee machine, bent with his hands on his knees, watching the coffee filter into the pot.
For a moment, she has no idea what to do next.

Usually, when he makes coffee, his co-workers walk in and engage him in conversation.
Fillin’ up the old coffee machine, someone says.
Yes, he answers.
Good stuff, they say.
Sometimes, they lean against the counter, and wait for him to finish preparing the coffee,
Their empty mugs dangling in their hands like begging bowls.
He feels like the center of attention, the man of the house.
Out of the silence they will say,
Brewing the Elixir of Life.
And he never has any idea how to respond.
But today,
Out of the silence,
There is only silence.
He sees her standing in the doorway, quietly,
Waiting.

The first thing he notices about her is that she has a large forehead.
It reminds him of Frankenstein, but in a really nice way.
Like a pretty Frankenstein.
He’s known many intelligent people who have had large foreheads,
And he’s always imagined that it’s because their brains are too big for their heads to contain.

She is looking at him.
He looks like the kind of guy her mother would like her to be interested in,
The kind of guy whose pleasure in stability borders on perverse,
Like a well-organized sock drawer really lights his fire.
He is at home in himself and in this office,
And she wonders if at the end of the day, the janitors open up a panel in his back and power him down,
Then put him in the utility closet next to the copy toner.
But she almost envies him;
She thinks, at least someone is happy here.

It isn’t like he decides that he’s going to say something that he actually means.
Something true, and even vaguely embarrassing. It just happens.
It’s the kind of thing that only happens to him once in a while,
Say, once every three years or so.
Most of the time, he says things that he only half believes,
And more often than that, he says things that he doesn’t believe at all.
He looks at her, and out it comes:
Sometimes, he says, there’s a certain way that coffee can hit you that really makes you feel that anything can happen.
Like the thoughts you have are very important, somehow.

She understands.
She says, I understand.
When I drink a lot of coffee, I have to keep a pen around, because I feel if I don’t write down a thought, It’ll disappear forever.
She pulls a scrap of paper out of her back pocket, and unfolds it.

“One of my Favorite Things,” she reads, ” is to pretend when I’m on a down escalator,
That the person passing me on the up escalator is actually my grandchild, visiting me from the future.”

The way her face looks when she reads is like the way children’s faces look.
Her eyebrows are arched up high, her mouth is a perfect circle.
He is so excited to be spoken to the way she is speaking to him
That he can hardly even hear what she is actually speaking.

She finishes reading to him, and then feels embarrassed,
But when she looks up from her paper, he’s smiling.
Not really smiling, but smiling with his eyes.
She thinks about how smiling with your mouth is nothing, but smiling with your eyes comes from someplace deep.

He doesn’t know what to say next.
Can I pour you a coffee, he asks.

She holds out her cup, and he pours.

Coming soon carrot is coming soon!

2008-08-17T01:56:00.000-07:00