Showing posts tagged food
When you show up for a dinner party with friends, and the hostess unexpectedly asks you to cook the main course, that is a great compliment — right? View high resolution

When you show up for a dinner party with friends, and the hostess unexpectedly asks you to cook the main course, that is a great compliment — right?

A day for simplicity in Tapwaterville — pot-stickers, ginger-garlic carrots, and jasmine rice. View high resolution

A day for simplicity in Tapwaterville — pot-stickers, ginger-garlic carrots, and jasmine rice.

“
Eating with the fullest pleasure — pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance — is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.
Attributed to Wendell Berry, by Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food An Eater’s Manifesto, pp. 196-197.
Not a particularly creative menu, but some traditions are OK by me. View high resolution

Not a particularly creative menu, but some traditions are OK by me.

Brasserie TJ’s Pommes Frites

You just can’t go wrong serving homemade French fries with a great piece of grilled beef — especially when you have dry-aged only one porterhouse for 3 people. I think I have the method, too. Wash the cut fries in multiple waters, like sushi rice, until the water is clear. Chill for at least an hour submerged in ice water. Dry thoroughly and then do the first fry in peanut oil laced with bacon fat at 325 for 6-7 minutes and they are just starting to color. Drain and cool to room temperature on a rack, and then fry again at 365 for 2-3 minutes in the same oil until golden. Finish with a generous sprinkling of uniform sea salt and, if you feel like it, fresh minced thyme.

The Asparagus Question

The phenomenon is known as asparagusuria, but it doesn’t happen with everyone. The smell is due to sulfur compounds in the urine and several have been identified, including S-methyl thioesters. The source of these compounds in the asparagus and how they get into the urine is unknown. The ability to produce the compounds may be genetically determined. In one study, 43% of urine samples taken after subjects ate asparagus had the odor (lucky testers) but other researchers disagree, concluding from a separate study that everyone produces offensive urine after eating asparagus, but not everyone can smell the offending compound; it’s called specific anosmia or smell blindness.

Dr. Phil Handel, Table Matters

Pimentón: It’s Spanish for ‘Better Than Paprika’ - John Willoughby, New York Times Each fall for a few hundred years, the chilies grown throughout La Vera have been harvested and dried on racks, stretched over smoldering fires made from the wood of the local oak. After all the liquid has been slowly coaxed out of the peppers, they are stone ground. The result is pimentón de la Vera, a beautifully smoky, variably spicy, brick-red powder that gave me a whole new conception of paprika. Read More I freely admit to my own pimentón habit — though it is the only habit I admit to. When you use it, it is as thought you are are suddenly speaking with Antonio Banderas’s accent. View high resolution
Pimentón: It’s Spanish for ‘Better Than Paprika’ - John Willoughby, New York Times
Each fall for a few hundred years, the chilies grown throughout La Vera have been harvested and dried on racks, stretched over smoldering fires made from the wood of the local oak. After all the liquid has been slowly coaxed out of the peppers, they are stone ground. The result is pimentón de la Vera, a beautifully smoky, variably spicy, brick-red powder that gave me a whole new conception of paprika.

Read More

I freely admit to my own pimentón habit — though it is the only habit I admit to. When you use it, it is as thought you are are suddenly speaking with Antonio Banderas’s accent.

Small Plates: Four Easy Japanese Izakaya Dishes A Serious Eats series on my favorite food genre — small plates.
Small Plates: Four Easy Japanese Izakaya Dishes

A Serious Eats series on my favorite food genre — small plates.

America: Too Stupid To Cook, Part II

Michael Ruhlman

I love a good rant — and Ruhlman is particularly suited for a good rant — especially when the rant ends with a simple, but elegant recipe.

“Hey! Idiot manufacturers! Cut it out! The buttons don’t work—even your partners in food crime say so! Worse, when they don’t work, you are telling your customers that they are so stupid, not only can’t they cook, they can’t even press a button correctly!”

The rest of the article and the recipe

A Dinner Date With India and Spain

“CHICKPEAS are often cooked with spinach, from India to the New World. But in southern Spain, they are mostly made with chorizo. Combine these ideas, and you have a rich, deep, full-flavored stew perfect for a fast dinner on a cold night. The texture of the dish is heightened by drying the cooked chickpeas between paper towels, then shallow-frying them in olive oil. Instead of being mealy, they become crunchy-mealy — a change most people, I think, will like.”
Recipe Here

Tapwater Jackson’s pain de ménage experiment. Hey, you have to do something on Super Bowl Morning, which is a National Holiday in parts of Idaho and Guam. I am a cook, not a baker. I can make cookies that will make you moan, but that is just sugar and butter and not really baking. So, I have decided to bake the same rustic sourdough bread once or twice a week for the next year and post the results — though, probably not here unless I start shaping my loaves to look like Marilyn Monroe. I like the title, pain de ménage, because it just means homemade bread. But the approach I am taking is a very rustic French slow-fermented sourdough sponge method, and I have all this Alsatian blood coursing through my veins. If I figure out the shelf life, I will mail you a loaf. Image of this morning’s loaf by Icepick. View high resolution
Tapwater Jackson’s pain de ménage experiment.

Hey, you have to do something on Super Bowl Morning, which is a National Holiday in parts of Idaho and Guam. I am a cook, not a baker. I can make cookies that will make you moan, but that is just sugar and butter and not really baking. So, I have decided to bake the same rustic sourdough bread once or twice a week for the next year and post the results — though, probably not here unless I start shaping my loaves to look like Marilyn Monroe.

I like the title, pain de ménage, because it just means homemade bread. But the approach I am taking is a very rustic French slow-fermented sourdough sponge method, and I have all this Alsatian blood coursing through my veins.

If I figure out the shelf life, I will mail you a loaf.

Image of this morning’s loaf by Icepick.

How to Make Homemade Sausage

Hank Shaw’s tutorial for the basics of simple sweet Italian sausage, written as though the reader is an intelligent adult. I prefer Marsala to Sherry, but it is all about methods — not rules.

Espresso, Intelligentsia

A beautifully-made short film on making espresso.

By Department of the 4th Dimension

Culinary Thoughts From Chainsaw Breaks

I am pleased to note that another weekend of chainsaw work concluded without the loss of important anatomical appendages. In between assaults, and restringing the Pono, I had some culinary revelations that may amount to something.

Friday night, I fed my sourdough and left it out to bloom. In the morning I halved it and made a standard sourdough bread mixture, but with added olive oil. After rising, tossing, and finishing with onion and porcini jam and fresh mozzarella, it was delicious with huge crust flavor. Onion jam recipe to follow eventually.

Sunday was a small free range chicken that brined over night and was served with a roasted fennel and cardamon spiced cauliflower and popovers. The chicken was marinated just before roasting with a pureed emulsion of roasted and fresh garlic and olive oil with the zest and juice of a Meyer lemon and chile flakes, pepper, and salt and roasted over charcoal. But, the star was popovers made in a new mini (12) popover pan. The brining really made the chicken deep with flavor and the popovers were rich little pockets that got filled with the chicken and cauliflower, and which elicited comments of “my favorite meal — except for the cauliflower” from the 8-year-old.

I also did a confit of garlic cloves in olive oil and an Asian stock from the chicken carcass, so more later.

Chicken and Dumplings

“Chicken with dumplings is a meal that combines everything I love about food and cooking. It brings it all together: delicious food, economy, craft (that is, it’s fun to make). The recipe below uses two cups of leftover chicken but if you want to make this really flavorful, [or] if you ate all your roasted chicken and only have the stock, use boneless skinless chicken thighs, about a pound or so; roast them for twenty minutes in a very hot oven to give them some color and flavor first).”

Excellent instructions for a classic by Ruhlman