Well, they both start with "I".

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!

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".

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.