Untrained Gourmet

Writing about food for Examiner.com 2 - Does it pay?

2010-03-03T22:47:00.003-05:00

This is Part Two of a multi-part series of posts about writing about food and drink on Examiner.com, where I write as the Knoxville Gourmet Food Examiner and the Knoxville Coffee Examiner. For Writing about food and drink for Examiner.com Part One: How it works, click here.

In my last post, I detailed how writing for the online magazine Examiner.com works, and I also mentioned some rather tempting information about the potential pay that some Examiners prove is possible to be earning on the site. In fact, there is evidence floating around out there that some Examiners have made four figures per month writing for the site. Here's the seeming truth behind how that might be going down:

They write about celebrity bullshit that people shouldn't care about but eat up like it's something I cooked;
They watch Google Trends and pick the top-searched celebs to pour out info about, some of which may be suspect;
They post "news articles" on those topics, many of which are simply rehashes of the most popular links on Google concerning about a dozen times a day and publish them as news, which Examiner.com gets fed into Google's news reel rather efficiently.
They market the crap out of what they write on their Twitter accounts using all kinds of clever tricks and apps.

These four suppositions are based upon my memory of seeing the evidence I referred to (but cannot seem to quickly find again at the moment), and, if you're quick and relatively good, they could be a guideline on how to actually make money on Examiner.com.

Wait... ouch... "actually make money?" That's harsh.

Well, perhaps it's not warranted. There are some very web-savvy writers that produce expert-quality, solid content on their niche areas on Examiner.com that are doing fine without selling out hard to the celebrity path to riding several someones' coattails to relatively illegitimately earned internet cash. Those people seem to be making in the two-figures-per-day pay range, at least from what I have guesstimated (and having a Ph.D. in math makes me a pretty good guesstimator, most of the time). Two figures per day of nearly passive income isn't bad. It's something like $3-10k a year for what, at least on the front lines, is only a few hours of work a week. It won't pay off your house, but it actually could keep up with your mortgage if you're in the mid-to-high end of that range.

How do they do it? I wish I knew.

Maybe I overestimate my content (see Gourmet Food here and Coffee here), but I know I'm no slouch in the writing department (though some folks that outperform me from time to time are, a bit to my chagrin). As of the time of this writing, here's what typical (and atypical) Examiner.com numbers look like for me:

Total subscribers: 15 (food), 2 (coffee);
Number of articles: 102 (food), 5 (coffee);
Been writing since: 30 Nov 2009 (food), last week (coffee);
Typical daily performance earnings: $1.20-1.50 (food), $0.10 (coffee);
Record daily performance earnings: ~$10 (food), $0.25 (coffee);
Typical number of new articles per week: 4-5 (food), 2-3 (coffee);
Overall typical number of incentive dollars per week: ~$8;
Typical time spent on one article: ~30 minutes (both).
Overall earnings last month: $60-70 (because of their reporting mechanism, I can't say for sure until I'm paid later in the month).
Overall time spent per month (just writing): ~15 hours.
Overall time spent per month (including promotion): ~25 hours
Typical income per article (now): ~$1.75+$1=~$2.75 (sadly competitive with other by-hire online freelancing gigs), but woefully

While this has put a few bucks in my bank account that wouldn't be there otherwise (I can just hear my mom saying, "That's about a hundred and forty dollars (total time writing for them) you wouldn't have had otherwise!"), the average is working out to be that I'm making a little over $2 an hour in performance pay for my time writing for Examiner.com, or make that about $4 if you throw in the local incentives, but under $3 an hour again if you count promotional time. Those wages aren't too bad for a guy with a Ph.D. in math, right? Oh wait... shit... they are. Sure, $140 might seem like a lot, considering, but by the hour, given my degree, etc. that's not. It's nary a drop in the bucket.

So, why do I do it? A few reasons: (1) it's kind of fun; (2) I like to share/teach; (3) I wouldn't mind getting "discovered" and thereby make some real cash off of this, and Examiner.com is better for getting discovered than cooking quietly in my kitchen and mumbling about it on Facebook from time to time; and (4) I'd like to believe my pay could go up at some point.

So... has my pay gone up? Let's just use the Knoxville Gourmet Food gig for now since the coffee deal is too fledgling to know any different yet. Here's what my daily readership has done, in a nutshell, since I joined:

Month #1: Steadily increased (roughly linearly) from bubkus to about 70 page views per day;
Month #2: Steadily increased (roughly linearly) from about 70 page views per day to about 120-150 page views per day;
Month #3: Except one day when one article went nuts on StumbleUpon and got over 800 hits in a single day, it's been level + noise since then (This is the article, about chicken noodle soup, originally posted on this blog, that went nuts on Wednesday, February 3. Feel free to click on it and Stumble it to get that ball rolling again or something. That was awesome.).

So, that has me wondering... what's different?

Well, I went balls-to-the-walls publishing articles up until about six weeks ago, at which point my daily readership seemed to be going steadily up, more or less linearly. It had to be annoying to my subscribers (in fact, I know it was because my subscriber numbers actually dwindled during that time). Since, I've leveled off more nearly to the recommended publishing schedule of about 3-5 articles a week, and my daily performance pay leveled off just as quickly. But wait....

It seemed to me, hence the balls-to-the-walls publishing coming out of the gate, that overall performance earnings, given relatively constant quality (not really reasonable... I'd say it's gone up, at least in terms of my ability to write for the web), should be [dork warning] directly proportional to article count. Tips I received from other seasoned (and popular) Food and Drink Channel Examiners strongly backed this theory, only without numbers to confirm it. Month 3 suggests strongly to me that such isn't so, however. So... what's the deal?

According to an interesting Examiner.com writing experiment on 20sMoney, the reason is simply that older articles on Examiner.com may lose their visibility over time (due to how they index (rather poorly) with Google), cutting into the potential performance pay that those articles could generate, i.e. Examiner.com's performance pay might not really be that great a form of passive income, despite its highly competitive rate. Why? I'm with their guess: they do well in the searches because of sheer volume initially, but there's so much underqualified stuff floating around in the Examiner.com juggernaut of articles published each day that there is substantially good reason for Google to try to keep a passive lid on how much traffic they receive over time. I'm not saying that Examiner.com's approach is a bad one -- I can't think of a great way to ensure consistently high quality in the format they do across so broad a spectrum of topics with such a strong local initiative -- but that any punishment it sees in search-engine visibility is probably somewhat justified.

From where I sit, then, there really needs to be a call for more qualified Examiners to take up the mantle and start elevating the overall image of the site. With stronger credibility and a unique and effective vision, it could become a real media powerhouse without selling out to the Big-Media corporate voice that looms over seemingly most of what we see and read out there.

Of course... then there are the highly successful folks (firmly planted in the two-digits-per-day range) that make me wonder what it is that I'm missing. I have it on authority that some of the articles that some of these wonderful people wrote last year netted over $1000 for the single article (and is still getting lots of residual attention). That's some decent freelancer pay even for a well-researched, carefully designed and presented article sold to a major publication. So... it is possible to do well.

To close, since some aspiring Examiners might have a sour or bitter taste in their mouths after reading my disclosure of my position so far, I will take heart in that I've only been cultivating relationships and readership on Examiner.com for about three months. Many of the heavy hitters have been at it nearly since Examiner.com got started almost three years ago, which gives them a firm position to have made friendships and networking relationships on the site, which are, of course, for any blogger or journalist, the equivalent of manna. This article will likely need some updating three months from now to see if these Month #3 doldrums find a fair trade wind blowing through them at some point down the road, but the current lack of growth is a bit disturbing.

Stay tuned for more articles in this vein, but you can get started by seeing the original here: Writing about food and Drink for Examiner.com Part 1: How it Works. This text right here will soon be replaced by links to later articles in the series; thanks for your patience.

Writing about food for Examiner.com 1 -- How it works

2010-03-03T17:10:00.006-05:00

So, I haven't been too faithful about keeping this up. I find that writing about food but not talking much about the food itself is unsatisfying and kind of pointless. Still, as long as I'm writing about food for Examiner.com, I don't think I'm going to write much about food here, save to plant links to those Examiner articles, some of which, if I do say so myself, are quite nice and contain delicious recipes.

Instead, I think, at least for a while, I'll write about writing about food, specifically about writing about food for Examiner.com. This post will be the first in a series about my experience so far with Examiner, pulling essentially no punches on them and being as fair as is possible.

For those who don't know, Examiner.com is an online magazine of sorts, and its writers are independent contractors that get paid competitive wages (*more on this below*) for writing about any topic within their expertise once they're hired as an Examiner. The application process is easy: go to the website, sign up to write for them, list referrals (like me, see links below to my Examiner titles if you feel this article sways your interests toward writing for them enough to contact me so that I can properly refer you), write a short piece, give them a little bio and a profile pic, and wait a little while. As a tip if you apply to write for Examiner, keep that little piece via some version of copy and paste since you'll likely want to submit something you think is good, and you'll never see it again after the application. Keep your bio info too because there's an oddly good chance you'll have to submit it again and won't have access to whatever you spent time thinking up in the first place.

About those "competitive wages," they come in two forms, depending on your title. Everyone with Examiner.com starts as a local Examiner, which means that they're tied to and associated with the local area they apply to write for, usually the one they live in. Examiner pushes hard on an "everything local" initiative, and so local Examiners are expected to write about locally relevant content, although this can simply mean pointing a reader toward local resources for gathering more information or relevant stuff (like ingredients) to the article. In that, Examiner.com offers its local Examiners a "local incentive," via its "Rules of the Road," a short list of content rules that essentially boil down to putting a local spin on every article. That incentive is $1 per article for up to 5 articles per week (for a maximum of about $260 a year in local incentive pay, which is on top of "performance pay," by page views). That is about to double for sponsored local Examiners, which means local Examiners that are sponsored by some (local?) business.

In addition to "local incentives," Examiner.com pays everyone, including its more topical National Examiners, performance pay that works out to what seems to be about just shy of a cent per page view, taking into account a variety of factors that are kind of like a trade secret -- you never find out how they work, probably to help prevent you from gaming the system. Having subscribers (which means signing up for a free, no-spam e-mail alert system or RSS), however, seems to be more valuable than just random visitors, and apparently the time on site that a reader spends and click-through rate have something to do with it as well.

The other pay opportunities are recruitment tools and are pushed really heavily, and ostensibly very successfully: $50 per new Examiner referred and per new sponsor referred to the growing media network. It's possible to make some serious cash that way if you can talk a lot of people into getting on there to share their knowledge, but so far in my experience, people seem leery about signing up to write for them (more on that in the future too). The referral thing must work, though, because in three months I've written for Examiner.com so far, at least 7,500 new Examiner ID numbers have been given out, presumably one to each new Examiner writing on the site.

As for writing, the advanced editor they provide works very much like a blogging interface, so if you can work something like Blogger, you can definitely handle the Examiner editor. The basic editor is even easier to use and produces uniform but consistently nice articles that are relatively well laid out.

Examiner prefers its writers to publish 3-5 articles per week and requires at least one per month, but since they emphasize short, easy-to-read, attention-span-lacking articles (because of their success on the attention-span-lacking internet audience), it is certainly realistic to expect that articles can take between 10 minutes and an hour to complete, if you really want to spend an hour working on them. Personally, I believe in content, so I spend about 30-40 minutes on my articles, but I usually don't even bother proofreading them -- sure, quality counts, especially if you want to get "noticed," but I don't currently make enough money from Examiner on a per-article basis to justify the extra time. Besides, much to Examiner.com's detriment on the whole, most of the content on the site is utter crap -- poorly written, first-person, copy-paste, opinion-ridden, drivel that really should see some more editorial oversight. On the other hand, since each Examiner might be a rocking expert in their field, some of the content is absolutely top-notch and worth looking at and bookmarking, particularly some of the very creative, very successful recipes on there.

As for how the money works out... well, I'll go into super detail about that in a later post, but some Examiners literally make thousands of dollars a month just via performance pay. I don't think most of them write about food and drink, but on the other hand, some of the top Examiners in food and drink are getting at least thousands of page views per day, which comes out to possibly $10-50+ a day in relatively passive income at the low requirement of what amounts to probably about 2-3 hours a week writing time (which doesn't include marketing, promoting, or researching time). While this sounds highly enticing, I have absolutely no idea how to achieve numbers like that (again, more on that aspect later!) and don't come anything close to it yet. Then again, I apparently have absolutely no idea how the hell social networking plays a role in advertising except that I post many of my articles on my Facebook page and get a very modest number of clicks from that source (I currently consider my experiment with Twitter to have failed... I still can't get into that crap). I'm routinely in the top five Examiners in my local network (Knoxville, TN), however, which given my rather low readership is quite, quite the scary commentary on overall traffic to and through the site.

If you're interested in seeing what I've put on Examiner.com so far, I currently hold two local Examiner positions, the former vastly more successful than the latter (which is new but seems not to be growing very quickly):

Just follow those links to see a complete list of my articles under each title, which are handled and sorted separately. I'd love it if you check them out, especially if you subscribe, and if this article has made you interested in writing for Examiner, I'd appreciate an e-mail or a comment so I can refer you properly. If we communicate via e-mail, I'll be more than happy to share the upsides and downsides with you freely about writing for the site, so far as I see them now. For what it's worth, since I love writing and sharing what I know, writing for Examiner is fun, and it almost pays for my internet connection now (though not for my time), and the possibility for being "discovered" by someone that pays much more substantially is a nice bonus.

Click here to roll on through to Writing about food and drink for Examiner.com Part 2: Does it Pay?

Surprise lunch with my wife at Hot Rod's 50's Diner

2010-02-19T14:11:00.002-05:00

I love when errands turn into me getting awesome lunch.

I volunteered to ride around a little with my wife this afternoon while she ran some errands (actually, I ended up driving). We did that and then at the spur of the moment went to try to meet up with a new business contact of hers and found out that she was out to lunch at one of our favorite spots: Hot Rod's 50's Diner (in Maryville, TN, where we live). Since we like it, since we're hungry, and since her peeps are cool, we dropped by, did a little talking, and did a lot of eating.

I tell you what: that place can make a burger and fries. If you're ever in the Maryville/Knoxville area, you should definitely try to make a trip by there. It's really good.

Working the social media thing and not getting it

2010-02-18T22:16:00.003-05:00

So... I joined Twitter tonight, and as I'm sure about 80 million people have said before me,

I don't get Twitter;
I don't know how to work Twitter.

I think I know my username (@JLindsayCooks - because "UntrainedGourmet" has one too many letters for precious character-counting Twitter and because I want to use it to promote my food blogging and writing for Examiner.com), but I'm not even sure of that. I have no followers and don't really have a clue of how to find people on there that I know. In fact, I don't know anyone that uses Twitter. If you use Twitter and want to keep up with what I'm doing or in any other way think I'm awesome enough to follow, come follow me. It will be fun. I'll be eternally grateful. You get bonus points if you tell me

What's the magic of Twitter;
How to work Twitter.

I'm not a total moron (I've got a Ph.D. in something hard like math), so I know the basics of how Twitter works, but what I can't figure out is how you get followers. I found some guides on the web that told me to give a book away or something. I don't have any books that I can e-mail you (unless you want a copy of my dissertation -- BORING!!!), so that's out. Luckily, I'm funny as hell, so following me will be totally worth it. As a bonus, I'll usually be talking about what I'm cooking or eating, which will be awesome.

While I'm sitting here confused about the role of social internet media in the "promoting myself online" world, I'll point out that StumbleUpon, which you can clearly see I'm a part of, is one of the biggest mysteries on the internet. Seriously. I submit some good work to them; no one clicks. I click on some stuff; no one clicks. I submit something else; 70 people click (?). I submit something else that I think is better; 23 people click. I submit something else I don't think is quite as good; 800 people click (???). I submit other stuff; no one clicks. I'm totally mystified. I don't have time to go "Stumble around the internet" for hours a day clicking on bullshit that I don't care about or even that I think is neat, and I don't really get how it's any form of social outlet.

The big confusing one is Digg. I tried to play their game. I don't get it either (less than I get Twitter). L.a.m.e. Social media confuses the hell out of me. Why can't internet marketing be a little less confusing?

In other news, particularly the kind that pertains to food, I decided that my Southern-Chinese fusion recipes (bacon fried rice and peanut fried rice) are a little too hee-haw to publish on Examiner, so I wrote an article about Ugli fruit instead because it's like a super-weird, gourmet tangerine. I also told folks the secret to my flatbreads, which apparently everyone loves. Furthermore, I got hired on by the Examiner team to write articles under a second title: Knoxville Coffee Examiner (in addition to my regular gig as Knoxville Gourmet Food Examiner), and I wrote my first article for them today, a long piece about the loveliness and use of a French press, the rarity in use of which still surprises me.

Ah well, at least I understand how blogging works. I get to come on here, say my piece, pretend people read it, and feel great about myself and all of the cool links I get to plant. If you're in the mood to humor me, check out the links, subscribe to my feeds on Examiner, follow me on Twitter, and Stumble everything I write, though I guess shameless paragraphs like this don't make that kind of thing happen.

Experiments with coconut and bacon, but not at the same time

2010-02-15T15:48:00.003-05:00

We've kind of run out of things here and really need a trip to the store. That's led to some rather creative dishes over the weekend that were really pretty good, to be honest.

First, since the only meat we had left in the house was bacon, I decided to go for a Southern-Chinese fusion dish by making "bacon fried rice," which is every bit as uncomplicated as it sounds. Basically, I started several strips of bacon in the wok, fried them up nicely, and used the oil to make fried rice (with eggs, peas, and carrots, along with some onion, garlic, and ginger, of course) and then added the bacon, chopped up roughly, at the end, tossing it all through. It was surprisingly good... better, in fact than last night's similar dish (we have a lot of rice): fried peanuts in fried rice, which was also quite good. The essential idea there was to shallow-fry some raw peanuts until they were crunchy and then make them the primary protein component in the fried rice. I label it creative and good and am glad I made it.

In other news, since I do a lot of working out and need the protein, these kinds of meals wouldn't cut it. I had to make some protein drinks. My usual recipe is just (whole) milk, whey protein concentrate, evaporated cane juice, and (Ghirardelli or better) cocoa powder with the occasional dash of cinnamon powder or vanilla extract. Feeling a bit creative and needing to use some leftover coconut milk from the curry of the day before, I added that in place of half the milk (about 6 oz. or so). Whoa. Seriously. Whoa. Seriously. Whoa. What a good idea!

The weekend was rounded out with some of the best barbecue available in Maryville, the stuff over at Full Service BBQ, which is fantastic. The beef rocks, the pork rocks, the potato salad rocks. I had a good time with that stuff.

I feel sad, however, that I'm a little too busy with life and doings to have time to post much on here... right after my reinvention of the blog! I'll get better at it hopefully before too long, so hang in there with me. As for now... I'm working on some whole wheat and flax flatbread that hopefully will get a little dose of pizza toppings put on it.

A new direction -- my relationship and experience of food

2010-02-11T22:01:00.004-05:00

So I'm still writing recipes and food whatnot for Examiner.com as the Knoxville Gourmet Food Examiner, and that takes up enough of my writing-specifics-about-food time to where I have little left for blogging about it, particularly since the theme so far of this blog has been sharing the recipes I've tried and loved, which is exactly where I get most of my material for Examiner. Since I don't want to double-post, and I don't want to think up second-rate stuff for the blog, I've just kind of let it fall by the wayside. That changes again today, but with a different bent: I'm going to spend my time on here talking about my relationship with food and saying the things I can't say on Examiner (where I'm a "journalist" that has to follow the rules that only few others seem to follow: write in the third person and leave personal notes out).

SO! If you used to come here to find cool recipes to try, then you'll probably only find links to them as I put them on Examiner (do feel free to click those links, go to those pages, check out the recipes, enjoy them, and become a subscriber of my Examiner feed, which delivers my posts to you for free in your e-mail). This blog is about to get a bunch more personal instead of being about showcasing the recipes so much: it will be about my experience of recipes, foods, and other topics related to me the person... and a good deal about the food still. I think it's fair to say that I will continue to shamelessly promote myself and my Examiner articles, so expect a fair many links (which, like I suggested, you can or might should click on to visit them in their glory and then become a subscriber so you can enjoy them more regularly).

Speaking of shameless plugs, the article I wrote for Examiner today is kind of strange. It was really good, really interesting, and something I ate yesterday: oven-baked sweet potato French fries in both purple and orange. The strange bit, other than the vibrant purple of the purple sweet potatoes, is that it would be a perfect recipe for Halloween, and it's dead in the middle of February, which is pretty much the least Halloween-like month of the year. I'm betting I'll repost it. Here's what it looked like with both of them on the plate:
Neat, huh? They were good, too. The oven-baked quality of them seemed like it would leave me with soggy fries, but the reality is that with a quick par-boiling first, they come out almost every bit as crispy from the oven as they will from a deep fryer, though it takes considerably longer to get there.

If you wonder, I'm now a purple sweet potato fan (I can't wait to try them mashed, if only for the novelty of the appearance of the outcome) -- they're a little denser and drier, it seems, than the orange kind, and a bit less sweet, so overall, particularly in a savory use like this, they are really, really good (particularly smothered in some spicy barbecue sauce: Joe's Mo-Hotter XX Hell Sauce, which has a name I wish I was making up and which ended up in my kitchen only because we got some of it as kids to laugh about the name and have been laughing about it ever since... over 15 years of humor from pepper sauce).

Dinner tonight... well, it rocked. The recipe probably won't end up on Examiner due to their "local" initiative and the extreme difficulty of connecting "Chinese-style beef steak and mushrooms in coconut sauce over plain fried rice" with "Knoxville, TN." It's a shame, really, because it was really, really good. Maybe I'll change my mind and write about it, but I should have taken a picture because I don't have one to go with the article... unless the leftovers tomorrow come out nice looking.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the new format of the blog, even though the readership of this blog is so weak right now that I can probably expect that no one will see this post. If you do, welcome aboard... this should be kind of fun.

Perfect chocolate chip cookies, great recipes, and some restaurants... writing for Examiner still

2009-12-27T12:54:00.002-05:00

Granted, I'm not doing such a great job of keeping up with writing on this blog like I used to. It's difficult to come up with great material on one topic in two places, and frankly, I get paid to write for Examiner. So, while it's perhaps less than any readers I have left might hope for, here's another link-dump to stuff I've been writing on there as the Knoxville Gourmet Food Examiner.

Since it's coming up so soon, in case you missed it or just ran into this blog, you should definitely check out my list of New Year's resolutions that involve food and drink. I've already started doing some of them, and even if you're reading this in mid-April, it's never too late to start a new, healthy habit like trying out new foods or learning to cook.

In as big a surprise to me as it will be to many of you, Vienna Coffee Company (a popular topic here on The Untrained Gourmet because it's local to my Maryville/Knoxville area and because they do a great job) has thoroughly impressed me (and my wife and coffee-snob brother) with their high-quality Colombian coffee roasts that can't be missed.

Some of you might remember JB's beef and potato stew from way back when. I liked it so much the last time I made it that I decided it needed more exposure in my quest to have it be shared with the world on Examiner, so do check it out (especially if you're new here and don't remember it!).

I went to eat at Metro Pizza in Alcoa (between Maryville and Knoxville) recently and was quite pleasantly surprised. I'm glad to know there are still a few good non-chain pizza places around. I wrote a glowing review for Examiner that's worth looking at if you like Metro Pizza or are interested in checking it out. Metro Pizza serves authentic New York style pizzas that are hand-made by folks that know and love what they're doing. It's also a family-run operation, which is nice in the corporate-jungle world we live in today.

Another classic from this blog, way back when, the Madagascan chicken in coconut milk, akoho sy voanio, was also featured due to my belief that everyone should find (and love) this fantastic dish. Have a look!

Who doesn't like potato soup? A great variation on the classic using fried potatoes for a different taste and texture can be found on Examiner now thanks to my recent article on the matter. Oh, and if you don't like it, you probably just need more bacon in yours. That's a tip to take home with you.

My mom makes the best chocolate chips in the universe (probably). In fact, they're so good that I violate my long-standing, otherwise-firm rule about vegetable shortening to enjoy them (the rule is: don't eat anything containing vegetable shortening). I put her secret best chocolate chips in the world recipe up on Examiner for the world to find and profit from (with her permission). Thanks, Mom!

More great stuff on Examiner.com from the Knoxville Gourmet Food Examiner (ME!)

2009-12-11T22:14:00.002-05:00

So there's a project going on over at Examiner.com where we're supposed to try to write articles about New Year's Resolutions. At first I thought: "damn, I too bad I'm not in fitness/health/exercise; I'd be all over that!" Then I realized how many cool ideas there are for (gourmet) food and drink related New Year's resolutions (just in time for me to make some for myself, even). The link in the previous sentence takes you to a central article I wrote connected to all of the others. Take a look if you want cooking and food to be on your New Year's resolution list (resolutions that are easy to stick with!).

Here are the individual articles, to tell you more clearly what's there:

New Year's Food and Drink Resolution #1: Wine of the week. This is a project my brother and I did for months after I bought The Wine Bible by Karen MacNeil (a must have for wine enthusiasts or anyone that wants to know more about wine). It was one of the best ideas I've ever had. For a while, it was even more social when we had "Wino Wednesday," in which we got together on Wednesday nights, shared wines (with a purpose of learning about them) and food, and discussed philosophical ideas until late, late, late. Way fun, way cool. I might have to look into doing this again, actually.
New Year's Food and Drink Resolution #2: Cheese of the week. Given Resolution #1, this doesn't sound too creative until you visit a major cheese display and realize how little you know about cheese (or go read about cheeses of the world on Wikipedia!). It also pairs perfectly with Resolution #1 since cheese and wine go famously great together. Cheese was very, very frequently another central feature of "Wino Wednesday." If you want a list of great cheeses to consider getting started with, check out this article on 6 excellent gourmet cheeses to try (with food pairing and drink suggestions).
New Year's Food and Drink Resolution #3: Food with friends. This also isn't a copycat, particularly when you take my idea of "using" one of your gourmet-skilled friends as a teacher (paid in the food and drinks, of course) and you use it as an excuse to learn and practice your own cooking, which is kind of the goal: let learning to cook be your resolution.
New Year's Food and Drink Resolution #4: Learn to cook. This here is what the real resolution for next year should be -- upping your skills. Everyone knows that chicks only want boyfriends (husbands) will skills. From personal experience, I can tell you that "cooking skills" win a lot of points with the lovely wife. Resolution #3 is a system of accountability and camaraderie to facilitate this resolution.
New Year's Food and Drink Resolution #5: Get out and try new things. This resolution really serves Resolution #4 by keeping you inspired, and it provides lots of great meal opportunities, vacation ideas, and potential dates to go on, not to mention all of the increased knowledge you'll have to impress said date with if you do #5 solo first for a while.

So, get a fitness-based New Year's resolution like everyone else... you'll need it once you start up some or all of these interrelated food-and-drinks-centered ones (all of which could very possibly improve your life immeasurably if you stick with them).

Gourmet food articles I've written for Examiner.com

2009-12-10T20:46:00.002-05:00

As you know, I've taken up the gauntlet as the Knoxville Gourmet Food Examiner, writing for Examiner.com. Since I'm trying to put nearly all original content on there, check out what I've had to say. There are a lot of great recipes and ideas there that you shouldn't miss.

My most recent article is time-sensitive, so see it first! Dancing Goats Coffee is doing their final roast in 2009 of the Panama Esmeralda Special (100% Geisha coffee). This stuff is seriously top-quality and makes a great Christmas gift for a foodie or coffee-lover.
If you're going to cook well, you need seasonings. Here are 12 must-have dry seasonings for any great cook.
Here's a three-part, very informative article about tea. Part 1 is about premium teas; Part 2 is about other infusions and tea drinks; and Part 3 is a recipe for homemade masala chai tea. You can also find some great links to online premium tea retailers.
Every foodie, college student, and almost everyone else loves to get a Christmas gift card to a (upscale) grocery store as a gift!
If you've read this blog at all, then you know I love my Aeropress coffee maker. Here are two articles on Examiner extolling it as well: a review of the Aeropress and how to make a great latte with the Aeropress and a blender.
Speaking of coffee, you should visit Thunderhead perk in Townsend, TN, and read this review for extra incentive. Don't miss the scones!
While you're up and around the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, pick up a cookbook after you read this article about some of the great traditional holiday recipes from the Great Smoky Mountains.
Planning to cook a bird this year? See this article about brining and butterflying your holiday turkey, chicken, goose, or duck, and read its follow-up article on how to make a great brine for your bird or other roasts.
Quite possibly, everyone in the universe loves hot chocolate. The Aztec king used to drink it heavily daily (50 or more cups a day!) to preserve his strength and potency. In this article, you can learn how to make your own homemade hot cocoa (hot chocolate). In this follow-up article, you can learn some great variations on hot cocoa (hot chocolate).
Lentils are underrated. Read about how to make great lentil soups here.
Ginger can be an intimidating ingredient. Learn how to love and use ginger here.
Great soups almost always include a great stock. Learn to make your own rich chicken stock from scratch here. Use it to make healthy chicken noodle soup completely from scratch!
Make some sweet yeast rolls with this recipe. Use the dough to make a West Virginia favorite: pepperoni rolls.
I've praised paprika before. Click here to see my Examiner.com article about (smoked) paprika and its uses.
Need some snack ideas for the holidays? Here's a list of five of my favorite holiday-season snacks.
Speaking of snacks, I love citrus and citrus juices. Here are three related articles talking about (1) holiday-season citruses, particularly tangerines and grapefruits, (2) freshly squeezed orange, grapefruit, and tangerine juice at The Fresh Market, and (3) an update when I recently discovered that they also produce their freshly squeezed orange juice from certified organic oranges.
I tested out Annie Chun's Noodle Bowls here and wrote a review.
Since learning how to make it in June, I think homemade pasta has become my favorite food, particularly when I make shaved pasta for Asian and other cuisine. I had to share it with my Examiner.com readers (you could be one too!)
Followers of this blog also know that I like to test out and review many local coffees. I wrote an overall review of the local to Knoxville and Maryville, TN, coffee roaster, Vienna Coffee Company.
I can't get enough of this stuff or tell enough people about it: The Fresh Market's double-cream white chocolate milk. Naughty good!!!
The post that started it all for me there, which I featured on here as well: my favorite dish this year at Thanksgiving was my sweet potato and apple cream soup. Beautiful!
Last, but certainly not least, I started providing a hub-page of links to some of the best of what other Food Examiners on Examiner.com are writing about each week. Take a look and subscribe to some of their pages, if you like. Some of their stuff is really good!

So... if you're not visiting my Knoxville Gourmet Food Examiner page and keeping up with it (why not subscribe and make it easy on yourself), then you're missing the best of what I have to say about food lately! Check it out!

Thunderhead Perk in Townsend, TN

2009-12-08T13:43:00.003-05:00

"Far away from the daily grind," they say. Indeed. This place is magnificent. A tiny treasure that's all too easy to overlook just outside the lovely Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Townsend, TN.

To save you from seeing them twice, see my recent review of Thunderhead Perk as the Knoxville Gourmet Food Examiner. My wife and I had a great early-morning coffee date there today, and I can say with certainty that as coffee shops go, this one is a must-visit.

Ginger root! Uses and ideas

2009-12-06T13:55:00.005-05:00

I love ginger root (it's actually a rhizome, not a root, but this isn't that kind of blog). It's got to be one of my very favorite spices. I use it almost indiscriminately... well, okay, that's not true. It goes in an awful lot of my soups, stews, teas, and desserts, though. Why? Because it makes them all better!

I get the impression from folks that a lot of people don't know what to do with ginger root, but it doesn't have to be a mysterious ingredient. It's basic character is that it's spicy with a distinctive flavor that might be described by some as being a bit soapy. I don't think soapy is quite right, but spicy is. It's hot but not like peppers.

Actually, ginger is splendidly spicy, and its characteristic flavor can be great in teas, desserts, and many dishes. Plus, it is quite good for you. As an added benefit, Chinese medicine says that ginger root is warming (good for winter) and excellent for digestion. In fact, it is also an effective aid in reducing motion sickness, it's stomach-calming effects are so potent!

Although the rhizome looks a little alien, don't be afraid of ginger! Here are some ideas on how to use this wonderful spice, fresh or dried:

Gingerbread is a holiday favorite. If you don't just buy some ready-made and want to make your own, check out this popular recipe from The Food Network. Making gingerbread and designing gingerbread houses is a wonderfully fun thing to do with the kids around the holidays.
Ginger can go a long way to making tea a more warming and satisfying drink, particularly when it's cold outside. Slice fresh ginger root thinly into "coins" and drop one to three of them, according to your tastes, into the bottom of your teacup or teapot before adding the water to infuse your tea. If you use tea bags, that's fine too. You can eat the ginger if you want, but it's quite spicy!
Adding ginger to teas isn't just tasty, it's healthful too. Ginger is very warming, and adding some to tea, particularly black tea, in the fall and winter, it can help keep you warmer and healthier. I have it on good authority that a cup of black tea a day during the fall and winter is a very good idea to "keep out the cold." Adding ginger can help even more. Also, even though Chinese medicine labels green tea as "cooling," a few coins of ginger can really counteract that. It also is a great aid to digestion during this season of overindulging at the table.
Add fresh ginger, either in thinly sliced coins, matchsticks, or by mincing it to your beef stews. It's surprisingly good. Usually about "an inch" of the root for a large stew is appropriate, but use this seasoning to your tastes.
Any Asian fried dishes or soups will call for ginger. These are great with your homemade pasta, particularly the shaved pasta, which is very common in Chinese home cooking.
Add a little dried ginger to the filling mixture for cinnamon rolls, which are absolutely delightful this time of year. You can find a popular recipe for cinnamon rolls here, from The Food Network.
A small amount of finely minced fresh ginger is absolutely delicious in peach or berry pies and cobblers. Shh... that's a major secret of mine. Actually, in July when it's the right time, make your blueberry pies but add one peach, sliced very thinly and a half an inch of finely minced or grated fresh ginger. It will blow your mind!
Add several coins of fresh ginger to your stocks or some matchsticks, grated, or minced fresh ginger to your soups (like this one and this one) for a nice depth of flavor and a bit of indistinct, pleasant spiciness.
For the bold, flavor-loving, experience-seeking types, slice fresh ginger into very thin coins and enjoy them raw. It's quite spicy with a distinctive, interesting flavor.
Make very small matchsticks with fresh ginger and add them to salads. This is particularly good if a very light touch of sesame oil is added to the dressing.
Add half an inch or an inch of ginger to your fresh juice recipes if you are a fresh juicer. In fact, this much ginger with several apples and half a lemon, mixed evenly with club soda, makes a quick and easy drink similar to ginger ale. Several apples and a whole lemon (peel and all) with this much ginger makes a wonderful ginger-lemonade that can't be beat!

To make ginger "coins," slice the ginger in thin cross-sections to obtain a nearly round coin shape. To make matchsticks, stack up several coins and cut them into thin strips, all in one direction. To obtain a fine dice or mince on your ginger, take the matchsticks, and cut them into tiny pieces cross-sectionally.

Thanks go to the Knoxville Gourmet Food Examiner (that's me, haha!) for this article, which can be found on Examiner.com in a slightly different version.

Oh, and if you've missed it, here's another article I wrote on Examiner.com highlighting some of what was best in food last week from other food Examiners around the region and country. Check it out for some great ideas, particularly for holiday recipes!

Fresh squeezed juices from the Fresh Market, a product review

2009-12-04T12:42:00.005-05:00

I love beverages. I particularly love them when they're sweet, and especially even more so when they're good for me too. Hence, I go to The Fresh Market way too often to buy their freshly squeezed juices (and usually who knows how much other stuff as well!). In fact, because there is now an Earth Fare almost as conveniently located to where I work as there is a Fresh Market store, these juices are the primary item that keeps my patronage at TFM. This one, obviously, is the grapefruit juice, and as you can see, I've already dipped into it a little. That's because it's crazy good and impossible to resist... plus it's sort of the inspiration for this post, and I needed some direct inspiring.

For more about these juices, you can check out the article I wrote about them on Examiner.com as the Knoxville Gourmet Food Examiner. If you do, also check out the related post on tangerines and other citruses, perfect for the season since this is their season, including several awesome uses for the juices.

I'd call these juices one of the secrets to my success, if success can be measured in terms of how much happiness I think they bring to my life (plus some nice nutrition and vitamin-C!). Definitely check them out!

Knoxville Gourmet Food Examiner

2009-12-01T17:21:00.002-05:00

I've recently been named the Knoxville Gourmet Food Examiner, writing for Examiner.com. Click on the link on my title to check out my profile, which contains links to all of my articles, to see what I've got to say for them!

Homemade noodles featuring fresh squash juice

2009-11-30T22:26:00.003-05:00

Homemade noodles featuring fresh squash juice? Squash juice? What is this, Harry Potter all of a sudden? Do I have house elves working in my kitchen? Seriously? Squash juice? And isn't it pumpkin juice? But isn't pumpkin a squash? Wait, wait, wait... squash juice noodles... you can't be serious.

Wrong. I'm serious. Look!
Here's (some of) the squash juice, specifically butternut and golden acorn squash... looks like pumpkin juice:
Here's the resulting lump of pasta dough:
"Double-double toil and trouble/Fire burn and cauldron bubble!" Here's the finished shaved noodles!
Nice and orangish, huh? Believe me... they were surprisingly good too. The squash flavors came through, sweet and a bit nutty with that nice, obvious taste that is only squash, but they weren't overpowering. They made a lovely accent to the chewy, doughy noodles.

Surprisingly enough, the "pumpkin juice" was stunningly good as well. It was a test of will to keep myself from drinking a glass of it, but that's probably because I used small, vibrant squash from my garden this summer that were amazingly sweet. Specifically, I got about two cups of juice from one small butternut squash and one full-sized golden acorn squash (interestingly enough, neither of which were planted intentionally -- they grew out of an old compost pile!).

To make this, you need some special equipment: a juicer (like the Jack Lalanne Power Juicer, e.g.). These are well worth the investment, considering the potential! Once obtained, it couldn't be easier... and if you get some small, sweet pumpkins, then you can entertain your Harry-Potter-crazy kids (or yourself...) by making yourself some authentic, super-healthy, fresh pumpkin juice sometimes (sweetened with some apples if needed with little extra effort or expense). You don't even have to peel the squash as long as you wash it really well first, though you certainly could. You probably do want to seed and gut it, though.

The rest of the recipe, which could use juices from essentially any veggies you wanted (carrots, beets, spinach, or parsley seem like other interesting pasta choices, as is potato and sweet potato, which I've tested), is simply to replace some, most, or all of the water in a recipe of homemade pasta with the juice you make. In this case, I replaced the entire cup of water for a three-cup pasta with the squash juice. In case you don't know how to make these noodles, see here for a recipe or read the summary of this recipe below! The noodles, incidentally, can be used as I typically use them, in Asian fare since that's how I learned about them, or in place of whatever usual noodles you put into a pasta dish. Click on the labels (to your right): noodles, pasta, and Asian for lots of ideas on how to use these noodles. I've read good things about doing lasagne this way and look forward to testing it out, probably with veggie noodles.

In case you want things to be specific, here's the actual recipe I used for these noodles:

3 cups of unbleached all-purpose flour, sifted;
1 cup of freshly made acorn and butternut squash juice;
A pinch of salt;
Elbow grease.

Add all of the ingredients except the grease in a bowl and combine until mixed. Once the mixture starts to become a dough, add elbow grease by kneading the dough until it is smooth and has a nice texture. Carefully with a very sharp knife shave the noodles from the ball of dough directly into boiling water, pulling and pinching the last few (or all of them if you get frustrated enough). Boil for about 3-5 minutes after the end of the shaving until the noodles are all done. Drain and use like pasta.

Oh... since I mentioned it above... if you get a juicer and get all excited and juice potatoes or sweet potatoes, for whatever purpose, don't drink it. It tastes pretty bad and seems to make me feel quite ill every time I try it. I don't think it's a good thing to do.

Pork Cubes with Garlic, Mushrooms, and Carrots over Shaved Noodles

2009-11-27T19:24:00.002-05:00

This was another dish that my wife thought was just about perfect. My opinion is that the reason is centered in that I'm getting better at making the noodles.
The trick, really, is not overdoing the pork. Pork gets very dry very quickly when it's overcooked. Of course, it has to be cooked through, so don't underdo it either!

Ingredients:

One 3-cup recipe of shaved noodles (see below);
About a pound of pork chops, cut into half-inch cubes;
1/2 medium sweet onion, halved and sliced into quarter inch strips;
Two full-sized carrots, cut into two-inch boards and then halved;
About ten white mushrooms, cleaned and quartered;
Four or five cloves of garlic, crushed (first) and minced;
Approximately 1 inch of fresh ginger, minced;
1-3 tsp (to taste) hot sauce;
1-2 tbsp (to taste) soy sauce;
1-2 tbsp canola oil;
Salt and black pepper to taste.

Directions Summary:
Start by putting a pan of salted water on to boil (for the noodles). Then prepare all of the vegetables and the meat. Set ingredients aside while preparing the noodle dough. When the dough is ready and the water is boiling (or very close to it!), heat the oil in the wok over high heat. Add all of the vegetables except the ginger and garlic and salt them. Then stir fry them momentarily. Shave the noodles into the boiling water, pausing occasionally to flip and stir the veggies, removing them from the pan when the onions start to caramelize. Set the vegetable mixture aside and add the pork to the hot wok. Season it with salt and pepper, and once it sears on one side, begin to stir fry it. Drain the noodles when they begin to float, after approximately five or six minutes in the boiling water. When the pork is nearly cooked through, add the hot sauce, toss the meat, and then add the vegetables back in. Add the soy sauce and mix thoroughly. Finally, either serve (traditional style, see below) or add the noodles to the pan and mix well.

Shaved Noodles:
To make shaved noodles, use a firm dough, approximately 3 to 1 (by volume) of flour to water, depending on the thirstiness of the flour. I add a pinch of salt and, in particular, King Arthur brand all-purpose unbleached flour. Combine the ingredients, mix until it starts to form a dough, and then knead well for 10-15 minutes (longer for chewier noodles, shorter for less-chewy noodles). Then, after the dough rests for a moment, use a very sharp knife to shave slices off the ball of dough directly into the boiling water (like this, only mine are shorter, probably thicker, and not nearly as professionally done... also, my pot is a lot smaller as is my ball of dough). When the dough ball gets too small to continue this safely, pinch it thin and pull/tear the noodles off by hand. Cook them until they float (usually 4-6 minutes after the shaving ends).

Traditional Style Serving:
Put some noodles in each of several bowls (one per person). Then, place a serving dish or the wok (with heat protection) full of the fried dish in the middle of the table. Condiments can be set nearby, if they're desired. Each person can spoon some of the fried dish into their bowl as they want and eat it directly that way, the whole family sharing in the meal process in an interesting, different, and somewhat more intimate way than we're used to in the West. Chopsticks, of course, enhance the experience!

Sweet Potato and Apple Cream Soup: An Unlikely Thanksgiving Post

2009-11-26T21:04:00.004-05:00

Of all of the things that I could talk about on Thanksgiving, like poultry of some kind (turkey, goose -- I really wanted to make goose -- chicken (capon, anyone?), or duck -- I really, really wanted to make a roasted duck), I choose to talk about sweet potato cream soup? Am I serious? Yes. Because it was crazy good and something different and interesting. Plus, my mom beat me to the punch and cooked pretty much everything else last night, leaving me with a few sweet potatoes and a "do something with these... if you can!!!" challenge. Thanks, Mom.
"Wow, Jim, that's really, really, really, really good soup, and that's coming from someone who doesn't like sweet potatoes at all!" That was my mom's reaction to this stuff. Like I said, it was crazy good. So how did I do it?

It started with my small pile of sweet potatoes: five small ones, as I would reckon them, all of the orange variety. I peeled them and chopped them into roughly three-quarters-inch cubes and dropped them into some cold water. On a whim, I added a red delicious apple (the only kind I saw at Mom's house, though I would have preferred Granny Smith for this), peeled, cored, and cut up similarly. That water got boiled until the sweet potatoes were nice and soft.

Once it was done, I drained the pot and put all the solids back into the pan with about half a stick (2 tbsp.) of butter, probably 12 oz. of whole milk, a pinch of salt, a half teaspoon of good cinnamon powder, and a quarter of a cup of brown sugar. I also added a tablespoon of whiskey (by which I mean "bourbon" since I'm from the Southeast) because it's the holidays. After a few minutes of cooking on medium, I whipped out the immersion blender and blended it until it was quite smooth (this could be accomplished in a regular blender as well). Then I ran it through a relatively fine chinois to make it nice and smooth, putting it into a clean pan over medium-low heat.

To finish it, start off by adding 2 more tbsp. of butter and stirring it through as it melts. Then taste it. It should not taste flat. If it does, you probably need another pinch of salt to wake up the flavors and a little more cinnamon, sugar, and/or butter (or why not a little of all of them?). Use sugar to your desired level of sweetness. For what it's worth, I would have garnished this with a small dollop of marshmallow fluff right in the middle of the bowl, and, of course, it is served hot as a wonderful starter for a good fall (or any time!) meal. Oh.. and as much of the sweet potato could be substituted out for squash as you'd like. It would still work wonderfully!

Summary of the recipe:

Five small sweet potatoes or the equivalent, peeled and cut into cubes;
One apple, peeled, cored, and cut into cubes;
4 tbsp. (half a stick) of butter;
12-16 oz. whole milk, depending on desired consistency;
A pinch of salt;
1/2 tsp. cinnamon powder;
1/4 c. brown sugar
1 tbsp. whiskey or bourbon.

Summary of directions:
Boil sweet potatoes and apple until sweet potatoes are quite tender. Drain. Lower the heat to medium and add the sweet potato mixture, half of the butter, and the rest of the ingredients back into the pan. Let cook for 2-3 minutes, stirring, and then blend until smooth with an (immersion) blender. Strain (and press) the result through a chinois or fine mesh strainer into either a clean pan or back into the original. Discard the pulp (or use it somehow else?). Add the remaining butter, adjust the flavors, and serve hot with an optional garnish of marshmallow fluff or fresh crema.

Cafe du Monde French Roast With Chicory Latte

2009-11-12T22:12:00.003-05:00

I've been gone, working like crazy, for a couple of weeks, left off with a bunch of articles about beverages, and I come back with another article about something good to drink? Yes. That's me. Ask my wife: I love beverages (and often am carrying two or three or four around with me) -- only sometimes alcoholic ones. There's been a bunch of surpassingly good food, but unfortunately I've been too busy to jot down how I did what I did with it. No worries, though... there will be more!
So, this is really a post about a few beverages, though not the ones in the picture. Those are both the same and only one of the the things I'm about to talk about. As you can see, I used the Cafe du Monde French roast coffee and chicory, and I followed my normal plan to use my Aeropress to make a latte (which I've been referring to as a fake "cappuccino" but realize now that I use too much milk to justify that term).
That basic recipe again? Sure:

Four scoops (? tablespoons, I think) coffee, usually fresh and whole-bean as opposed to this pre-ground kind of stuff;
12 oz. freshly boiled water (for the Aeropress, only about 10 oz gets used and it should be cooled to around 180-190F before using) or approximately four largish shots of espresso (or equivalent);
8 oz. whole milk with 2 oz half and half, heated to just below scalding and then put in a blender on high for about twenty or thirty seconds;
One tablespoon turbinado sugar, divided into two equal amounts, one in the coffee and the other in the milk;
A dash of premium vanilla extract in the milk.

How does it come out? Well, alright. I think if you're a die-hard Cafe du Monde coffee with chicory lover, it's probably quite good. I'm not. I like the little bit of variety of the chicory, but personally, I don't like that much of it at once. So... how can I "fix" this?

Two options:

Only use 1 scoop of the Cafe du Monde stuff and 3 scoops of my favorite freshly ground whole-bean stuff: quite good... surprisingly good... almost better than usual with just that little bit of chicory flirting in the background;
Add caramel and cocoa to make it a turtle mocha-latte... superb! I used just a dash (half teaspoon or so) of the Rieme caramel syrup (also mentioned here) into the coffee and a heaping tablespoon of Ghiridelli unsweetened cocoa powder into the milk while it heated up, almost like making really weak hot cocoa.

If you are into experiments, give it a try. It's a bit of a shame that I can't get the Cafe du Monde stuff in a whole-bean and roasted chicory-chunk variety, but I'm sure the freshness wouldn't be terribly awesome (or could that also be possible in this advanced day and age of essentially instant shipping abilities??).

Black Tea with Caramel Syrup

2009-10-26T12:11:00.005-04:00

I'm still busy, so I still have to make short posts. I've made some wonderfully good stuff, but I have pretty much no time to talk about it. Let me talk about something I've been making a lot of that's quick and easy, though... something to get you through hard-workin' times when you've just had enough coffee: tea. According to my friend JB, who is Chinese and quite knowledgable, black tea is good in the fall to help the body warm up and adjust to the seasons, yet another reason to enjoy a couple or three cups of it a day as the leaves fall and the weather cools.
I drink a fair amount of tea, but it's sort of a seasonal thing. I'm also a tea snob (much like I'm a coffee snob). I recommend loose leaf, good quality tea, which can be a bit hard to find. A decent brand you might consider is Adagio. I usually try to stay away from tea bags (filled with "floor sweepings"), but if you're into that kind of thing, Newman's Own "Royal Tea" isn't terribly bad (and is pretty good for the price and being organic). They are quicker and easier, and we usually have them on hand (for the kids or making kombucha), so they get used quite often when I'm in a hurry. They also make a more "proper" British cup since I've noticed that many Brits seem to prefer "crap tea," a term courtesy of a dear Scottish friend of mine. My high-falutin' Assam from a single estate that I served him once was "nice, but a little too uppity" for him, which is really saying something if you know this guy.

The secret of my success in making a super-delicious, perfectly enjoyable cup of black tea around this time of the year is to flavor it a little: a splash of half and half, a half tablespoon of turbinado (hippy sugar) (I make my tea in 12oz. mugs), and a dash of Rieme caramel syrup: "for flavoring coffee." The trick is to use just a dash of the stuff, otherwise it becomes rapidly cloying and almost irritating, more like candy than a pleasant beverage. These, though, are definitely the best flavored syrups I've come across. Most, in fact, are pretty bad in my opinion, and this stuff is fantastic.

By the way, this stuff is fantastic in coffee too, so if you can get some, then you should.

Product Review: The Fresh Market's Double-Cream White Chocolate Milk

2009-10-23T17:52:00.004-04:00

Behold the beauty of The Fresh Market's Double-Cream White Chocolate Milk, one of the greatest ideas to ever hit the market, if you ask me.
This stuff is naughty good. It's decadence in a glass. You'll probably want to have a seat before you have your first taste of it, and then you have to face the ultimate challenge of not downing it all in one go (which, I can tell you from experience, makes you feel very bad). It's delicious almost beyond words: like melted ice cream without the gross factor in a subtle, lovely, rich white chocolate flavor. This stuff is genius, perfect, and altogether bad for you in all ways except that it nourishes spots in your soul that you just love to nourish. How naughty good is it? Well...
...that naughty good. Observe the high sugar content (as high as soft drinks). Mmm.... Observe also the high fat content (higher than half and half... that must be what they mean by "double cream"). Calories, high. Fiber, low. Cholesterol, not good. All this goes together to make: perfect, in small doses. On the other hand, it is relatively high in protein, Vitamin A, and calcium, although I feel a little bit guilty for wanting to say that this is possibly the "ideal source for those nutrients," mostly because of all of the not-good-for-you filling that bottle with beautiful goodness.

So, in taste and experience, this stuff gets an 11 out of 10 on my meaningless scale of quality, but in healthiness, it scores a bit lower at about a -2. Then again, you could always drink lots of water and work out hard and regularly, and then it wouldn't matter so much....

If you haven't had this stuff and have access to a The Fresh Market that happens to be carrying it (they only seem to have it sometimes, though their good ol' fashioned (whole) chocolate milk is rather beautiful too), then you have to try it.

For what it's worth, it makes just about the best white chocolate mochaccino that I've ever had, as long as you're making it with decent espresso from a good coffee source. So rich... so delicious... so romantic with my wife in the mornings and sometimes afternoons.

A Chinese Invention Dish: Steak and Eggs with Homemade Pasta

2009-10-21T12:36:00.003-04:00

I'm almost sorry for posting yet another Chinese dish, but like I was doing earlier with the bread making, I'm completely into making these dishes again. I've made JB's beef and potatoes a couple of times, in fact, in the past two weeks, and that says nothing of these noodle-based dishes that are quite filling and excitingly delicious, particularly now that I'm feeling more adventurous. This installment's adventure is based on a favorite breakfast of a Scottish friend of mine: steak and eggs, but I made it for dinner and following the rough idea of JB's fried dishes.
This recipe used the other half of the beef roast that I used to make this yumminess, which by paying attention to the dates, you'll realize implies that I made this dish about a week ago. It incorporated a lot of noodles (because the last dish I made used too few), a recipe for which can be found here, scaled up to about three cups of flour and a cup of water (and still 11 gallons of elbow grease). Here's what all went into it other than the noodles:

Approximately a pound of beef shoulder roast, in half-inch cubes (steak could be used instead);
3-4 cloves of garlic, crushed (first) and finely chopped;
1/2 an inch of fresh ginger, finely chopped;
1/2 a sweet onion, chopped;
6-8 mushrooms, halved and chopped;
3 eggs, salted, peppered lightly, and beaten in a bowl;
a healthy dash of red wine vinegar;
2 tablespoons of soy sauce;
2-3 tablespoons of canola oil for cooking.

After getting everything prepared and a pot of salted water boiling for the pasta, I started cooking the eggs first. I simply poured them into the hot wok and scrambled them until they were just short of being "dry." Once that was done, I transferred the eggs to a plate to await the completion of the dish. The onions and mushrooms were next, which I added to a re-oiled, re-heated wok and, once salted lightly, let cook until they were soft. Actually, I let them cook, stirring only occasionally, until I had shaved all of the pasta into the boiling water. Once the pasta was shaved, i.e. when the veggies were done, I transferred them to the plate with the eggs to await the meat. A little more oil in the wok, which I gave a quick chance to reheat a little, preceded the meat, garlic, and ginger along with a little salt and pepper for the meat. I stirred this around until the meat was browned on all sides, and then I added the soy sauce and vinegar. While that stewed, I drained the pasta and then immediately added the eggs and vegetables mixture to the wok and stirred everything together. When mixed, I let it cook for about a minute before adding the pasta, mixing, adjusting the seasoning. That was it. Done. Pretty much perfect.

Monster Burritos for Fourteen!

2009-10-20T19:37:00.003-04:00

One of my friends just turned 30, and so his wife and several of his friends decided it would be fitting to have a little birthday party for him (at an indoor water park, no less!) last Friday. My wife and I were invited and decided to go, and everything looked very promising for offering a great time. The only thing that wasn't settled at least a couple of weeks ahead of time was what we'd be doing about dinner. I suggested that we should make a roast or a huge amount of spaghetti (or both!) because it would be cheaper and more fun than everyone going out, and so in the process, my title "Untrained Gourmet" preceding me, I got hired to make something good. I decided on mega-sized, super-delicious pork burritos because of the overwhelming crowd-pleasing ability of burritos, particularly huge, sloppy, delicious ones. Here's mine, just before I tried to wrap it up and eat it, on a tortilla that easily measures fourteen or fifteen inches across (and that is flavored with chili!).
Apparently, folks raved about them. Some of the things I heard were about three or four variations on "That was seriously the best burrito I've ever had." and "Thanks for your gourmet expertise this weekend. Everyone raved about it after you left and all day Saturday. A great time was had by all." Well... that's what burritos are good for.

This was a bit of a monument for me, honestly, since I've never had to cook for more than 10 before in one go, so it was a little bit exciting and a little bit scary and a little bit trial, experiment, and error. There were three dishes: the meat filling for the burritos, some black beans (I say for the burritos, though I guess they could have been a side), and Spanish rice (again, I say for the burritos, though I originally intended them as a side). The entire undertaking was rather epic! Remember, this recipe feeds 12-15 hungry adults.

Meat filling and sauce:

A five pound pork (or beef) roast -- I used pork loin;
2 1/2 sweet onions, halved and sliced thinly;
8-10 medium-to-large cloves of garlic, crushed and finely chopped;
1 large can of fire-roasted tomatoes;
6 chipotle peppers in adobo sauce, chopped;
2 thinly sliced fresh (red) cayenne peppers (more, optionally, for more heat);
6 Nardello (or other sweet, red peppers), seeded and roughly chopped;
2 tsp. whole (or freshly ground) cumin seeds;
Several sprigs each fresh thyme and (Mexican) oregano, finely chopped;
4-6 bay leaves;
Zest and juice of half a lime, grated or very finely chopped;
1 tbsp. brown sugar or molasses;
2-3 tbsp. red wine or apple cider vinegar;
Salt and black pepper to taste

As for the tortillas to serve it on, if you can get the giant, delicious ones that are available at EarthFare (sorry, I cannot recall the brand, but they come in a wide variety of flavors including chili and sun dried tomato), then get those. Otherwise, get other flour tortillas, as large as you like, or for a crowd, in a variety of sizes. We had three sizes, including the super-giants pictured above.

How to make it:
Start out by seasoning the meat with salt, pepper, and ground cumin, and then sear it in a relatively hot Dutch oven or other large pan. Remove the meat from the pan and set it aside and add some oil and the onions and fresh sweet peppers (Nardellos for me). Cook them until the onions are translucent, and then add the bay leaves, cumin seeds, cayenne, garlic, tomatoes with their liquid, and the vinegar and deglaze the pot, scraping up as much of the gramines (delicious burned-on meat bits) as you can. Then add the lime zest and chipotles, stir well, and put the meat back in, wiggling it so that it is mostly covered with the liquid. Resist the temptation to add more water. It will be okay. Salt and pepper everything lightly and let it come to a boil; then reduce the heat to low, cover it most of the way, and let it cook until the pork is quite tender (probably three or four hours -- having access to an indoor water park is helpful for this stage, though keep things on the very low if you're leaving a cooking pot unattended). *Alternatively, skip the searing/sauteing parts and just put everything in a big-enough crockpot, set to high unti it boils and then to low until it's done.* Once the meat is to pulling-tender, remove it from the pan and add in the freshly chopped herbs, sugar/molasses, and adjust the seasoning with a little salt and pepper. Allow the sauce to continue to cook, uncovered and preferably over somewhat higher heat so it reduces somewhat, while you let the meat rest and then pull and cut it apart. Once it is pulled, add the meat back into the sauce, mix thoroughly, and reduce the heat to low to await serving. Just before serving, add the lime juice.

For the black beans:
If you want to be a rockstar, use about two cups of dried beans and soak/cook them until tender according to the package instructions. Then set them aside and use as instructed below. Otherwise, use canned beans. We used six cans of black beans and had only a little left over.

6 cans of beans, all black or with some pintos mixed in (at most 2 cans of pintos), thoroughly rinsed;
One sweet onion, chopped medium-fine;
Two bell peppers, chopped likewise;
A couple of tablespoons of your favorite not-crazy-hot hot sauce;
Salt and pepper to taste;
Half a stick of butter and a little oil for cooking.

Start out by preparing and then sauteing the onion and peppers in the oil and butter. Once they've softened considerably (and even caramelized on the edges somewhat), add everything else and stir. Cook over medium in this way for a few minutes until the beans are all warmed through, which takes roughly 5 minutes or so. Try to time this to finish around the same time as the meat, which is most easily accomplished by having someone else pull the meat apart. Assistants are great.

The rice, which we overdid, but if people are hungry or like Spanish rice on the side, then this will work great. I'll put up what I actually made for posterity's sake, but feel encouraged to half this recipe in practice since we ended up with plenty of left over rice (which is a fantastic ingredient, by the way, in scrambled eggs the next morning!). This is the proper pinkish-reddish-orangish "Spanish" (read: Mexican) rice made properly from scratch.

Four cups of white, long-grain rice;
Half a sweet onion, finely chopped;
3-4 cloves of garlic, crushed and finely chopped;
1 large can of crushed, fire-roasted tomatoes with liquid;
Half a stick of butter;
1 tsp. whole cumin seeds (or the equivalent, freshly ground);
4 bay leaves;
A little finely chopped fresh (Mexican) oregano;
3-4 tablespoons hot sauce;
A heavy dash of Worcestershire sauce;
Salt and pepper to taste;
Enough water to mix with the tomatoes and their juice so that the total quantity of liquid is as specified on the package cooking directions (usu. 8 cups, or generally, two cups of water per cup of dry rice). NOTE: If you missed it -- measure the water, tomatoes, and juice together or you're going to have some soggy, not good rice.

Doing this stuff right isn't hard, but it isn't a freebie. You have to start by toasting the rice in a hot pan (the pan you'll cook it in). This requires moving the rice around pretty much the whole time while it's on a fairly high temperature, and it takes several minutes that cannot be used for anything else. When the rice is getting nicely toasted (it gets all extra white and some of the grains get a little golden), add the cumin seeds and bay leaves and continue this dry-toasting for about thirty more seconds or perhaps a minute. Next, add the butter, onion, and garlic, and continue swirling the rice mixture around in the pan. It will start to sizzle, and that's what you want. This should continue until the butter more or less melts, which takes about 2-3 minutes. Then, add the water, tomatoes with juice, hot sauce, oregano, Worcestershire sauce, salt, and pepper and stir. Let the mixture come to a boil and cook on that relatively high heat for 2-3 minutes. Then reduce the heat immediately to low (on an electric burner that means you have to use two eyes or plan ahead knowing how your electric range works with heating and cooling times... kind of a pain) and cover the pot. Leave it this way until the time period stated on the package directions (probably 20 minutes) has elapsed. At that point, turn off the heat (remove it from the burner if electric) and leave it alone until you're ready to serve it. You can fluff and mix it just before serving. Again, plan ahead and try to time this to be finishing around the same time as everything else.

Once it's done, get out some tortillas and add some sides. The recommended list includes, but is not limited to:

Freshly grated lettuce (iceberg is popular);
Diced tomatoes (2 is probably enough);
Finely diced sweet and/or spring onions (1/2 of a medium onion is enough);
Some kind of Mexican blend, Monterrey Jack, Colby, cheddar, etc., cheese, freshly shredded if you have the time and manpower;
Sliced, pickled jalapenos;
Salsa, though not much will see action due to the sauce with the meat;
Hot sauce;
Sour cream or Mexican creme, optionally enhanced with some freshly grated lime zest;
Guacamole (preferably homemade);
Whatever else you like on burritos.

A good time will be had by all... guaranteed!

Coffee Review: Vienna Coffee Company's Thunderhead Espresso

2009-10-15T09:47:00.002-04:00

I haven't yet met Jaimie, the owner of Thunderhead Perk in Townsend, TN, but hopefully I will be meeting her this week. My wife adores her and claims her scones are the best. Vienna Coffee Company in Maryville, TN, came up with an espresso blend for Jaimie that they fittingly call Thunderhead Espresso (organic) that happens to be quite delicious regardless of whether it is served alongside one of Jaimie's apparently legendary, warmed scones.

Their website claims that the blend is rich, which I think is a bit of an understatement. The smell, in fact, carries the very definition of rich coffee, and the flavor is full, balanced, and mild, like a pleasant riff of smooth jazz on a double bass. Vienna recommends that this espresso is great almost any way you can serve it: straight shots or blended into a latte (or cappuccino), and I tend to agree. It's nice straight, but in my opinion, it stands out blended. That could be because I just came off their Espresso Bella, which is undeniably nice to have in a wide variety of ways.

If you're into espresso blends, however you like to take them (even brewed as coffee instead of as espresso), this one is a nice one that I have to recommend, particularly if you like them smooth and easy without ostentation or fuss.

(Chinese) Beef Cubes and Mushrooms with Red Wine Sauce and Homemade Pasta

2009-10-11T14:00:00.002-04:00

I think of this recipe as being a bit inspired since I had a picture in my head from the outset and then did two things differently from that grand vision.
I wanted to make a beef and mushroom stir-fry with noodles again, and when I saw a good deal on a nice oven roast at the grocery store the other night, I was almost giddy with excitement. Yesterday, I got the opportunity to start cooking it up. My original plan had been to make something nearly identical to a previous recipe, but variety, or at least variation, is really the spice of life, and inspiration hit me as I was making it.

With Asian cooking, it's a wonderful idea to get everything arranged before you start because the stir-frying process is fast an furious. That means, since I wanted to make noodles, that my first step was to salt some water and start it on its road toward boiling, and my second step was to get the ingredients cut up. Here's what went into this:

About a pound of beef roast, cut into half-inch cubes;
Eight or ten nice shiitake mushrooms, trimmed of their stems and sliced thinly;
Six large white mushrooms, halved and sliced thinly;
Four medium cloves of garlic, crushed and chopped finely (first);
About half an inch of ginger sliced across and then into thin matchsticks;
Six spring onions, cleaned and chopped cross-sectionally including much of the greens;
Most of one fresh, red cayenne pepper, sliced thinly;
About a tablespoon of soy sauce;
About two or three tablespoons of a rich, table-worthy red wine;
About a tablespoon of red wine vinegar;
Salt and black pepper to taste;
Two or three tablespoons of peanut or canola oil for cooking;
One small recipe (about two cups of flour worth) of homemade shaved pasta (a recipe is here).

Once the water was heating, I chopped up all of the veggies except the spring onions (sorry, no pictures -- I couldn't find the camera until after I finished cooking!) and put them on a plate. Then I cut the beef and and spring onions and let them wait on the cutting board while I made the pasta dough. By then, the water was boiling and I had put the oil in my wok over high heat and let it get very hot. The veggies went in first, with a little salt and pepper, and sizzled and fried until they were getting soft. Meanwhile, I shaved the pasta dough into the boiling water with my freshly sharpened chef's knife.

After stirring and tossing the veggies and letting the mushrooms reduce in volume rather dramatically (about 5 minutes, probably), I took them out of the pan and put them back on their plate to wait. Once I let the wok get properly hot again (about a minute), I put the beef and onions in with a little more salt and black pepper, freshly ground, of course. Just a little stirring of that happened before the noodles were done cooking, so I drained those.

When the beef was approximately 2/3 of the way to being done (probably just two or three minutes), I added the soy sauce, wine, and vinegar, stirring things through, waited about thirty or forty seconds for some of the alcohol to boil off and flavors to mingle, and then I added the mushrooms back in. Another minute or minute and a half later, the meat was just finished, so I turned off the heat to the wok and added the noodles to the pan (going strictly against the traditional way of enjoying noodle-based Chinese food and not worrying about it at all). After a little stir and a little rest for the dish, I took the above picture and then dug in. It was absolutely fantastic!

Vienna Coffee Company: Espresso Bella

2009-10-08T21:10:00.002-04:00

Here's another review of a flavor of Vienna Coffee Company coffee, the one that I just finished enjoying several times in the mornings and afternoons: Espresso Bella.

When I visited the company a couple of weeks ago, I picked up this one along with the very delicious and yet interesting Organic Balinese Blue Krishna mentioned in that post (follow the link). I was told that "if I like pulling shots and just drinking them straight up, this was a great way to go." I don't exactly pull shots, as you all know, because I don't have a real espresso machine, but that didn't deter me from making it both in the Moka and in the Aeropress. My first experience, actually, came from the Moka, and my first impressions (which I'm glad I wrote down) were very pleasant: full, round flavors with a hint of toastiness and a little smokiness, properly understated. Even from the Moka, I recognized immediately the overwhelming smoothness of this espresso blend also.

In the Aeropress, which makes a slightly flatter, certainly less "cooked" tasting coffee than the moka, this coffee stood out as being very well balanced and wonderfully flavorful. It did a better job than many of the varietals and blends that I've tried at being equally pleasant (as cappuccino or "presso," what I call the concentrated coffee that comes out of the Aeropress) as a morning or afternoon cup, and so there were many days while I enjoyed this stuff that I enjoyed it twice a day. My wife was duly impressed by the flavorfulness of this coffee as well.

I think this is an outstanding espresso blend, actually, and I think I recommend it over the Espresso con Robusta, Little River Style that I also like a great deal, should buy again, and should review for you. At the moment, I'm lucky enough to be working on (and will write about soon!) some Organic Thunderhead Espresso, a blend worked out for my wife's friend Jaimie at Thunderhead Perk in Townsend, TN, a great coffee shop that my wife and step-daughters went to today while I was at work (though I'll find my way there sometime soon). Stay tuned for those reviews when I have time to talk about them: two more espressos and hopefully a coffee shop.

Lamb and Barley Soup with a Parmesian Portabello Snack

2009-10-06T20:17:00.004-04:00

First thing's first: I can't believe I forgot to take a picture of this wonderful stew when it was finished. Unfortunately, I can't show you the finished product, so we'll consider the cooking pictures to be teasers. I assure you, it looked like beef and barley soup is supposed to look only the beef was lamb, and it was spectacularly good.
The ingredient list is kind of long, so here's what all went into it:

About a quarter of a leg of lamb with bone (probably about a pound and a half of meat);
Three medium carrots, cut into quarters lengthwise and then into half-inch pieces;
Four small potatoes, cut into pieces of a similar size to the carrots;
One medium sweet onion, cut similarly;
Four cloves of garlic, smashed and chopped finely (and first);
Two red and one green Nardello pepper (mostly to use them, leave out or substitute any sweet pepper), chopped;
One red cayenne pepper, chopped finely;
Two stalks of celery, cut lengthwise four times and sliced rather thinly;
Eight white mushrooms, cleaned and quartered;
Half a cup of hulled barley (pearled is a fine substitute);
Two tablespoons Job's tears (optional);
Two tablespoons wild rice;
Two tablespoons brown rice (note: the rices are optional, but in Chinese medicine, mixing rice and barley is supposed to be very building to the system, so I usually include them in tandem when I can);
Four bay leaves;
Salt, freshly ground black pepper, Worchestershire sauce, and red wine vinegar to taste;
A long sprig of fresh rosemary and a handful of chives, finely chopped;
One bottle of beer (preferably something heavy and malty);
Four and a half cups of water;
Two to three tablespoons canola oil.

Here are all of the veggies cut up and ready to go. It's very helpful to have all of your ingredients prepared well ahead of time, although with a stew, I suppose it's not so important. I'm just in the habit, I guess. Having them this way is very helpful, however, if you want to saute the veggies first and deglaze the pan, which I usually do but didn't for this dish.
As for preparing it, I started with the lamb going into the oil and browning a little on each side. Once that was achieved, I put all of these lovely veggies except the garlic into the pan and stirred it around so that as much of it as possible got some pan time, although I wasn't aiming for perfection. After a couple of minutes, I added the garlic, bay leaves, and the beer.
Once that was in, I added the water and the grain along with a healthy amount of red wine vinegar. When all of that was in the pot, I stirred, covered the pot, and left it alone for about twenty minutes. Then I lowered the temp and added the herbs, by which point it looked like this. Right about then is when I was really starting to get hungry, and so while this did its thing, covered over medium-low heat, I whipped up a snack on the side for my wife and I: portabello mushrooms with herbs and balsamic vinegar, finished with a little Parmesian cheese (freshly grated reggiano, of course).
We ate those, mmm, and other than coming back to stir the pot occasionally, that was done and out of mind. I considered making a hearty, whole-wheat flatbread but decided against it figuring I wasn't feeding an army. It would have went perfectly with the soup, though!

A couple of hours later, there was something else to do: get the meat out of the stew and cut it up into little bite-sized pieces. I opted to cut it, instead of pulling it, because that way I could choose to go across the grain and have much more tender little morsels in there. The pieces, actually, were on par with those from the carrots and potatoes in size. It looked like this, in fact, just before I put it back into the stew:

To finish, I let the little meat bits cook in the stew for a while and get nice and saturated with the liquid. That also gave the barley, potatoes, and rice enough time to start to disintegrate a little, offering their starch into the broth to make it into a more gravy-like consistency. Finally, of course, I adjusted the seasoning (salt, pepper, and vinegar) and the served it in bowls. If more people had been around, freshly made flatbreads or (better) some nice crusty sourdough would have made the meal absolutely perfect. The lamb really gives it a nice touch being just a tad on the gamey side of red meat flavors, though not nearly so strong as venison (which makes an awesome stew of this sort also, hunters!).

You should try it, especially as the weather starts to turn a bit cooler like this. It's really wonderful!

Sweet Chile Colorado On Beef Fajitas Over Rice

2009-10-01T21:35:00.003-04:00

Because JB came to my house the other day and basically made me pick all the peppers in my garden, I had a plethora of late-season peppers, mostly Nardello, though with several beautiful orange and green bells, and I had to do something with them. This was my almost inspired use of the little beauties.
Secretly, I'm not a big fan of fajitas, although I think essentially everyone else in the world loves them. Honestly, it's not that I don't like them as much as it's that there are a lot of other things in the Mexican restaurants that I'd rather eat than fajitas. If they did fajitas with chile colorado like I did last night, then I might be inclined to change my mind on that.

I started with a recipe for "New Mexico Chile" and made my plan from there, intending to use the Nardellos instead of the dried red New Mexico chiles that usually make up the dish. I cut up about fifteen of them and did a reasonable, though imperfect, job of seeding them. I also smashed two cloves of garlic and roughly chopped them into the pile, and for a little kick, I chopped up a single, rather small (red) cayenne pepper as well. With just a little chopped onion, a little freshly picked and chopped oregano, a heavy pinch of cumin seeds, and a little bit of chopped garlic chives, I was set to make the sauce.
With a little oil in the pan, I added all of those peppers, onions, garlic, and whatnot and started to let it sizzle for a while. After it did its thing for about ten minutes or so, stirring it occasionally, of course, I added a bit of water and some red wine vinegar along with some salt and pepper. After that bubbled for a bit, I added the herbs, and that's what this picture shows, steam-blur and all. It was starting to smell mighty nice in the kitchen right about then.

While the sauce cooked down, half covered over medium heat, I cleaned and sliced two green bell peppers and half an onion into some healthy-sized pieces. I also took two bottom-round steaks, which I got for a great price, and sliced them thinly across the grain, cutting them into approximately two-inch-long strips. Not shown in the photo is the lime that I cut into quarters.

After I got everything all cut up and decided that the peppers had stewed for long enough, I poured all of that mess into the blender and let it run for a while. When it came out, it was thick, almost like paste, so I had to add some water. Immediately, I put it back on the cook, and here's a photo of the smoothed-out version bubbling away.

Meanwhile, I started some oil in a large skillet, which I put over high heat and let get very hot. Not having made fajitas before, I screwed the next part up and put the meat in first. I should have done the veggies ahead of the steak so they'd kind of caramelize. In any case, I put in the steak and let it cook for a few minutes, stirring it around to cook it fairly evenly, added the onions and peppers, and let it all cook like that over vigorous heat until the meat was just short of done, which didn't take long. Once the meat was just barely short of being done, as in the picture, I added the red-pepper sauce to the pan and let it stew the meat and veggies the rest of the way. When I turned it off, I added the juice of half of that lime and stirred it through. It was brilliant.

As you can see in the picture at the top of the post, I served this delicious stuff over lightly cumin-scented brown rice, although it would have been absolutely incredible over wet polenta (meaning without doing the baking business) heavily loaded with colby-jack cheese. I also intended to add some black beans to the entire mix, adding them to the skillet with the sauce or serving them on the side, but as I wasn't feeding as many people as usual last night, I held off on those. They would have been great, though, as would have been a little dollop of sour cream off to the side.

Also, had I left out the cumin from the sauce recipe, replacing it instead with a pinch of fennel seeds and adding a bit of rosemary and basil (and perhaps a tomato or two for character), this sauce would have been mind-blowing over pasta (and easily vegetarian-friendly in that case). In fact, it would have been absolutely incredible with pasta, some sauteed veggies, and, if you're into getting some protein veg-style, dry, fluffy scrambled eggs. Peppers play very well with eggs. If we have another Nardello harvest still out there on our little bushes, then I'll try that soon and let you know. Otherwise, it will have to wait until next year!

Fried Potatoes with Leek

2009-09-30T11:36:00.007-04:00

Leeks really are a beautiful vegetable: onion-like but mild and with an interesting shape and texture. They also play very well with potatoes, most often in a leek and potato soup, so I thought it would be interesting and tasty to try them fried with potatoes. Here's how it went!
First thing first, I crushed and chopped up two cloves of garlic, then I cut up the white and light green part of a leek, one Nardello (sweet) pepper from the garden (picked by the "famous" JB, who came to visit us last week from Beijing! Hence the lack of posting for the week), and four potatoes, washed and peeled. Other than seasoning, that made the entire ingredient list.
I put about two tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil in my large skillet and put it over medium-high heat next and added the potatoes. Since potatoes take a lot longer to cook through than any of the other ingredients, I let them fry like this for several minutes, getting soft and slowly browning, before adding anything else except a little salt and freshly ground black pepper. Occasionally I tossed them around in the pan to try to encourage some evenness in the cooking, but for the most part, I like to leave them alone so that at least one side gets a little toasty golden-brown.
That's when I added the leeks, peppers, and garlic, which I tossed through, seasoned lightly, and let cook until everything was done.

After it was done (see the main picture above), I topped it with a little freshly grated Parmigiano reggiano and plated it just as the cheese melted a little. It was LOVELY.

Stir Fried Mushrooms and Bok Choy With Pork and Homemade Noodles (Mian)

2009-09-18T21:06:00.005-04:00

My wife loved this. In fact, she talked about it for days, which I can say because I have to guiltily confess that I made this a week ago and am only now getting around to posting it.
Doesn't it look good? I can tell you, like my wife surely would, that it was extremely good and very characteristic of real Chinese cooking, based on my experiences with JB this summer (n.b.: all of the dishes labeled with "JB" in the title are directly based on the meals I watched/helped him prepare and enjoyed dozens of times this past summer while living with him, and JB is short for Jinbao, which is a very Chinese name for a very Chinese guy that cooks very authentically Chinese food). That said, you won't probably have a dish like this in a Chinese restaurant unless it's a very authentic one, and although I'm not super-widely traveled, I do know that the vast majority of "authentic" Chinese restaurants aren't. I couldn't tell you what area of China this dish is typical of, but since it reminds me of JB's cooking, we'll say the area around the capitol and be willing to be wrong. I should point out that he never got bok choy while we were together, passing it over for Napa cabbage every single time, so to make it more characteristic of his cooking, replace the bok choy with Napa cabbage. He used a lot of it. I'm sure it's pretty common in his cooking.

Stories aside... how did I make it? Well, as so often happens, I found a cut of meat that's suitable for my purposes and a great deal and built the recipe around it. Bone-in pork steaks (not chops, though honestly I don't yet know the difference) were on sale when I went shopping and looked plenty fresh enough for my purposes, so I got some. I was surprised to see how little bone and fat there was given that it definitely carried a bone-in price per pound (i.e. low). As you'll see below, I ended up cutting it up into roughly half-inch cubes and setting it aside until it was business time, although that actually happened after I cut up the veggies, which happened after I put a pot of salted water on the boil to make the pasta.

The stars of this dish were the veggies, of course, and those required some prep work. First, I used three kinds of mushrooms, two ribs of celery, almost an entire head of bok choy, about half a sweet onion, and the obligatory garlic (two or three cloves, crushed first and finely chopped) and ginger (about three quarters of an inch, cut into fine matchsticks because I have a slight bent toward that shape over minced or coined ginger in dishes). The three types of mushrooms were baby 'bella (about 4-5 of them, halved and sliced thinly), shiitake (sliced thinly), and maitake (chopped roughly).

The cutting of the other veggies was like this: I cut the half of the onion so it became quarters and then sliced quarter-inch thick slices across it. Done. I then tore the greens off of the bok choy and sliced the whites and celery into thin cross sections... lots of them. Done. Finally, I sliced and chopped the mushrooms. Done. After setting all of that on a plate, I made a chiffonade of the bok choy greens and then cut up the meat and made the pasta dough (2 cups all-purpose or bread flour, about 2/3 of a cup of water, a pinch of salt, and a lot of kneading).

Once everything was in place and my pasta water was boiling, I started the heat on the wok at a high temperature and added a couple of tablespoons of canola oil. I'd have preferred peanut oil, but I don't have any right now because I didn't want to buy the high-falutin' kind and refused to buy almost two gallons at a go. Anyway, the veggies, sans garlic and greens, went first with just a bit of salt. After they had a few minutes of rather vigorous stir-frying, I added the garlic, greens, another light pinch of salt, and a small splash of toasted sesame oil to the pan, tossed it gently for about thirty seconds, and poured the mixture on the plate. That's what you see in this picture: the veggies waiting on the plate for Phase Two.

Before starting Phase Two, I shaved and pinched the noodles from the dough directly into the boiling water and let them get cooking. Once that was done, I made sure my pan was cooking hot again with just about half a tablespoon (or a little less, maybe) of fresh oil in it and added the meat, which I immediately salted lightly and peppered with freshly ground black pepper (because my first attempts to get Szechuan peppercorns failed -- I'll have to use the internet for those, I think). I let the meat cook until it looked like in the picture, meaning until it was definitely close but not quite done. Overcooked meat is tough and not good and defeats almost the entire purpose of the stir-frying over high heat. When the meat took on that appearance, I added a couple of tablespoons of rice wine and let it sizzle for about thirty seconds before adding the veggies back in. About a tablespoon and a half or so of soy sauce chased the veggies.

After a quick stir, it was time to drain the pasta, and as soon as it was drained and shaken, I added the pasta in and mixed it up, and that's what you see at the top.

Seriously. This was good. Really good. Definitely a thumbs up!

Honeycrisp Apples

2009-09-17T19:05:00.003-04:00

Wow. After three years of enjoying these beauties in the fall, all I can still say (as I munch on one now) is "wow." Not "wow!" That was the first year. The "wow" of the honeycrisp apple for me has mellowed into an enduring wow of subtle and deep appreciation and ever-renewing amazement.
This apple, in my opinion, is the apple that redefined all apples for me. I had my preferences before my first honeycrisp: this apple is good, that one isn't so good, that other one is okay or good enough or some such. All apples now are inferior compared with these beautiful specimens. They have the perfect balance between sweetness and tartness along with a full, pleasant apple flavor that leads me to believe that if I actually believed the story about the Garden of Eden, I'm pretty sure I know which apple that snake was peddling and why Eve, who otherwise had it all, fell to the temptation -- and would do it again knowing the full ramifications of her actions (if it was a story to be taken literally, I say again!). I mean, seriously. They're that good. Almost all other apples for me now are either "pie apples" or "juicing apples," the latter category including inferior pears and crab apples in addition to the usual mealy kinds that I don't like but can often get for a low, low price and run through my juicer just the same.

I belly up for these apples. They can be pricy. The four above were what was left of the six that I bought for a little under $14.50 the other day, but on the other hand, they're huge. On the first hand, they're still over $3 a pound, which is about $2 a pound more than I'm usually happy to let go of for apples. These are worth it, though.

Here's my story on Honeycrisps because it's just worth sharing. A few years ago, I went to New England in the early Autumn for some training, and with me went hope well-founded for some near-perfect New England apples. The first one I grabbed, hoping for a Cortland, was a honeycrisp, a varietal I'd never heard of and felt willing to try since they came from a local orchard somewhere in rural Massachussetts. I took my first bite of it as soon as I got out of the store and after my traveling buddy bit into his lifetime-first Cortland (we don't get good apples in the South, or so we used to say because it was true). He almost fell over from it, but it was nothing in comparison to my nearly ridiculous reaction to my first honeycrisp. "WOW!" is a big understatement. On threat of pain or death, I made him go back into the store and buy a honeycrisp, which ellicited a similar reaction from him. I was sold. Appledom had been redefined in just one bite.

They never got old. I ate dozens, figuring that'd be all I could get until next time I came to New England. I sucked down the cider of the precious fruit, ate two or three before meals and others as snacks, and loved every bite of them. I was just sad that I couldn't bring some home with me, having no room in my luggage to carry them. Then I came home, and lo! Honeycrisps were in the store just weeks after I told my family about this unbelievable, almost mythically good apple. Their reactions matched mine.

Folks, I tell you. This is the best apple ever. Ever. Ever ever ever ever ever. You should drop whatever you're doing right now and go buy a dozen of them, especially if they're huge.

JB's Lamb and Leek with Homemade Noodles (Mian)

2009-09-16T15:29:00.003-04:00

I redid a "classic" last night, this time with lamb instead of beef. Click here for the recipe, see here for the picture:
The only change in the recipe from the previous one is that I replaced the beef with an equal amount of lamb's leg, which, of course, tastes slightly different and altogether wonderful. I really hope you try it!

Coffee Commentary: Vienna Coffee Company's Organic Balinese Blue Krishna

2009-09-15T20:12:00.003-04:00

Look at this beautiful batch of beans that I took straight from the bag of Vienna Coffee Company's absolutely delicious, wonderfully different Organic Balinese Blue Krishna coffee.
I actually went to the Vienna Coffee roastery last Friday and was given the five-star tour of the place, which is, of course, everything I expected out of a place that roasts coffee but isn't a coffee shop in addition to that. Their roasters are nice and state of the art; there was a table of fellows, including the roast master, sitting around shooting the bull and/or talking business (I didn't eavesdrop to find out which), and a very helpful lady working the retail register that answered lots of my questions, talked shop with me for a bit, helped me pick a couple of coffees, showed me their facility (said five-star tour), and was all-around pleasant to talk with. I found out that they roast nearly continuously: three days a week during the summer and full-time during the winter (because it apparently gets wicked hot in there in the summer while roasting), and that the coffee is constantly being cycled around, sold and moved, and is therefore always fresh and great. I picked up two kinds that I'd never tried before and promised to write about this one (though eventually both will get some attention) as I was leaving. I would have done it sooner, but I really wanted to experience this coffee fully before I said anything about it.

This coffee is different from any other I've had. The flavor is almost... tangy, I think, though not in a bad way... when made into faux-espresso either in my Aeropress or in my moka. It's a very pleasant flavor that more strongly reminds me of my espresso-drinking experiences in Tuscany a few years ago than any other varietal or roast since. In fact, I would dare say that it was a distinctly familiar taste that harkened back to my time in Northern Italy, although my research on the matter indicates that this coffee is usually sent to the Japanese markets instead of those in Europe or America. The interesting combination of flavors is, of course, most poignant and tantalizing when it's taken black, though they all stand up very well and play quite interestingly with sugar. Adding cream after that mellows the flavors considerably, although it still results in a very pleasant cup (or cappuccino) that has an extremely unique taste that my wife says is her second favorite or maybe favorite of all (after Sumatra Mandheling, like anything can compare with that rich, full flavor).

The first thing my first taste test told me about this coffee, however, was "this will be good brewed cold." I had to get a new French press for that, though, and hence part of the delay. I realized that there's one at my mom's house that no one on earth but my brother uses, and since he lives more than 90% of the year out west in New Mexico and California, I figured I could swipe it temporarily with no harm nor foul. That's what I did, but I forgot it accidently on my first trip there -- warning, this link is to another blog I keep about my family life and the ridiculous dealings with a ridiculous teenager that resulted from this forgetful episode, so foodies in particular might not find any interest in it -- because Mom is so interesting... and had to wait another day to start this fifteen-hour-long experiment. Finally I did it, and I was right, though many of the tangy, interesting notes that scream to be enjoyed cold don't bloom as strongly in the cold brew as they do in a hot one. Then again, I didn't find them to be as strong in hot-brewed coffee either, at least not compared with pressure-brewed stuff. Still, it was delicious: almost certainly a pinnacle moment in my list of cold-brewing experiences.

All-told, I'd say that I strongly like this coffee and will definitely be getting it again... and again... and again. To quote the nice lady at the Company, "this one is kind of a party in your mouth, and it's hard to describe. Some seem to really like it, and some seem not to." My advice: try it.

Akoho sy Voanio (Chicken in Coconut Milk)

2009-09-09T22:44:00.004-04:00

A dish from Madasgascar, you say? Yes, I do say, and yes, it is good. My first reaction upon reading the recipe for this was "that sounds relatively interesting... might be worth a try." My first reaction upon tasting the outcome was "holy ___ (something that doesn't rhyme with "now" or have anything to do with any food that I'm eating)!!!" It was a lot better than I had expected, needless to say (but said anyway). Here's what it looks like on plate:
Basically, this is like a curry without the curry, although I understand that adding curry is an interesting and pleasant side adventure. It's also remarkably simple to make. I nicknamed the recipe "the recipe of twos" because of all of the twos in it. To highlight that, let me list the ingredients:

Two pounds of chicken meat (I use chicken thighs, typically and here) or a whole chicken, cut it up or not ahead of time (mine is boneless thighs -- on sale at the store today -- cut into roughly one-inch cubes);
Two small to medium onions, chopped;
Two (or three) medium fresh tomatoes, chopped;
Two (or three) cloves of garlic, crushed and finely chopped;
An inch of ginger, sliced to dime-thick circles and sliced into matchsticks or finely chopped;
One can of coconut milk or the equivalent in homemade coconut milk;
Salt and pepper to taste;
Serve over (brown) rice (we always start with two cups, dry, for the amount of liquid this produces).

Of course, that's the "official," i.e. boring, version of the recipe. Here is an amendment I've found worth making: salt and pepper the chicken as you normally might before cooking it but also add a light dusting of cinnamon powder and cayenne pepper powder to it. Also, be very attentive to the salt -- either too little or too much really takes away from this dish. Had I not hit it on the head the first time I made it out of dumb, beginner's luck, my reaction would have been far muted from where it was and this probably wouldn't have ever been cooked in my house again (or on this blog). Luckily for all of us, it was perfect and delicious. My subsequent attempts have taught me to taste, resalt, taste, resalt, taste, resalt, etc., at the end until it's perfect.

Start by cutting everything up nicely. The chicken is secretly already cut up and browning in the pan (seasoned with salt, fresh black pepper, a dusting of cinnamon, and a dusting of cayenne) and does not appear in this picture. As you can tell, the first thing you do after that is start the chicken, which should be browning in a large pot with canola, peanut, or coconut oil. Peanut oil is most traditional, apparently, in Madagascar, and coconut oil is okay too. I used canola oil because it's what I have. Clicking on this picture brings up a bigger version so you can see how I cut up the ginger. I prefer it this way because the slightly bigger pieces taste nice.

Special note: depending on how long you need the "stew" portion of this to cook and the color of your rice, you might have started the rice ahead of time. Here are the tips for how I make rice (and I always make not-white rice):

Toast your rice by putting it in the pan you intend to cook it in over medium-high heat and moving it around a lot until you hear the little grains popping softly kind of like popcorn or until you notice that they're getting a little toasty-looking;
Season your rice with salt and black pepper at the least;
Scent your rice with appropriate flavorings -- here I used two bay leaves and two coins of ginger;
Use just a bit under twice as much water as you did rice for whole-grain rice (about a tablespoon short of double per cup of rice is about right);
Let it boil after you've added your water for a little bit (two or three minutes) before lowering the heat and adding the lid.
When it finishes cooking (45 minutes covered for normal brown rice), turn off the heat, shake it vigorously, and either replace the lid or never take it off... let it finish steaming until you're ready to use it.

This is a photo of the browned chicken when it's browned enough to add the onions, which go in next. It took it about six minutes over medium-high heat to get to this point, stirring it occasionally. It requires about that long again with the onions so that they cook until they are translucent. I realize this picture is sideways. I'm having technical difficulties today and am not feeling like fixing it this time.

After the onions have cooked thoroughly enough, add in the garlic and ginger and let it cook for another minute, stirring, of course. Then, add the tomatoes and coconut milk pretty much straight away. It looks about like this at that point.

I know... another sideways picture. It wasn't sideways in my previewer, and fixing this issue is kind of a game of jumping through hoops. I have better things to do tonight. After it cooks/stews in a mostly covered pan over medium heat (which you turn it to after the mixture comes nearly to a boil or starts boiling, depending a bit on your patience) for at least twenty minutes, it starts looking like this. Now you can start the process of salting it to taste, which requires a fair amount of salt because of the coconut milk. Essentially, it's done now if you used little pieces of chicken already cut up, but over the next little bit, the chicken will become more tender. If you used bigger chicken pieces, you'll need at least 10-15 more minutes than that. If you used a whole chicken, the total cooking time after the liquid is added is about an hour to an hour and twenty. Then you have to get the meat off the bone or figure out how you're going to serve it.

My only serving suggestion for this is to put it over the rice and don't be cheap with the liquid -- it's delicious. Also, expect seconds are in order once you taste it. It's really incredible stuff. A proper dessert in Madagascar involves peanuts almost always, apparently, so I usually finish this up with a simple American twist on that: a spoonful of peanut butter with chocolate chips in it or some equivalent peanut-butter-based candy that I don't buy much of.

Healthy Juicing!

2009-09-06T17:46:00.003-04:00

Why would you want to turn all of this loveliness
into this other loveliness?
Because it's good for you, obviously! The benefits of juicing fresh fruits and especially vegetables are numerous: first of all, you get your fresh fruits and veg requirement in a pretty quick and easy step. Second of all, it's nutrition central: at least anecdotal evidence floats around out there that it can strongly help prevent or even, in some cases, cure cancer or other chronic illnesses. Third of all, it's pretty tasty, although it does take a little getting used to when you're drinking veg.

I've talked about juicing before and mentioned things like how it makes my hair and nails grow like mad when I drink juice regularly (proving (?) its goodness for the body). See here for that. What I'm about here is talking about some of what I know about the various ingredients that I juice on a regular basis.

Carrots:
Carrots are the anchor around with the rest of my juice is made. I always include carrots in my juices unless they are specifically designed to be a specialty fruit-only juice or an ingredient for cooking. Carrots are loaded with beta carotene and a host of other vitamins and minerals, and for the tiny number of calories they possess, they are extremely nutrient-dense. If you've never drank a glass of straight-up, freshly made carrot juice, then you really should just to see what it does to your body. If you do it on a more-or-less empty stomach, it's kind of like pouring Liquid Schwartz in your engine.

Apples:
Besides being somewhat good in the vitamins and minerals department, apples are very high in natural sugars that really elevate the energy levels. These are almost as great a pick-me-up as many of the more popular, caffeinated avenues to that end. Honestly, their nutritional profile in juice form is rather unremarkable, but their main benefit is in making almost any other juice far more palatable because they're very sweet in an inoffensive, well-mixing way. A few apples will make far rougher juices much easier and pleasant to drink. They are, however, high in sugar, so if that's an issue, do go easy with them. Sadly, the biggest nutritional boon of apples is their fiber content, most of which is lost in the juicing process.

Celery:
This soup-flavoring veg makes a lot of juice for how much of it you have to use, but its flavor is strong. It's good by itself with apples or in small quantities in other juices, and a couple of juiced stalks do well in a vegetable soup with a little simmering. The nutritional value of celery lies primarily in electrolytes it contains, though it does contain small quantities of amino acids that are helpful as well. Traditionally, celery is used to decrease inflammation and detoxify the body because it contains coumarins.

Beets:
I'm kind of excited about beets lately. I don't really like them, to be straight with you, but they are nice in juice (though if overdone will cause red diarrhea the next day!). A half a beet or a small-to-medium whole one is fine for two servings of juice. It's long been suggested by folk wisdom (or at least I heard it) that beets will make you strong, and there might be something to that. Besides being high in antioxidants, vitamins, and minerals, beets provide a significant amount of nitric oxide in the diet, which is a compound used by serious exercisers to promote better blood flow to tissues, including muscle tissue, under the presumption that it will increase muscle growth overall. While that's not substantiated, the use of nitric-oxide enhancing supplements isn't decreased by the belief or science in any way. More reliably, the nitric oxide in beets is known to lower blood pressure because nitric oxide is a natural vasodilator (it dilates your blood vessels). Over a rather short time period (a few hours after consuming some beet juice), there is a marked drop in blood pressure that lasts for about a day. Daily consumption won't replace blood pressure medicine, but it can help keep the numbers a little lower in the very mildly hypertensive. Nitric oxide in the diet is also known to act beneficially on the male sexual response, and so beet juice may have these kinds of effects, though very slight, as well. Finally, in a recent study, it was shown that regular consumption of beet juice by athletes increased their endurance by as much as 16% in controlled tests. When they're fresh, I include the beet stems and leaves in my juice too!

Ginger Rhizome:
I include a little ginger in most of my juices because it is good for digestion, warming and simulating to the digestive organs, and helps settle the stomach. It's used in traditional medicines in almost every culture that can get their hands on it, almost always for digestive reasons, and it has been shown to have better effects, without side effects, than many commercial motion-sickness medicines, including prescription-strength ones (disclaimer: I'm not advising you to stop taking anything recommended by your doctor for any reason). It's apparently a bad idea to have in your diet if you have gallstones, but without those, it seems to have beneficial effects on cholesterol levels. It's also a mild blood thinner and seems to help prevent and cure various forms of diarrhea. It also seems to have beneficial effects on blood sugar levels in some cases. In any case, it's hot and tasty, so it adds a certain zest to the juice but can easily be overwhelming.

Lemon:
The last "usual" ingredient that I use is lemon. This appears in most of my juices because of it's nice Vitamin C content and very pleasant flavor (once combined with the sweeter apples and carrots). You can juice the whole fruit without peeling it (supposing it is washed very well and/or organic), getting some of the benefits of the zest and pith as well. Lemon juice is supposed to help clear the body of mucus as well and is a popular ingredient in detox preparations.

If you haven't juiced, then you might try it. I have found very few people, other than those who are total slaves to their tastebuds (as the flavor takes some getting used to except in the cases of fruits only) or very lazy (because the prep and cleanup are a bit of a chore), that don't see the overwhelming benefit to their health provided by adding some fresh juices this way.

Funghi e Porco Raso con il Pesto e Pasta Casalinga

2009-09-06T13:43:00.004-04:00

Even though I don't speak Italian, I thought "Mushrooms and Shaved Pork with Pesto and Homemade Pasta" might sound better that way. Thanks to an online translator, I probably titled this post completely incorrectly, but I'd only find that entertaining and am not particularly fussed by it. Sorry if it insults someone in your family. I'm just trying to have some fun here. Anyway, here's the dish:
The deal to making good, fresh pesto (if you don't just buy some and save yourself a little time and effort) is that you've got to have access to fresh herbs: lots of them! The problem with that is that fresh herbs are expensive to buy, so it's really best to grow your own. Luckily, we're slowly transforming much of our yard into a garden, and herbs grow, at least in the summer months, in plenitude throughout the yard.
For this dish, I gathered rosemary (one sprig), oregano (two sprigs), three kinds of basil, and a little parsley. Since pine nuts are expensive, I didn't put any in my pesto, but I did include some fennel seed that I ground up freshly before I started. Here's my cutting board covered in the herbs (before processing, obviously) and a head of garlic, two cloves of which ended up getting crushed and tossed into the food processor just a few minutes later. To make sure I gathered enough herbs, my process was simple: go pick some herbs until I'm sure I have enough, then pick some more until I'm sure I have too much, and then pick a little bit more because making enough pesto to be the sauce for a whole meal requires quite a lot of leaves. This pile of herbs, in fact, only made about four or five ounces of finished pesto after riding in the food processor with those ground fennel seeds, a little salt, a little black pepper, and a couple of tablespoons of e.v. olive oil.
In this photo you can see the ground up pesto in our little food processor (oxidized to a dark green on top and secretly much brighter green underneath) along side seven sliced up white mushrooms (halved and sliced thinly, as I so often do) and half a red onion, halved and sliced thinly. Processing the pesto really meant little more than turning on the machine with just the fennel seeds in there (about half a teaspoon of them) and letting them grind up for about two minutes, stuffing in all of the leaves (pulled from their stems) and garlic, adding some oil, and grinding in two two-minute bursts, scraping the sides down in between. That's easy if you have access to lots of herbs. In addition to the onions and mushrooms, I also crushed and finely chopped two more garlic gloves to be cooked with the meat. Right after I gathered the herbs, by the way, before I even processed them, I started a pot of salted water on its long trip toward boiling so that I'd be able to cook the pasta as soon as I was ready to.

The meat was pork loin that I bought when the price was right a few weeks ago and promptly froze, not having any particular desire to use it right away. Frozen meat has a distinct advantage over its non-frozen counterpart: it's easy to slice thinly once it's partially thawed (when still hard-frozen, it's hard to cut and freezes your hand off!). I cut off about a one pound chunk, maybe a quarter pound heavier, for this recipe and proceeded to slice it like it's prosciutto, so thinly that sometimes I could see through it. I also cut it into small pieces about the size of quarters or so. Oh, and somewhere in there, I made the dough for the pasta:

2.5 cups of flour (0.5 of which was whole wheat, but that's optional);
about 3/4 cup water;
half a teaspoon of salt;
two gallons of elbow grease.

The process is straightforward: sift the flour and salt into a bowl, make a depression for the water, add the water, combine the ingredients into a doughy ball, a bit on the dry side, turn it out onto a counter, and knead it until it's smooth, roughly 10-15 minutes) or a little longer (if you like chewier pasta). My awesome wife helped out with the kneading this time while I cut up the pork! Once the pasta dough was ready, sitting patiently in its bowl waiting for me to pull it (I pulled it instead of shaving it this time) and the pork was sliced up, the cooking, which was quick, quick, began.
First, I tossed the mushrooms and onions into a searing-hot, large frying pan with a little olive oil and added a bit of salt, a little pepper, and some red pepper flakes. I let them cook until the onions went translucent and then poured all of it out of the pan and back onto the plate where they had been waiting for me. While that were cooking, I pulled the pasta out with my thumb (in a hard pinch) and tore it off into pieces into the boiling water. Here's what it looked like when they were all in there -- notice how, for the most part, they've all sunk. They'll float, or at least some will, when they're ready. After pouring out the veggies, I added a little more oil to the pan, let it regain its heat for a few seconds, and added the pork and garlic with a little salt. Stirring it a lot, I cooked that until the pork was just barely not finished cooking, at which point I added the vegetables back in and mixed everything together. Just then, I drained the pasta, which was done (after about 4-5 minutes in the water), splashed a little red wine vinegar (because I don't have any white wine vinegar) over the meat and veggies mixture, and added the herb part of the pesto to the pan. After stirring it in a little, I added the pasta, stirred much more actively, and then added about a fourth of a cup of fresh grated Parmesan cheese (to "finish" the pesto).

Stirring finished it, and I served it up in heaping mounds to the delight of all.

Tonight, I think, will be another rendition of JB's beef and potatoes stew with the added bonus of a large number of sliced shiitake mushrooms!

Morning Cappuccino and a Coffee Comparison/Review

2009-09-05T12:13:00.002-04:00

I've talked about my cappuccinos before, the ones I have on a daily basis with my wife to tremendous enjoyment an as a celebration of everyday romance, but I haven't shown you what these little beauties look like. Here's the cups I made the other day in my favorite mugs ever, which I got at Big Lots about seven years ago for fifty cents each (had I known their greatness when I bought them, I would have bought all they had of them).
Someone might find argument with how these look, but do remember that I don't actually possess any of the proper tools for making a proper cappuccino, and yet I still have fooled even seasoned Europeans (meaning Europeans that have been to Italy and France and enjoyed many coffees in each place) into believing I do have such equipment. This isn't about recipes, though. I think I mentioned before how I make these. See here, for instance. The real trick is simple, of course: don't be cheap, i.e. buy good coffee, use plenty of it, buy good sugar and cream, and use enough of those, and if you add flavorings, get the good ones, e.g. by Rieme.

This post really was to show that picture, but I should talk about the coffee in those mugs. As usual, it came from Vienna Coffee Company here in Maryville, TN. The method of brewing it into cappuccino (actually what we call "pressoccino," to be more "accurate") is the same as in the recipe linked to above. All that varies over time is the particular kind of coffee we get. What's in those mugs is their Sumatra Mandheling, which is roasted medium-dark and absolutely glorious as everyone who has had a Mandheling from Sumatra knows. The flavor is rich and complex, deep and satisfying, and it stands up nicely to milk and sugar to have a very round, full mouth feel and flavor. I think that were it not for my love of variety, I'd probably only rarely buy any other flavor of coffee because this one is really hard to beat. It is almost definitely my wife's favorite.

I'm comparing it with the other flavor we've been going back and forth on, one I intend to write a more proper review of later: their Mocca Java, a blend of coffees from Yemen (Mocca) and Indonesia (Java) that they claim has big earthy flavors and a complex flavor for a darker roast. I definitely taste the earthiness and complexity, but honestly, I find the taste a bit flat, particularly after the very round, robust taste of the Sumatra Mandheling. I've been holding off on a review of this particular blend because I figured I owed it the honor of being brewed in a Moka since there is pun-value there, but I haven't gotten around to it (my wife doesn't much like the output of the Moka because the coffee seems to make her jittery that way -- I suspect it's the oils, many of which don't pass the paper filter of the Aeropress). The Vienna website claims that this cup has chocolate notes despite being unflavored, and I think I can see that. Perhaps it is one of the reasons for my distaste of it, despite the fact that it's obviously well roasted and well blended coffee: I don't really like chocolate going in my coffee, although I really like coffee going into my chocolate. Honestly, I don't feel like I can give this coffee a fair appraisal until I taste it from a French press, and I broke mine and haven't been in a rush to get a new one (since I only rarely drink brewed coffee now). I will note that it's good enough, despite my tastes, that it has been purchased three out of the last five times I've bought coffee, so it's definitely worth picking up and enjoying.

Incredibly Good, Buttery Mushroom Topping

2009-09-04T21:10:00.004-04:00

Anyone that's ever been to an expensive steak place knows that one of the best things in the whole world to put on top of a lovely chunk of perfectly cooked meat is a beautiful compound butter. For the purposes of this, I will pretend "compound butter," which means something quite specific, means "flavored butter." Since "compound butter" melts directly on the hot, grilled meat, I will further take "flavored butter" here to mean "melted flavored butter," i.e. "butter-based sauce-like topping." If I had called this post "Mushroom Butter-Based Sauce-Like Topping," it would have lost 98.3% of its appeal (I'm a mathematician, so I made that number up just like any regular person could have done). This is, in fact, very similar to something I did recently, although I took it in a slightly different direction this time and made something lovely, proving that creativity often lives in variations on the uncreatively reused ideas from last week. Then I decided it needed its own spotlight. Too bad I'm not good enough at Photoshop (and don't own it) to put a spotlight shining on the picture I took of the sauce-like stuff cooking. Thus, imagine there's a spotlight, and let it be as glorious as you know this thing tasted!
There it is, bubbling away. There isn't too much in there:

three white mushrooms, halved and sliced very thinly;
a clove of garlic, smashed, chopped finely (first) and added last;
an "edge" of a medium onion (1/4 c.-ish), sliced thinly and halved (about an inch long and paper thin);
three or four tablespoons of unsalted butter;
salt and black pepper to taste;
about three tablespoons of nice red wine vinegar (substitute your favorite flavor of vinegar depending on the dish you're making).

I didn't put any fresh herbs in this because, honestly, I didn't feel like going out to where they're growing and picking them. Thyme would have been particularly nice, though, as would rosemary or whichever herbs happen to be the best complements to either what you're putting this on or what side dishes you're serving. I was just putting this on rather uninspired burgers (cumin and crushed black pepper crusted, actually, served on nice thick toast with mayo and hot sauce). This would have been spectacular on top of any of the following, though:

steak (wow, yes);
burgers (I know; I did it);
meatloaf (hmm... that's a better idea than I thought when I decided to type it...);
chicken (baked or grilled);
pork chops or roast;
sliced roast beef (also known as "Reason Number Three not to be vegetarian");
pasta (if I doubled or maybe tripled the recipe, particularly if I did it with thinly sliced grilled chicken and fresh chopped tomato added at the last second so it barely warms up and doesn't cook);
scrambled eggs or a scrambled egg burrito if you don't mind it dripping with buttery awesome.

The making of it was easy also: melt the butter in a small saucepan or skillet, add the not-garlic veggies and salt, cook until the onions go translucent, add the garlic, cook for 1-2 more minutes, add the vinegar and pepper, and let it reduce (i.e. concentrate and marry the flavors) for 5-10 minutes over medium heat or until whatever else you're cooking is done cooking using lower heat as needed to accomplish that feat. To serve it, proceed to put some including the sauce it's kind of swimming in over whichever of the above things you've made. If you're doing it with pasta, just put all of it in the pasta and toss it.

Chicken Noodle Soup, Completely From Scratch

2009-08-30T22:16:00.005-04:00

My wife was sick today, so I made her chicken noodle soup. I did the whole bit from scratch, save one little flavor-amplifying corner that I cut. It looked good; here's her picture of her bowl of soup:
Notice how it is excitingly not yellow.

Here's a little warning for you: this takes all day, but here's the light at the end of that tunnel: it's completely worth it because it's the best chicken noodle soup ever.

Start by making a real, nice chicken stock. This is where I cut corners and used store-bought (fancy-pants kind) chicken stock in my chicken stock. To make it you're basically going to throw most of the kitchen sink into a pot and boil it for a long time. If you have ready access to some nice herbs in your garden, then that's going to help. If not, you'll be okay using dried ones or paying top-dollar for them at the store. You could also not use them, but there just seems to be something almost morally wrong with chicken soup without parsley in it. Also, my ingredient list carries a lot of weird stuff in it because I was going for "medicinal" soup, not just dinner (although it wasn't medicine, strictly speaking, so we all could enjoy it). Thus, my ingredient list includes a few somewhat strange items. It also includes a few nonstandard things because my garden gave me too many of some things that just had to be used somehow. Here's what I put in mine. I'll put "more standard" stock ingredients in italics for you and try to list them all first.

One whole chicken, cut into pieces (I included the giblets too -- ew);
Three medium carrots, scrubbed and chopped into large-ish pieces;
Two ribs of celery, washed and chopped likewise;
One onion (a small, red one for me), peeled and roughly chopped;
A few (five for me) cloves of garlic, smashed and roughly chopped (first);
A few (five or six for me) bay leaves;
Some (maybe 15-20) black peppercorns, whole;
About a tablespoon (?) of sea salt;
A few sprigs of fresh herbs or their dried equivalent (I used a sprig of rosemary, three of thyme, two of basil, a handful of chives, and two sprigs of oregano);
One quart chicken or vegetable stock and one quart water, lightly salted, or two quarts of water, slightly less lightly salted;
Two white mushrooms (all I had left), chopped roughly;
About an inch of ginger sliced thinly;
Approximately one ounce of goji berries;
Approximately 30-40 dried schizandra berries;
Half a teaspoon each of whole cumin and fennel seeds;
Approximately one teaspoon of dried elderberries;
About a dozen Nardello peppers and two sweet bell peppers (garden overload!) sliced roughly;
One very small acorn squash (from the garden, unlikely to be used otherwise), sliced into large pieces (seeds included in stock);
The peels of a potato and a small turnip.

Basically, all I did was cut everything up and put it all into a big pot, poured in the stock first and then water until everything was more-or-less covered, and put it over medium-high heat until it boiled. Then I covered it and let it cook like that over medium heat for about thirty-five or forty minutes, until I was pretty sure the chicken was done. The only special note here is that I planned to use a potato and a turnip in my finished soup, and so I peeled those, included the peels in the stock, and put both in a bowl of cold water to keep them from "rusting." I left the skin on the chicken because it is full of lovely virtuous substances like gelatin and fat, but if you're less into fat, you could have cut it off first and not included it.

Once the chicken was done, meaning cooked through enough to where it was ready to fall off the bone, I fished all of it out, which took a little while. The giblets that I put into the pot stayed there and continued to do what they would to the stock. Once it was all out, I re-covered the pot and let the chicken cool for about ten minutes, and then I proceeded to pick all of that lovely meat off of those bones and set it aside, covered, until the very end of this whole story. I put the bones and skin and chewy bits back into the pot because their virtues hadn't all made it into the soup. I let them cook in there with the veggies for another half an hour or so before finishing the stock.

As this boiling process continued, I cut up the vegetables that I actually wanted in the soup (since the stock veggies were all to be discarded). Those would be

Two more carrots cut into small pieces;
The turnip and potato cut into matching small pieces;
One rib of celery cut into small pieces;
One shallot, chopped a bit more finely than I meant to;
Three sprigs of flat-leafed parsley, roughly chopped;
Three tablespoons of unsalted butter (not a veggie but needed in the next step).

When I finished with that, I had conveniently let the bones and veggies cook for just long enough (for me today... I probably could have obtained even more virtue from the bones over the course of another couple hours over medium-low heat), I started the "straining the stock" process, which consists of "pouring" the stock into another large pot or bowl through a fine-mesh strainer. That would be easy enough if I had a second giant pot and a professional-sized strainer, but I don't. That means there was pouring; then there was spooning things out in "strainer-full-sized" scoops and letting it drain. It took a while to get it all done, but eventually I did.

While the last scoop dripped its last bits of stock into the other pot, I started cooking the veggies for the soup in three tablespoons of butter. I wanted to do this for the same amount of time as it takes for onions to go roughly translucent, so I let this happen for about five or six minutes, stirring frequently and salting it lightly while it cooked. You might notice that this is in the same pot. I washed it in between stock-making and veggie cooking.

Once the veggies had cooked for long enough to have softened a bit, I poured in the stock, through the strainer again just in case I missed anything on the first pass (I hadn't, it turned out). You can see in this picture how the stock is a lovely shade of brown instead of a weak yellow tone. That indicates remarkable goodness in the stock and a delicious flavor to come. You can make a darker brown chicken stock, incidentally, from using the bones of a roasted chicken, which you could even further roast to really get them nice and dark. You can also see that turnips and celery float better than carrots, shallots, and potatoes. The scientist in me is dying to talk about density or specific gravity here....
The next thing I did was start to make the dough for the hand-made shaved noodles (刀削面, dao xiao mian), which I already mentioned how to make (see the recipe on the link). I'm finding that the right proportion for the water and flour is 3 and a quarter flours to one water with a pinch of salt and a lot of kneading, but I never get it quite right on the first try anyway. Here's what it looked like after I let it rest for a little bit (in the shape of a lovely ball).

I finished the soup by shaving the pasta into the boiling soup just after I confirmed that the potatoes and turnips were done and that the salt was correct, if not just a bit strong, for the stock (strong to compensate for the noodles). After the noodles finished cooking, which took maybe three or four minutes, I put in some frozen peas (because we didn't grow them this year to have fresh ones) and let them thaw through before turning off the heat and double-checking the salt (it needed a little more, actually).

Just looking at the picture again a few minutes ago made my wife let out a growling "Mmmm," so this one really must have been done right!

Meyer Lemonade

2009-08-27T18:26:00.003-04:00

I wish I had taken a picture, but I didn't. In my bottle today, as I went to work, I made up a quart of Meyer lemonade, which is a nice thing. The Meyer lemons are usually only available in the dead of winter, but since it's the dead of winter in New Zealand, I found some at the store the other day that were so lovely that I had to pay the exorbitant price for them. I won in the end, though, because the cashier just rang them up as lemons, which I didn't notice until I got home. Anyway, they make a beautiful, different kind of lemonade that is all together refreshing and delicious. These were so vivid that they were almost orange. In fact, I was initially attracted to them in the store without realizing they were Meyer lemons because I saw, maybe for the first time in my life, "orange lemons." They weren't quite orange, but they were far more orangish in color than any of the other lemons we have around here.

My basic lemonade recipe runs about like this, although it can, of course, be adjusted to your tastes (I prefer mine slightly sour). I usually use a tablespoon of sugar per lemon's worth of juice and about two and a half or three cups of water. That's the whole recipe. If you want to make a pitcher, scale up (so use about three lemons and three tablespoons of sugar to fill a two-quart pitcher or six lemons and six tablespoons of sugar to fill a gallon).

A nice little thing to do is also to slice up (cross-sectionally) another quarter or half a lemon into almost paper-thin slices and let them float in your pitcher. Not only do they look nice, but they slowly impart their oils into the drink.

Rosemary-Balsamic Mushroom Smothered Hamburgers with Smoked Paprika Home Fries

2009-08-26T21:56:00.004-04:00

No doubt some of you remember (or would like to remember) my recipe from Monday night: smoked paprika home fries, which were spectacular and yet still somewhere in the comfort-food arena. Tonight, I decided to share that recipe with the family, throwing in burgers with a little gourmet touch, though no buns because there was plenty of food without them. Take a look-see:
Of course, all I had to do for the home-fries was scale the recipe up to five potatoes instead of two, so since you're definitely link-savvy, there's no need to repeat that recipe and process here. The rosemary-balsamic mushroom smothering "glaze," however, stands to be talked about, as do the burgers (even though I cheated again and bought -- and seasoned! -- preformed ones at the grocery store seeing as I had enough to do what with working, mowing, tending the garden, cleaning up, cooking, and etc. to get along with today). All I did to those patties was put a fair amount of freshly ground black pepper and seasoned salt on them on both sides before I threw them into the hot pan. I'll mention the cooking details below as well.

First: smash and chop up some garlic (for the mushroom stuff and the potatoes combined, I used five cloves, although none of them was breaking any size records). Then cut up everything that needs to be cut up, details on how to do that are below and on the recipe for the potatoes linked to above.

Now, to make the mushroom "stuff," I started off with about half a stick of butter in a small frying pan (half a stick?!? yes!) over medium heat. To that, once it melted nicely, I added a small amount of finely chopped onion and about seven or eight "baby 'bella" mushrooms that I had cleaned (with a towel), halved, and sliced thinly. Of course, I salted that lightly immediately and added just a couple of small turns of black pepper. Once they fried a little bit in all of that lovely butter, I added probably about a third of the finely chopped garlic and all of the leaves of a nice sprig (about 6 inches) of rosemary, also finely chopped. After letting that fry for a couple of more minutes (giving it a good stir, of course), I sprinkled in a dash of red wine vinegar and a fair amount of balsamic vinegar, probably just short of a quarter of a cup. I wanted that to reduce and concentrate, so I didn't turn the heat down, though I did stir it from time to time. For the record, I actually started all of this just after I started the potatoes because... that's right: potatoes take freaking forever to cook, especially when you don't have another frying pan and have to redneck it in a wok like I did.
Observe the mushrooms in their buttery, rosemary-y, balsamicy happy place, mellowing down over medium heat and letting all of those flavors concentrate and mingle (and letting the mushrooms get fully soft).

Here's all three pans going at once right after I added the burgers, which would probably have been when I guessed the potatoes would need another ten minutes. The pan I put them into was crazy hot, and I put the side I seasoned down and then seasoned the tops directly in the pan. Clever... I know.

This is what the burgers looked like when I flipped them after approximately five or six minutes over the quite-high heat I had them cooking on. Notice that lovely crusty goodness created by putting the burgers directly into a very hot pan. They needed, all told, probably just over ten minutes on both sides combined, although that brought them out medium well. The thing to watch for, particularly if you want "well done," is that the juices run completely clear as they come up and out of the meat. Mine were definitely still a little pink, and it was delicious.

To finish this off, I put the potatoes on a plate, nestled the burger beside, poured the mushrooms and sauce over them, and then put a little leafy salad on the empty spot on the plate. I let everyone dress their own salads (balsamic vinaigrette for the adults that have sense and ranch for the kids who clearly don't), and I put ketchup all over my potatoes, just like last time. One of the kids copied me.

Smoked Paprika Home Fries

2009-08-24T22:11:00.002-04:00

Sometimes I come home after training and scavenge whatever I can. Tonight I wanted some comfort food, and because of my mom, that means potatoes. No one else wanted anything, so this was super-quick and super-easy.
I've mentioned before how much I like good-quality paprika, and so here you find me talking about it again. Basically, all I did was wash and cut up two Idaho-style potatoes (the kind we have, though I usually prefer Yukon gold for making home fries) right after I crushed a clove of garlic and chopped it up finely. I also cut up a little bit of onion, maybe a quarter of a small-to-medium one. Saving the garlic for a minute, that all plunged into a hot skillet that contained about a tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil and started to fry, a little salt and freshly ground black pepper landing on top of it immediately. After a couple of minutes, I tossed the potatoes in the pan and then let them fry for another minute or two before adding the garlic, half a tablespoon of unsalted butter, and a bit more seasoned salt. After a few more minutes of frying and a little more stirring/shaking the pan, I added about a half a teaspoon of the bittersweet smoked paprika and just a bit more salt (it's kind of surprising how much salt potatoes can take before they taste like you added any salt -- which makes for an interesting reversal: how much salt is on your potatoes (or French fries) that do taste (extra?) salty?). After a good stir to mix everything through and a couple of more minutes for the potatoes to finish (it's kind of surprising how long it takes to cook some potatoes, particularly when you want them quickly), I tasted them to make sure I didn't miss on the salt, turned off the heat, splashed them with a little red wine vinegar, tossed them, and put them on a plate. That's it.

Of course... I'm lame like this: I smothered them in ketchup right after I took the picture.

Cantaloupe Smoothie

2009-08-23T13:52:00.004-04:00

I wondered about this idea for a recipe because of our plethora of melons this summer. Many of them had to be given away or thrown away because we just couldn't keep up with how many of them there were (I ate four at one point in a day-and-a-half-long span and did not appreciate the results of that bombardment of my internals). Well, in addition to our Charantais melons, we had a regular-old cantaloupe come up near one of our compost piles, and it made a regular-old cantaloupe of unsurpassed quality. I picked it when it was ready, and like everyone else in the family, I just wasn't ready to eat another melon. That's when I decided to turn it into a smoothie, which was quite good.
It was, of course, ridiculously easy to make. I cut up the whole cantaloupe into bite-sized pieces (peeling it and seeding it, obviously) and then put almost all of it into the blender (being weak or maybe sane, I cannot skip the opportunity to eat some fresh fruit when it is presented to me). It was very good for cantaloupe... almost as good as the French ones, in fact. Then I added about a tablespoon of evaporated cane juice (hippy sugar) and a cup of whole milk and whole-milk yogurt combined (the ratio of those is up to you: for more of a "drink," use mostly milk; for most of a "smoothie," use mostly yogurt; and "mostly" can mean "all" here if you like, in either direction) and an eyedropper's worth of good-quality vanilla extract. Then... blend. Done. Wow!

The flavor is unsurprisingly melony while being surprisingly less gross than the picture in my head was. It is, in fact, quite nice... retaining all of the lovely cooling notes of melon with all of the creamy goodness notes of smoothie. Everyone seemed to enjoy it greatly.

Beef Steak and Mushroom Stir Fry with Homemade Shaved Noodles (刀削面, dao xiao mian)

2009-08-20T17:50:00.005-04:00

I know my posting of late has fallen in frequency... school started back (I'm a teacher), so I've been busier. I've still been cooking, though! In fact, I made a lovely little dish the other night with a nice flat iron steak I got at a great price: Stir-fried beef steak with mushrooms, which I served with homemade shaved pasta, i.e. 刀削面, dao xiao mian (a bit like this, but with mushrooms in place of the leeks). It was, as I expected, great. Here's what the finished dish looked like:
It was, as usual, pretty easy too... since I took care to remember (as is always important in making Asian food and many other kinds of dishes) to get everything prepared before I started the proper cooking (technically, I started the boiling water before anything else because that takes a long time). Here's how I did it:

First, I salted some water and started heating it to boil, probably about a gallon. Then I put a bit over two cups of flour into a bowl (sifted, in case of monsters or marbles) and mixed it with just about half a cup of water and a pinch of salt. One quarter of the flour was 100% whole wheat. With some mixing and then mashing and then kneading, I worked it into a ball of rather dry dough and put it back into the bowl to wait for me.

While the dough waited for me, I prepared some veggies. I started with garlic (always start with garlic) and crushed and finely chopped two cloves. Then I cut ten paper-thin, cross-sectional slices of ginger (carefully!) and then cut up a carrot into matchsticks about an inch long. After cutting off the stems, I then sliced (as shown) five shiitake mushrooms into thin strips. I finished by halving and thinly slicing a sweet onion and eight white mushrooms.

Here's my veggies all chopped up and ready to go.

The next thing to do was move the vegetables from the nice arrangement on the board above so I could cut up the steak: a lovely little 1.25-pound flat-iron steak. As you can see, I cut it into thin strips about an inch and a half long. Once it was cut, I was ready to get down to business, which started by heating a wok over rather high heat with a couple of tablespoons of peanut oil (canola oil would be okay too) in it. I also observed that my water was boiling (finally!). The veggies, not including the garlic and ginger, went into the pan first, and except for a pinch of salt, they were left unseasoned and stir-fried rather vigorously for about a minute. Then I turned the heat way down and let them soften a bit while I shaved the pasta dough into the water, pulling and pinching it at the end to preserve the ends of my fingers.

Once the pasta was in the boiling water, I poured the contents of the wok onto a plate and turned the heat back to quite high (just barely below "high") and added a little more oil. Once the wok was hot, I put in the garlic and ginger for about fifteen seconds before adding the meat. All of that got stir-fried for about a minute and a half and then I drained the finished noodles, which needed, all-in-all, about 3-4 minutes to cook through (and float to tell me they were done). As soon as I finished draining the pasta, I tossed in a pinch of red pepper flakes, about a tablespoon of soy sauce, stirred it around, and then added the veggies back into the pan. Note that the meat was obviously not cooked through yet -- I didn't want to overcook it and make it tough. After about another minute or so of mixing the ingredients in the pan together and making sure the meat was all cooked on the outsides, I added the pasta and mixed things up again. Another minute or so later, I turned off the pan and garnished by sprinkling about a half teaspoon of unhulled sesame seeds over the top. It came out beautifully and to the tremendous enjoyment of the whole family -- even the child that hates mushrooms loved it!

Super-Fiber Flatbread and Smoked Paprika Hummus

2009-08-16T11:47:00.006-04:00

I've been meaning to talk about paprika for a while -- it's one of my favorite ingredients, and it has such a weak reputation because of the oodles of cheap, almost flavorless paprikas available in bulk on the market, crowding out the more pricey stuff that's actually worth buying. I even thought, until I saw Wolfgang Puck make chicken paprikás on tv a few years ago, that paprika's only real culinary role was to add a maroonish color to food or to perhaps garnish dishes like potato or maccaroni salads -- pretty but flavorless. Momentum and thriftiness kept me from buying any real paprika for years to follow, though my interests went up and up every time I'd look at the nice stuff in fancy little metal cans at the upscale grocery stores I was increasingly loving to frequent (Whole Foods Market, you'd be on here in a position of glory if there was one of you within a two-hour drive of where I live... please come to Knoxville or Maryville... you'd make a million dollars (off of me alone!)).

Anyway, I used beautiful bittersweet paprika to make lovely hummus and paired it with some lovely little super-high-fiber flatbreads/pitas:
Yum! The hummus was the easier of the two parts to make, although both were quite simple.

One can of garbanzo beans, rinsed well;
One small clove of garlic;
One teaspoon of unhulled sesame seeds;
One pinch of whole cumin seeds;
One turn of a black pepper mill;
One tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil;
The juice of half a lemon;
About a quarter teaspoon (I think) of sea salt -- be conservative, you can add but cannot remove;
About a half teaspoon of bittersweet smoked paprika;
A little water to make it go;
About a quarter teaspoon of sweet paprika for garnish.

Take all of the completely dry ingredients and add them to a food processor and process until it starts to get smooth. That takes a while and isn't going to satisfy you all the way. Don't fuss. Then add the beans and the liquids, holding back on the water, and run it again. If it's flowing smoothly and mixing well, don't add water. If it's too thick (and therefore not blending well), add some water, maybe a tablespoon -- be conservative, you can always add more. Let it run and run and run until it's smooth (five minutes or so, which seems like a long time to let your food processor run... you might have to do it in stages and let the little electric motor inside cool off depending on the power and quality of your food processor -- if you burn it up, you're doing it all with a mortar and pestle the old-fashioned way... have fun with that). Put it in a bowl and check for seasoning. Add more salt if necessary (be conservative at first with the salt, and your life will be better). Let that stand to let the flavors marry. I made this, by the way, while the flatbread dough was rising.

For the flatbread, I made a proper dough. The main motivation for this dish, actually, is that sourdough starter is a bit of a chore sometimes. I had to make bread or throw some of it away. My starter is still wimpy, so I had to add yeast, which is fine anyway because it speeds the process up. I used almost a cup and a half of starter, about two cups or so of flour, half being unbleached all-purpose and half being 100% whole wheat flour, and then I added the super-fiber ingredients: extra wheat bran (about a tablespoon) and psyllium seed husk powder (about half a cup!!!). To that, I added half a cup of warm water with a teaspoon of proofed yeast, two teaspoons of evaporated cane juice (hippy sugar), and a healthy pinch of salt. Because of my secret bent to add Chinese tonic herbalism when and where I can, I also added a teaspoon of astragalus root powder, though that ingredient is definitely 100% optional.

I mixed the dough until it was smoothish and rolled it out of the bowl and onto the counter. Then I kneaded it for about twenty minutes, turning it a quarter turn and pushing down three or four times, folding it in half, turning it a quarter turn, pushing down three or four times, etc., and then oiled the doughball and put it into an oiled bowl. Once in there, I covered it with a slightly damp towel and let it rise in a nice warm place (all places are warm this time of year -- we're very conservative with our air conditioning) for a bit over an hour, until it doubled. Then I punched it down, rolled it out onto the counter, kneaded it again for about three minutes to redistribute the ingredients, and cut it into sixteen pieces of roughly equal size. Those I formed into little balls and then rolled out into flatbreads using the side of a bottle. I'd roll out as many as I could fit in my quite-hot skillet, and then while those were cooking, I'd roll out the next ones.

Here's the dough in three stages with the bottle I was using as a rolling pin: little balls (in the back), squashed little balls (further forward), and flatbreads (obvious).

Golden Garden Goodness: Yellow Watermelons!

2009-08-14T14:47:00.002-04:00

You know I love to talk about things that come out of my garden, and right now we're in the peak of watermelon season, apparently. I counted yesterday. There are still about twelve or fifteen on the vine, and this beauty pictured here is the fifth we've picked. It's also the last of the golden yellow watermelons we're getting this year (I think... our baby watermelon plants got all mixed up, so there might still be some growing somewhere, but the remaining melons all seem to have a different shape. Anyway, these things are awesome and a real gift from the garden, and since I just enjoyed half of one in a single sitting (again), I thought I'd post about them.

To be technical, I don't know what varietal this watermelon is, but I expect it is a "yellow crimson." I know that I found out about yellow watermelons when I was a teenager but never saw one until a few years ago. Last year I decided that I was going to try one, by goodness, and bought one even though it failed two of my normal criteria for watermelon selection: it was already cut in half and it cost something like $8 for half a watermelon (Hhhwhat? Are you serious? I'm serious.). At least I knew it was yellow. I wasn't particularly impressed with the fruit I bought, but I liked the novelty enough to save some of the seeds to try growing them this year. It worked.

The flavor of yellow watermelons, if this varietal is any kind of representative, is similar to watermelon, though it tastes more like nectar, I think. The flavors are softer and distinct, and more honey-ish, than any red watermelon I've had, and it's all together pleasant. It also seems to be less crisp than most of the red watermelons I've had, though it's every bit as messy-juicy and probably slightly or even significantly sweeter. On a health front, I don't know what boons yellow watermelons have other than huge amounts of carotenes and being a spectacularly delicious source of fresh fruit in the diet, but I do know they lack lycopene, the quite-famous antioxidant carotenoid usually associated with tomatoes (also red, like lycopene itself).

If you've never had one of these beauties, do yourself the favor I needed a decade to convince myself of: get one and try it. Yellow watermelon is a very nice treat on a hot summer day like today!

Burgers with Sourdough Rosemary Flatbread and Mashed Potatoes

2009-08-13T19:16:00.004-04:00

I'm sure all twenty of you (my readers) are just dying to know what happened to that loaf of sourdough that didn't rise. I made flatbread out of it, that's what. First, I put it in the fridge overnight. Nothing happened. Then I let it sit out and warm up for a couple of hours. Nothing happened. My starter is apparently not mighty enough to make it rise without some additional yeasties. At least it doesn't smell like white vinegar any more (I started feeding it more flour at each feeding and the odor straightened out in about three days to a pleasant sourdough scent). In fact, I don't think it rose at all. Thus, I "punched it down" and then chopped up all of the rosemary on a long, fresh sprig very, very finely. Then I took some coarse sea salt and kneaded the salt and rosemary into the dough, working it for about five minutes until everything was very evenly distributed. Next, I made it into little flatbreads and put them on the grittle.
How'd they taste? Well... very sour. The sourdough flavor was almost overwhelming, although the salt balanced it and the rosemary kind of reigned things in and made it pleasant enough to where I put down three of them immediately before I remembered that I was only making nine: one to try and eight for "buns" for my burgers later. Crap. I'm glad I added the salt and rosemary because otherwise, these would have been hard to eat on their own (but good for making sandwiches or having with hummus).

Since I decided to have them with burgers (which I cheated and bought pre-formed because they were on sale -- otherwise they would have been better because they would have had chopped garlic, mushrooms, and rosemary in them) and mashed potatoes, I started to work on those. The burgers only needed a little dressing up since they were pre-made. First, I splashed them with some red wine vinegar and let it soak in a little, and then I sprinkled on seasoned salt and dried, ground rosemary leaves. I pressed the seasoning into the meat lightly and set them aside while I cleaned up the potatoes, which I left most of the peels on, and started them in some salted water: cold and turned to boil soon. Here's the trick to making awesome mashed potatoes that essentially no one knows....

If you want mashed potatoes, then you know you're going to be adding some kind of milk/cream and butter to them eventually. Wouldn't it be cool if you could add flavor? My mom boils onions and garlic in with the potatoes and then mashes them in. That's great except a large part of the flavor goes out with the water. The trick is to chop up those ingredients (here it was three cloves of garlic, two long sprigs of fresh rosemary, and about a quarter of an onion) and cook them in the milk and butter.
I put about three tablespoons of butter into a small saucepan, melted it, and sauteed the onions in it for about five minutes. Then I added the garlic and rosemary and continued cooking it for another minute or two before dropping the heat. Once the pan was sizzling very little, I added about 2/3 of a cup of milk (for my 7 medium-sized Idaho potatoes) and a little salt. I let that warm slowly until scalding and then just let it simmer, like I was making "tea" out of the ingredients in the milk. When the potatoes were fork-tender, I drained them and poured the milk mixture into the potatoes with more salt and a little black pepper. When I mashed them and found them a little dry (which is what I had hoped, going intentionally a little short on the milk), I mixed in two heaping dollops of plain, whole milk yogurt and stirred everything until it was (relatively) smooth and definitely well-mixed. Those were very nice mashed potatoes with just a touch of rosemary and garlic.

While the potatoes were boiling away and the milk mixture was simmering, I put the burgers in a very hot skillet (we don't currently have a grill or I would have grilled them) and seasoned the side I didn't season yet. After long enough (maybe five minutes), I flipped them and let them cook on the other side until the juices were coming out clear, maybe another five minutes. Then I put them on a piece of flatbread (since I couldn't make "buns" out of the breads because I ate too many earlier) with the mashed potatoes. Normally I would have dressed them up with some chopped onion and some nice tomatoes fresh from the garden, but I've had enough of tomatoes for a few days and didn't do it. That's some organic ketchup and super-awesome mustard on there, though. Yum!
Tomorrow, I'll tell you what to do with those leftover mashed potatoes (if you have any) -- one of my all-time favorite secret recipes that is glorious beyond glorious. It's good enough, in fact, to make sure that you make extra potatoes just to have extras (it works best if you use leftover mashed potatoes, which usually suck, because they have less water content after they sit in a refrigerator for a day or two).

Another Tomato-Basil Soup with Homemade Pasta, This Time With Sausage

2009-08-11T22:04:00.006-04:00

It's a funny thing, food. Sometimes, it's subtle and wonderful and makes you happy, and you love it but you don't fully know why you love it, like many a nice classical piece. At other times, it's simple, sublime, and stunning and it makes you happy, and you love it and know exactly why you love it, like fewer nicer classical pieces and like this stuff. At still other times, it's lovely because it's familiar, although nothing more than that is particularly special about it, or more accurately that what is so special about it is lost in blinding familiarity, although it still makes you happy. Then there's times, like when you cook sausages, that it's powerful and moving and not in any way subtle. It's like AC/DC... perfect as it is, but splendid because it's so perfectly up in your face... making you very, very happy. And so it was tonight in my kitchen.
Look at that. Seriously. Italian sausage all up in some tomato-basil soup with homemade pasta. Hells bells. The recipe is nearly identical to the previous tomato-basil soup I did, that one with chicken. The only real differences here would be more peppers and three links of fresh Italian sausage, one hot and two sweet (though if I had my way, it would have been three hot ones... family, you know).

The plan was grander than that. It was going to be spectacular, a feast for the mouths and for the senses. I was going to make rosemary sourdough flatbread to go with this dish (and was tossing around the idea of putting garlic and/or parmesian in it too). Due to the fact that my starter, which smells perfectly lovely again, almost like fruit in fact, seems not to want to leaven a loaf in any reasonable amount of time right now, though, the plan was modified to include the bread with the leftovers... which we already ate because this was so incredibly delicious.

Unfortunately, after two hours in our plenty-warm house, this is what the dough looked like:
Hhhwhat, you say? Two hours? Yeah, it didn't rise more than about 10% (volume increase). Crap. Yeah, that's my fingerprint in the middle.. in its incredibly relaxed, too easy-going to do anything for me state. Thus, I covered the bowl and put it in the fridge. Wherever it gets by about lunchtime tomorrow is where it's going, and then I will have flatbread (even if it's as flat as a tortilla).

The only really sad part about this recipe is the state of our garden. I was out in it today picking the tomatoes for the soup, and I'm pretty sure that this is the last such soup that the garden is going to yield this season. The tomatoes are just pretty much done. I lament that mainly because I really wanted to try it with beef, and once you grow your own tomatoes, the ones at the grocery store just won't do. I might try it with the absolutely superior (among canned tomatoes) Muir Glen Fireroasted ones or the San Marzano ones this fall or winter, but I just don't think it will be the same.

Lemon Cucumbers: A Gardener's Summer Treat

2009-08-11T11:21:00.003-04:00

Heirloom vegetables are really cool, in particular these little yellow cucumbers that are called "lemon cucumbers." Their name is a little misleading... it refers only to their appearance and not to their flavor, which is distinctly cucumberish. They're also a gem of the garden, producing massive amounts of delicious fruits for almost no effort in terms of upkeep. I enjoyed one earlier with a little salt and balsamic vinegar, though they're almost equally delicious just with a pinch of salt or all on their own.As you can see by the uncut cucumber in the background, these cucumbers are almost round and quite yellow. The skin isn't quite as thick as with the long green (usual) cucumbers, and they're only rarely bitter anywhere within the flesh. Obviously they also make a nice slicing cucumber, though the slices of lemon cucumbers are a bit larger than what you're used to with the regular green ones.

These plants are magnificent if you're a cucumber-lover. First of all, they're easy to take care of. Second of all, they produce a LOT of cucumbers. Last year, we grew eight plants thinking that would be a nice supply. It was overload! We grew two this year because there were many times last summer that we would have thirty or more cucumbers in our kitchen. That's just too many. The flesh is also tender and juicy, and as I said, it's never been bitter in my experience. Furthermore, the flavor is characteristically cucumber although as if it has just a pinch of natural saltiness, not enough to make them preferable without salt but just enough to make them great without the addition.

These are really a gift of the season! If you garden, then you should definitely consider these in the future.

Food Science: Should Bread Dough Be Kneaded Twice?

2009-08-10T12:33:00.003-04:00

Something I've wanted to do on this blog for a while, since I have a scientific background, is "food science." I like to find things out for myself when I can, and I think people find it interesting to read about these kinds of experiments. Since my sourdough starter is rip-roaring these days, I'm making a lot of bread, and so the first installment of what I'm calling "Food Science" is an investigation using bread.

I've been reading a lot about bread making lately, as would make sense, and one thing I've noted in a few cookbooks is that most recommend directly against a second kneading phase (which I still like very much for flatbreads because of the chewy texture it seems to impart). I almost always knead the dough again after I punch it down, but yesterday I decided to do some science. I made the dough as usual, just a normal sourdough recipe, and then after the first rise, I cut the dough into two pieces, as equal in size as I could manage. One of those pieces was kneaded a second time for approximately ten minutes, and the other was carefully and delicately shaped into a baguette without a second knead, trying to preserve much of the volume from the first rise. Here's the two loaves just after shaping, the re-kneaded loaf in front:
As you can see (if you look carefully), the dough in the rear is slightly larger than the loaf in the front because of the gas bubbles that have been retained by not kneading it a second time.

There are two competing ideas, both entrenched in the art and science of bread making that lead me to have curiosity about which will be a more effective approach. First of all, more air is more air, and it should lead to more volume in the loaf that wasn't kneaded a second time. Furthermore, there should be less-developed gluten in that loaf, so hopefully it will even be able to rise further on the second rise, getting some of that bubbly texture that is typical of sourdough loaves. On the other hand, re-kneading the dough should redistribute the ingredients, though it pops many of the air bubbles, giving the yeast a better chance at finding the food it needs to grow during the second rise. It should also help stretch the gluten and develop it further, perhaps facilitating the second rise even more (since the dough will be relaxing while it rises that second time). What's going to happen?

An hour later, I took another picture, but it doesn't tell the whole story. For the first half an hour of the second rise, the loaf that was not re-kneaded was clearly larger than the loaf that was. By the time I took the picture, after an hour (when the re-kneaded loaf had approximately doubled in volume), the loaf that I had merely shaped (and didn't re-knead) seemed to be smaller and had a surface appearance not unlike stretch marks, as if it had stretched and then shrunken back. Perhaps its second rise went on too long. Perhaps the redistribution of the ingredients really was important. I'm not sure. Here's the result after the second rise, though, with the re-kneaded loaf in front:
Observe that the loaf in front, which was re-kneaded, appears smoother and is legitimately slightly larger than the loaf in back, which was not re-kneaded.

After scoring them as identically as I could using diagonal marks, I baked the loaves. The oven-spring of the re-kneaded loaf was also noticeably larger than that of the shaped loaf. Hmm.... Twenty-five minutes in a 400 F oven gave me this:
The loaf in front, the re-kneaded loaf, is obviously bigger and better-looking. So much for the idea that more preserved gas means a more voluminous loaf....

The real question lies in what they look like inside, though. See for yourself (nearly identical):
The loaves are oriented as before, but it doesn't really matter since they're pretty well identical inside: no big bubbles in either, just a pleasant, smooth, bread-like texture.

So... in a side-by-side comparison, the results of this experiment (re-kneading versus not re-kneading) are:
Taste: Identical (sourdough-bread-like).
Texture: Essentially identical (pleasantly springy with a nice mouth feel).
Density: The re-kneaded loaf is slightly lighter than the not-re-kneaded loaf.

The jury is out, then, because the body of literature on "don't re-knead the dough" is pretty extensive and yet this small experiment (that wasn't performed under ideal conditions) seems to suggest otherwise. The main result of this experiment: two yummy loaves of bread that I get to eat simultaneously in alternating fashion! Win-win? I think so.

Blueberry Yogurt Milkshake (Not a Smoothie!), Plus Goji Berries

2009-08-08T20:14:00.005-04:00

July and early August are awesome because of blueberries. We have a lovely blueberry farm near our house that we can go to and pick our own organic blueberries for the prices of dirt-cheap and a couple of hours of hot, mosquito-ridden fun (which, unless you're a blueberry farmer, meaning you do this kind of crap every day, is actually fun... for a little while). The prices are unbeatable: something ridiculous like $0.60 a pound or something if you pick your own berries. Usually, we end up picking ten or twelve pounds over the course of the summer. The other day, my mom went and picked a bunch and froze all of the extras that she couldn't wolf down, and then she gave a quart of the frozen goodies to me. I realized the immense potential of this gift the second I remembered that I still have some leftover ice cream from my last milkshake experiment....

There's got to be some kind of subtle distinction that says when a blended drink ceases to be a (creamy) smoothie and when it starts to be a milkshake. For me, that distinction occurs exactly when ice cream comes into the picture. No ice cream: smoothie. Ice cream: milkshake. Unnecessarily complicated definitions need not apply. That's why this is called a yogurt milkshake. That way, I get that yogurt tang in my milkshake decadence. Yes! Basically, I used a "normal" blueberry milkshake kind of recipe and added yogurt to it. Whoa. Complex, I know. The result is delightfully good creamy purple wonderfulness:
It goes down like this (for two or three big glasses like this):

Three or four scoops of awesomely good vanilla ice cream;
Half a cup of plain (whole milk) yogurt;
About a cup of (whole) milk;
Half a cup of frozen (not necessary, but it keeps it colder) blueberries;
About a tablespoon of hippy sugar (evaporated cane juice or turbinado), or just use your own regular white sugar if you don't care about that kind of thing or use maple syrup (I'm out) if you want it to be really good.

Combine all of these ingredients in a blender and blend it until it's smooth, maybe a minute or two to really get the blueberries and ice cream destroyed and worked in. That's it. If you like it thicker and all of your ingredients are cold, you can add a little ice to it. I don't. I like being able to chug it, not giving myself brain damage and a bizarrely sore hard palate trying to suck it through a straw.

The milkshake pictured above actually has three other ingredients that I didn't mention. Secretly, I frequently work a little tonic herbalism into my cooking, and there are two other ingredients along those lines in this shake. One is powdered astragalus root (which I now put in most of my shakes) and the other is goji berries (wolfberries), both added before the blending. A third secret ingredient lurks inside this shake: whey protein concentrate, a scoop and a half of it, actually (30 g of protein worth). Why? It only barely modifies the flavor and gives 30 g of protein plus a slightly more "milkshaky" texture. I guess we could say that it lowers the guilt that these healthy ingredients are added, but I never feel guilt in drinking a milkshake anyway. I had three yesterday, in fact (two like this and then one classic chocolate malt)! Worried about my health? I train it off. No worries!

A deep question lingers, though... if I used frozen yogurt in place of ice cream in this recipe, is it a smoothie then? I dunno... but if I wanted it to be a smoothie, I'd have just replaced the ice cream with yogurt and maybe added some extra just to be on the safe side.

Super-Fiber Loaf: A Very High Fiber Sourdough Bread with Flax Seed and Psyllium Husk

2009-08-07T19:41:00.005-04:00

Psyllium husk? That doesn't sound delicious....

Honestly, I can't say this is the best bread I've ever made. It's rather dense, though it's very soft and has a pleasant flavor. I knew it would be, so I used sourdough starter and yeast to try to leaven it, but even in the kneading stage, I knew it was going to bake into a brick of a loaf. At least it tastes good and has a nice mouth feel, even if every little slice of it weighs as much as three loaves of normal bread (slight exaggeration). You can see the hearty awesomeness of it directly in the only picture I took of it: the prebake loaf picture:
It looks essentially the same after baking except just a little darker. It's pretty good, though. Here's what all went into it:

1 cup white-wheat flour, sifted;
1/2 cup white unbleached flour, sifted;
about a cup of sourdough starter;
1 packet of rapid-rise yeast, bloomed in 1/4 cup water with a teaspoon of evaporated cane juice;
1 tablespoon evaporated cane juice (sugar);
1/2 teaspoon salt;
three heaping tablespoons brown flax seeds ground into meal (in my cleaned coffee grinder);
three heaping tablespoons psyllium seed husk powder (fiber country);
one heaping tablespoon hulled millet ground into meal (in my grinder);
1/4 cup Bob's Red Mill 10 Grain Hot Cereal ground into meal (in my grinder);
one heaping tablespoon of unflavored whey protein concentrate powder, sifted;
1 teaspoon raw apple cider vinegar;
a bit more water to make it come together.

First, I ground up what had to be ground up very finely. To be sure I did it fully, I would grind it up, run it through my sifter, and then regrind anything that didn't go through. That took three repetitions to get everything to finally fall through the sifter, and then I started to put things together. I knew right away when I started feeling the dough as it came together that it was going to be dense bread when it finished, but hopefully I could knead it into a pleasant texture and provide a wholesome, nourishing flavor that spoke highly to the whole grains and seeds that I used. That part worked. Kneading it took a little longer than usual, probably 20-30 minutes and was a bit more effort than I had expected. The first rise took longer than expected, almost two hours before it doubled in bulk. The second rise was given just over ninety minutes, by which time it had grown considerably but not doubled, and I threw it into a 375 F oven for 30 minutes at that point, tired of waiting on it any longer. It grew essentially none in the oven, but the internal texture isn't at all grainy, which I kind of feared. It's smooth, almost like dry, stretchy, slightly chewy carrot cake, although it tastes very multigrain and wholesome. It's also very filling, and because of my sourdough starter, which is getting stronger, and the vinegar, it's mildly sour, moreso than most sourdough that I've had but not unpleasantly so (one of the children likes it, and the other doesn't so much).

Since it has a fair amount of fiber-donating ingredients in it, I expect that the fiber-per-slice level is probably in the 8-10g range, even though the slices are somewhat small. I also think that if done correctly, because of the sourness, this bread would make one heck of a good meaty sandwich. In fact, I think I might have just figured out what I'm having for dinner....

[Edit, two hours later: That sandwich was a good idea, the bread and meat both sliced thin. What meat? Leftover rotisserie pork loin, of course!]

Rotisserie Meat and Leftover Rotisserie Meat

2009-08-07T12:41:00.002-04:00

A rotisserie is a very good thing. I'm a huge fan of how meat comes out when it's been roasted in one of these clever gadgets, and I take advantage of it as often as I can. My mom has a small counter-top rotisserie in her kitchen that we use a few times a year (she might use it more, I'm not sure), but we're a bit short on space in our kitchen and thus don't have one. I usually buy (gasp!) my rotisserie meat, but I can often do it with little or no guilt since a quick walk around in the store often convinces me that I'm not paying all that much extra for meat that's been cooked in a big, professional rotisserie than I would be for meat that is still raw. Since I don't have a rotisserie and buying it already cooked is a wonderful time-saver (usually I eat it essentially on the spot), I'm happy to belly up.

One of my very favorite things to do with leftover rotisserie meat, usually pork, chicken, or turkey, is put it in scrambled eggs (you'll learn to see this kind of thing coming if you read any number of my posts). Since it's already cooked and I don't want it to dry out, it goes in the pan at the last moment before the eggs do. Usually, I saute some nice fresh veggies, right now out of our garden, and then toss in some chopped up leftover rotisserie meat (a little for egg sandwiches, a lot for scrambles on a plate), and then season it with a little vinegar before adding the eggs. When it's done, it's lovely.

Honestly, I'd say that rotisserie meat, often with little else, is a favorite lunch of mine (insomuch as I have favorites -- there's too many things to like to have favorites), and using the leftovers (if there are any!) in my eggs for the next day or two is a close second. My usual maneuver is to leave work and pick up a rotisserie something (most often pork loin) at The Fresh Market, eat most of it on the way home (washing it down with some of their freshly squeezed orange, grapefruit, or tangerine juice -- I love that tangerine juice), and then save what's left for the next day or two, unless my wife is feeling some rotisserie too, in which case she usually polishes off what's left almost as quickly as it comes through the door. What do I do with the leftover juice? Usually I drink it down to about an inch or inch and a half in the bottom of the container, add some sugar, and fill it back up with water to have instant high-quality citrusade of whichever type I happened to buy. Win, win, win.

First Blush Wine-Grape Juices

2009-08-06T22:02:00.003-04:00

Whoa! I went to Asheville, NC, today with my wife and found out that they have a fancy grocery store there (Greenlife Grocery) that carries many interesting things, including First Blush Juices, which are grape juices (unfortunately from concentrate) pressed from single varietal wine grapes. According to their website's store locator, they don't even sell it in Tennessee (our sometimes-food-backwards state). Then again, according to said locator, they don't sell them in North Carolina either....

My experience with them (I got two despite their relative priciness at about $2.50 for 11.4 fl.oz.) is quite a bit like my first experience with single-origin chocolate, which I should repeat and blog about one of these days. They're good; they do and don't taste like grape juice as we know it; and they don't even taste like each other. I've always kind of wanted to taste these sorts of things, but the opportunity just hasn't ever come up. If I can believe the hype, these juices are even ridiculously antioxidant rich, touting claims even about one of the golden-boys of the antioxidant world: resveratrol. (Secretly, I know there's more resveratrol in peanuts and in the outer layers of onions than in wine grapes, but let's not ruin a good thing with that kind of stuff).

The experience was quite a mind-opener, although it really should have been expected the more I think about it. I tried the Syrah and the Merlot (Cabernet and Chardonay are also offered). Both are exceptionally sweet and distinct, characteristic enough of the wines that they would produce to be able to identify certain flavor notes that are characteristic of the different types of wines and yet grape-juicy enough to hit that sugar-loving spot that tingles deep inside every dessert/beverage lover. I'm honestly almost giddy about trying the other two flavors and kind of wish I would have sucked up the cost and got one of each. Particularly, I want to try the merlot and cabernet side-by-side and see if there's more or less difference in the grape juices that make the wines than there tends to be in the wines (which I've read that even Masters of Wine cannot always distinguish in blind tastings).

I'm tickled also, being this kind of nerd, about how the company chose its name (if the bottles are to be believed): apparently the juice that comes from the first pressing of the grapes in winemaking is called the "first blush." Supposedly pumped full of antioxidants (like resveratrol), these extremely interesting and flavorful juices are probably quite healthy (despite being loaded with natural sugars) as well as an absolute delight to get to try and drink (slowly, sip by sip, of course).

Pink Grapefruitade

2009-08-05T16:38:00.003-04:00

Pink grapefruit-ade is one of my very favorite beverages, and I have it on good authority that it's even more refreshing than lemonade and delightful even for people that don't like grapefruit. That is, of course, because it's thinned down and includes sugar. Think about it: how many people like lemonade (lots)? How many people like lemon juice or lemons (not lots)? It works that way with grapefruit too. The recipe is ridiculously simple... so simple that you don't really need a recipe. It goes like this: juice a grapefruit (or use store-bought grapefruit juice, preferably freshly squeezed and unpasteurized like the Fresh Market sells), add some sugar, add some water. Technically speaking, both the water and the sugar are "to taste," but I try to aim for something comparable to what I would use for lemonade, if a bit heavy on the juice.

What you need to know is that a grapefruit holds about a cup to a cup and a half of juice. A lemon holds about a quarter of a cup, i.e. about five times less. Since I like more grapefruit juice, proportionally, in my grapefruitade, that means I usually use one grapefruit to make a quart to a quart and a half of grapefruitade depending on how much juice comes out of the grapefruit and how thin I want it (when I'm really thirsty, I want more water and less fruit and sugar). You also need to know that a grapefruit contains more sugar than a lemon -- it's more bitterness, not sourness, that make people not particularly like grapefruit so much, particularly with the pink or red ones. Thus, I only use about a tablespoon of sugar per grapefruit. Let's pretend you like it sweeter. I would say: use more sugar. Let's pretend you don't want it so syrupy. I would say: use less sugar. Also, don't use crap sugar. Get some evaporated cane juice (or maple syrup) and do it right. It comes out a lovely orange-pink color that just begs to be enjoyed, with our without a little mint (mint is nice in grapefruitade, but not all the time). See:
For added fun and excitement, I sometimes (frequently) add the juice of other citrus, particularly lime when I have it. I find they play well together. Adding lemon juice gives it more tartness (but not bitterness), and adding orange juice gives it more sweetness and a rounder flavor. Don't be limited! You can make orangeade, lemonade, tangerineade, limeade, any combination of those -ade, and even "Five-Alive-ade," using your own recipe instead of store-bought stuff. Using a juicer, you can even make exotic things like kumquatade (which needs a lot of sugar and is best pretty thin unless some other juices come in to soften it up a bit).

If some of these other recipes confer superpowers onto me, this one replenishes them when I've done something like mow the lawn.

Cappuccino Milkshake Two Step

2009-08-05T14:13:00.003-04:00

Guess what I just drank (easy because of the title of the post). Yes it was good. A cappuccino milkshake made in just two easy steps with just two easy ingredients (that I didn't have to do anything but buy)... because what really sweet coffee drinks need is more sugar (in the world's most perfect form of sugar: ice cream)!

The story behind this one starts a few weeks ago when I came home from London. London is probably the world's greatest place for people that like smoothie-like beverages made out of ingredients that people can actually pronounce (like fruit). It was wonderful, and I came home wanting that experience. Thus, when I saw a acai-mangosteen juice drink by Bolthouse Farms on sale (usually prohibitively expensive despite the possible health value of those ingredients), I got it. It was fairly good but more juice and less smoothie than I had hoped (probably because it didn't have bananas in it) and sadly used "from concentrate" ingredients more than "not from concentrate." Still, it was on sale and satisfied my craving. Later, I went back and wanted something similar again (my treat for doing some chores like grocery shopping), and I decided to get one of their high-protein flavors. All of the ones there had soy protein in them (no thanks) except one: Mocha Cappuccino. I got it. It's good. I marveled that it's sweetened with apple juice (from concentrate). I drank the whole quart in about six and a half minutes. Chug-a-lug, buddy. Zzzzooooom!

Then I got an idea... put that stuff into a blender with vanilla ice cream. That seems like a complicated recipe, I know, so I held off until today to make it (real reason: the store I shop at was out of it temporarily due to its apparently much greater popularity as compared with the "fruit" flavors). Guess what. It worked.. because what a really sweet coffee drink needs is more sugar!

If it wasn't so expensive and obviously bad for me, I would put this beverage on the short list of things that I drink that are clearly sources of my superpowers.

Sourdough Flatbread (and Accidental Pita) with Almond Hummus

2009-08-04T22:01:00.004-04:00

I used my sourdough starter to make flatbread today. It came out really well except the dough didn't do much rising despite the heat and humidity. Also, my starter smells very strongly of white vinegar and is less bubbly than it has been, though I read about that and found out that it's nothing to be to scared about. Another site (lost the link, sorry) indicated to me that it's relatively normal in our weather conditions and just means the acetic acid bacteria are kind of running the show in the starter. I'm not sure how to fix that or if it needs fixing... more flour, I think. If it goes South, then I'll compost it and start another one... nothing really lost. Anyway, I whipped up a nice loaf with it the day before yesterday (including nutritional yeast and yogurt!) and some splendid flatbreads today, about three quarters of which probably qualify as pita bread or some other kind of pocket bread since that's what they did. It was fun watching them puff up in the skillet like little balloons, but I have no clear idea of how I achieved it. Kitchen science, a likely up-and-coming feature on this blog, might help me figure it out. The process for making this flatbread was essentially the same as for the last flatbread except the only liquid I added was water, I did it with sourdough starter instead of packaged yeast (roughly 2 flours, 1 starter, and 1 water, by weight, does it apparently, or just fiddle with it until it feels right and then knead the heck out of it like I do).
Other than the fact that my flatbreads turned mostly into pocket breads, the most exciting part of our little dinner today was the hummus. I really like adding things to hummus, and mentioned before, in fact, that hummus is a "platform" dish for me. What I mean by a platform dish is that the basic recipe serves as a platform for many delicious experiments to be showcased. Today was nothing too inspired but came out quite nice: I added almonds and just a few drops of sweet almond oil. Essentially, I added about two dozen raw, unsalted almonds in the very initial stage of making the hummus, following the same recipe and protocol as in the previous post on the topic. Specifically, I put the almonds into the food processor with the sesame seeds and ground them up until they were a very fine dusty, almost pasty stuff. Then I started building the hummus on top of that, adding a little oil when it was time to add oil. It came out very nice because of the pleasantly subtle, vaguely sweet flavor of the almonds and the smooth texture that they imparted. My wife stated that she could tell it was somehow different and that she liked it, but that she wouldn't have ever guessed that I put almonds in there. For what it's worth, I suppose I could have used almond butter if I had any, but that stuff's expensive, so I never have any.

I wish I could say that I stuffed my little breads with all kinds of interesting things, but they didn't have that kind of a chance. In fact, almost half of them were gone before the hummus was even made... several having gone pretty much straight to being eaten as quickly as the cooled enough to be handled.

Juicing for Health

2009-08-04T15:29:00.004-04:00

We love our juicer, and we make a lot of interesting juice recipes that, like most things I make, aren't recipes at all. We just grab some stuff, think about it a little, and put it through the machine. Sometimes the stuff we make is awful, but almost always, it's quite good. I'm not entirely positive, but I'm pretty sure that juicing your own fruits and vegetables has got to be hands-down one of the best ways to get a massive amount of nutrition into your body right now. In fact, my brother and I used to talk about the feeling that we'd get from drinking juice as "juice weird," which isn't a far cry from the feeling you get from a couple of cups of coffee on an empty stomach (meaning really alert) only without the caffeine jitters. Subsequent research on my part has revealed that a huge part of the reason for that is the high fructose content, particularly in apples, that the fruits and veggies running through our machine happen to have. The rest of the reason, I think, is the unbridled nutrition coursing through our veins like a raging tide of goodness.

There are lots and lots of things that can be juiced and only a few that cannot (e.g. bananas, which blend into the juice in a blender perfectly well if you really, really feel bummed out about the lack of ability to juice a banana that most juicers will present to you). Many things, when juiced, taste almost exactly like the way they taste when they're not juiced except somewhat more concentrated. For instance, it's a tremendous surprise to people that juice apples or grapes for the first time that the liquid that comes out tastes like apples or grapes, not like the crap juice they're used to buying at the store. The same goes for veggies, so you kind of have to be careful with those (read: spinach is spicier than it looks, and mustard greens are surprisingly very hot). In particular, herbs put way more flavor into your juice than you may be ready for (read: don't juice a bunch of mint unless you really want to struggle to get it down).

Here's kind of our staple recipe that we build off of:

Two or three decent-sized carrots per person, or the equivalent (children need less);
About one small to medium apple per person, sometimes with an extra one tossed in, seeded.

Carrot juice is crazy good for you. I've read and heard a growing body of evidence that people are even using it to try to help cure cancer. It really makes you feel better and rounds out your daily nutrition if you have a couple or three juiced carrots (which are actually pretty sweet on their own). Apple juice is not particularly crazy good for you except that it has a fair amount of natural fructose in it for energy. They're mostly included because they are sweet. Veggies tend not to be sweet, and apples counterbalance that and make the juice more palatable. If you're not into sugar or need to watch your intake of it, leave out the apples. More apples, by the way, make for more sweet.

Usually, we add some or all of the following as well:

About a quarter of a medium-sized beet (with greens when possible) per person;
About a quarter of an inch of fresh ginger per person;
About a quarter or half of a lemon per person, peel on;
About half an orange per person, peel on;
Maybe a stalk of celery per person;
About half a cucumber per person.
A small bunch of parsley, spinach, or kale.

This list isn't exhaustive, and it's rare that all of that goes into any particular juice. Today, for instance, for two people I juiced three small apples, five meaty carrots, one small beet, one stalk of celery, about a half an inch of ginger, half a lemon, a cucumber, and a little watermelon rind. It was quite good (a bit sweet) and chocked full of awesome nutrition. It also (because of the beet) happened to be quite beautiful in the glass, see:
Usually we try to juice daily, but more realistically, it goes in spells where we juice a lot (once or twice a day) and then where we don't juice any for a month. I think it's the prep time and cleanup efforts that are the main reasons for the periods when we stop juicing... that and the enormous amount of produce that has to be purchased to keep it up unless it's something very straightforward like just carrot juice or carrot with apple. I know we feel better when we juice a lot, and juicing regularly definitely makes our hair and nails grow quite a bit faster (so it must be very good for us!). It's an added bonus to be able to juice things that come freshly out of our garden.

Cooking with Mushrooms: What to Know

2009-08-02T18:12:00.002-04:00

I think I'm going to try to start incorporating another new feature into this blog, although I've done a rather crappy job of dealing with the other features so far. I even went out to eat last night and intended to write a review of the restaurant, but then family time on the last weekend before school starts back for the kids kind of took over. Maybe I'll write it later. Anyway, the new feature will hopefully be helpful for aspiring cooks... it's stuff you should probably know about ingredients before you start cooking with them. Ideally, I'll talk about science and whatnot in these kinds of posts, but mostly I'll probably end up talking about my experience. I would love to have and take the time to look up all kinds of awesome science (or do it myself!) on my ingredients, but honestly, I just don't have it right now. Maybe once my dissertation is published or this blog becomes popular enough to justify putting that much more time into it. Anyway, today's commentary is about mushrooms, which I thought would be worth mentioning after making a lovely egg sandwich with them for lunch.

First and foremost about mushrooms, they're very wet vegetables that you cannot juice. Squeeze though you may, you will not get juice out of a mushroom, but the thing is over 90% water by weight. In general, adding salt to something will draw out its moisture, and so you can expect that when you're cooking mushrooms and you put salt on what you're cooking that you're going to end up with a considerable amount of liquid in the pan that you didn't expect (see, with tomatoes, e.g., you'd end up with a considerable amount of liquid that you did expect, making this an important note). You need to account for this in dishes by either adding less fluid (if fluid is to be added) or by cooking that fluid off by sauteing the mushrooms longer initially, usually after adding some salt to draw out their liquids. The cooking-them-down method is usually the one I choose.

Secondly about mushrooms, they behave strangely in the presence of fluids. On the one hand, as we noted above, they give them off readily in the presence of salt and/or heat. They also absorb fluids rapidly (usually they "fill" in about ten to twenty seconds), but they'll only absorb so much and will only do it once. That means if you wash your mushrooms, then they're going to absorb water. That usually means that you're going to have a less successful result than otherwise. It also means that your mushrooms will absorb a little bit of whatever liquid they first come in contact with, most notably vinegars and oils so far as flavoring is concerned. Thus, I never wash my mushrooms (I wipe them with a slightly damp towel or clean them a brush), and I usually try to put them into something that tastes good like butter, olive oil, or bacon oil right off the bat. If vinegar is more my thing, I might dip them quickly in vinegar or wine right before throwing them in the pan or add vinegar to them soon after adding them. I'll almost always deglaze a pan with mushrooms in it with vinegar or wine also. A special note here: if you go to saute mushrooms in some oil, they will absorb a fair amount of it (and not give it back). That means you might have to add more oil to prevent other ingredients from sticking! They also are moist enough to really moisten dishes like meatloaf or burgers, but they don't hold together well at all, so they shouldn't be overused for that purpose.

Third, mushrooms are dirty, but you can't wash them. You need to brush them off, cut off particularly dirty ends of the stems, and perhaps get rather aggressive on some spots with a slightly damp towel. You don't want to eat that dirt, but you don't want to run them under the faucet either.

Fourth, mushrooms have a texture all their own... one that most kids seem to hate. Mushrooms are chewy. They tend to stay that way even when stewed (science I'd like to do is boil mushrooms until they become mushy... I bet it takes a long time), so you need to anticipate that. Big chunks of mushrooms, therefore, do poorly in stews because they become big chewy things that usually have a fairly poor mouth-feel (though slices are great stewed). For some things, like sauces, I either slice them very, very thin or cut them into itty-bitty chunks so that the texture plays far less of a role where texture shouldn't be playing a huge role.

Fifth, mushrooms all have distinct flavors that play more prominently than you might suspect. It's a really good idea to experience the flavors of different mushrooms at some point in some rather straightforward way... a really simple dish featuring them, sauteing them and using them as a garnish to burgers or other meat, making a main course out of them, etc. That way you know how their flavors work and can therefore make good decisions on how to use them. You can always just taste them fresh as well. Exotic mushrooms sometimes sound fun and exotic, but they might not taste the way you think they're going to and could wreck what you're trying to make. On the other hand, some mushrooms have a very, very delicate flavor, and you could ruin that by putting them in the presence of too many other strong flavors. You have to get to know your ingredients to cook well.

Sixth, mushrooms are almost universally delicious fried with bacon. Oh goodness.

Seventh, mushrooms are usually very good for you in very interesting and subtle ways. The white mushroom (which is very closely related to the portabello mushroom... they're actually essentially the same thing in two colors!) recently has been shown to reduce cancer risk, for instance. In fact, regular consumption of that mushroom along with daily consumption of green tea appears to cut breast cancer risk by 90%. Guess what my wife and I have a lot of now (mostly for her!). The shiitake and maitake mushrooms grow on wood (which according to traditional medicines is one sign of superior healthiness) and confer significant enough health benefits to be dried and sold as supplements in health food and vitamin stores. Surprisingly (or not), they taste great also (the Lingzhi or Reishi mushroom does not taste great and cannot really be eaten because it's as hard as a stick, however, but it makes an interesting addition to broth).

I'll probably think of a few more exciting things to say about mushrooms in the future. Just keep in mind the main things, though, when using them: they're good, they shouldn't be washed but should be cleaned, and they contain a lot of fluid and yet absorb fluids readily. As a bonus, here's how to make them into egg sandwiches (see the link for instructions) with bacon (my favorite flavor).

Follow the instructions for making egg sandwiches here, changing out the part before the addition of the eggs;
Use two or three white or baby portabello mushrooms, halved and then sliced thin;
Two strips of (streaky) bacon, fried by starting in a cold pan, cooked until crisp;
A clove of garlic;
Optionally a small amount of finely chopped onion;
Optionally a small amoutn of finely chopped Cayenne pepper.

Basically, start the bacon in the pan and cook it until it's getting crispy. Take it out of the pan, set it aside, and add the mushrooms (and onions). Salt those immediately. While that cooks, let the bacon cool a little and then chop it up into small pieces. Add it with the garlic and let it all cook for a couple of minutes... don't burn the garlic. Deglaze with a little (a tablespoon or so will definitely do it) vinegar of choice or white wine and let the liquid reduce. Once the liquid has reduced, lower the temperature, add the eggs, and follow the instructions on the other egg sandwich post. This one is probably the best of them!

Coffee Review, Kind Of, Vienna Coffee Company -- Timor Maubesse (Organic)

2009-08-01T16:26:00.002-04:00

Since I ran out of coffee the day before yesterday and therefore had to get some new coffee yesterday, I decided to get a couple of kinds that I haven't mentioned on here yet. Of course, I strongly prefer to buy locally roasted beans when I can, and so this coffee was roasted by the Vienna Coffee Company. Intrigued partly by the new label and partly by the type, I picked up their organic Timor Maubesse with high hopes and am glad to say that the cups I've brewed so far have not disappointed those hopes. The Vienna website gives the following description for this coffee:

This wet-processed coffee from the world's most impoverished country is a testament to the value of international collaboration to rebuild this legendary coffee origin. It produces a mildly sweet, balanced cup with good body and modest acidity. It leaves you with a crisp, almost spicy finish. This coffee will be appreciated by "lovers of subtly adventurous beverages."

Well... that's me most of the time: subtly adventurous and loving beverages. Actually, I have a love affair with beverages of almost all descriptions... to the point where I frequently am teased for having three or four of them near me. In any case, I found this coffee spellbinding in scent both in the bag and in the cup. The smell is distinctly reminiscent of the description above: rich, full of body, and crisp: a very complicated, intriguing, mature coffee odor, if that last word makes any sense here.

As for the taste, which the bag describes as having a "sharp finish" on a "medium-dark roast," i.e. a full-city roast, I can't give a full and honest review. As I mentioned before, I broke my French press the other day while I was washing it, and I haven't gone to the (only very slight) trouble of replacing it yet. Since I never make drip coffee anymore (bleh), the only thing I've done with it is put it through my Aeropress. Then I mix it with sugar, vanilla, and foamed milk to make the "pressoccinos" that my wife and I enjoy so much, figuring I'd give a proper review of it "eventually." Since I never did that for Kaldi's Dance, I figured I probably wouldn't get around to it on this go with the Timor Maubesse and better talk about things as they are. As they are, sugar, vanilla, and particularly milk/half-and-half round out the edges of any coffee, so the details are blurry and yet pleasant for the cups that come out of these beans.

The flavor of what we drank from these beans is definitely more full and robust than what came from the Kaldi's Dance and the Eithiopian Harrar Longberry Horse (my review/experiment). It's prominent even through the vanilla and milk fat, which is very nice. The flavor is full and crisp, meaning it doesn't leave a heavy aftertaste. In fact, if I had to pick a coffee out of all that I've had that represents a full-city roast the best, I'd probably hand it to this stuff. It really is that nice and characteristic. Also, from what I've tasted, the flavor is more complex than the other coffees that I've been drinking recently, even through the other ingredients of the cappuccino, so that like the smell, the flavor is intriguing. To put it really simply, I really like this coffee and will definitely be getting it again.

I think the best testament to it is what I did when I finished my afternoon cup. After I drank it, I went in and got a bowl of leftover soup from last night. When I finished the soup, I looked over at the table and was filled with sadness, enough to where I actually told my wife that I was just overcome with a "tremendous sadness." I had expected to find more of this coffee waiting for me to finish my soup for some reason, and that it wasn't there really let me down. It really is that pleasant, particularly in the afternoon. Right now, in fact, I can't stop picking up the bag, shaking it, and giving it another smell. It's just really nice.

Asian-Cuban Fusion, By Way of Pork Rib Stew

2009-07-31T22:16:00.002-04:00

I got some more pork ribs the other day. I love them. They're great, they make awesome stews (if you don't barbecue them), and they're usually, pound-for-pound, quite inexpensive. These were "country style," which apparently means "boneless, very meaty, and not the usual part of the ribs that I'm used to with ribs." I didn't cry. They were also scary cheap despite being fresh enough not to scare me (I checked the dates and felt the meat -- all was in order). I intended to use them to make a Cuban-inspired dish (which basically means that I would use a lot of cumin, bacon, and some brown sugar despite not really knowing what the hell Cuban food legitimately tastes like), but then my lovely wife saw them and bought Shiitake mushrooms. That could only mean one thing (she loves that stuff): but I had other ideas!!! Oh, the quandary. I decided to compromise and do both at once, figuring they were "close enough" together to be alright. It worked well. Everyone was impressed (including my mom who doesn't seem to like anything with flavor, which this had a lot of).

Despite what I say up there, I've followed some fairly reputable Cuban recipes before, so I had an idea of what I was doing. Cumin is important, brown sugar helps, and I had a hankering for something a little spicy and was using "Cuban" to open the door to "habanero." Other than that, I went completely stereotypical with it and just included black beans and bacon (borrowing from my favorite real Cuban recipe: Cuban-style black beans, which have all of the aforementioned ingredients in them and are beautiful, especially over cumin-crusted pork chops sitting on top of cumin-scented brown rice with mashed sweet potatoes nearby... wow... and yeah, that's an awfully heavy use of cumin, which ties the dishes together). Essentially, I stole some of the ideas from the black beans and added them to the Asian stew, sans cabbage.

My ingredients and how I did it:

First things first, I crushed and finely chopped five (yes, five) cloves of garlic;
Then I chopped up all of my veggies, listed below, and seasoned my pork ribs (as detailed below also);
For the cooking, I started out with some bacon (four thick-cut strips of applewood-smoked bacon, actually) in my Dutch oven over medium-high heat and cooked it up until it was crispy (n.b.: For my European audience, by bacon I mean "streaky.");
Then I took that out and added about a pound and a quarter of "country style" pork ribs, although I'm sure any style would be fine, seasoned lightly with coarse sea salt, freshly ground black pepper, and ground cumin -- I seared them on both sides in the bacon oil;
Next I took out the pork and added the following veggies, all chopped up: two carrots in largish chunks, two stalks of celery sliced thin on a bias, a red sweet pepper (actually four Nardellos) chopped up, four ounces of white mushrooms cut into quarters, six ounces of shiitake mushrooms sliced thin, half a sweet onion sliced into thin semicircles, one fresh cayenne pepper (red) chopped into little pieces, and about an inch of fresh ginger sliced thinly. I cooked them for a few minutes until they were getting a little soft, added some salt, and then added the garlic and four bay leaves, letting it cook in for a minute or two;
To deglaze the pan, I added a fairly large amount of red wine vinegar and about a tablespoon of soy sauce and scraped up all of the toasted pork bits (gramines, I think, is the technical term) and then put the pork back in with about half a teaspoon of whole cumin seeds and several dashes of habenero hot sauce (to taste?);
I added about three cups of water at this point and stirred everything up;
Once the water boiled, I turned the heat down to a notch below medium and mostly covered the pot and pretty much forgot about it for about three hours (I think I wandered in to stir it about three times in that time);
About a half an hour before dinner time, I added a can's worth of prepared black beans (some of which I smashed with a spoon), rinsed well and a tablespoon of dark brown sugar;
To finish it, I took out the bay leaves, chopped up (pulled apart is more accurate) the very tender pork into bite-sized chunks, added about a tablespoon of olive oil, chopped up the bacon and put it in there, stirred everything around, and gave it a few more minutes to come together. I adjusted the salt and served it in bowls with a bit more freshly chopped (into small pieces) onion to a cheering crowd.

If I had wanted to, I could have stretched it over cumin-scented rice or served it with cumin-scented flatbread. The cumin-scented thing sounds fancy, but it's not. For the rice, add about a quarter of a teaspoon of whole cumin seeds to the rice when you start making it. For the flatbread, add about a quarter teaspoon either of whole cumin seeds or of ground cumin to your flatbread dough when making it (need a recipe for flatbread? Look here!). Now that I think of it... cumin-scented jalepeno corn bread might have been pretty good too... maybe sans the jalepenos.... Anyway, for more food I could have also served it with mashed sweet potatoes or, my favorite, sugar-and-dark-rum-glazed sweet potato home-fries (with just a hint of cinnamon -- whoa Nelly).

I don't know if the fusion was fair or not, but the dish came out very good and rather well balanced considering things. I liked it, at least, and so did everyone at my house. Sorry for the lack of pictures. I took one of the bacon frying, decided that was a dumb picture, and then forgot to take any more after that. Oh well... stew looks mostly like stew, even with black beans in it.

(Half) Wheat Sourdough Bread, from Scratch

2009-07-30T21:40:00.005-04:00

I'm very excited about this post. I made my first loaf of sourdough bread today, and it turned out really good. What's really got me amped is that I made the starter from scratch too. For some reason, that just seems completely awesome to me because I always felt like sourdough bread would be something I had to have connections to get to make. Then I'd have a starter to take care of, and that would be an awful lot of responsibility. I might even end up having to find and hire a sourdough sitter if I wanted to go out or on vacation. I was pretty sure I didn't want all of that. Then I found out that I can make my own starter, and my curiosity teamed up with my unbridled enthusiasm to create and gave birth to my first loaf of sourdough.

I didn't get the idea for how to make a sourdough starter of my own out of a dream. In fact, I read it here. I even meant to poorly recreate the picture on his website, but then I didn't feel like doing it. Also, I'm not sure I did it quite right, though given the instructions, I'm not sure how I could have done it incorrectly. I mixed some unbleached flour with roughly an equal weight of water (yeah right, I used too much water... let's be honest here) and put in one of the outer leaves of a head of organic red cabbage. Then I covered it with another leaf of cabbage, finding the middle ground between the choices suggested in Ruhlman's blog, and let it sit for a few days. I didn't really have the faintest idea of what to do with it, so I fed it every morning when I got up and before I went to bed, hoping desperately that it wouldn't take off with crazy sourdough powers and make a mess of my kitchen while I slept or worked on my dissertation. After the forty-eight hours that are suggested, mine hadn't increased in volume at all but was quite bubbly and smelled rather strongly of sauerkraut with a reddish, purplish, slightly tan liquid on top that I dutifully stirred in every time I fed the starter. At that point, I took out the cabbage and decided that it was probably too thin to grow (I also realized that feeding it again was going to make it not fit in my container if it grew at all, so I composted half of it). I fed it, adding almost no water, and covered it with a towel. A day went by. Bubbly, stinky, not growing. Another day went by. Bubbly, stinky, not growing. Day by day, though, I increased the proportion of flour to water by just not adding water when I fed it. Then, I got up this morning and the container was almost full and had no residual liquid on top, indicating that it had more than doubled in size! Woohoo! It also had ceased to smell like cabbage gone funky and had obtained a mellow, subtly sour, very "make bread with me" kind of scent.

I was overjoyed. I was also scared. On the one hand, I wasn't sure if my baby starter was ready to make bread. On the other hand, I knew that if I left the container as it was, i.e. made no decision about what to do, it would outgrow its container within about three hours. Two and a half hours later, it reached the very top of the container (it was growing so fast I could almost watch it grow) and brought the decision to a point. I figured I should just try it. I was only out some flour and time if it went badly.

I split the starter in half since, once stirred, I had about two cups of it. Then I added two cups of flour, one cup being "white wheat" flour and the other being unbleached white flour. The first thing I did after that was feed the starter another half of a cup of flour, which caused it to spend the next four hours getting very big and then eventually shrinking back to a more manageable size (and delightful, more developed smell). Back to my bread, I put in a little water, a tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil, and some nice sea salt and worked it into a nice dough, which I kneaded duitifully and then covered and set aside for the first rise, which took about two hours because my starter is still a baby. Here's the result of the first rise posing with its "mother."

Of course, I floured my working surface again, kneaded the dough again, and shaped it into an oblong loaf shape to prepare it for baking, putting it on my lovely pizza pan that isn't as good as a stone but is much easier to clean, lighter, and less likely to break. Then I scored it to help it rise, and it looked like this.

I baked it in a 350 F oven for 35 minutes. Interestingly, I didn't know how long to bake a loaf like this, so I looked it up while it was baking and found out that 30 minutes is usually about right at the 35-minute mark. Since the page I looked at recommended 400 F for the oven, I figured I was okay. I was right on, actually. This is what it looked like when it came out.

Sliced and served. I liked mine with fig preserves on it.

The Gifts of the Season: Fresh Fruit and Vegetables from the Garden

2009-07-30T13:01:00.003-04:00

As I mentioned in my last post and a few other times in the past couple of weeks, our garden is providing plenty for us. Today, it took a new turn and provided about a dozen cucumbers and almost as many melons, to say nothing of the seven hundred billion (slight exaggeration) (mostly cherry-sized) tomatoes that still need to be picked and were ignored since, at best, I can only carry a couple of melons at a time. Almost all of them were the fancy French charentais melons (a/the variety of cantaloupe), and almost all of them were picked because they split. The problem with these melons, as we've experienced it, is that it's hard to tell when they're ripe. Essentially, they're supposed to be mostly yellowish when they're ripe, but only two of the twenty or so that we've picked have reached "yellowish" before they split. I noticed on my cool analytic software that people wonder, like I did, why these melons split. I don't wonder, though. I find out. The reason is rain, which falls in bucket-sized drops here this time of year. When the melons are ripe or close to it, a sudden watering (like from rain) will cause the melon to swell faster than the skin can accommodate, and it cracks, usually along the bottom. All you have to do to see why is cut one of these melons and then take a moment to watch the stem where you cut it... it oozes clear, orangish liquid almost like a slow-flowing tap. That's why they split. Our solution has been to watch the weather and get out there pretty much as soon as possible after it rains. Usually some have already split, so they get cut and eaten forthwith. I don't know what to do with the eight or nine of them that I picked earlier today, though, along with our first watermelon (which we've eaten a little more than half of).

How did I know the watermelon was ready? It didn't split, but I found a handy guide online that indicated that if the stripes become less distinct, the bottom gets a creamy yellow color (instead of white), and the vine half withers, then it's probably ripe. Thumping on it gives a hollow sound, and comparing it against a larger watermelon that didn't make that sound told me that this one was probably ripe. It virtually cut itself (explosively) once I touched the knife to it, so I'm led to believe it too would have split had I not picked it after the torrential rains that fell yesterday and all night. It was pretty good, but more or less, it tasted like clean, pure rainwater. We were a little disappointed, but I wasn't fussed. I do wonder if they taste differently if picked on a day when there's been clear skies and hot sun for a few days straight.

So today, other than a cappuccino with my wife, I've had nothing to eat but fruit... lots of fruit: the gift of the season. I started with probably half a pound of cherries (I freaking love cherries, especially when they're $1.99 a pound)... I can't wait until our little cherry bush/tree starts making them (next year???). The rest has been melons... melons, melons, melons (since they split, they can't really just sit around). Later will probably be something involving cucumbers and tomatoes (a salad?). Eventually, though, I'll eat something more "solid" since my double-secret homemade sourdough starter (to be posted about soon) appears to be ready... I can literally almost watch it grow now. [Edit: soon is now!]

Chicken and Homemade Pasta in Fresh Tomato-Basil Soup

2009-07-29T22:33:00.008-04:00

I should create a new feature here: We grew too many tomatoes this year and can't figure out what to do with them! That was the main inspiration for tonight's dish... use some of these tomatoes without resorting to making tomato sauce or a big salad that is all tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers (which is good with the right dressing -- red wine vinegar and oil, 1:2 ratio, a little seasoning salt, a little fresh herbs chopped up fine, and a tiny dash of sesame oil... wow -- thanks Uncle BAM). I also wanted to try something pretty minimalist.

Besides that, I did have a desire to try again to get shaved pasta (刀削面, dao xiao mian) right. Honestly, I did a little better by making the dough a bit more dry, but it was still too moist in the middle. That gave me a bit of a stir because it was just, just, just wet enough to really come together, so I'm going to have to fiddle with it more. I might have to add a dough conditioner like baking powder, but I'm certain JB didn't. Thus, I know it needs not be done to achieve a good result. Because all of my pictures are starting to look the same (stew-ish stuff cooked in a wok with the picture positioned in the upper left and very small), here's a photo of the finished product, larger and centered and stew-ish and in a wok. Mmm... it looks good.
What got me about this is that the noodles were actually more delightful to eat than the chicken was (even though it was good breast meat -- thighs probably would have been better). My favorite part, though, was the soup, which I drank straight from the bowl unashamedly after eating most of the stuff out of it with a fork. Here's how it went, feeding the whole family (myself, my wife, and two teenaged blond monkeys):

A pound and a quarter of boneless, skinless chicken breast cut into three-quarters-inch cubes or thereabouts;
About four or five medium cloves of garlic, crushed and chopped finely;
Half a sweet onion, chopped;
About five good-sized fresh tomatoes, cut into pieces roughly the same size as the chicken (some of mine were red; some were yellow-orange);
Probably what came out to 12 good-sized basil leaves, cut in a chiffonade (sounds fancy but is easy, see below or here);
Three leafy sprigs of fresh flat-leaf parsley, finely chopped;
About a quarter of a cup of extra virgin olive oil;
A healthy dash of red wine vinegar;
Salt to taste.
Two cups of flour worth of fresh shaved pasta (see the link for the recipe and process), cooked in salted water and drained.

First, I started boiling some salted water for the pasta because that takes a long damn time. Once that was on the fire, I made myself a cup of tea to sip on and chopped up the garlic. Then I made the pasta dough, setting it aside to rest and await my knife and hopes for a good outcome. Once that was done, I chopped up the onions and chicken, getting the oil hot in my wok (because it would kind of double as a stew pot and frying pan while allowing me to use a lid) about midway through, using medium-high heat and not letting the oil get to smoking. When everything was cut up and the pan was hot, in went the chicken and onions. I salted them lightly and let them cook a bit to get the chicken to "brown" a little on all sides. While that happened, I cut up the tomatoes, adding first the garlic and then a healthy splash of red wine vinegar when I figured the chicken had cooked enough. When they were cut, I added the tomatoes and salted them, and then I covered the wok, leaving all as it was until I heard it sounding quite vigorous in there. Then lowered the heat to just below medium and went out to pick the herbs from my garden. Upon returning with the herbs, I washed them and chopped them up, basil first, waiting on the parsley. To chiffonade the basil, stack up the leaves, roll them up into as tight a roll as you can, and then slice them thin, horizontally. I added the basil when it was cut, stirring and re-covering the wok at that point. That's when it started smelling crazy good, so I added just a bit more vinegar to pump the acidity (see below for an important note on this). At that point I chopped the parsley and then cut the pasta (and pinch-pulled about half of it) into the pot of now-boiling water, let it cook, and drained it. At that point, I put the cooked noodles into the tomato-basil soup and mixed everything around, checking the seasoning and acidity. After about another minute, I turned off the heat and added the chopped parsley on top. Serve in a bowl. Yum.

If I had it, there would have been freshly grated parmesian (reggiano, of course) or some other delicious dry, hard cheese. I didn't have any, but it would have been fabulous. Also, I think subbing out the chicken and subbing in beef (or, dare I dream, lamb) would have been excellent beyond measure in this dish.

The special note: Acid and fat offset one another to a certain degree in food, particularly soups, because oil is rich and acid cuts through richness. So... to make soup like the soup you pay $8+ a bowl for, you need to understand and capitalize on this. Your soup, to be $8+ a bowl, needs richness, so you need a decent amount of good-quality fat in there like e.v.o.o. or butter. Since this soup was not a bisque, I used olive oil. You'll need acidity to perk that up and cut through the fat (so your soup doesn't taste more like gravy). I used red wine vinegar and the natural acidity of tomatoes here, but balsamic vinegar, wine, beer, white wine vinegar, hot sauce, apple cider vinegar, etc. are all good for the purpose. You want to develop a taste for when the acid-fat balance is appropriate and aim for that routinely. Usually it means using more fat than you think you want in a soup and then waking it up with a little vinegar. Just remember the one and only "rule" (as far as I'm concerned) in cooking: you can always add, but you can never take away. Incremental is a good method to keep from screwing this up, let me tell you. Your gallbladder and "...but I don't like vinegar" center will thank me.

Stan's Czech-Style Butter Beer Meat and Mashed Potatoes

2009-07-29T15:45:00.004-04:00

I honestly don't know what to call this dish. A guy named Stan, who happens to be Czech, made it for me and taught me how to do it. I've since modified it -- without guilt -- because another Czech guy that happened to be present looked right at the dish, tasted it, and said "that's good, but it's not Czech." Stan countered by stating that his grandmother, who only makes Czech food, makes it, so it must be Czech. I just ate it happily because it tastes good.

This recipe carries a butter warning: it contains a stupid amount of butter. So that doesn't daunt anyone, note that butter is delicious, is strongly backed by really great chefs, and is quite likely a contributing factor in the so-called French paradox, so it might not be as bad as its reputation. Did I mention that it's delicious? It's delicious. Really, seriously, butter is delicious, especially in the form of a buttery sauce.

Here's the ingredients. The way I did it last night is given, Stan's recipe (which I used as a skeleton for this one) is in italics. Everything in Stan's recipe is in my recipe. It fed all of us, so around 3-4 people will be served by this dish.

About a pound to a pound and a half of chicken or pork cut up into little pieces;
1 leek or half of a small sweet onion, chopped;
2 cloves garlic, crushed (first) and finely chopped;
half a fresh, red Cayenne pepper, finely chopped;
a big handful of chopped green or red cabbage (I used red for the first time last night, and it worked well);
about a quarter of a cup of chopped sweet peppers (because I have a bunch of them from our garden);
the leaves of a few sprigs of fresh Thyme, chopped;
half a bottle of Czech beer (meaning Stan uses Czech beer and I don't care what beer I use);
1-2 sticks of butter, depending on how you do things (I used 1 for the meat and some more for the potatoes.. I just dropped in the whole stick into the meat mixture at the proper time and said aloud "taken care of" with a grin on my face about how ridiculous it seems to do that kind of thing);
a little milk or cream (because more milk fat is what this recipe requires to be good);
a little oil;
approximately 10-12 medium sized potatoes or the equivalent, boiled and mashed;
salt (and pepper) to taste;

As with everything on here, this is really easy. Cut everything up first, starting with the garlic. Put the chopped up, peeled (that's Stan's way) potatoes into a pot of cold, salted water and start to boil them. Meanwhile, heat some oil in a rather deep pot over medium high heat, and put the meat in with some salt, cooking until it's just browned on the outside. Add the veggies to that. Let it cook for just a moment and then add the beer. Stir the pot and cover it, reducing the heat to about medium. Stan let's that cook until the potatoes are ready, so the meat gets quite tender, and then pours most of the liquid out of the pan and into the sink, adding most or all of a stick of butter to replace it. I don't do that. I pour it off into a pan, but about half a stick of butter in with the meat, and put the other half into that pan to make a sauce, like a loose gravy (which could be thickened by adding a slurry -- equal parts water and cornstarch mixed until relatively smooth -- or pouring the liquid into a blond roux -- combine equal parts flour and oil and cook over medium-high heat until it starts to brown just a little). There's too much flavor in that liquid to waste! I want that liquid to reduce. Then I add some of it directly to the potatoes with the milk (cream, what-have-you), a little more butter, and some salt and pepper to make proper mashed potatoes. To serve it, put the potatoes on a plate, put the meat over the top, scooping up as much of that meaty butter as you can get, and pour the gravy/sauce over the top of everything. It probably is served best with some steamed veggies like broccoli and a hearty chunk of (homemade?) bread (with butter, of course) on the side. Nice.

A note about Stan's way: Stan says that the proper Czech way to do this recipe is to make sure there's much less meat than veggies. In particular, there should be a lot of potatoes, outstripping the quantity of meat several times over. The Czech way is to have lots of potatoes with a little meat and sauce. Apparently he's serious about this because when he made it for us, I was in charge of the potatoes. I made what seemed like a nice pot of mashed potatoes, though nothing spectacularly huge, and Stan made me make another batch to add to it. He said I'd barely made enough potatoes for one girl to eat (this would have been for five adult men) and gave me a proper description of the mountains of potatoes that flow forth on every Czech plate. Maybe make more potatoes than I recommend. They also shouldn't be too fussed up with bacon, cheese, and all of that. The potatoes here should taste like potatoes, he says. I think I agree because the sauce is ridiculously rich what with the enormous amount of butter in it.

JB's Beef and Leek with Homemade Noodles (Mian)

2009-07-28T09:25:00.005-04:00

This dish is apparently pretty typical for home cooking in the Beijing area in China, although the noodles were supposed to be shaved noodles (刀削面, dao xiao mian) instead of what I made due to inexperience. Either way, the fresh pasta is approximately a billion times better than stuff that is dried in boxes, and it's easy enough to make from flour and water that there's not a lot of need to feel like it shouldn't be done. Now this dish is both very nice and reminiscent of what is frequently served in Chinese restaurants and called "Mongolia beef" although without all the pepperiness and with the mellow flavor of (a lot of) leek. It's quite excellent with lamb as well, as I can attest since I had it from JB's wok that way several times. Like essentially everything on here, it's also quite easy to make and a people-pleaser. My dish fed the four of us (both kids are girls, so if you have boys or are feeding adults, you'll probably need to make slightly more than this, particularly in the noodle department).

I used for the stir fry:

One and a half pounds of beef steak, cut very thin across the grain (like almost deli-meat thin);
Two leeks, washed thoroughly, washed again, peeled, cut, washed again, and then cut up into quarters lengthwise and into inch-long sections, using all but perhaps the last quarter of the green part (this is quite a pile of onions and looks intimidating), then rinsed again (leeks are sandy);
Two Nardello peppers, cut to match the pieces of leek in size;
Two cloves of garlic, crushed and finely chopped;
About an inch of ginger, finely chopped;
Two tablespoons soy sauce;
A half teaspoon or so of red pepper flake;
Two tablespoons of peanut or canola oil;
Salt to taste.

For the noodles:

About two cups of all-purpose, unbleached flour, sifted into a bowl;
a half teaspoon of salt;
Roughly 2/3 of a cup of water (enough to make a proper dough);
11 gallons of elbow grease.

The first thing I did to make this was crush the garlic and chop it up (always do the garlic first to get more health out of it). Then I did the ginger and the leek, followed by the pepper. I transferred all of the veg except the garlic and ginger to a separate plate, started a pot of salted water to head toward boiling, and cut up the meat next, taking care to trim the fat and to slice very thin and as neatly across the grain as I could. Essentially, I wanted my pieces to come out roughly a half-inch wide, an inch or so long, and as thin as I could comfortably cut it. That took a little while, so the water was getting close. I set all of this aside next to start making the pasta dough. In hindsight, I maybe should have made the pasta dough first, but I'm not sure about that. Making the dough is easy: put the flour and salt in a bowl, make a depression in the middle, pour in most of the water, stick your hand in, and mix it up. It sticks to your hand, and then as the dough starts to come together, it starts to come off. If not, add more flour and keep going, rubbing it off your hand. You want this dough to be a little on the dry side. Mine was a little on the too-wet side, which had rather bad consequences later. Once the dough comes together, roll it out of the bowl and onto the counter and knead the heck out of it for about 5-10 minutes. You just want it to relax, not to be something you can pull into fancy pulled noodles (you have to knead that for over half an hour). Longer kneading times lead to chewier pasta, but it depends on how much time you have and are willing to invest. JB didn't knead his forever, so I didn't knead mine for very long either.

Set the ball of dough aside to rest while you start the stir fry: oil in the pan over high or medium-high heat until it's hot. Add the meat first and stir it around a little, adding the garlic and ginger soon after with a little salt. Stir that around a little and add the rest of the veg. Mix things together nicely, add some salt for the veggies, and pour in the soy sauce. I turned the heat down to medium-high at that point and covered it while I started to make the noodles.

Ideally, with shaved pasta, you take a sharp knife and shave chunks of dough off directly into the boiling water: easy as can be. When the noodles have cooked for a few minutes (sometimes they seem to float, sometimes not), strain them and they're done. The problem is that my dough was too wet, so the sharp knife (which I sharpened and which was therefore, indeed, very sharp) wouldn't finish the job; the noodles kept sticking to it or failing to cut all the way off the lump of dough. That was no good. I used JB's "finishing the dough" trick from the beginning to deal with that problem. Basically, I squeezed the dough thin and tore it off with my fingers, tossing it into the boiling water. Squeeze, tear, toss; squeeze, tear, toss; etc. After about two minutes, the whole lump of dough was in the water boiling away. After about two or three more minutes, it was cooked as lovely homemade pasta.

In China, it's typical to serve this stuff the Chinese way: all of the stir-fried stuff would have been uncovered, stirred, and adjusted for proper seasoning, and then it would be put into a large serving bowl in the middle of the table, possibly with a spoon in it for spooning up the greasy, delicious "gravy" at the bottom. Each person would get a bowl of noodles and add from the serving bowl according to their wants. I just dumped the drained pasta into the wok, turned off the heat, and stirred it around with the stir-fry (which is also acceptable, apparently). That seemed to work really well and is what you see pictured at the top of the page (there aren't more pictures of this exciting dish because the camera was otherwise employed while I was cooking it). It's way good and quite easy, so I hope everyone tries it out.

The Art and Science of Cooking Well

2009-07-27T12:12:00.003-04:00

Cooking is an art with scientific principles behind it. The fast food industry has taught us that, at least: if I take these identical things and cook them in this identical way then I will get an identical result regardless of whether the cooking is done by a top chef or a complete boob. Science, as a gateway to technology, opened the door for the mechanization of food preparation because cooking can be regarded as a science in many ways (predominantly chemistry with some biology/ecology thrown in from time to time). For me, though I have scientific training, cooking is an art.. a discipline with few, if any rules, in which the formulas (recipes) are suggestions that can never actually get you anywhere great although they'll get you somewhere nice every time.

Cooking well is a multisensory experience that requires attentiveness and background. Things have to smell right; they have to feel right; they have to look right; the cooking often enough has to sound right, and in the end they have to taste right. All of that has to come together for cooking to come off well. The recipe matters only a small amount in comparison, and once those things are understood, one no longer needs to pay attention to much else. I, in fact, usually invent recipes in my imagination, tasting the ingredients in my head before I put them together and then being able to realistically predict what will happen when those things meet in a bowl or a pan. In that way the process feels very organic and natural, not contrived or forced. Getting there is a matter only of acquiring some knowledge, experiencing it for yourself, experimenting a little, and (the secret to all of my success in any of my endeavors) paying attention to the process and results.

Here's how the five usual senses play a role in my cooking, along with a note about the one rule that cannot be forgotten (probably the only rule in cooking, I think, once you're comfortable with it):

The Only Real Rule: What Goes In Usually Can't Come Out
This is simple but has profound implications in the kitchen. If you add too much salt, the only remedy for that problem, really, is to upsize the entire recipe, which often enough is impossible. Too salty usually is just too salty (and if you're a hard-core like I was in my early days, you eat it anyway to teach yourself why too much salt is a mistake to avoid). Typically, play by the equivalent formulation of this rule: you can always add, but you can only rarely take away. If your soup gets too thick, add more water. If you make it too thin from the beginning, enjoy your thin soup (reducing it will probably destroy the character of whatever is in the pot that isn't liquid and pouring some off will pour out all of that flavor resulting in a smaller amount of thin soup with more chunky bits). This rule pertains particularly to the following: salt, seasonings, and spicy stuff (hot sauce or peppers or whatnot). If you go too far with those, then you've definitely gone too far. "Enjoy" what you have, and learn something from it!

Touch: It Has to Feel Right
A good stew, for instance, can be wrecked by cutting the vegetables into pieces that are the wrong size. Things that are cooked more quickly are even more sensitive to this problem. In particular, attention should be paid when cutting up the ingredients to create a proper mouth-feel with them. You don't have to cut everything to the same size, but you should cut every carrot in a dish, for example, to roughly the same size and shape. That will ensure even cooking and a more consistent, pleasant mouth feel. You don't have to play that way, but you want things to come out well. Similarly, you should pay attention to how long or short you should cook something. Some things, like broccoli, are better a bit crunchy. Some things are not so good crunchy, like potatoes. Other things, like rice and dried pasta, have to find the right place: too short is bad and too long is also bad. Feel is particularly important when making dough. If you don't develop a sensitive touch for the dough, then your bread is going to suck. That's just how it goes. Of course, things aren't so complicated... you just have to feel what you want to feel. For instance, if your dough is grainy, logic should tell you that your bread will be grainy. If a grainy-feeling bread is what you're after, rock on. Otherwise, work it more to see if it smooths out.

Smell: It Has to Smell Right
One particular gift of our evolution is that our noses are awesome at telling us if something is going to make us sick. Pay attention to how your ingredients smell. I smell all of my ingredients in the store to make sure they smell nicely... before I buy them. If something smells bad (unless it's supposed to smell bad), then it probably won't taste good. In fact, the smell that something gives off makes up a huge component of its flavor (odor is very complex while taste is very simple, speaking of how our body reads and interprets these things -- more when I talk about taste), so by smelling something, you can open the door to imagining how it will probably taste (with some exceptions). Much of the imagination that goes into cooking well is connecting with how scents and flavors will combine in the finished dish, something you can only start to imagine if you know the scents and flavors of the particular ingredients along with how they tend to change as you cook them (e.g. onions). For produce and meat, always pay attention that it smells fresh. For produce in particular, try to pick things that smell like something... a lot of big agriculture delivers produce to the grocery store that doesn't smell like much because it was picked days or weeks too early for shipping. Guess what... it won't taste like much either.

Sight: It Has to Look Right
I had a conversation once with a close friend that I never really understood until I started cooking a lot (not that he cooked!). He said he'd rather have a very nicely prepared meal that looks very elegant and lovely than a very well put-together date, that looks very elegant and lovely, to share it with. For him, how the food looked was of high importance! I just didn't (and still partly don't) understand why he feels that way, but I do realize that good-looking food enhances the experience tremendously. Seriously, look at this guy's strawberry tart and try to tell me that you don't want to bury your face in it (actually, look at a lot of his food.. it's so freaking beautiful that I can tell it's delicious without any of my other senses getting in on the act). Try to think about how your food will be presented and do little things if you have the capability and the time. Good-looking food carries with it the expectation of good-tasting food, and that expectation can enhance the perception of the flavor that you know you made really good via all of your careful efforts.

Hearing: It Has to Sound Right
This is really mostly to do with the cooking process... the sound can tell you a lot. For instance, I can now know by the sound they're making alone that my vegetables, when I sautee them to make some scrambled eggs dish, are ready to feel a little vinegar (i.e. the sauteeing business is done). Getting this skill is experience. That's it. Go cook. Pay attention. Notice that when your onions are turning translucent, e.g., they don't sound like they did when you first put them in the pan. The sounds your food makes when you're cooking it tells you a lot about the temperature of the pan (initial sounds) and residual water content of the food (during any frying exercise). In other related news, I used my Moka pot yesterday to make a lovely cup of rather burned pseudo-espresso because I couldn't use my hearing to judge things: my wife was doing dishes, I was making bread, and the kids were simultaneously watching a movie, listening to a radio, and talking their (and our) heads off. That thing makes very specific sounds that tell you when to turn off the heat. I never heard it make any sounds over all the din in the kitchen, and so the beverage came out tasting a little toasted. I still drank it.

Taste: It Has to Taste Right
This is obvious. It's also the simplest and the most profound part of cooking well. The flavors of the ingredients have to combine appropriately, the acid/fat/sweetness/saltiness balances must all be proper to create the satisfying, appropriate flavor that you're after (be that rich or bland or something in between). Experimenting, paying attention to the other senses as you go along, and cooking a lot will get you better and better at this part of things. Understanding how taste works helps a lot too.
Essentially, we have a few basic flavors that we can taste and that's about it: sweetness, sourness, saltiness, bitterness, savoryness, and hot (like hot peppers hot -- pungent is a more accurate word). As far as taste goes, there is very little variation in how we perceive things: sour is sour is sour. Thus, combinations of those things make up a big component of taste. Nearly as important is smell. We get a strong olfactory component from our food (our noses are aimed straight at whatever would go in our mouths, and then inside, the two are connected), and we can detect and identify literally millions if not billions of distinct scents. Taste makes up the bulk of the experience while smell fills in the gaps (taste is the melody and the bass and the percussion, and smell is the harmony, if you like music). Furthermore, it's valuable to know that a little salt goes a long way in one respect: salt has the function (in addition to tasting salty) of making other flavors more accessible to your taste buds, i.e. the right amount of salt doesn't taste salty, it makes things taste more like themselves (i.e. it's a "flavor enhancer").

Intuition, Ispiration, and Imagination: It Has to Seem Right
Here's where good cooking becomes great: intuition on how to combine ingredients, inspiration on what things to make and how to make them, and imagination both to try to create something new as well as to play out how it will come off in your mind before you start cooking, while you're cooking it (so you can adapt as needed, mid-process), and while you're putting it onto the plate (it has to look right...). Don't be afraid to try something new once you've got a basic idea of how things work and how your ingredients taste, smell, and feel. That's where the really good stuff happens.

Hummus and Yogurt Flatbread

2009-07-26T17:20:00.007-04:00

This entry will feature two recipes that work great in conjunction: hummus (this time plain) and flatbread (this time with yogurt in it because I wanted it to be more like naan).

Hummus, simply put, is a ripoff at the store. It is about five times as inexpensive to make if you have the tools (a food processor is nice here), it tastes fresher and all around better, and it leaves the opportunity for you to experiment with it (hummus is another "platform" dish, like scrambled eggs, in my house upon which many exciting, delicious experiments are performed). Nice. Did I mention that it's crazy easy? No? It's crazy easy to make. Here's what's in it:

1 can of garbanzo beans (chick peas) or preferably the equivalent quantity that you boiled up yourself in salty water;
1 medium-small clove of garlic (choose the size according to taste);
the juice of half a lemon;
more extra virgin olive oil than you're probably going to like to hear about;
about a tablespoon of sesame seeds or sesame tahini;
a little salt (to taste);
usually a little water;
optionally garnish with fresh, chopped parsley.

How do you do it? Crush the garlic and peel it, cutting it roughly if you want to. Put the sesame seeds in the food processor and run them until they start to break up (that doesn't always really happen and certainly doesn't matter any). Add the garlic, salt, some olive oil, half the lemon juice, and around half of the garbanzos and give it a whirl. Don't overload the food processor! If it starts to incorporate nicely, then you're lucky. Chances are, you'll need more oil or a little water to get things to come out fairly smooth at this point. Add either, according to your tastes (note: olive oil, if you're unaware of it, has a flavor that is distinctive and somewhat peppery... try drinking a spoonful of oil straight sometime so you know what you're working with). Do pay attention that using too much olive oil will make your hummus taste very much like olive oil, but adding too little oil leaves your hummus tasting a bit too much like plain garbanzos. Scoop most of this out of the food processor (unless you have a big one, in which case, you don't have to do this in two steps) and into a bowl and then repeat it until all of the ingredients have been added (for one can's worth of beans in a small food processor, two goes is enough). Be sure if you do this in more than one step to stir well in the bowl since the two halves probably won't taste quite the same. Sprinkle freshly chopped parsley across the top. Done.

Flatbread is one of life's greatest joys, I think, both to make and to eat. It's very simple, perhaps one of the oldest foods and probably the oldest form of leavened bread, and it offers a wide variety of experiences by subtly changing the ingredients. Like any bread you make by hand, it is a lot of work. Luckily, any flatbread recipe will double as a great pizza crust recipe if you want to take it that way instead. Like pizza crust, flatbread is best if it's a little chewy, which means developing gluten, which means serious elbow grease is required to do it right (if you do it by hand).

Now bread-making is considered to be a science as much as an art, and so recipes are usually followed hard and fast, using careful measurements, always by weight, and precise proportions. I don't do that. There's a few reasons: I don't have a scale, it's less adventurous, I have worse results generally, and I think it's largely crap because factors like the humidity and temperature affect the outcome. If I'm going to have to adjust anyway, then I don't want a formula. A rough guide is fine, and then I can finish it by feel. That's more personal anyway. Here's a rough guide, in walk-through format with pictures!

This is where it always starts. Sift some flour (here 1 cup and a half) into a bowl. In a measuring cup, put a packet of yeast (rapid rise is pretty good for the purpose), a little sugar (agave nectar in this case), and about a quarter of a cup of warm (~90 F) water. Then wait. The yeast has to "bloom," which means activate. You can tell it's ready when it's got foam all over the top of it almost another quarter of a cup thick.

Using a wisk is my favorite way to get the gluten started. After adding the yeast and water to the flour, add more water (and in this case 5 heavy dollops of plain, whole-milk yogurt because this is yogurt flatbread), and start to wisk. You want the mixture to have the consistency of rather thick pancake batter, so add more water or flour until that's about right. Mix vigorously with the whisk for about 15 minutes, stirring one way for a while and then the other (like a Harry Potter potion) to start to develop gluten. Note that this would wreck pancakes for the same reason.

Once you've whisked the fire out of it (the fire will go into your forearms and hands), let it sit somewhere warm for about an hour. It should roughly double in volume in that time due to the activity of the yeast. This is a good time to make your hummus, for instance, as I did. The picture shows the result after it sat for an hour.

Whisk again. Add salt (about half a teaspoon, probably) and (optionally) some oil (olive oil is great for pizza crusts, maybe a tablespoon or two, a tablespoon of finely chopped up sweet cream butter went into this dough). Add flour. Whisk. Add flour. Whisk. Etc. until it gets too thick to whisk. Add flour (rough guide: 3 flours; 1 liquid starts to come together nicely). I stuck my hand in too soon and it was too sticky. Remedy: add flour. If the flour won't incorporate, add water. You're making bread here, not a rocket ship.

After you get all of the sticky mess off your hand and incorporate it back into the dough and you find the proper mixture of flour and water (it should be a little sticky but not awful unless you leave your hand still in it for too long), dump it out of the bowl, getting as much stuff out as you can, and begin to knead it on a clean surface. If it's too wet (really sticky), add more flour. If it's too dry (crumbly), add a few drops of water at a time until it feels about like you'd imagine it should (like slightly sticky Play Doh). Knead by folding it and pushing it away from you. Use body weight.

At first, it will do this when you stretch it, i.e. tear and be all grainy looking. It's also springy and unresiliant. It's not ready. Knead it more, beating it and rolling it and messing with it however you like. If you're good at kneading, this will take about twenty minutes. If you're not good at it, you'll need at least a half an hour of this party. You want the dough to come out smooth and relaxed, like it just had a nice massage. The change is very noticible. For chewier bread, keep going after gets that way.

Roll it into a ball when it's nice and relaxed (look how chill it is here) and let it rest for about 10-15 minutes. Seriously, you just beat the crap out of it (or lovingly massaged it) for a good while... you want it to perform for you right now? Get real. Let it relax for 10-15 and try to get the gunk off your hands and have some sports drinks to put yourself back together (you might need most of that time to do it).

For making flatbreads, you'll need to break the dough up into more manageable pieces. For a pizza crust, you can skip this step if you want to make a big-ol' pizza. For miniature, single-serve pizzas, get a knife of some sort and cut your dough. Here, I'm cutting it in half, but I did that a bunch of times (eight) to get sixteen (in this case) roughly same-sized wedges of dough. If you want bigger breads, cut it into fewer pieces. If you want smaller breads, cut it into more pieces. Again, this isn't the space shuttle; it's bread.

Here's some of the wedges and some being formed into little balls. Notice they're not all the same size because I'm not perfect (or I like variety?) and because it doesn't matter. These are roughly the size of golf balls, though. There's no need to turn them all into little balls right away, but eventually all of the wedges will pass through a ball-shaped phase. This is when you should put a skillet or grittle on medium-high heat to get it ready for cooking these little beauties.

Press the balls out into flat shapes. I don't really use my fingers much for this (more the heel of my hands and the backs of my hands unless I feel like rolling them out with a glass bottle or rolling pin), but the pictures using other parts of my hands made it looked bad. This was totally posed. You should probably push out two or three of these at any given time and have two or three little balls rolled up and ready to go at any given time while cooking.

Here's one cooking in the pan (after it was flipped). Cook them about like pancakes, which means they cook on one side for a few minutes (3 or so in a hot pan), get flipped, and get similar treatment on the other side. Smaller breads can be cooked two or three at a time in a large pan like this. You want them to look a little toasty and feel cooked-through if you tap on them.

Halfway done! Notice I have a few little balls of dough prepared, a few little (unevenly sized) flat, pressed-out doughs, and a plate on which I'm gathering the finished products (which could be kept in a warm oven to keep them hot, but they stay really hot that way). If the dough seems to be drying out, it doesn't really matter unless it crumbles when you try to flatten it out. If that happens, add some water to your hands and knead the doughballs in your hands again and then press them out. ...not a spaceship....

At last, at last, they're all cooked (actually, the last two were in the pan when I took this), stacked on a plate, sitting next to a bowl of the hummus I made with some parsley and a lemon for garnish. The lemon promptly was squeezed into my water and the sprig of parsley eaten as soon as this photo was snapped. Then we got down to business and ate it up, no utensils required.

A fun variant on the flatbreads (or little pizzas) is that they can be cooked on a grill to create grilled flatbread. That's good stuff, but we don't have a grill anymore. Grilling bread seems weird, but it's really, really a good idea. Make sure your grill is clean and the fire is burning clean (if it's wood or charcoal) before you put the dough on there, though. Summertime perfection!

Coffee Roaster Review: Vienna Coffee Company

2009-07-26T12:03:00.002-04:00

Since I had cappuccino and cereal for breakfast this morning (cereal can be good!), I didn't make anything particularly exciting to talk about. I did, however, realize that I've been meaning to say something overall about our local coffee roaster: Vienna Coffee Company (coffee experiments will be on hold for a while because I broke my French press doing dishes the other day, but really I cracked it being careless about six months ago, and it's survived until now without leaking a drop). Despite my lack of a specific coffee review, I will note here that I wish I could do one properly because I have some of my current favorite from Vienna: a blend called Kaldi's Dance, the name referring to the legendary story of coffee's discovery by a goatherd named Kaldi watching his goats behaving very energetically after eating some ripe, red coffee berries. A proper review will follow sooner or later, but for now, I'll suffice it to say that it's my favorite from Vienna and that the description on their website (find the link to it on this page, roughly halfway down) more or less nails it: "complicated, earthy, etc."

So what about Vienna Coffee overall? I love that it's local. I respect that it's better than any other coffee I've run into without having to do a mail-order or a direct import via my brother who lives far away near a very good coffee roaster. I appreciate it usually a couple or three times a day. I just wish they'd put a roasting date on their bags because I'm not clear on how fresh their coffee is when I get it. Granted, I get it at a store, or occasionally by showing up at their roastery, so perhaps mail-order is different. I suspect not, though, and real coffee geeks really want to know when their coffee was roasted because they know that stuff is perishable and diminishes in brewing quality quickly after a short peak period.

I've probably tried three quarters of their caffeinated, non-flavored coffees (I don't usually do flavored coffee and don't believe in decaffeinated coffee, which might even be quite bad for you). I probably would have tried them all by now, but since I rarely keep notes (I'm not a serious coffee taster, just a serious coffee enjoyer), I can't honestly remember for sure which ones I've had and which ones I haven't. I do know that I haven't had a bad one yet, and the descriptions they provide are quite accurate. I'm certain that the freshness of the coffee I've had from them varies from quite properly fresh, to "fresh enough" most often, to "I think this is probably pretty old, relatively speaking." It's consistently better than essentially all of the crap in the grocery stores, though, including in most cases fancier places that tend to carry decent or good coffee. It doesn't, however, quite compare with a giant like Dancing Goats Coffee (formerly Batdorf and Bronson, having changed their name to match that of one of their best blends) or some smaller places I've found that are quite awesome: Bluebottle Coffee Co. (San Francisco, California) and Milagro Coffee Y Espresso (Las Cruces, New Mexico). It more than makes up for that, however, by being 1) local, 2) less expensive, and 3) quite good in its own right and excellent when it's properly fresh, which Dancing Goats and Milagro are consistently able to produce because it's part of their fundamental coffee ethos.

I'm glad to see that Vienna Coffee is featured in a lot of local restaurants here too. Though this list is not nearly inclusive, I know for certain that it's featured at the Tomato Head (which is awesome for well-crafted, healthy, hippy-style, cafe-style food) and at a local coffee shop called Grounded, which might have one of the best coffee-shop names around, not to mention superior atmosphere and great desserts and whatnot.

Overall, I give Vienna Coffee Company an eight out of ten in terms of ten-point scales that don't really mean anything. I'd probably give it a ten if they had roasting dates on their bags, but I'm probably pretty easy to get a ten out of (along with a half dozen suggestions for ways to make that ten really stand).

Vanilla Milk and a Lovely Vanilla Smoothie

2009-07-25T23:08:00.004-04:00

I'm a total sucker for flavored milk drinks. I don't know why that's the case, but ever since I was a kid, the perfect desert has always been a milkshake, or in the lack of ability to acquire such a thing, a glass of chocolate milk. When I broke my arm and busted my chin in a bicycle accident as a teenager, I lived on chocolate milk for about a week. When I had my wisdom teeth pulled as an older teenager... yep, chocolate milk for about a week. When I need a special treat or a little pick-me-up when I'm at the store or on a road trip: a quart of chocolate whole milk usually does the 1000-calorie trick for me (Note: I always feel bad after I down a quart of whole milk, but I always look forward to doing it again). In London this summer, I almost danced to find out that they have more than just chocolate in their list of flavored milks to choose from: chocolate, strawberry, vanilla, mint (I didn't try that... seems kind of gross), fancy chocolates, blends of the previous, and... my favorite... banana milk. Why banana milk isn't in the U.S. is confusing and irritating to me. Children would love it. I would love it. Essentially every person in the country would be happier! I hope my voice is heard on this matter, and this beverage makes its lovely little vaguely yellow way here (particularly if I get a little commission or at least some free banana milk out of the deal).

Anyway, I have a secret recipe for vanilla milk that I actually like better than chocolate milk. It's way simple and damn near perfect in all ways: healthy, satisfying, refreshing, delicious, etc.

Fill a glass as high as you desire with whole milk (other milk would be okay if other milk is okay to you);
Add good vanilla extract, maybe half a teaspoon or something (just a little is fine but don't be a total cheap-o);
Add about a tablespoon of (preferably grade B) maple syrup (yes, maple syrup);
Stir;
Attempt to drink it slowly;
Fail at that and chug it anyway;
Probably make another one.

This can be done with sugar, but maple syrup makes it both better and healthier. The choice is clear if it's available. This could also be done with a vanilla-flavored syrup (like for flavoring coffee), but what guarantee do you have that the vanilla in it is as good as the vanilla that meets my standards of "good vanilla extract?" Also, what is the likelihood that said syrup is made from maple syrup (especially grade B, which has more flavor and more nutrition, i.e. is a win-win situation)? Zero. Get the real stuff.

If you like smoothies as much as I do, then you can thicken this up by adding yogurt. Since yogurt is sour in comparison with milk, you get to (not have to) use more maple syrup (or add some sugar). You could use vanilla-flavored yogurt, but their vanilla is probably less good than yours, their sugar probably isn't maple syrup, and your kids will probably eat all of your not-plain yogurt before you get to it (ours, at least, don't like the complication of having to add things to yogurt to make it taste like candy and avoid it almost entirely). I usually go 50-50 on the milk-yogurt ratio, but if I'm feeling like a thicker smoothie, I use more yogurt. If I'm feeling cheap (all too often), I use less yogurt since yogurt costs, ounce for ounce, about 6.72 times as much as milk (given the prices at the store tonight while I was there). Homemade yogurt is cheaper (same as milk, essentially) and easy, but honestly, I'm just too lazy to do it consistently.