The Culinary Arcanist

An Open Letter to McMenamins.

2009-06-28T00:26:00.000-07:00

Greetings,

I am a long time fan of your McMenamins establishments. Your restaurants and pubs have built a well deserved reputation for quality gastropub-style cuisine and excellent microbrewed fare. I've been going to the McMenamins located here in Bend since it opened, and have generally been nothing less than pleased with my experiences.

However, the last two visits my friend and I have made to the Old St. Francis location have been off-putting to say the least, and I am deeply concerned by what I see as one of my local favorites slipping severely in quality, and unless steps are taken to significantly improve the standards of the place, neither of us foresee ever returning.

The first of these two visits, which occurred a few weeks ago, we walked out almost as soon as we entered, as from the moment we walked through the front door, we were immediately assailed by the pungent reek of what I can only identify as raw sewage. So repulsed was I that I insisted to my companion that we leave immediately, and we wound up dining elsewhere that afternoon.

Tonight however, I decided to give the place another chance, in part because it was a rather late hour, and few establishments were open at this time. This time we entered through the rear hotel entrance, and once again, upon entering, I picked up a distinctly toilet-like reek, though much milder than my previous encounter, and while my initial reaction was to leave yet again, my companion wrote it off as perhaps an overflowed toilet in one of the guest rooms, so we pressed on to the dining room proper and were relieved to be greeted with the smells of cooking food.

After a delightfully short wait we were seated, but from there, the problems began to pile up. The service was terrible. Once seated it took at least 10 minutes for our actual server to come around to take our drink orders, and it took longer still for them to actually arrive, despite the fact that both of us, from our vantage point, could see them waiting at the bar for the vast portion of this time. Our drinks themselves, a couple of root beers, were remarkably unpleasant, brackish things which I only stomached simply because the water, which didn't arrive until sometime after the soft drinks did, were significantly worse.

After a good wait further, our server again reared his head to take our dinner order. We ordered the Cajun tots as an appetizer, and two "Communication Breakdown" burgers with bacon and fries.

The Cajun tots arrived and were, for the most part, as good as always, if a bit unusually crumbly. Our burgers, on the other hand, were spectacular in no respect but in the magnitude of their mediocrity. My burger was utterly and completely tasteless, and my friend's was, in addition to tasteless, apparently dripping with a ridiculous quantity of grease. The fries, in both cases, with the same, which is to say utterly soaked in grease, and completely soggy. They honestly seemed rather more like they'd been boiled than fried, and then quickly tossed in a cold pan with some old fryer oil from the week before.

Disappointed with the quality of our meal, but still optimistic enough to brave the inevitable long wait it seemed to take the staff to accomplish anything whatsoever, we decided to order the bread pudding, a menu item that, like the tots, we've both traditionally almost always ordered, because it is generally fantastic.

It wasn't. In fact, it was the single most unpleasant thing we were served the entire evening. Presentation wise, it looked like a plate of baby vomit. Rather than the firm texture I have come to expect, it was rather a mushy pile, sitting in the midst of some curdled cream and crowned what appeared to be a to be a hastily added topping of ice cream that had completely melted to soup in the massive wait before it arrived at our table, and yet, despite it having melted, upon tasting it we were rather alarmed to discover that the dish was still ice cold in the middle. While we were warned the dish would be rather rich, an observation that bore out with previous experience and made me quite hopeful in fact, it was in fact, so mushy and bland as to be almost insubstantial.

I wish to mention further, at this point, because it surely played at least a part in how unpleasant some of the dishes served were, just how truly awful the service was through all this. Our "Server" we only encountered but a few times in the course of the evening, and only in the interest of occasionally bothering to come round with the rather ghastly excuses for beverages. Our actual food was delivered by a man who appeared to actually be one of the kitchen staff picking up the slack. Most of the waitstaff could be visibly seen gadding about socializing with their friend or other waitstaff, among them our server who at one point took a break to huddle up with several others for a long chat session that took up most of the time we were there. At another point, thanks to the visible window, we even witnessed another waitress (at least we assumed she was a waitress, even though she didn't appear to be dressed or equipped for the occasion) hanging about in the kitchen having a beer while she chatted up the only two cooks in the place, who similarly seemed to be spending most of the time horsing about.

And the resulting long waits were also all in spite of the fact that despite it being 10pm on a Saturday evening, and the downtown area being packed with people, the dining room was almost completely vacant. Not counting the waitresses socializing at a table near the entrance, I counted at most four tables besides ourselves.

As the final capper to the evening, my dining companion, whether due to the grease in his burger or the curdled nature of the dessert, or worse, some sinister and unseen microbial agent allowed to fester in the meal during it's frequent long waits under the heat lamp, became rather violently ill, and very shortly after leaving the establishment proceeded to evacuate the meal out of himself at a rather alarming rate.

Needless to say, I was mortified by the experience. The server was, at least, kind enough to credit us the amount of that truly godawful dessert, but the whole of the experience left me feeling more than a bit burned, and I am disappointed to say I will not be returning until I hear some form of report indicating that the restaurant has put due effort into mending its ways. I am sad to lose such a once wonderful spot in the Central Oregon dining scene, but it seems as if it is already on it's way out, if tonight's turnout was any indication.

I appreciate your time, and hope that in due haste your organization can remedy the deep problems that seem to be apparent in this once fine establishment.

Sincerely,
J Arcane*
jarcane@gmail.com

This is the actual letter sent to both McMenamins in Bend, as well as the home office, minus my actual name, which I do not use in public online discourse. Needless to say I was less than pleased with my experience.

I'm back on Blogger.

2008-12-16T18:22:00.001-08:00

Well, it seems that not only did the Mac I was using to build the website at jarcane.info die, but my server host apparently died as well, and I can't even get ahold of the owner right now to find out what the hell's wrong.

So I'm back on blogger, and working to set up a redirect to bring jarcane.info traffic back here.

I'm also back cooking again, so maybe I'll start writing about food and such again.

The site to end all sites.

2008-06-30T21:56:00.000-07:00

So, I have a new website.

It's at http://jarcane.info

It is, essentially, an attempt to consolidate all my various scattered blogs and web presences, as well as serve as a single repository for any future writing, of which I hope to make quite a lot more, as I intend to actually keep up with content updates in this new venture. I've also added a forum, with the hope of making it a great place to hang out and talk about food and games and things with all my various online friends and readers, and anyone else who happens to pop by.

Check it out, add it to your bookmarks, subscribe with your favorite feed reader. See you there!

Puerco al disco, sorta.

2008-06-03T14:08:00.000-07:00

Last night, I caught a snippet of the Argentina episode of No Reservations, in which he visits a sort of commune there, where they prepared a rather magnificent looking dish, carne al disco, a dish of sliced beef, onions and peppers, cooked in garlic oil over an open flame in a shallow cast iron pan.

It looked absolutely amazing. So, naturally, I had to rip off the concept as best I could, and create a dish of my own inspired by what I saw. After a bit of fruitless searching on the internet for a recipe, I ultimately decided to just wing it, and we headed off to the store.

I wandered about, rounding up ingredients as inspiration struck me. I grabbed a yellow onion, a red bell pepper, one each of anaheim, habanero and yellow chiles, a can of coconut milk, a bag of key limes, a pound of linguica, and some corn tortillas.

The vegetables all got thinly sliced with a mandolin, except the habanero, which I diced. The linguica I cut into thin rounds as well. I also took out 4 thin sliced pork chops from the fridge, pounded them a bit, then seasoned with salt and lime juice and left to rest.

Come cooking time, I quickly seared the chops, then took them from the pan and tossed in the linguica, heating them a bit before tossing in all the vegetables, reducing the heat, and letting them sweat a bit, just long enough for the juices to start deglazing the pan. Then, in went the can of coconut milk, the juice of 4 of the key limes, and the pork chops. I threw a lid on top, and let them simmer on about medium heat for a bit.

For serving, the pork chops were served just with a bit of the resulting coconut sauce, while the remaining mixture of sausage and vegetables was served on tortillas as tacos. The pork was a bit dry, I think it would've been better if I'd basically poached it in the cocount milk without searing first, but the tacos were absolutely excellent. Rich, flavorful, truly a dish to be proud of.

Something to make again, that's for sure, and another pork recipe for that restaurant concept I've been pondering about lately . . .

A peace offering.

2008-05-16T14:21:00.000-07:00

http://xkcd.com/418/

I haven't posted in even longer than usual. I haven't honestly done much lately I felt worthy of writing about. I've been on tighter finances than usual, and it's left my diet consisting of a hell of a lot of pasta and ramen.

There have been a few highlights. Homemade orichiette with butter and parmesan, for instance, probably the best damn pasta I've ever had, and I didn't even do that great a job with it. The esteemed Mr. Batali is right on when he says it's always better homemade with love, and he's equally dead on when he talks of the beauty of simplicity. Of all the pasta dishes I've prepared of late, that one was, without doubt in my mind, the absolute best.

I've also been playing with a Yucatan inspired ramen soup, made with shrimp broth and a healthy dosage of achiote. It develops this amazing, rich flavor and texture, and a gorgeous deep red color. It actually coats the side of the bowl. I also made a pretty damn nice turkey ramen with black pepper the other day.

I'm hoping soon to actually finally find a new kitchen to cook in, it's just a matter of finding the right opportunity. I stupidly let a shot at the Blacksmith slip by me out of lazyness and I'll regret that one forever. I'd really like to get a spot in a real haute cuisine sort of establishment, somewhere I can really learn the ropes, instead of the amateur fumbling about in the dark I do now.

Today's important culinary tip.

2008-04-09T09:59:00.000-07:00

Stay away from the cheap Mexican sardines.

Thanks to a can of El Mexicano sardines, I've spent the last few days in general misery. I knew I should've stuck with a more traditional puttanesca recipe.

The folks over at Chowhound described them as "last on the list of over 39 canned sardines sampled. If I ever do buy a worse tasting sardine, it will go directly in the garbage." I can certainly attest to their foulness, indeed, it was rather apparent upon opening the can even, but I figured the rest of the dish would balance their overt fishyness. Indeed, the final dish was much more mild, though still a bit strong.

I didn't expect to actually get sick from the damn things though.

Catching up on events.

2008-04-06T15:26:00.000-07:00

So the last week or so has been an almost exhausting cavalcade of new recipes and experiments, as well as an interesting new development in the form of me actually getting paid for doing this now.

Yup, that's right. The folks at Bend's Source Weekly have seen fit to give me irregular column space. The first piece, a profile of cook/owner Tammy Mills of Cross Creek Cafe, ran a few weeks ago, though due to some confusion had to be cut down considerably. I hope to post the extended profile soon.

Walking back through the menu over the last week, the biggest adventure was the smoke roasted pork tacos, for last weekend's D&D game.

I started with two roughly 6.5 lb boneless pork shoulder roasts, and brined them for two days in a brine seasons with whole dried japonica chiles, peppercorns, mustard and coriander seed, lime juice, and bistek.

This then got thrown on my smoker over hickory chips at about 250-300 for two hours, topping them off with a few slices of fresh pineapple. However, the temperature proved insufficient to get them done in a reasonable amount of time, a fact that was unfortunately largely the fault of the weather.

So I brought them inside and threw them both on a cookie sheet, and popped them in the oven for a bit. Unfortunately, I'd neglected to consider that the pan I'd grabbed had no edges on it, and the running molten fat from the pork wound up starting a bit of a fire in the bottom of the oven.

So the pig got yanked back out, and the oven left alone for a bit, and some rapid brainstorming occurred. One of my fellow players, and also a fellow cook, spotted a crock pot on the counter, and upon pointing it out, it occurred to me that if we were going to finish one of the roasts in that, we should take advantage of all the beer lying about, and cook it off in that with some more of the pineapple slices. The other roast meanwhile, went back on a proper baking sheet this time, and back in the oven at 350 degrees.

The oven roast went in for another hour, before, all of us quite hungry, we decided to pull that one out and carve into it. The thickest portion in the middle was still a bit rare in the center, but a good two thirds of it was quite done at this point, so we went ahead and carved off a healthy portion, and went about making tacos of it, served on corn tortillas with some fresh pico de gallo and a squeeze of lime. The oven pork was absolutely fantastic, moist, salty, rich with fat. The flavor was sort of like a pastrami, crossed with bacon, and the texture was perfect.

The remainder went back in the oven for another hour or so to finish, at which point we returned again to crack into both the oven and crockpot versions, which were both well and cooked by this point. The crockpot version, by contrast to it's oven compatriot, was almost a totally different animal. It was moist and tender, and the flavor of the smoke had mellowed and blended with the bite and the acidity from the beer and pineapple to create a whole different flavor from it's dry roasted counterpart.

It was well more food than any of us actually needed of course, and I wound up still having a third of the oven roast to take home, sadly leaving the crockpot one behind, having only really had the chance to give it a taste.

This wound up finding it's way into many of my recipes the following week. The next morning, we decided to make sandwiches with it, and I discovered that, now that it had chilled, I could slice it and use it rather like bacon, and so made some open faced sandwiches, by placing slices of the pork on a baking sheet under the broiler, before putting that back onto some bread with some healthy slices of pepper jack over the top. I served this with some Campbell's tomato soup, itself seasoned with a bit more of the pork, sliced thin, broiled until crisp, and then tossed back in the soup for flavor.

I also used it, sliced, then chopped into smaller pieces, to add some extra body and flavor to a few other dishes, like chicken and rice with sauce veloute, and a southwestern chicken lime pot pie. The last bit of it wound up coming full circle, and again being turned into tacos, this time diced, tossed with bistek and Tapatio, and then refried in butter on a flattop griddle.

I had considered repeating the experiment on a much smaller scale this weekend, but ultimately wound up taking a bit of a break from cooking over the last few days. However, tonight, my break ends, and I shall be returning to the kitchen to prepare a lovely spaghetti puttanesca with sardines.

A flavor trip to the real Mexico.

2008-03-06T11:38:00.001-08:00

Recently, I hace discovered a new favorite taqueria, El Cochinito Contento in Redmond Oregon.

A small Mexican market on 6th, tucked in it's back corner by the butcher counter is a little taqueria, that serves some absolutely fantastic, and really authentic tacos and menudo that is simply to die for. The taco selection is a smörgåsbord of nasty bits, from tongue, to tripas, to cabeza, my personal favorite. Fatty, tender head meats on a warm corn tortilla with some chopped onion and cilantro, all it needs is a little squirt of lime to be one of the best things I've ever eaten. For the less adventurous, there's also some fantastic adovada, azada, and al pastor as well.

And the best part? Tacos are a mere $1.50 each. The amazing menudo, which takes me two sittings to finish? $5.50. It's an absolute steal, for some of the best damn REAL Mexican food you'll find short of travelling there.

-----------------------

The other night I found myself with a strange craving for fish. I don't often eat seafood these days, largely because I've been quite broke, and any sort of seafood has a tendency to cost an arm and a leg.

But the power of one of my strange cravings is not to be trifled with, and rather than find myself fighting off said craving for the literal weeks it was likely to linger, I instead wound up going to the nearby Safeway to take a look at their seafood stock, hoping actually that they had gotten a share of the massive shipments of smelt that the Redmond Safeway has been getting of late.

They did not turn out to have any such, but they did have some surprisingly nice, surprisingly fresh, sole, which I acquired immediately, and then set about wandering through the store, trying to come up with a recipe for it. Wandering through the "ethnic food" aisle, I somehow hit upon the concept of poaching it in some kind of green salsa.

A brief perusal of my available options in the store, led me to promptly check out, and rush over to the Colima Market to acquire some real ingredients, in the form of two tomatillos, one each of pasilla and Anaheim peppers, two limes, cilantro, shrimp boullion, and bistek.

A sudden flash of inspiration on the way back home led to me swinging back by the Safeway for a can of coconut milk for which I was horridly over charged, and a can of Jumex mango nectar.

Once home, the tomatillos and the peppers were roughly chopped and tossed in the food processor, along with the juice of both limes, a healthy dose of cilantro, a sprinkling of bistek, salt, pepper, and Tapatio. this all got pulsed until very finely chopped but not quite pureed, essentially making a nice mild tomatillo salsa.

This then went into a saute pan, along with the coconut milk, a cube of the shrimp bouillion, more bistek and tapatio, a splash of the mango nectar, and salt and pepper. Into the resulting liquid went about 3/4 to 1 lb of sole fillets, on a high flame until the liquid just started to simmer, then reduced to a very low flame, covered, and them simmered for about 15 minutes, then removed from the flame and let to set for another 10 while the rice I intended to serve it over finished cooking.

For the rice, I made a 2 cup helping, substituting some of the liquid for half a lime's juice and some more of the mango nectar, and also adding a touch more bistek, tapatio, a couple whole sprigs of cilantro, and some salt and pepper. This gets brought to a boil and then covered and reduced to a very low flame for about 20 minutes, then taken off the flame and left to sit for about 10 minutes with the lid still on.

Once it's all done, fluff the rice with a fork, serve some out over the plate, and then top with sole and the left over cooking liquid.

The sole is positively melt in you mouth tender, and the sauce is tangy, sweet, savory, all at once, and almost no trace of heat surprisingly enough.

It was a great meal, and my dining companion said it was the closest to Yucatan style cuisine he's had since living there.

A fine evening.

2008-02-14T22:55:00.000-08:00

Last night I finally got another opportunity to make my chicken Alfredo, and I must say, it was quite possibly the best batch of the stuff I've ever made.

The chicken was a little bit different this time. Usually I would go for fresh chicken, cut into chunks, and then sauteed. Once cooked through, in would go the butter, cream, cheese, and fettucine.

This time however, we'd gotten a killer deal on a rotisserie chicken from the nearby Costco. $5 for a whole chicken is rather tough to pass up. So I took the breasts of the chicken, pulled them apart, and then took the shredded chicken and tossed it in the saute pan with a whole stick of butter, a couple cloves of minced garlic, salt, pepper, garlic powder, and onion powder.

The chicken, by itself, was already incredibly delicious once it had been cooking in the butter for a while, and soaked up all kinds of wonderful fat and flavor. Once tossed together with the pasta, a pint of heavy cream, and about 5 oz of grated Asiago cheese, and then simmered for a while to thicken, it produced a rich pasta dish that felt like it was making love to your mouth.

Now, to cap the night with a cocktail, I continued my experimentation with cachaca. I havent' had the budget for my regular trips to Hola lately, and when I found that the East Bend Liquor Store stocks the stuff for about the price of two caipirinhas at Hola, I figured I would give a shot at making my own caipirinhas.

The first experiment was atrocious. For one, I couldn't find any decent limes at the shops we went to that day, so I wound up having to settle for lime juice. For two, I just plain fucked up the recipe. Not enough lime juice, too much brown sugar, too much cachaca. It was unpleasant to drink, and neither myself, nor my drinking buddy, were able to finish them. There were brief moments that almost tasted like the real thing, but mostly it was awful.

So last night, I basically gave up on trying to do a traditional caipirinha, with the intention of trying again at a later date with some real limes perhaps. Instead, I wound up doing something similar, only this time, I cut back a hair on the brown sugar, only used about a shot of cachaca, and finished it off with some 7-up.

The resulting mix was fantastic, the same kind of refreshing, mellow, "I-can-drink-this-all-day" feeling you get from a caipirinha, it just doesn't actually taste much of anything like one.

For whom the bell tolls.

2008-02-02T00:29:00.000-08:00

Well, it seems my time has come at the Japanese restaurant.

I was informed today, whilst in the midst of my lunch I might add, that my employer no longer desires my services for the dinner shift, leaving only the now ever so brief morning period (currently a whopping two hours on average), and thus cutting my hours to roughly enough to buy me a hell of a lot of ramen.

Ultimately, I think it comes down to culture difference. Put simply, the kind of kitchen culture and attitude which comes naturally to me is one that more resembles Gordon Ramsay's behavior or what Anthony Bourdain describes when he speaks of life in the professional kitchen, while what they are expecting is apparently some coddled little whelp who takes a heap of shit and asks politely for more. These are the kind of people who probably watch Ramsay on Hell's Kitchen and think "What an awful man", whereas I am the type of person who would be sitting in the audience and probably beating him to the punch.

I admit, unwaveringly, that I am an ill-tempered bastard when the chips are down. I swear like a fucking sailor, I'm constantly in a near or outright rage, and I quite simply have no patience nor do I possess any capacity to put up with much shit. I swear at myself, I swear about the customers, about the orders, about the prep, about fucking everything. As Bourdain put it in an interview at the Google campus, the kitchen becomes a world of hyperbolic black and white, only in my case, things have a far greater tendency to be evil horrible bastards than great saviors, with the sole exception of my sous chef, whom I now realize I will not be working with again.

The engine of my rage however, had become downright turbocharged over the last several months however. Stuck, alone, fighting a seemingly constantly losing battle just to keep my head above water, working my ass harder and harder everyday it seemed, for less and less reward. Even on the two glorious nights out of my workweek when I actually had a second cook to assist, more often than not, he'd be stolen away to the sushi bar, leaving me alone trying to battle through a dinner rush, running what is essentially three or four stations at once. I had at least one episode which could be best described as a near nervous breakdown, complete with alternating bouts of violent destruction and near tears, and pushed through only by the sheer motivating power that is the call of "Order up!"

But for all that, I must say that in, say, Yoko's, my alma mater, the kind of furious temper that si known to overcome me in the heat of a hard rush or a massive prep crunch, never seemed out of place to anyone, never did anyone bat an eye. Certainly there were more than a few confrontations, with waitstaff, with fellow cooks, even the occasional one with the boss whom I otherwise got on quite well with. There were definite shouting matches, and in a few occasion, even threats of violence. But it's a high stress environment, and at the end of the day, everyone seemed to somehow accept that this was simply part of the job, the curse of the kitchen. The same son of a bitch who threatened to beat the shit out of me in the middle of the kitchen, and whose face I was sorely tempted to slam into the the hot grill, would wind up giving me a ride home a few weeks later. Honestly, I seemed to be the one who had the most problems with taking that shit home with me.

And for better or for worse, that's just the kind of environment I expect in a kitchen, and I know I'm not alone in this, or Bourdain wouldn't sell out so many damn book signings. It's liberating in a sense, and in some ways helps keep the blood flowing. The kitchen is a warzone, and you absolutely cannot let those bastards keep you down. The orders are the enemy, the tools of the trade your weapons, and the food your ammunition. It is nothing short of a battle for your own survival, but when you constantly find yourself outgunned, outmanned, ill-equipped, and poorly supplied, after a while the most battle-hardened soldier is gonna find his morale seriously tested.

The bastards nearly killed me this time, and for my service, I get bucked out. But this ronin doesn't know anything left but fighting the good fight, and that means it's time to find a new banner to fight for, and a more rough and tumble troop to serve with.

And I'm seriously thinking it might be time for some more advanced training.

A piece of home, with a twist.

2008-01-27T22:13:00.000-08:00

As a kid, one of our favorite cheap meals in my family was the wiener wrap. You roll up some hotdogs and grated cheese inside cheap canned biscuit dough, and pop 'em in the oven for however long the package directions on the can say. It's a bit Sandra Lee, and admittedly chock full of all kinds of artificial preservatives and everything else, but it's a tasty bit of homemade junk food regardless.

Tonight, while sitting about waiting for a diagnostic on a spare PC I had sitting around, I got a sudden craving for the things, and decided they'd be a cheap alternative to what I'd originally planned, which was having some of Abby's Pizza's delicious chicken and spuds delivered.

So I marched off through the winter wonderland to Ray's, and after wandering indecisively for half an hour as is my custom, wound up deciding to get a little more fancy with them.

For the meat, I went with some fresh hot Italian sausage from the meat dept., for the cheese, some grated Asiago, and for the dough, some croissant dough.

The dough concerned me a little, I think it may've been past it's shelf life a bit as it smelled fermented. But it was late, and I didn't feel like trudging back through the snow to go get another one or something.

It took me several tries before I finally figured out how best to roll the sausages up in the dough, but once I did, I put them in the oven at 350 for about 18 minutes or so. They still looked kind of pale at this point, so I gave them another 2 minutes to get them nice and golden brown.

They looked fine at first when I pulled them out, until I started trying to take them off the pan. They'd cooked together on the sides, and for some reason this caused the dough to not cook completely on the sides, so they had to go back in the oven for another 5 minutes to finish them off.

I finally got them done however, and they proved quite tasty. Probably could've used a bit more cheese I think, and they were very heavy, and kinda greasy, but still rather tasty and quite filling too. I was only able to eat 2, and the second one was rather pushing it I think. I'll have leftovers now for lunch at work tomorrow, and possibly dinner as well.

Try the caipirinha.

2008-01-21T10:58:00.000-08:00

I have discovered a new favorite drink.

Hola! makes caipirinhas.

Yet again, Bourdain has failed to steer me wrong.

It was a couple weeks ago I had my first one. We were out for the evening's meal, and I decided to have a cocktail. Without really thinking about it, I ordered my usual gin and tonic, and noted a look of disappointment on the face of my waiter.

As I idly sipped my gin and waited for my food, I picked up the drink menu, and my eyes wandered down and immediately noticed something I had not seen the last time: caipirinhas.

In that very instant, I knew I had to try one. I could not pass up the opportunity to consume a beverage that my personal idol has spoken so glowingly of, so without hesitation, I ordered one.

The waiter brought me the fresh caipirinhas, which adds to the usual mix of lime, cachaca, and sugar, some hibiscus nectar, mango, grilled pineapple, and a few other things I've now forgotten, because the instant you taste it, a wave of pure bliss over comes all of your synapses, and the only thing you can think about at that point is moving to the beaches of Brazil and drinking caipirinhas all day.

It is one of those moments much like the previously discussed climactic moment in Ratatouille, where a food transcends beyond merely tasting great, but actually takes you somewhere else altogether.

So this recent Saturday, when it came time to make dinner plans, the first thing that came to mind was caipirinhas, as I was nursing a bit of a hangover from a night of pounding Henry Weinhard's and playing Rock Band all night, and figured, what better "hair of the dog" solution than the magical nectar that is the caipirinha?

However, a sudden craving for tempura in my dining companion led to us deciding to first take our meal at Yoko's. We wound up getting the veggie tempura, the spicy Thai roll, Batman roll, spicy albacore roll, broiled mussels, and some seared albacore sashimi. Phelan was our sushi chef for the evening, and, as always, everything he made for us was absolutely fantastic. I've known Phelan for years, I got my start in the business of food at Yoko's downtown years ago, and he makes some excellent sushi.

After we wrapped up our fantastic meal however, we decided to end the evening with a nightcap of caipirinhas. This time, a slight misunderstanding with our waiter led to us getting the regular caipirinhas, and I was initially concerned once I realized that we had not been served the same drink as before.

All such doubt of course, instantly disappeared from my thoughts the second I tasted it, because it was still every bit the heavenly drink the fresh caipirinha is, just different. More pure and simple, but no less amazing. You will be served fantastically by either, and I would have a hard time choosing any preference between them.

For yesterday's meal, I finally executed a plan I'd been intending to try for some weeks now. At work I had attempted to make a rolled, breaded veal dish, stuffed with a "Peppadew" goat cheese, but the veal I had used was largely dismal, and the breading didn't adhere well. However, the goat cheese itself, once it had melted and blended with the hint of honey mustard I'd added, was incredible, and I knew from that moment I had to do something with it.

My friend had mentioned that he had a ton of ham, and so this rolled about in my brain a bit before deciding that I wanted to do some kind of goat cheese cordon bleu dish. Eventually, I decided to go all pretentious fusion cuisine, and make goat cheese Cordon Bleu wontons.

So I mixed the remaining "peppadew" goat cheese, with some other three pepper stuff, shredded ham, minced chicken, some garlic, honey mustard, and a few spices. The mixtured got put in the wonton's crab puff style, and dropped in the deep fryer.

Unfortunately, they just weren't that great. The oil was on it's second usage, and it started going funky quick, and somehow, the process wasn't hot enough to get the goat cheese to melt properly. Plus my wontons weren't staying terribly well sealed, which meant the insides getting a lot of grease in them.

The filling also needed something else, like some vegetable of some kind, or some apple. Something light and crisp to cut through the heaviness of all that meat and goat cheese. I tried it in a panini this morning and, while it melted properly and tastes pretty good, it's damn heavy on it's own, and the buttery grilled bread only exacerbates the problem.

However, one thing all this experimentation has succeeded in is breaking me of a fear of goat cheese that came from some truly foul Carre du Berry that was my only previous experience with the stuff. In fact, I've come to rather like the stuff, in moderation of course . . .

The Buffet of the Damned.

2008-01-14T13:54:00.000-08:00

There is something about buffet restaurants that has always unnerved me as a cook. I was never quite sure what it was, exactly. Sure the food is generally frozen crap, and generally focused on pure quantity with quality of any sort rarely entering the picture except by pure chance, but the same could be said of much fast food or even the average chain restaurant.

Recently however, my eating companion and I visited a new restaurant, the King's Buffet in Bend, OR, and it was upon leaving that restaurant, feeling slightly unsettled, that I finally realized what it was that had been bothering me all this time.

Buffets are for people who hate food.

This might seem like a contradiction of basic logic. After all, what better place for a lover of food than a place where you can eat your fill of any of a staggering array of dishes. Selection, quantity, and all self service too!

This is of course, pure bullshit, but it is the kind of twist in logic that keeps bringing me back to the places from time to time, despite my almost irrational fear of them. However, there is another clue to the true nature of these places in the other reason I usually wind up in them: desperation.

And from this I return to the point that these are not places for people who love food, but rather, they are for people who see food as some sort of onerous obligation, and who would rather be done with it altogether were it not for that bothersome aspect of biology whereby the lack of consumption is liable to result in death.

So, rather than concentrate at all on what they eat, they take the route of the purest swine, and belly up to the nearest trough, and eat whatever vile slop flows past them until they can but roll about in the mud like an over bloated sow. How better to delay any further need for sustenance than simply cramming your gullet past it's limit. The goal is not satisfaction here, indeed, the goal is perverted into the reverse, to cram such massive slop buckets worth of garbage in your face that your body is now utterly repulsed by the mere thought of food.

You can see it in the faces of the patrons. The only ones who generally don't bear at least some hint of a depressing pallor are the children, who are by nature generally happy to eat basically anything. There is a strange, downtrodden grimace that afflicts the face of a buffet patron, as if the very soul of their palate has been drained from them, and they are now left only with a hatred of food and those who craft it.

The buffet is, to me, hostile territory, like the pious marching into the gates of hell. I cannot help but feel unnerved and out of place in a buffet, because it's very nature is poison to the pursuit of true cuisine. That sense of dread and fear is simply a manifestation of the very same bone chilling shiver that afflicts a man confronted with a place of pure evil, an infernal sacrificial altar upon which food is offered up for the slaughter in the name of a darker, twisted faith that worships only blind consumption and gluttony for gluttony's sake.

It may be that there are still buffets out there taken in a spirit of a love of food, I have heard good things about the true traditional smörgåsbord, but until presented with such, I can only intone that old saying, "There, but for the grace of God, go I."

Yin and Yang.

2007-12-23T17:20:00.000-08:00

So, I have gone through, what is essentially, a study in opposites in the last 12 hours or so of eating.

Yesterday, I was down with a massive hangover, and as is often the case, my response to this was to crave a big greasy burger. I for some reason passed on grabbing a Jody's melt, and wound up going all through my short work shift without eating anything but a bit of miso and rice. So when I got off work, and my friend arrived to cart me off to Bend, I implored him to take me somewhere for a big greasy burger.

So, we went to Kayo's Roadhouse, a cheesy oddly Western-ish themed, and remarkably large restaurant on the north end of Redmond. My friend remarked that the cheep wood and sheet metal decor reminded him of the Japanese internment camps, and this disturbing ambience would prove to foreshadow the entire meal.

After considerable poring over the rather disappointing menu, he decided on the 8oz. petite sirloin, medium rare at my insistence, while I stuck to my guns and ordered a burger with Swiss, grilled onions, and bacon, despite the rather idiotic pricing scheme (purchase the base burger, then tack on the extras for a dollar a pop).

We were first served a basket of rolls which were obviously cheap and frozen, served with a cinnamon butter, and a simple Caesar salad. My friend was suitably impressed with the cinnamon butter, while I found the choice to be a bit odd to accompany a savory dish. The Caesar was reasonably competent I suppose, if, like most, largely inauthentic.

Then came the entrees, and this is of course the part where everything falls apart. For starters, my burger is not greasy at all, in fact, it's dry as a bone. Because it's burnt. The bottom half of the pre-formed and obviously also frozen, pre-packaged burger patty is a layer of black char. The fries are OK, again frozen but this is a common state of affairs in most American restaurants. My only quibble with those was that they had rather inexplicably added cinnamon to the seasoning salt they were dusted with, which again seemed rather out of place.

My companion's steak was, of course, not actually medium rare at all. As my mother taught me as a lad, the vast majority of restaurants tend to overcook everything, so it is generally wise to order the next level of doneness down from whatever you actually want. As a result, the steak wound up coming to us medium, with only a hint of pink left in it. Thank God he took my advice, and didn't ask for medium as he'd originally intended, as I fear for what resulting slab of likely near-charcoal meat might've wound up on his plate. However, this was a minor injustice compared to what one experienced upon actually tasting the steak. Honestly, neither of us were actually convinced it was a real steak, the texture was entirely wrong. There was no realy fiber to the meat, the mouthfeel more resembled a finely ground hamburger that had simply been pressed into a shape vaguely resembling a steak. And the actual flavor bore a strong resemblance to that organ meat flavor one gets in a beef heart or cheap supermarket chuck steak. The capper on the plate was supposedly mashed potatoes, but I'm personally more convinced it was some kind of synthetic gum resin, given the amount of texture and flavor that was left in them.

A waitress eventually came around and replaced my burnt burger with a second offering, as well as another helping of the strange cinnamon fries, which again wound up being the lion's share of my consumption. I made a half hearted attempt at this second burger and while they had managed to at least not actively burn this twice-damned slab of ground beef byproduct, on the whole it was still largely dismal, and the cheese wasn't even properly melted. It was actually still cold on the corners that stuck out of the side of the burger. Something about the whole thing somehow triggered my nose's sense memory, and I found myself again smelling the unspeakably foul "sukiyaki" from my own place of employ, and my appetite basically disappeared at this moment. I'd managed to fill myself up well enough on fries at this point, so at least I'd managed to feed the hunger from my all day fast.

A manager eventually came around as we were leaving, and comped us for $9 of the bill, which still left us paying $20 with tip, which was still far too much for what is, quite undoubtedly, one of the worst meals I have ever consumed. I don't even know that I would've been entirely satisfied with a total comp, and I will not be returning there ever again.

However, this afternoon's meal, was far superior. Instead of a restaurant, we cooked at home. Instead of Western cuisine, we went with American Chinese, in the form of the crab puff.

I had discussed earlier in the week doing a sort of "deep fried weekend", setting up one of the pans as a deep fryer, and going to town with all sorts of fun things. My main driving thought was Buffalo wings, a personal favorite of mine, and one that's just plain better when it's fresh fried at home. My friend however had seen an episode of Good Eats and been left with a massive craving for anything involving wontons.

As crab puffs are one of my favorite appetizer dishes in the world, they seemed like a natural fit for the combined preferences and cravings, being both deep fried, and wonton related.

So we went to the restaurant supply store, got a fryer thermometer, some wonton skins, a big package of imitation crab and a bottle of Kikkoman sweet and sour sauce, and from the regular supermarket, acquired some green onion, cilantro and carrot. We already had a good sized hunk of cream cheese in the fridge, as well as a big jug of cooking oil that had been acquired earlier in the week in preparation for the "deep fried weekend".

The filling wound up consisting of, of course, crab and cream cheese, as well as peeled carrot, chopped green onion, and dashes each of chopped garlic, salt, pepper, malt vinegar, Olive Garden Fiamme hot sauce, and olive oil, and then mashed all together. This went, about half a teaspoon or so at a time, folded into the wonton skins, first folding them in half and sealing the edge with water, then crimping edge corner flap twice.

These got dropped into hot oil, about 350 degrees F, and cooked till nice and golden brown on each side, generally taking about 3-5 minutes at a guess, turning them at least once during cooking.

The sweet and sour turned out to be largely disgusting, so for a dipping sauce we wound up just using some sweet chili sauce with a splash of malt vinegar.

The sauce wound up being largely superflous however. They were, simply, the best crab puffs I've ever consumed, better even than any of the restaurants I've eaten them at that impressed me with their quality. They had enough of a good flavor all their own, that they really were better without the sauce as tasty as it was.

We ate an insane number of them, in the end splitting something like 30 or more of the things, leaving the both of us stuffed to the gills. I ate so many I don't think I'll be able to think of eating them again for a while.

Certainly made up for last night's pathetic excuse for "food".

Kitchen nightmares.

2007-12-20T23:54:00.000-08:00

I hate my job.

OK, lot's of people hate their jobs, so this should probably sound like a bit of a banal statement to the vast majority of you.

Thing is, I didn't hate my job before. But my workplace is rapidly doing it's absolute best to burn me completely the fuck out. Somehow, with every passing week, it seems I work harder and harder and harder, for the privilege of earning less and less money, and I'm frankly tiring of it.

At this juncture, the honeymoon period hasn't just worn off, it's jumped straight to the "plotting to kill your spouse and collect the insurance money" stage, or at least quite near abouts.

I am the only cook. This is, by and large, one of the core problems as it is, because it's simply a fuck of a lot to handle just getting orders out while running all the stations, and not having anything come out burnt to a crisp or forgotten or done wrong. This also means I'm the only one doing the prep most of the time, which is also something of a bear, but no big deal so long as I have time to do it, But lately, my hours have been dwindling rather rapidly, meaning that I have less and less time to actually get the prep work done, and on top of that, despite my hours shrinking, we've been getting more steady business, meaning I'm too busy cooking orders to work on prep at all. Which leads to lots of fun days wherein I get swamped with more orders than I can handle as it is, with the added joy of running out of bloody everything in the middle of a rush. And then comes the surprise orders for tempura bits for the sushi, or requests to come up and help with the sushi or wash dishes (as there is no dishwasher either), meaning further delay of often vital prep.

To top this off, there's an increasingly flippant and even condescending attitude towards my presence there that I'm getting rather agitated with. The other day, the waitress had the audacity to actually walk up and take one of the pans off my goddamn range while I was in the middle of setting up mise en place for a fried rice order. I've gone from being respected as a cook who knows what the hell he's doing, to being treated like another of their long line of idiot teenagers that have filled the whites before me, constantly being second guessed and nitpicked over everything I do, usually with disastrous results. I've actually had to goddamn fight over things so simple as how to rapidly thaw a box of shrimp. I have less authority over how things run in the kitchen apparently than random fuckwit friends of the owner's who claim to have worked in a sushi bar once, who in today's instance actually deigned to dictate the nature of the yakisoba recipe.

And now the aforementioned waitress has basically turned my goddamn kitchen into a daycare. During the lunch shift I now have to deal with the accompaniment of two screaming 5 year olds running amok in my kitchen, and of course, their parent's idea of "discipline" basically amounts to talking to them in a displeased tone. That old cliche about the definition of insanity springs instantly to mind whenever I witness her explaining for the hundredth time that they are not to leave their little corner in the back of the house. Tonight I also got the oddity of her recruiting her older daughter for clean up work. Yes, that's right, unpaid child labor, right in my kitchen.

And for all this, I make barely enough to pay the bills, and much of my food throughout the week comes from my meager tips. I've had to borrow money twice just so I'd have enough cash to eat over the weekend.

This will not last much longer, thankfully. Earlier this week I was informed by my landlord that he is losing the house, and as a result, I have to move, within the next several weeks. A perusal of the local housing scene has made it abundantly clear that I'm unlikely to find anything satisfactory, so I've decided to take advantage of the situation and use it as an excuse to get the fuck out of this redneck ass town, and start looking for a job elsewhere, and a cheap flat to go with. At this point, even if I'm making minimum wage, if it's at least full time, I'll be doing more comfortably than I am now.

For the most part, I haven't really been doing much cooking even, I've simply been too burned out, and have even fallen in with the dreaded frozen meal again. However, there have been a few shining beacons in the darkened wasteland of my recent diet, which I shall recount thusly:

1) Numbered by utmost importance, is Hola! Mexican Restaurant. A friend dragged me along last weekend, and it is, quite simply, the best restaurant in Central Oregon. Absolutely, and utterly, fantastic. The lomo de puerco I ate during my visit was, quite simply, the most delicious and perfectly cooked piece of pork I've ever consumed in my entire life. We're talking blow job good here. I have difficulty thinking about it without tears welling up in my eyes, it was like a tiny orgasm every time I took a bite of the absolutely fork tender, deliciously moist, perfectly seasoned pig. A further sampling of my friend's mole poblano provided one of the most complex and well crafted blends of flavor I have ever experienced. We finished the meal with a not at all bad and actually quite delicious coconut flan, in which my only quibble was simply that it didn't taste all that recognizably like coconut.

2) Sushi. I have sort of stumbled into an informal and unspoken arrangement whereby it seems I can make myself sushi all I want, so long as I'm providing the main ingredient. This has led to some interesting experimentations as a result of my cash-starved situation, and so far I've made sushi with such oddities as canned kippers (rolled with cream cheese and eel sauce), smoked mussels (prepared similarly to the "spicy tuna" roll), and probably the oddest, turkey pastrami, which went through several iterations. However the piece de resistance was when I lucked out on a sale and got a hold of our next item . . .

3) Oysters. The nearby Fred Meyers had a sale on medium oysters, and I leapt upon them. $2.50 for a 4 oz jar of oysters that is normally $5 was too good to pass up. Now, I have never actually had oysters that I recall, excepting some utterly vile canned smoked ones I was once subjected to by the owner of my previous Japanese restaurant job, but I decided in my head that what sounded like a good idea was to tempura fry them and roll them into a maki with some mayo and tobiko and whatever else sounded good. I wound up picking up some shiitake mushrooms as well, and sauteeing them with a bit of salt, pepper, and a dash of chili oil, and then rolled them with the fried oysters, spicy mayo, green onion, and carrot, into a Japanese style maki (which I am not very good at I might note, a great shame of mine). However, I still had 4 fist sized fried oysters left after making two rolls to bring to my computer shop guy, so I decided not to let them go to waste, and to eat them with a bit of ponzu.

This was really the best route to take. Because those oysters were absolutely incredible. Rich, melt in your mouth texture, wonderful flavor, and a touch of the sea that for once is welcome, instead of off putting. I eat them and I want to move to the coast somewhere, and live off them for the rest of my life. The sushi by comparison was simply too busy, and too much going on, and it drowned out the magic of the oysters. Even the tempura I used seemed to be just a bit too much getting in between me and the good stuff, and I now understand what Bourdain sees in the damn things, because I honestly just want to eat one of the buggers raw now. The closer to the primal essence of oyster, the better. Shame I'm not going to be getting them that fresh any time between now and I don't know when. In the mean time I think I'll settle for tweaking my frying method to cut down on extraneous breading.

I hope they have more tomorrow. They were almost sold out when I got today's.

The importance of fat.

2007-12-14T10:13:00.000-08:00

I've discussed this with a few folks lately, and thought I'd bring my thoughts on the subject here:

We are all too damn afraid of fat.

It's been stripped from our food rather systematically over the last couple of decades, and as far as I am concerned, it's a damn crime.

Look at the hamburger. Most people don't even know what a good hamburger tastes like anymore, because they've never had one that hasn't been completely stripped of any fat. The "lean burger" is a damn crime, you cannot make a decent hamburger without the proper percentage of fat. A good fatty burger can even survive the evils of "well done".

Sausage is the same way anymore. When I go to the market and buy ground sausage, I expect there to be enough fat in that sausage to make gravy with afterwards, but with the exception of Ray's, the stuff you find in every grocery store around here is so dry and lean that I have to fry a couple of strips of bacon along side to get the fat I need to make a roux.

Fat isn't that big a deal, people, just don't eat so goddamn much of it, and get off your ass once in a while. There's a reason so much of that old country homecooking is riddled with it, it's actually a really good source of long burn energy, provided you're actually working for a living and not sitting on your ass all day.

At least we've managed to fight off the damn anti-carb thing.

I have seen Ratatouille.

2007-12-01T00:30:00.000-08:00

I know, I know, it's been out for quite some time. I've never been much of a TV and film guy, I'm always too busy playing games or pottering around on message boards with my spare time, and very often simply have no TV at all. It's not that I don't like either of those things, it's just that, barring my recent extended and involuntary sabbatical to the familial homestead, most of the time I simply don't follow it or bother to watch it much.

In the specific case of Ratatouille, there was the additional hitch of it being a Disney/Pixar film, qualifiers that I largely avoid purely on reflex.

However, this one, had hints of promise. Thomas freaking Keller advised on the film. Anthony Bourdain called it one of the best restaurant movies he'd ever seen. And then came the final straw earlier today, when rumors trickled in to one of my IRC haunts that it was in the running for an Academy Award nomination.

My ears perked up. There was some discussion on the part of some of the chatters as to how in the hell a restaurant movie could even have such appeal as to net an Oscar. I attempted, in my own groggy, sleep-deprived, and largely futile way, to impart upon the residents as to the kind of drama and tension that goes on in a restaurant when the shit really hits the fan, the rising level of interest in the mysterious workings of the professional kitchen, and the proliferation of legend and myth surrounding it. But largely it all seemed to fall on deaf ears.

Having now seen it, I know now how I should have responded: "Just watch the fucking movie."

To really sum up in my mind exactly why this film is bloody incredible, however, I must dip into a rather singular moment from the film, it's climax to be exact. While most of you reading this have probably already seen it, for the sake of those who haven't, I will simply state that this is a film that captures the spirit of truly great cooking in a truly brilliant and clever fashion that I simply did not expect, that you must see it immediately, and that you should also really, really skip reading the rest of this post, because I'm about to spoil the hell out of one of the biggest moments in the film.

I'm serious. Stop it, now. Go get the film, watch it, then come back. You'll understand, trust me.

The film climaxes on what can be no better explained than by the application of the sadly cliche phraseology of "a moment of clarity". Not just for the for the character who experiences it, but for the audience, the creator, and I suspect a bit of the real life chef, Mr. Keller, who created the dish that sparks it.

The ominous, vampire-like restaurant critic is served the titular dish, with Remy the rat's (and real life chef Thomas Keller's) particular spin. We see him take a bite, and then suddenly, he is instantly transported back in time, to his childhood, standing in the doorway with a sad look on his face, his mother, smiling back, and comforting him with a bowl of simple ratatouille.

All in an instant, transported by memory to a better place, a better time, simply through the gentle touch of a chef, bringing to life a seemingly simple, unimpressive dish, simultaneously new and remarkable, and yet also old and familiar.

This is the power of truly great food. And this is why Ratatouille is one of the most incredible pieces of cinema I have ever seen, because in that brief scene, more than any other in a line of well-crafted moments and visual cues, we see it represented visually to a level of clarity I wouldn't have thought possible in the medium. So much is conveyed in such a brief, yet powerful image, and it seems to bely a level of understanding that I was simply floored by.

Setting aside my snarky, cynic's facade a moment, I must humbly admit that scene literally makes my cry just thinking about it. Its like someone reached right in my chest and found that spark that makes me want to do what I do, and thrust it on screen, and then comforts me softly just as Ego's mother comforts him.

The rest of the film is, in many ways, simply icing on the cake. The incredible verisimilitude, the clever writing, the animation, the sight gags, Collette, all really build the foundation for that final resolute moment in a way that few films manage.

So yes, it deserves an Oscar nod. At least a damn nomination. I'd consider it a victory for chefs and cooks everywhere if this film got the recognition it deserves, simply for managing to portray so well with so little, the passion and the joy that is food and cooking. This is an Important Movie(tm), if not for the rest of them, then at least for us.

The French are geniuses.

2007-11-25T23:51:00.000-08:00

So, I never really thought much of French cooking, really. I dont know why, exactly, perhaps it was simply youthful rebellion against the overwhelming French influence on formalized Western cuisine, or my greater affinity for Asian styles of cooking, but I just never was terribly sold on the importance of it.

Oh, certainly, I recognized that some of the techniques were downright invaluable. I couldn't live without the roux, if nothing else. But I never really thought much of it, because it seemed like such a basic thing.

And despite being the Bourdain fan that I am, even when he'd go on at length about the wonders of French cooking, it still didn't really register.

Until I watched him make cassoulet.

It was for the Cleveland episode of No Reservations, that he prepared a cassoulet for Michael Ruhlman and his family.

Here was a dish, which basically involved cooking a bunch of different kinds of pork, inside of pork skin, with a pot-pie-like pastry crust to top the whole thing off.

Pork pot pie.

Any dismissal of the French instantly vaporized. I don't know how I can even entirely express in text with enough emphasis. I literally feel that the medium of text is inadequate to describe how utterly and completely astounded and infatuated I was at the very idea of this dish. I've taken longer to fall in love with women.

Of course, the moment I saw it, I knew I would have to make it. Someday, somehow, I would make a cassoulet, because it was simply too damn genius not to experience first hand, and there aren't exactly a lot of French bistros in the middle of the Oregon desert.

Well, today, I finally got my chance. I was perusing the days selection of meats at Ray's, and saw the package of pig skin, and immediately the light bulb moment went on in my head. I would make cassoulet. A chat with the butcher revealed that he was perfectly happy to cut me a bit of skin to suit even.

My mind was made up. A frenzy of activity ensued to acquire all the desired and needed ingredients for my own interpretation of the concept. First things first, I needed a pan, as my house is dreadfully short on them, and completely lacking one that was ovenable.

I wound up going with a cheap disposable foil 5lb. loaf pan.

Next was ingredients. At this point, I realized I was going to need a basket, so I went back to the door, and grabbed one, and basically worked my way around the store from there. A sweet potato, cheap surplus from Thanksgiving, a red bell pepper, shallot, Braeburn apple, fresh savory for some herbage, an onion which I didn't wind up actually using because of the strength of the shallot, some brown sugar and paprika for some further flavorants, a bottle of cheap pinot grigio (more cheap sale-priced Crane Lake), and two cans of white beans. From the butcher counter, 4 strips of peppered bacon, 1 large andouille sausage, a custom cut measure of pork skin, and a smoked pork hock chunk, cut in half. Finally, to top it off, premade pie crusts, to provide the topping.

Once I got it home, I discovered that the pork skin wasn't quite the big solid piece I'd hoped for, as he'd mostly just picked out bits from the already cut package from the shelf. Fortunately, there was a big enough sheet of it to cover the base of the pan, which I figured was good enough, so I laid it across the bottom of the pan.

Then, into the pan went the yam, shallot, apple, and red bell pepper, all diced, followed by three cloves of minced garlic. On top of this went the two halves of pork hock, followed by sliced andouille, and chopped bacon. On top of all this went the cans of white beans, draining the liguid into a seperate vessel first. Then seasoning: black pepper, paprika, cumin, New Mexico chili powder, garlic powder, salt, a sprig or two worth of the fresh savory, and a generous helping of brown sugar. For liquid, the liquid from the beans, a good amount of the pinot grigio (maybe a cup and a half or so), a bit of soya sauce and seasoned rice vinegar, and then topping it off with water until everything was roughly to the level of the top layer of beans.

All of this was topped by covering the top with the pie crust. One 9-inch pie crust wasn't quite big enough to cover the whole length of the pan, so I wound up using one whole one, and part of the other, crimping it over the top and trimming the excess from the side of the pan, then slitting across the top five times.

This went into the oven for about a half an hour at 350 degrees, followed by another 10 minutes or so at 450. This proved not enough, so it wound up going back into the oven for another hour at 350, and to be honest, I think it could've used another half an hour or so, and this will probably be what I do to heat up the leftovers for dinner tomorrow.

However, difficulties with nailing down the cooking time aside, the dish was overall absolutely fucking delicious. Like a rich, slightly sweet bean soup, and absolutely tasty. The red pepper and some of the sweet potato seemed a bit undercooked, hence the consideration of another half an hour's cooking time.

Still, while probably not remotely faithful to the traditional French recipe except in the overarching concept, I think I managed to pull of a very, very tasty dish, and I intend to make it again. Possibly even next weekend.

A brief Thanksgiving public service message.

2007-11-22T14:42:00.001-08:00

Just Say No to White Meat.

When it comes time to divvy up that colossal bird, choose flavor, choose dark meat. Your mouth will love you for it.

White turkey meat is only slightly lower on the scale of tasteless culinary conformity than the dreaded chicken breast, in that every once in a while, you find someone who manages to cook the turkey properly enough that there's at least some moisture left in the white meat of a turkey.

So rather than winding up in the same category as people who order California rolls and teriyaki chicken at Japanese restaurants, or the Dread Chicken Caesar, go for where the real flavor is at, and open up your tastebuds to the world of turkey bliss.

Save the white meat for tomorrow, and throw it in a Thai yellow curry. That's what that shit's for man.

I am to wine . . .

2007-11-18T23:49:00.001-08:00

. . . as most people are to beer.

I'm not much of a wine guy. For a wannabe gourmet, that's probably some kind of horrible crime or sacrilege, but really, I've just never been a fan of the stuff. I have never had a white wine that I liked at all, and only the occasional red that I've tolerated or liked at all. Most times it's more the effect of most alcohols where after the first glass or two, you just don't care anymore.

So I suppose it should come as no surprise to me that the Crane Lake cabernet sauvignon that I have managed to polish off this fine evening is in fact nothing more than another brand name from the same man who is responsible for Franzia in a box.

I feel vaguely dirty, but damnit, it wasn't a half bad wine to me, and the review I found online at Winecast has be wanting to try their petite Syrah tomorrow. At $3.33 a bottle, it's damn hard to resist.

Dinner itself was a bit of an odd sandwich. Roast beef and red-pepper marinated canned squid on marbled pumpernickel/dark rye, with a Tillamook smoked cheddar spread, fresh spinach, and Cardini's original Caesar dressing. Pretty good, though I'm not sure the squid really added anything to the party, and was in fact far milder than I expected.

For lunch a few days back, I got a Black Angus ball tip steak, cooked to a char medium-rare, and sliced sashimi style, and served with a dipping sauce of shoyu, crushed red pepper, Korean red pepper paste, sugar, and brown rice vinegar, quickly boiled and then filtered. Very, very tasty, and something I'd be proud to serve as an entree in the restaurant.

I am not the next Iron Chef.

2007-11-13T23:25:00.000-08:00

So for dinner Monday night, I was a bit tighter on cash, and decided to finally break down and experiment with beef heart.

My love of Tony Bourdain has sort of left me inheriting a deep curiosity about offal, but I personally have done nothing whatsoever with them in my life. This appeals though, in a way, because it presents a fun challenge. I love getting some strange new ingredient, and then trying to figure out what in god's name to do with it, and what better challenge for the cook's instinct than the sort of thing most people simply throw away?

Heart also seemed like a relatively easy place to start. It is after all, nothing more than one big muscle, and thus, can be treated in some ways like a tough, gamey cut of regular old beef.

Google however, was almost no help whatsoever. Seriously, I've just about given up on finding food information on Google, because invariably I seem to just wind up with shit tons of links to those "post your own recipes" sorts of sites, which are generally littered with misinformation and shoddy recipes that often result in terrible or even inedible food.

While I did eventually find a reference to a Peruvian dish called anticuchos, which is marinated chunks of beef heart, skewered, and then grilled. But I was feeling remarkably lazy, and not really feeling up to trying to find an adequate container for marinade. I will probably try this again however.

So instead, I decided to get creative, and devise my own method. For some reason, perhaps simple alliteration, the phrase "braised beef heart" kept popping into mind, and so I decided that was what I would do. I had some left over sangiovese, and figured I'd do a red wine braise, using that crummy folding omelet pan I'd seen on the stove.

So, I melted about a tablespoon of butter in the pan, added two chopped garlic cloves, and a half teaspoon of chili garlic paste. I salted and peppered the strips of beef heart on each side, and then seared them in the butter, before adding some of the wine, a little more black pepper, cumin, and New Mexico chile powder. Brought that up to a simmer, folded the top closed, turned down the heat to low, and cooked it for about a half an hour.

It was upon checking it, that I discovered that the brand new dial thermometer I'd bought for temping meat with, was apparently already broken. I'd had some trouble with it the night before with the porketta chop, but now it was just giving me temperatures that made no sense at all, and taking far, far longer than it should to take a reading. I finally wound up giving up and just cutting into the thing. Satisfied it had reached doneness, I removed the meat from the pan, set it on a plate, and to the now carmelized wine and spice mixture, added a bit of seasoned rice vinegar in an attempt to deglaze the pan a bit, and create a pan sauce, which I then drizzled liberally over the heart.

My initial reaction upon finally tasting it was a bit mixed. By itself, the meat still had a bit of an odd liver-y taste to it, and it was still a bit tough. The sauce, while a bit greasy and lumpy, still tasted quite good however, and managed to cut through that organ meat taste a bit, and the meat itself seemed to mellow over time. From time to time, I would also get bites of very uneven texture, where part of it would be OK, but then one side would be very tough. I think perhaps next time I need to endeavor to more carefully butcher the meat, so as to perhaps remove some of the extra-tough layers of the meat.

However, at it's core, the recipe shows promise. I think it needed more cooking liquid, indeed, probably the remainder of the bottle I had left, but I was wanting to conserve enough for a glass to drink with the meal. It also probably needed a longer cooking time, to ensure more break down of the meat, and a more careful eye towards removing outer membranes and such that result in tough sections. I will have to try it again, and hopefully do it right next time.

For entertainment as I consumed my meal, I watch the concluding two episodes of the Next Iron Chef. I was pleased. While John Besh is definitely an excellent chef, in my heart of hearts, I'd been wanting Symon to win from day one. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's just his style, his attitude, his personality. I'd seen him before on Iron Chef, as well as Bourdain's visit to Cleveland, and was impressed with the guy. I was disappointed that Morou got sent home when he did, although I am sort of forced to agree that his presentations were a bit formulaic, it seemed to me like a small thing, especially considering that otherwise the actual food seemed to be consistently impressive.

I was also please to see that the two Food Network ringers, the ones who looked like they were accidental transplants from Next Food Network Star, both got sent home. Both really just seemed amateurish, the woman's personality, especially in her final appearance, was painfully grating in it's vapid bubbliness, and the other guy, while he did surprise on occasion, just clearly didn't even belong in the same room with any of the other giants there. As Ruhlman and Bourdain had both intimated on their blog, Food Network really surprised by not going with the vapid "TV personality" over the people with real talent and experience.

So overall, I'm very happy with the results. The show was fantastic, and I think the ultimate winner really deserved it, and I look forward to seeing him in action in the coming season of Iron Chef America.

Ray's Food Place is the best supermarket ever.

2007-11-11T13:07:00.000-08:00

So, I've been working a lot, and largely exhausted, and had sort of neglected the blog and the writing. It started with just the move distracting me, and then all the hours in the kitchen, but lately, it's been a bit intimidating coming back, because for once, I actually have things to write about.

Too many things, in fact. I've had some time to experiment since my last entry, with a whole bunch of things, and produced some really excellent food, and learned a few things. So look for more blog entries to come as I try and catch up and all the back log of new recipes.

However, for the moment, there's just one thing I want to talk about: Ray's Food Place. This is, hands down, the best goddamn supermarket I've ever been to, and I love it with all my heart.

Why is it so wonderful? Well, here's my menu for today. For lunch, a fresh comice pear, smoked gouda, jalapeno cheese bread, and Mexican grapefruit soda. For dinner, I've got a lovely pork sirloin chop, rubbed liberally with the house porketta spice, and a Nappa Valley sangiovese.

And how much did I pay for all this bounty? $10.70. No, I'm not joking. And all of it, except possibly the wine as I've not tasted it yet, and WineSpectator.com is no help at all, is positively lovely.

Largely, this is all a result, oddly enough actually, not of a relentless focus on quantity and cheapness, but seemingly paradoxically, on quality and freshness. Ray's policy, as best I can figure out, is that everything must be absolutely, gloriously, fresh, and great quality.

So that pear? On sale, got it for about 50 cents, because while it is still perfectly delicious, and in fact, just the right ripeness, it's just barely too ripe, and they'd rather just sell it off.

The pork chop was only a buck and 50 cents, for exactly the same reason. It only just got cut two days ago tops, and is probably fresh enough still that if it were beef, you could make a carpaccio with it.

I've yet to buy anything from their meat department that wasn't absolutely awesome, in fact. I never get that feeling I get walking into most grocery stores and being genuinely nervous about the meat, or realizing the butcher doesn't actually know what the fuck he's doing, or that half this meat's probably already been frozen once, and looks about like it.

Generally speaking, when I walk in through those doors, I know I'm going to be able to get something really good, for not a whole lot of money. I have lived like a king since moving here, because of that store.

I still live.

2007-10-16T13:15:00.000-07:00

I have been away from the Internet for a while, but have managed to grab some time at a local internet shop with which to update matters.

I have a new job now. The Mexican restaurant turned out to not have enough money to pay me, so I have instead found a new, and much better home, as the head cook at a little Japanese/Korean restaurant here in town, and have even finally found my own home in town for a reasonable amount of money.

I love my new job very much, I feel like I'm at home again, and I look forward to going to work every day. My first real culinary experience was at a Japanese restaurant, so while the techniques we use at the new place are a little different, all in all, it's all like old hat to me. My employer has been very impressed with my skills, and I've even gotten to flex my creative muscle a bit and really show of what I'm capable of. I'm thinking I might talk the owner into running weekly specials, to give me the opportunity to try some new dishes, and I've already added a few tweaks and one new item to the sushi menu.

All in all, it's going very well indeed, though the last week was a bit exhausting, as our lunch cook was out with illness, leaving me to run two all day shifts in a row.

I also finally got another opportunity to try my hand at barbecue this weekend, this time with a nice pork shoulder roast. It came out not so hot, it got a little burnt on the outside, a little dried out, but all in all the end result, shredded and put in a corn tortilla with some fresh avacado salsa and homemade sweet hot sauce, was amazingly tasty, and I've learned a lot about how this damnable smoker works best and how to get it just perfect next time.

Recipe Recall.

2007-09-21T09:52:00.001-07:00

So, some of our readers may recall a recipe I posted for a mock BBQ chicken sandwich.

I'm going to now recommend strongly that no one actually make that recipe, and intend to do the same.

I'm not sure what exactly is the problem, I suspect the simmering process may not be hot enough to ensure proper food safety, or maybe it's the heating up of the ranch dressing from the addition of warm meat mixture, but I believe I may've contracted food poisoning of some variety after preparing a similar dish (though this time with my homemade BBQ sauce and some baked chicken) for my lunch recently.

I had previously suspected this may be the case when after I made the big batch for the whole family some time ago when the recipe was posted, I came down with an awful fever/diarrhea thing, but I dismissed it as a fluke or a coincidence. I must now suggest that this is likely not the case at all.

I spent most of last night with a raging fever so bad I was having dreams about using my body as a human heat source.

On the good news front though, after finally getting a straight answer out of my former employer at the Mexican restaurant, I was able to, with in a couple of days, acquire a new job at a Japanese/Korean place as a cook. After one night there, I am already quite pleased with my new job, I like my coworkers, the recipes are dead simple, and it's all really quite familiar territory in many ways, so I'm happy.

I just hope I can survive tonight's shift while still recovering from my very poorly times illness.

I finally did it. I made real barbecue.

2007-09-17T23:08:00.000-07:00

After finally managing to wrestle some money out of the hands of my erstwhile employer, I broke down and bought an electric smoker.

Well, technically, I bought two. My initial intent was to build my own, inspired by Alton Brown's hotplate and pie pan technique, but after my second store and a total failure to find any suitable materials that would actually fit together, I broke down and bought an electric water smoker on sale at Lowe's, a Brinkmann.

Unfortunately, it was a piece of garbage. The smoker body came in three sections, a base, a center section with a side door, and a lid. The problem was, the center section was completely bent out of shape, so badly in fact that initially the center wouldn't even fit properly on the base, and even after an attempt at evening it out, the lid wouldn't actually fit right on the top. there were huge gaps all around the lid, essentially ruining it's utility as a smoker.

So I went back, returned the thing, and went out again hunting for suitable body and grill bits to try again at building my own. After a considerable amoutn of running around, I again gave up, went back to Home Depot, and bought the Char-Broil electric smoker I'd seen the day before. I was immediately impressed with it. It was simply a more well constructed thing, and more well equipped. The design was actually closer to Alton's designs, and could be used for both dry and water smoking, it had an integrated thermometer in the lid, and the electric element was actually mounted to the body, and included an adjustable thermostat.

My smoker finally acquired after two days hunting, I got it put together the night prior, in preparation for my intention to smoke some beef spareribs I'd acquired on Friday.

Come game day, I hemmed and hawed a bit over when to start the whole process, and wound up starting a bit too late. But not for the reasons one would necessarily expect, but rather due to the fact that it turned out that no one had told me the fact that the fridge I had chosen to store the ribs in, didn't actually work. So I got to soaking the hickory chips, and about an hour or so later, I broke out the ribs to prep for smoking, only to find they weren't any good.

The result of course was that I had to run to town to get more ribs, which took a considerable amount of time given that I'd planned on some very tight timing, perhaps a bit unrealistically. As a result, my wood chips smoked too long, which ended up making the smoker much slower to heat up to the right temp for ribs.

I prepared the ribs with the same dry rub base I used for the oven baked ribs I'd made previously, with the sole addition of some cinnamon, and got those in the smoker, and fired it up. It got up to about 180 degrees, but seemed to halt there, which was a problem because I was shooting for at least 200 to about 220. I wound up solving the problem by tossing a small handful of dry, unsoaked chips into the smoker, after which it quickly got up to where I wanted it at.

The sauce was a pretty traditional recipe, with a few of my own tweaks and a touch of a local ingredient: fresh juniper berries. Adds a nice touch that goes wonderfully in a barbecue sauce, gives it a nice peppery note that's just fantastic. If anything I think I did not use enough, which is wonderful, because I had my doubts at first.

I added the sauce in the last half hour of cooking, a relatively light basting, just enough to jazz up the flavor.

In the end, the ribs were not perfect. I discovered that the smoker cooks rather unevenly between the two racks. The top rack seems to be a bit cooler, so the ribs up there came out a bit on the tough side. The bottom rack was hotter, and came out much better. The meat had pulled away from the bone the way it should, the meat was incredibly tender, the fat on the underside had actually crisped up a bit, creating this delicious crust on the underside, infused with the rub.

It was not perfect. I clearly need more practice, and more time to work out the peculiarities of my smoker. Next time I think I'll try using the water basin for the liquid, and but the chips in the base by the element, either dry or only lightly soaked. I'm not sure how it will turn out with the addition of the water vapor exactly. Alton Brown made a toss off reference in "Q", about how the water vapor from propane burning can inhibit smoke penetration, which would seem to be even more of a problem with an entire basin full of liquid. At the same time though, I do know some smoker designs I've seen in competitions do use water reservoirs. One thing I do thing is that the water vapor and the basin itself may help to hold more heat in the smoker, which would certainly not be unwelcome.

We shall see. I have a great desire to master the art of barbecue. I envy the Southern states their preponderance of delicious smoky goodness, and I harbor certain dreams of trying to create a new regional variation of barbecue right here in Central Oregon. In addition to the juniper berries, I'd really like to get hold of some manzanita, for another nice local flair.

And weirdly, I'm even finding myself almost instinctively wanting to take on that weird sense of secrecy that surrounds so many barbecue recipes. I actually found myself questioning whether to make this post, and just how much info to share. I wonder what it is about this particular culinary art that leads to such secrecy, in such stark contrast to the foodie movements, the Iron Chefs, and the trendier restaurants, which seem to revel in bragging about every last detail.

It's a curious thing really.

Let's all pretend it's winter already!

2007-09-14T23:42:00.000-07:00

I discovered the other day whilst acquiring sausage and bacon for biscuits and gravy, that my favorite local market's butcher counter has smoked pork hocks. Thus, it became an immediate and perfectly natural desire, to make soup with them.

So this evening, I acquired a 1 lb bag of lentils, and two of their fine pork hocks. Sprinkled the hocks with a little salt and seared them in a pan with some olive oil. Sweat off a mirepoix in the big stock pot, added about 3 or 4 cloves of garlic, toss the hocks in there, and then filled it up with water. From there, in went some fresh chopped sage, oregano, and cilantro, some Worcestershire and soy sauces, salt, pepper, paprika, cinnamon, and a single beef boullion cube. For a little extra touch, I added a healthy splash of Black Butte Porter.

Brought that to a boil, tossed in the lentils, put a lid on it, and reduced the heat to low, and let that stew for 2 hours. Once that was done, I pulled out the hocks, pried all the meat off the bones and copped that up and added it back into the pot, and also pulled out the marrow and added that too. Stir that all up, and serve, with a pint or two of Black Butte Porter of course.

Wonderful meal. Good and hearty, and pairs well with the dark beer. Makes me feel like it's wintertime again. Can't want until it actually is winter.

Adventures in ribs.

2007-09-10T00:32:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Ray's Food Place, I finally got the opportunity to actually experiment with a real cut for barbecue: beef spare ribs. They were running some kind of sale, two racks of spare ribs, bagged up, and sold for about a buck a pound. We were in a bit of a hurry, and needed something to pick up for dinner, and they caught my eye.

Thanks to their cheapness, I actually got two goes at making ribs, once the first night, and again on my brother's birthday the next night, a suggestion of my mother's as a substitute for the pizza they had planned to order.

This proved to be good, because I rather botched the first batch, on two fronts, mainly due to my own ignorance. The first mistake turned out to be in the butchering, namely, that I didn't realize any was required. The back side of the ribs has an outer membrane that is completely inedible, cooking up into a tough layer of unchewable gristle. The second was that I cooked the ribs for about half as long as they needed to be, mainly because I was impatient, but also out of a certain ignorance as to what a good cooked rib is supposed to look like.

The part I did hit just right though, was in the seasoning. My initial plan had been to go with a dry rub only, and serve the sauce either on the ribs afterwards, or even on the side. So I went about building a spice mixture, on the fly, of salt, pepper, paprika, cayenne pepper, garlic powder, and chili powder. But then I hemmed a bit, concerned my ribs were going to be too dry, and decided to baste on a fair amount of cheap hickory BBQ sauce anyway. The end result wound up being the best tasting part of the whole thing.

Now, for cooking method, my original plan had been charcoal grill, but it turned out the only grill I had was so small that not even one of the racks of ribs would fit. So I had to go with the oven. The first time around, I cooked them at 350 for 45 minutes, which was way too underdone. The meat was rare, and to safe temp and everything, but not a texture you want for ribs. So for the next night, I cooked it at 325, for a good hour and a half or so.

The second batch was, of course, much, much better, and in fact, downright delicious. The texture was great, the flavor of the meat and the combination between the sweet sauce and the slightly spicy dry rub was perfect.

I want to make more. Maybe experiment some more with actually making my own sauce. And maybe refurbishing the bigger grill I found in the backyard. Or maybe trying to replicate the Army surplus Swiss box smoker Alton Brown demonstrated at the South Beach Food and Wine Festival.

I really want to experiment with smoked meat and things, but have so far lacked the equipment. With some money coming in, perhaps I can do a little Alton-esque improvisation of my own and make a nice smokebox.

Of course, the money is proving to be an issue still, because now my damn employer won't give me my check. I was supposed to meet my boss at the restaurant at 1 PM yesterday, and instead spent all day sitting around waiting for him to call, which so far, now 36 hours later, has yet to happen, and my own attempts to call there have all somehow missed him. This, plus some of the other behaviors and things hinted at, are making me exceedingly doubtful about my job security, and it seems I am again in the market for another cooking job.

A real Iron Chef challenge.

2007-09-10T00:17:00.000-07:00

So, I do enjoy the Iron Chef America show, especially when Mario Batali's on, but really, could you get any more softball than a lot of the ingredients they choose? Tonight's battle is parmigiano reggiano. How can you not think of like, a billion things to use that for? I'm a total hack, and I could handle that.

There are occasional surprises, like the Battle Opa Opa, in which I don't think Mario Batali had even ever seen that fish before, let alone cooked with it. But it's still a pretty damn nice looking fish.

I wanna see some secret ingredients that really give the chef a challenge. I'm talking nasty bits and crummy processed food products. I wanna see Battle Spam, Battle Chipped Beef, and Battle Potted Meat Food Product. I wanna see Battle Trotters, Battle Chitlins, and Battle That Funky Dangly Bit in the Back of the Throat.

Mix things up a bit, and really put the heat on 'em.

Schnitzel!

2007-09-02T02:41:00.000-07:00

I don't know what it is about my brain sometimes, that it just comes up with things seemingly out of nowhere. Not long after I made my last post, which resigned itself with a somewhat melancholy note relating to my sudden reduction in creative kitchen freedom, out of nowhere my mind thought of the thin-sliced pork chops in the fridge, and then came the words: weiner schnitzel.

Weiner schnitzel is of course, a lovely breaded, tenderized meat dish which hails originally from Vienna. It's history is fascinating, starting out, it is speculated, in Italy, where it spread to Austria, then Germany, and eventually, across a pretty healthy portion of the world, evolving in many cases as it went, into such forms as the chicken fried steak in the US, or the tonkatsu of Japan.

Traditionally, it is made from veal, but in my case of course, the thin pork chops which I had acquired as part of my supply gathering seemed ripe for this treatment. It also had the advantage that, when paired with a side of mashed potatoes, I could get away without using my dwindling vegetable supply and still get a pretty full meal out of the deal.

It's also dead simple to make really, just take the thin-cut chops, put a piece of wax paper or plastic wrap on top, pound them out, then dust in flour, dip in egg, then in breadcrumbs, and fry up in about a quarter inch of hot melted shortening with a little bit of olive oil for extra flavor, over medium heat.

For the mashed potatoes, I added some milk, butter, sour cream, minced garlic, salt and pepper, for a nice flavor and a good creamy texture. I keep the skin on my mashed potatoes, as I love the taste of potato skins, which also works out in that I hate peeling potatoes.

To top off the whole meal, I made a quick white gravy with a roux of the excess flour and some freshly rendered bacon fat, to which I added a healthy amount of milk, some salt, and a liberal amount of black pepper.

The texture of the schnitzel was absolutely incredible. Tender, flavorful, still moist, yet just slightly crispy on the outside. The mashed potatoes were creamy and delicious. The only weak point of the meal was that the gravy was a bit lumpy, not a mistake I usually make, but I was feeling something of a rush to get the gravy done before the schnitzel and potatoes got cold.

And for dessert, a simple slice of last night's pound cake.

Pure magic.

Culinary freedom.

2007-09-01T14:09:00.000-07:00

So I finally acquired employment, as a cook and dishwasher at a nearby Mexican restaurant and bar. It's going reasonably well so far, except for the part where I was forced to take an entire week off work, not even a week and a half after starting, as I had to watch my sisters while my parents were out of town.

The upshot of this though, is that I got complete control of the menu. Of course, when I went and did the shopping, I was at that time unaware of the fact that I'd have two extra mouths to feed. Fortunately, I'd chosen a menu that hinged on making big batches of dishes, that I could eat over time.

For the first night, I made a big batch of jambalaya, with baby shrimp and Italian sausage. For the second night, shrimp fried rice with cilantro and a chili-lime infused soy sauce.

The piece de resistance however, was supposed to come the third night: The family recipe Italian sausage burritos, made almost completely from scratch, from the refried beans, to the salsa, and even the tortillas.

The last of course, was the one approached with the greatest trepidation, as I'd never attempted such a think before, and I already knew from previous experience that the rolling pin skills upon which successful making of flour tortillas hinges so heavily and which I would thus require, were practically non-existent in my repetoire of cooking skills.

Which of course proved to be just one of many problems. I'm not sure the recipe I acquired was actually accurate: it claimed to yield 12 12-inch tortillas, but there was no such chance with the amount of dough produced. I missed the part of the recipe to let the dough rest. My rolling skills were awful, and resulted in horribly misshapen messes, and my pan and heat were all wrong, so the tortillas weren't cooking right.

Eventually, I gave up after the 3rd attempted tortilla, and wound up feeding most of the failed scraps to the dog, while reserving the remaining dough for, well, something. Not sure what yet, maybe some kind of thin boiled dumpling, as I've seen in one of the Caribbean restaurants Andrew Zimmern visited in one episode.

I was now without tortillas for my burritos, as I had somewhat overconfidently skipped acquiring any sort of back up plan, like some pre-made tortillas, or the masa flour I'd considered buying. Corn tortillas are pressed, instead of rolled, meaning that while I'd have to improvise something to use as the weight, it wouldn't rely on my total lack of skill in the rolling pin area.

After a not insignificant amount of general swearing at my failure, I finally decided to just go with a plate of rice and beans instead. So I set about boiling the pinto beans for the frijoles refritos (look at me with the foreign language reference twice in the same post! Could I be anymore pretentious?).

While the beans boiled with a bit of salt and chopped bacon for a good two hours, I got to work on the salsa. Dead simple recipe, just a 16 oz can of whole tomatoes in sauce, half an onion roughly chopped, half a green pepper roughly chopped, one jalapeno sliced, the juice of one half a lime, and a little salt, all pulsed in a blender, and then mixed in a healthy dose of chopped cilantro.

For the beans, you need fat. Many of the traditional recipes I've read use mountains of straight-up lard, though my recipe goes a lot lighter than that. A couple strips of bacon, rendered out into the pan (save the bacon itself for your own snacking once it's cooked, we only need the fat), to which we add a pound of hot Italian sausage. Once that's good and browned, in go our cooked beans, drained, but conserving the stock.

Then we start mashing them up. I just used a good potato masher, I used to use a fork a lot. I think the fork gives you better control over the texture, but for a large batch of beans it really isn't practical. If I weren't cooking the meat in with the beans, and I actually owned one, I'd imagine a stick blender would work pretty well for this too.

Throughout the mashing process, you're also adding back some of the stock from the beans. This keeps them from drying out, and also helps us get to the right texture we want out of the beans. I like mine a bit thicker than is the standard in most Mexican restaurants, but remember, if you add too much liquid, you can just keep cooking until it thickens up again, so you really can't go wrong. At the restaurant I work at, the beans just sit on low heat all day, with the cook adding back water periodically over the course of the day if the beans get too thick or too dry.

For the rice, I just boiled some long-grain rice, with some sprigs of cilantro, some chili paste, and minced garlic.

For the final plating, I topped both the rice and beans with some grated cheese, giving it a minute or so to melt, before topping off with some of the salsa.

The result was quite delicious, and filling, and ultimately served to wash away any and all frustration left from my failure at tortilla making.

Last night's meal was simply the leftover jambalaya, which reheats remarkably well in the microwave for a rice dish, with a side of garlic toast. So, I guess to make up for the lack of actual cooking that day, I decided I wanted cake, and after some digging around for a recipe for a simple cake, finally decided on the pound cake recipe out of the Betty Crocker cookbook.

It came out fantastic, and lighter in flavor and texture than I expected. I'm used to pound cake being a pretty dense, rich sort of cake, but I'm not sure if it was a product of the recipe, or me over whipping the ingredients, but it came out with a texture that was firm, yet pillowy soft, with a slightly crispy crust, and a much lighter, gentle flavor than I normally expect. Fantastic.

Not sure what I'll do tonight. My stepfather had to return due to a work emergency, so I guess my plan of making a second batch of jambalaya, this time with pork in place of the shrimp, won't work, as he refuses to eat anything with rice.

Alas, the shackles have returned, and I am again constrained in my options. But it was sure fun while it lasted.

Well, they both start with "I".

2007-08-12T18:16:00.001-07:00

Sometimes, you have an idea, and you just don't know where in the hell it even came from. I'm sitting here, immersed in a marathon viewing session of Anthony Bourdain's A Cook's Tour. My simple breakfast of yesterday's soda bread toasted with butter, cheese, and apple, finally having digested enough to make me again crave food, and the idea hits me: bruschetta.

And I mean for real this time, not cheap toast with Johnny's garlic spread, but done the proper way, toasted under a broiler, rubbed with garlic and drizzled with olive oil, with a single twist, in that I'm fairly certain soda bread is not really a traditional bread for this dish.

But why not? Soda bread apparently has a reputation for toasting well, and my breakfast this morning had proved that rather effectively. Why not jazz up some simple toast with an Italian flair? I'm generally reticent about all this "fusion" nonsense that's all the rage at the yuppie troughs, but sometimes this sort of cross-cultural pairing just works, it seems, in fact, so natural that it could easily have been thought of centuries ago if only their respective cultures had been closer neighbors.

So, I decide, bruschetta it is. My mind then begins wandering to a relish, and I find in the fridge a small cup of sliced pickled banana peppers, leftovers of a stop at a Quizno's on the way home from a visit to the hairdresser's with my family. I chop those up, toss them with a quarter onion, about a half teaspoon of chili garlic paste, a few cloves of minced garlic, salt, pepper, and paprika. The whole mixture then goes into a frypan with some olive oil while the broiler heats up to toast the bread. After it's been cooking a while, I add a splash of the vinegar from a jar of pepperoncinis and cook just a bit longer, before setting aside.

The toast goes in the broiler on low heat, and after a good crisping, I rub it down with the fresh garlic and drizzle a little olive oil across it, before topping with the pepper relish and a little fresh grated parmesan cheese.

The result is fantastic. Rather than being overly spicy, instead, the sauteeing has brought out some of the sweetness locked away in the peppers and onion and garlic, and there's a subtle, multi-toned flavor to the mix that is absolutely perfect. At one point, I even catch a rather surprising hint of something like apple, so faint and out of place I am tempted to dismiss it as perhaps just my nose pulling back the smells from this morning's breakfast.

The bread itself is, indeed, wonderful when toasted just right, in fact, it seems to have toasted better in the broiler than it did in the toaster when I made my breakfast this morning. It's got just the right crunch, without being overly hard or difficult to chew.

I'm now wishing I had more already, merely an hour after my meal, but alas, I have no more of the peppers. I think perhaps I might still try a similar recipe with some pepperoncinis at some a future date, and this will certainly become a favorite treat in the future every time mother sneaks another cup or two of peppers out of the sub shop . . .

I made bread!

2007-08-11T19:22:00.001-07:00

So, for some time now, even before the baking bug hit me, I've been wanting to make some bread. But I've been lacking both yeast and a decent bread flour, and hadn't motivated myself to request it, given it's limited utility outside of, well, making bread.

Then yesterday it dawned on me: Irish soda bread. Having pretty much been adopted in part because of a lack of harder wheat making yeast-risen breads infeasible, it was thusly a perfect option for a bread I could make without going out of my way to get a bunch of stuff I didn't have in my house.

I dug around for some recipes, and was initially deflected by the requirement of buttermilk, but then I again thought back to the words of my great teacher, on how to substitute it with some normal milk, acidified with some vinegar or lemon juice.

The Wikipedia article led me to a wonderful site with the lofty title of The Society for the Preservation of Soda Bread, whose author has dedicated himself to disseminating actual authentic recipes for traditional Irish soda bread.

So going on his recipe for white soda bread, I set to work, making only the substitution of vinegar-spiked 2% milk in place of the buttermilk. So I suppose I've probably lost points for authenticity thus likely disqualifying me for membership, but hey, isn't making the best of what you have sort of the true spirit of any country cooking, regardless of nation, including soda bread?

Philosophical points aside, after some initialy difficulties in handling the extremely sticky dough, I managed to get it in the oven, and after 45 minutes of baking and about half an hour of cooling time, I can say that regardless of whether it's authentic, the one thing it definitely is, is damn tasty. Denser than I expected, but still fluffy, with a unique flavor and aroma entirely unlike any bread I've ever consumed.

It succeeds at what I think of as the ultimate test of any bread: You can eat it plain. Yeah, I probably will experiment with a little butter or jam or maybe something really wild, but when it comes right down to it, I can and have just eaten it cut right off the loaf.

In fact I think I may just go do that now.

More fake "BBQ".

2007-08-11T19:05:00.001-07:00

So my new favorite sandwich comes by way of a bit of culinary necessity. My stepfather had cooked up a large batch of boneless beef rib strips, or rather, overcooked. They were reasonably well seasoned, but extremely tough, almost like jerky.

I decided to try and experiment with some ways of bringing some life and some tenderness back into them. The first, largely failed, experiment, was to reheat them slowly in an oven inside a foil pouch with some sauce, sliced onion, and garlic, and then wrap the result up in a warm tortilla with some cheese. The ribs wound up still tough though, which made eating them whole in a wrap an overly difficult proposition. I also wound up with some very undercooked, but potent garlic, as I'd left it whole, underestimating the amount of time and heat it would need to cook it through in that state.

So, thinking back to something I remembered seeing on Alton's show about how toughness is largely the product of the length of the meat fibers. But the grain of the ribs was a bit tough to guage really, especially after fully cooked and then chilled in the fridge. So, I decided to go for a brute force approach.

I took one of the rib strips and cut it into small thin slices, and put that in a small saucepan,
with some BBQ sauce, a little sriracha, and some minced garlic, put a lid on it, and heated it on a medium-high burner for a few minutes. Put that between two pieces of bread with some ranch dressing and shredded cheese.

Damn tasty. The sauce is delicious, and finally the meat is actually chewable. Heating it up helps bring out some of the sweetness in the sauce, which tastes damn good with the spice of the sriracha. It actually reminds me of the garlic chicken I used to get from one of the local Chinese restaurants, so much so that the next day, I actually made a similar meat mixture with tonkatsu sauce in place of the BBQ sauce, and tossed it with ramen noodles. It just seemed like a natural combination.

On life, and what matters in it.

2007-07-31T08:23:00.000-07:00

Today marks a somber and regrettable moment in my life. The storage unit that has for the last half-decade house the various collected belongings culled from 25 years of life on this Earth, has lacked payment for the last time, and will soon be auctioned off to some dispassionate junk collector who will, in all likelihood, throw out the vast majority of it.

Old books, old computers, countless games, a complete collection of the writings of my early school-age years, and plenty of just plain old junk. The first computer I ever owned sits there, the first thing I ever wrote that was worth half a damn sits there, and a whole host of other nostalgic things, are all now but a short breadth of time away from finding their way into the hands of someone who will rummage through it, salvage what might serve as decent eBay or junk store fodder, and likely toss the rest into the nearest landfill.

But, strange as it may sound, there's an odd sort of liberated feel to the realization that almost everything you had gathered in life will soon be gone. In many ways, for good or ill, that storage unit has served as an anchor about my heels from the moment I acquired it. Very often miles away even when I still lived in the city that housed it, I still held on to it all, always with the apparently vain hope of finally getting a place of my own one day where I could get all of it back out again once and for all. It was a symbol of a hope for a better life, with a nice house and the money to afford it. I dreamed of a place with a nice big room where I could finally set up my own personal antique computer museum, and a dedicated gaming room, and all sorts of fancies of that nature.

Yet as I reflect upon that dream, I wonder if perhaps I've been looking at it the wrong way. I think of a world out there that I have largely never experienced, living my relatively sheltered life in the Pacific Northwest's least interesting cities. Places I have loved in spite of themselves, but still nonetheless lacking the vibrancy and culture of so many places in the world.

I watch Anthony Bourdain and Andrew Zimmern wander the world, experiencing exotic foods, while I can only look on in rapt jealousy, and I suddenly understand the term the food blogging community seems to have latched on to: food porn. It is inherently voyeuristic, gazing on at things we wish we had, a pale if occasionally satisfying substitute for the real thing.

But surely, like one might say about the more traditional variety of fleshy cinema, the real thing is so much better than simply watching it. It must be experienced, tasted.

And this is where I start thinking that I've had it all wrong. I may fancy the sedentary life quite often, but at the same time, I'm bloody miserable living like this, making do with my culinary experimentations with what I can manage to learn from recipes pulled from the internet. One of my greatest thrills in life is finding something new, whether it's a place or a food or a game or just the right group of new friends.

And here I've had, by twist of fate and my own bungled life management skills, removed the only physical anchor that still tied me down to a more stationary lifestyle. Could I not, now, with so few possessions to my name, be free to travel the world, experiencing all those things I have until now only dreamed about and drooled over on the television screen?

Certainly it would be a far more fascinating way of learning the arcane art of cuisine. Like the adventuring wizards of so many fantasy stories and role playing games, I could be searching the world not for new spells, but new foods and tastes and techniques. I've never been one for classroom learning, and I'm not likely to ever be able to afford the kind of tuition a top culinary school offers.

So this seed of an idea has formed, of becoming the wandering cook. Start here in my own backyard, save up enough cash for a passport and a ticket to who knows where, and start looking for a job opening in some restaurant where ever in the world it might be available. Work long enough in each place to save up for a ticket to the next, and work my way around the world, and just keep going, recording the sights and sounds and tastes of each new place, before moving on to the next.

That's the theory anyway. The practicalities, as is often the case in these sorts of fancies, remain to be seen. Can a person even live like that anymore? So many countries seem to have such exacting standards as to who they will allow to stay and work in a country, so many other countries might simply not present the opportunity for a foreigner like me to simply walk into the kitchen and start working. Most countries aren't exactly jumping at the chance to import more cooks, it's not even considered a "professional" field in the parlance of many immigration authorities. What about language and cultural barriers? Can I even manage to fund this kind of lifestyle on the salary of an ordinary cook? What if I find myself trapped in a place where I simply can't afford a ticket on to the next place?

Or, how much of this sudden onrush of questions is simply the scared, coddled little mama's boy in me trying to come up with excuses to continue with the same dead-end life I've lived for so long now? After all, this is an adventure we're talking about, the kind of thing that certainly requires some thought, but also relies intrinsically on some level of sheer impulsiveness.

The opportunity here to learn about the many foods across the world is just too tempting. There's so many places in the world I want to go simply for the food, and likely so many other places that I'd never even think about for food, that could have a host of surprises in store.

There's a feeling I get sometimes, with food, where I just sit and think of all the things out there that I just haven't tried yet, and it drives me absolutely batty that I haven't tried hardly any of them, and I want to try them all. I can easily see making a life's work out of doing nothing but going out, and doing my best to reach that unattainable goal.

Step one of course, is to go down to the local saloon, whom I've just learned is hiring, and do my best to talk my way into the kitchen. As with so many journeys, this one really starts at home, and in the preparations that will have to made for this adventure to truly begin, and I truly hope that this most recent dream, unlike so many in the past, I can will into reality.

And maybe get a nice fat book deal out of it.

Holy crap, I baked something.

2007-07-26T04:35:00.001-07:00

Last night, for the first time, I actually baked something that did not come in the form of a mix in a box. This may come as a shock to the reader, but by and large the oven has always been for me, a place to which I did not go.

The art of baking has never been something I really got into, I think perhaps due to the exactitude involved in it's practice. I'm a very "eyeball it" kind of cook, I just throw what seems right into the pot, and see what happens. Generally all the measurements for my recipes come afterwards, during an introspective phase in which I think back on it and try and remember just how much of any given ingredient I put in it.

The preheating process is a sublime agitation to me, this idea of having to wait for the device to finally getting around to producing the requested temperature. I tend to have a similar complaint with electric ranges too, though to a far lesser extent.

I don't even use the oven for any non-baking/pastry type recipes. Basically, if it can't be made on a grill or a stovetop, I don't cook it. The general exception has been frozen pizzas, boxed cake or brownie mixes, and Bisquick biscuits.

However, I think my attitude on this is starting to shift, as I continue my desire to search out new avenues of experimentation.

A few nights ago, I made biscuits and gravy for the household. Now generally, when I make biscuits, I buy a box of Bisquick, add milk, and spoon onto cookie sheets as per the recipe on the box for drop biscuits. But this time, I was feeling a desire to actually try to make them from scratch for once. In the end, I sort of wussed out on the scratch-built way to go and bought another box of Bisquick. But this time, I decided to improvise and buy some buttermilk to use instead of the normal milk. I also decided to actually put in the effort of properly kneading the dough and cutting it into rounds, rather than half-assedly spooning them onto a cookie sheet and calling it good.

And to my surprise, I found I rather enjoyed it. Something about just digging in and getting my hands dirty and working the dough appealed to me.

So last night, when I found myself craving something sweet, I wound up deciding to just bake something. I expressed a desire to try my hand at baking in my IRC haunt, and someone mentioned making shortbread, which then led my thoughts to shortcake.

So I did some digging on the Food Network site, and started pulling up recipes, and found one for sour-cream shortcakes. This would be perfect I figured, because I didn't have any heavy cream, as was called for for most of the recipes I'd found, while this one only wanted the sour cream.

I ran into a few snags as I prepared my ingredients. Right after I'd just got done mixing the dry ingredients, I discovered to my dismay that we were out of butter. but I soon discovered that apparently the butter-flavored Crisco can be used as an even substitute. I also found that the recipe was actually missing an ingredient in it's list, as the directions mentioned combining egg with sour cream, yet made no mention of how many, which lead to a frantic googling for similar recipes, which eventually revealed that the standard amount seemed to be a single egg.

However, I am pleased to report that, despite these setbacks, I successfully produced some pretty damn tasty little treats, which I have been slowly consuming, split in half, with a bit of jam on each side. They are rather like an odd mid-point between a yellow cake and a scone, and the combination is very, very pleasant, and may indeed become a regular staple.

I will I think do some experimenting further. For one, I'd like to see how it comes out with real butter instead of shortening. Butter has a certain percentage of moisture to it that shortening doesn't have, and I think it might make the different in making a moister cake. I'd also like to try actually kneading and rolling it out, and cutting it into rounds like biscuits, to get a more regular shape than the rough balls as per the written recipe. I'd also of course like to try some more elaborate toppings than just simple raspberry jam, maybe even that old standby, the strawberry shortcake.

But even as they stand, they're wonderful little cakes, and serve well both as a dessert base, and actually do well as a breakfast pastry, thanks to their similarity to scones. I will be making them again.

Barbecue without the barbecue.

2007-07-23T23:42:00.001-07:00

So tonight's bit of culinary magic is basically a page pulled from a restaurant I once worked it, only done right.

We had what the menu called a "BBQ Chicken salad", which of course, had no barbecued chicken at all. It was basically boiled chicken, shredded, and tossed with a healthy amount of cheap BBQ sauce. To be flatly honest, it wasn't the best. The chicken was usually over done, and when combined with the cold temperature the meat and sauce mixture was held at, made sort of a stringy paste that was largely unpleasant.

There was however, one magic method by which to turn it into something more palatable, which was to take the "BBQ chicken", put it between two pieces of bread with some cheddar cheese and just a bit of ranch dressing, then slapped in between the two hot slabs of metal that make up a panini press. After thoroughly warmed through, it actually approached something rather like tasty.

But, recently primed by Yet Another Good Eats Episode on the subject of poaching, it occured to me that with a more proper poaching job in a good stock, this recipe might still have some hope for it.

A small scale experiment a few days ago served to prove the principle, as using the simple technique of boil, drop, and hold discussed in the episode, combined with a flavorful dashi broth seasoned with garlic, onion, chives, and curry and chili pastes, produced what was actually quite a tasty sandwich.

But I was not done with it yet. While on a trip into town to deliver a package, my stepdad and erstwhile transportation dropped me that bombshell of a question, "So, since we're in town, you got any ideas for dinner?" My mind blanked for a solid 5 minutes, as it often does in those situations, and somehow my mind seized upon the experiment of a few day's past, and suggested I could make that, I just needed some stock and perhaps some fries for a side.

So, I started with a big 40 oz can of chicken broth, to which I added a sliced onion, a chopped stalk of celery, about 4 cloves of garlic, a tablespoon of curry paste, some chives, dried rosemary, parsley, paprika, and salt and pepper, into which went 6 chicken thighs. Brought it up to a boil, then dropped it down to the next to lowest setting on the burner and cooked for 20 minutes, then pulled off the heat for ten minutes.

Once the thighs had pulled from the broth and cooled, I set about the laborious process of shredding the chicken. Once properly shredded, I tossed this with about equal parts barbecue sauce and tonkatsu sauce, topped off with some sriracha sauce. This got tossed together, and then put into a bare frypan over medium-low heat for about 20 minutes, while the fries baked in the oven.

Put a helping of that on a bun with some ranch and mayo, and a slice of colby jack cheese. To speed up the cheese melting, I popped it in the microwave for 45 secs.

The result was perfect. The chicken was moist and tender, the combination of flavors from the three sauce was perfect, tangy, sweet, and just a hint of spice. Frankly, unlike my former employer's recipe, I think this one could actually get someone believing it was really barbecue.
The only think it lacks is the flavor of smoke.

Where to begin?

2007-07-19T02:08:00.000-07:00

Today's menu was all about the Bechamel sauces. I'm not sure what prompted it exactly, I think it might have been the rice with bacon gravy I made the other day.

So for my first meal of the day, I decided to go with rice and cheese sauce. I grated up some sharp yellow cheddar, and made a typical cheese sauce, but with one extra twist: I sauteed about a tablespoon of chili garlic paste in the butter, before adding the flour to the roux. It came out delicious. The texture and thickness was dead right for once, and strangely stable. I guess I just got the amount of milk plus roux plus cheese just right, as it just hit a point where the thickness just wasn't gonna change. Usually I have a problem with my Bechamel sauces, in that they don't stay the same texture for very long, but this was dead perfect. And something about the whole combination actually made the chili sauces' contribution more mild and almost sweet, as opposed to the heat I would normally expect from what was actually a bit more than I use for, say, my spicier ramen soups.

For dinner, I went with a mock Alfredo with tuna and spaghetti. I say mock, because, lacking heavy cream, I instead made do with a Bechamel base. A more traditional Alfredo derives it's sole thickness from the heaviness of the cream and the melting cheese, as well as the starch given off by the pasta, and this is generally how I prefer to make it these days. But, in a pinch, if you're sure to cook the roux just right, it works well enough to fool most anyone, and probably bears more resemblance to that jarred stuff in the store that most Americans are familiar with than the authentic recipe does.

-------

My most recent big experiment was crepes jambalaya. I'd been feeling the urge to try a more savory crepe dish, after the semi-success of my previous experiment with sweet crepes had gone relatively well.

I'm not sure what my big interest is in crepes exactly. Ever since I saw the crepe episode of Good Eats, they've sort of nagged at me, always begging me to try them, yet until recently, despite repeated recitations of the old standby, "I should really try that sometime", I hadn't yet had the courage to try them.

I think perhaps because they do have a reputation as a notoriously challenging dish to make, and in something of a surprise, Alton's presentation of the subject actually did much to reinforce that image in my mind. Perhaps this image fed into a conception of their crafting as a sort of right of passage for a cook. That by mastering the crepe, I would somehow be proving my worth as a cook.

In practice, they certainly did prove to be quite a thorough pain in the ass and, in all honesty, I'm not really convinced the effort is actually worth it. The sweet crepes I made during my first attempt were reasonably tasty, but the more neutral crepes I made for the crepes jambalaya just had an odd flavor that I'm not sure I cared for, and certainly didn't wow the way I would normally demand from a dish that took so much craft and effort.

The jambalaya itself on the other hand, has spiraled into a recipe all it's own, one which I'm actually quite proud of. For the crepe filling, it was really a simplification of the stuff. I chopped some bacon and got that rendering in a small saucepan, then added half a diced onion. While that sauteed I whipped up a quick broth/seasoning combination, using dashi for the base stock, and adding black pepper, a healthy dose of chili paste and even some sriracha, and oddest of all, Montreal steak seasoning.

The resulting flavor combination was superb, and rolled up with a tiny bit of grated cheese, really carried the whole dish.

I've since attempted a more complete version of the dish, made in a larger batch with a full compliment of vegetables, while still keeping the same base ingredients, and the recipe is excellent. The main thing it lacks is meat, I've yet to have the opportunity to try it with a decent compliment of meats. Perhaps soon I'll try adding some chicken to the mix, and it occurs to me I missed the boat on using some of the Italian sausage that we had bought in massive bulk from Costco, as all of it has since been consumed.

I basically ate nothing but jambalaya for a whole week, between the crepes, and the second, larger batch, which as well as eating on their own, I also rolled up into some tortillas with a bit of sour cream, sriracha, and grated cheese.

La pomme revolucion!

2007-07-17T13:14:00.000-07:00

From Noisebot, comes what I shall brand the official T-Shirt of the Apple Juice Revolution.

Thanks to Dan Davenport for the linkage.

Viva la pomme!

2007-07-04T06:47:00.000-07:00

It has occurred to me that thus far on this blog I have yet to sing the praises of Alton Brown's omelet recipe.

The Good Eats Fan Page has a wonderful transcript of the episode, which is the best way to get it, as the Food Network recipe card is a bit more vague on the process, and the process is really what makes the dish in this case.

This morning's simple breakfast was the Alton French omelet, filled with a four cheese Mexican blend, and sprinkled lightly with a bit of black pepper and paprika. To go along with, just two slices of buttered toast (no garlic toast this time, it's breakfast!), and a glass of apple juice.

Today's came out extra delicious, as a I actually managed to get the temperature just about right. Normally I tend to get impatient and wind up with the pan not sufficiently heated, and the omelet a little too runny. I like it a little bit liquid on the inside, gives a nice over-medium egg texture to the whole arrangement, but if the temp is too low, you wind up with too much liquid, and too thin.

Also, I love apple juice, and don't really understand the reputation it has in the US as being a child's drink at all. Where on Earth did this come from? And why do so many adults willingly deprive themselves of this simple yet delicious beverage? That crisp, refreshing flavor is just too wonderful to pass by simply because of some weird embedded cultural notions.

Even when you ferment the stuff and turn it into booze in the form of hard cider, it still bears a reputation as a sissy drink, despite the fact that a little homebrew cider can knock you on your ass faster than any beer, and can taste just as foul as the worst bargain "malt liquor".

So I suggest that we all do our part, and seek to rehabilitate this noble beverage. Order apple instead of orange with your next dine out meal. With Summer upon us here in the Northern Hemisphere, apple juice makes a fantastic refreshment on hot afternoons, and some hard cider makes an equally fantastic libation for the evening's festivities.

I needn't remind our American readers that the Fourth of July is upon us, and what better way to celebrate a bunch of rich, dead white men refusing to pay their taxes, than with an alcoholic beverage with a long and noble history as one of the great forms of moonshine.

Drink up, we will deprive ourselves of this delicious nectar no longer! Viva La Pomme!

I'm J Arcane, and I endorse this product.

2007-06-26T03:36:00.000-07:00

Now, I am a lover of Japanese cuisine. My first cooking experience was in the kitchen of a Japanese restaurant, and it was that experience that really helped kick start my love of food and cooking.

One of my favorite dishes of course, and the one which I have prepared the most often, is ramen. This wondrous noodle soup dish is simple to prepare, tastes delicious, and offers a veritable rainbow of flavor options and possibilities. Everything from a simple shoyu broth, to the slow-cooked creamy pork taste of tonkotsu broth, to a spicy curry ramen, and everywhere in between.

When it comes to packaged ramen however, I pretty much just use the noodles and make my own broth from scratch. Better flavor that way, more control over the salt content, more avenues for creative expression. It's nice to get some fresh yakisoba noodles and use those on occasion, but for the price you still can't beat the packaged noodles, and cooked in a nice homemade broth they're actually better than the crummy frozen noodles we used in my kitchen alma mater.

I generally do conserve the flavor packets however, perhaps out of the same instinct to through nothing away that causes me to stockpile grocery bags, which of course I almost never use. I just don't use the things unless I'm taking part in that oh so delicious handmade snack food: dry broken up ramen brick with seasoning.

But there is one exception to this rule. One ramen flavor to rule them all, the only one that has a flavor that really is worth the price of admission for any purpose other than a half-assed snack seasoning.

I speak, of this fine specimen:

It is, quite simply, the only packet ramen worth eating on it's own. It is the only flavor that stands toe to toe with the quality of the more expensive imported ramens you can sometimes find in the Asian sections of supermarkets. It is equal to even to the wonders of the Nong Shim Bowl Noodle brand.

There's just something about the heat of the dried peppers, and the peculiar, almost smoky qualities of the beef bullion used, that gives it a complexity of flavor that, quite frankly, you just don't expect to find in something that only costs 10 cents at the local megamart.

But it doesn't stop at the spice packet. In contrast to the almost depressing uniformity of your average packet of dried instant noodles, the wonderful folks at Nissin have seen fit to add an additional touch to this simple meal. Infused in the dried noodles is yet more dried chili and spices, adding an extra kick even to the noodles themselves.

And not only does it serve to season a not-half-bad instant ramen, but as I've discovered with tonight's evening snack, a conserved spice packet from this stuff also serves wonderful as a seasoning for some just steamed rice. I have experimented with it's seasoning powers only a few times in the past, but somehow I suspect that if I dared to try, it's flavor would serve well as a seasoning mix for a number of other endeavors.

And so I must tip my hat to this surprising little foil packet, for providing me with some real culinary magic. Next time you're at your local foodservice supply store, do yourself a favor and grab a flat of this stuff. It's a great thing to have around, not just for the noodles, but for the whole flavor combination.

The birthday dinner

2007-06-21T16:02:00.000-07:00

It's becoming something of a tradition in my home now, that my gift-giving take the form of preparing a gourmet meal for the honored. I shudder to think how that could wind up working out if I'm still here on Christmas or Thanksgiving.

Last night's dinner for my stepfather's birthday was actually a repeat of the meal I prepared for Mother's Day: Chicken Alfredo, Caesar salad, and cheesecake.

The Alfredo is a simple traditional recipe, of cream, butter, and Parmesan cheese. The most important step here is simply getting the right cream. Much of the "heavy cream" sold in stores doesn't seem to have the thickness needed to really do the recipe justice, most of it seems to made with heavy cream, but then diluted heavily with skim milk. The trick seems to be to give the carton a good shake. If it makes no noise, you've got it good. If it sloshes around like you would expect from a carton of milk, look for another brand. I actually had to go to two different stores to find a decent heavy cream.

For the Caesar salad, I made some simple croûtons of toasted bread tossed with olive oil and, once again, that good old Johnny's mix (I really do abuse that stuff, don't I?) For the dressing, I bought Cardini's, the original Caesar dressing, from the man who invented the stuff. It's interesting too, because it really doesn't much like any other dressing that's routinely sold as "Caesar dressing", but it's very good stuff.

For the cheesecake, as I had discovered that we didn't have a suitable pan for making cheesecake, I instead went ahead and bought a pre-made plain New York style from the bakery. And prepared my own topping, using a recipe for cherry confit culled from Tyler Florence's recipe for New York style cheesecake. I'm not entirely certain it came out properly however. It seems thinner than the recipe and picture imply, and I may have used fewer cherries than I should have. I was on time constraint however, and pitting the cherries was proving rather time consuming, so I stopped when it looked like I had about a pound as per the recipe. I think in hindsight I will next time use about as many cherries, but half the syrup content.

All in all though, the meal was delicious, and seemed to be well received, and I know I certainly enjoyed it.

Ham soup!

2007-06-14T23:04:00.000-07:00

Tonight's meal was a simple soup, with ham, vegetables, and macaroni, served with a side of baked garlic bread. The soup had a vaguely Italian flavor to it, in part because of the herbs I used, and would also I think serve well as a good white bean soup with some modification.

The garlic bread came out really well. The "Country Buttermilk" Safeway Select bread I used has a really great flavor to it, that pairs well with the Johnny's mix. It also serves well for the bacon bruschetta recipe I posted earlier.

Soup recipe follows:

1 lb. ham, diced
1 medium onion, diced
2 roma tomatoes, diced
1 green bell pepper, diced
2 slices of bacon, chopped
1/3 lb. macaroni noodles
2 cloves of garlic
Dried or fresh basil, oregano, parsley to taste
49 oz can of chicken stock

Add the bacon to a large stockpot and heat over medium heat. Cook for about 5 minutes, and add the garlic and vegetables. Cook, stirring occasionally, for about 5 minutes, and then add the ham and heat for another 5 minutes.

Add the chicken stock, then fill the can about 2/3 full with water, and add that as well, then bring the heat to high, and add the herbs, a few dashes of black pepper and salt, and bring to a boil, stirring occasionally.

Once the water comes to a boil, skim off any fat that foams up around the edges of the pan, and then add the macaroni noodles, and boil for about 10 minutes.

For the garlic bread, spread a little butter on slices of bread, sprinkle with Johnny's mix and paprika, and put in a 350 degree oven for 5-10 minutes.

Eggs, eggs, and more eggs

2007-06-12T23:02:00.000-07:00

Today's menu for some reason would up consisting entirely of fried egg sandwiches. I think perhaps my mother is psychic, as this time she wasnt' even in the house when I made the bacon and egg sandwich that served as my breakfast.

She just came home with a bunch of fresh sausage patties, Canadian bacon, English muffins, and a whole block of some cheap store brand "sharp cheddar", and wanted me to make egg mcmuffins.

By and large the meal was pretty straight forward, brown the sausage, fry the bacon, fry the eggs, slap them between a split English muffin with some sliced cheese.

I did make brief use of a trick I learned for pizza making, one of my favorite pieces of culinary prestidigitation, on how to make cheap cheese taste vintage, since I only had a small amount of the vintage white left. The trick is to to top the cheap cheese with a little bit of the good stuff. The similarity in flavors makes the two cheeses blend well, so you get the richer flavor of the vintage white, while the milder young cheese will help cut that bite at the back of your throat from the sharpness of the older cheese, which makes it an especially great trick if you've got any diners who aren't so hot on sharper cheddars.

Tonight's Snack

2007-06-12T05:10:00.001-07:00

It is very rare for me to make it too many hours past dinner these days without the desire for some kind of snack. Basically unless I am completely exhausted and wind up crashing shortly after my evening meal, my night owl nature will inevitably out pace my metabolism, and I'll find myself craving some kind of snack.

The problem of course is that by this time it's usually past midnight at least, and I'm in no mood for anything with the remotest level of complexity. I'm tired, hungry, and still feeling a bit of the after dinner laze.

It is these situations that lead to my recent addiction to garlic toast. Just pop a couple of slices in the toaster, butter them up, and sprinkle with my favorite garlic spread mix, and the latest development, a few shakes of paprika.

Tonight however I was craving something spicier. In this evening's episode of No Reservations, Anthony Bourdain had taken a visit to Indonesia, and this along with a lengthy discussion with a Lithuanian acquaintance about the wonders of Tom Yum soup, had instilled in me a craving for the wonderful flavor that is red chilies.

For this, I looked to one of my favorite ingredients: chili garlic paste. This ubiquitous variant of the sambal that serves so much of southeast Asian cuisine, combines the simple flavor of red chili with a little touch of garlic flavor, and makes an easy way to spice up any dish with a bit of a fresher chili flavor than the dried red pepper flake and cayenne found in so many kitchens.

Immediately I hit upon the idea of just making a simple topping for my usual toast, and the result was what amounts to a simple bruschetta-like dish with a very rich flavor.

You will need:

2 strips of bacon
1/2 of a small onion
1.5 teaspoons of chili garlic paste
2 slices of your favorite bread
Johnny's Garlic Spread mix*
Paprika
Butter

Chop the bacon into small strips, and add to a small fry pan over medium-high heat. While that cooks, chop the onion and add it to the pan, followed by the chili garlic paste. Toss to evenly distribute the chili paste, and allow this mixture to cook, tossing occasionally, until the bacon is cooked but not over done, and the onions are soft and have absorbed some of the reddish color of the chili paste.

As this is cooking, toast two pieces of your favorite bread, and very lightly butter, then season with a light sprinkling of the Johnny's and the paprika. Top each slice off with half of the bacon and onion mixture, and enjoy.

*If you're the sort who likes to do everything from scratch, like I am when I'm not feeling lazy, you could easily replace the Johnny's with fresh ingredients. Add some minced garlic to the topping mixture along with the onion, and then, towards the end of the cooking, add some finely chopped fresh or dry herbs, like some basil or Italian parsley to the party and toss to combine. Finish off the flavor combination by lightly sprinkling the toasted bread with Parmesan cheese, and then top with the bacon and onion as usual.