Silver Case

Had a wild hair in my ass to make ‘Mayan’ or mexican style hot chocolate for dessert.   Heated four cups of milk and melted in a half cup of Belgian chocolate, thickened with a teaspoon of flour.

Into that went a masala-like mixture of nutmeg, clove, cinnamon, and freshly-toasted Arbol chillis. These things are hot and fierce.

Finished it with a bit of sugar and some vanilla.

Hmmmm odd taste. Matilda (the insane chilli-eating Myanamar lady) encouraged me to pile on the arbol.  The result was a bizarre drink that, when it wasn’t searing your throat, tasted sort of like masala tea mixed with hot chocolate.

My throat was numbed from drinking the hot chilli, and my forehead had a sweat.  I don’t think I’ll make this a regular drink.

Nelson and RogerWarez both complaining about having too much access to sourdough bread.  Ugh, if I could be so lucky.  And trust me, the sandwich bread in Singapore is far softer, far sweeter than even the most unctuous Safeway brand.

My bread skills remain  lame.  I’m still fussing with poolishes as starters.  I made one stab at a wild sourdough starter and brewed up a noxious bucket of swamp slime.

Did a batch of cooking today. Varying levels of success.

Spinach Jam Sort of a spinach/olive tapenade with coriander, garlic, and quite a few spices.   This tasted quite nice and I ate all of what I thought would be a two-day batch.

Rice Pudding  Rice pudding made with plenty of lemon and lime zest.  I  like these horrendously heavy Eisenhower desserts.  The rest of my family is considerably les adoption.

Moroccan Flat Bread   Yes, this is certainly flat.  I eventually got a rise from it during baking.  It’s cooling off now; I’ll eat it tomorrow.  It seems to make the necessary hollow sound when I whack on the crust. Hopefully it’s ok.  I didn’t give it enough yeast.  That was a problem.

Vegetable Paella   I sort of freestyled a recipe.  But I flinched during the cooking, not giving it enough stock in the first place and then adding extras in dribs/drabs near the end. The result?  Top rice undercooked,  middle rice horrendously water-logged and gross, and the bottom charred, not browned.  The vegetables were so overcooked they seemed practically liquidfied.  Heat was too high and I didn’t start with enough stock.  Tasted dreadful.  I ordered that it be binned after dinner.

Cranberry/Orange Muffins With Strudel Topping    These look fantastic.  They’re colling downstairs. I’m looking forward to try them tomorrow morning.

I have a fancy oven, but I don’t know how to bake. Or moreover, I don’t understand baking science at all.  So last night I sat down with Alton Brown’s book on baking to get up to speed.  Very well written.  I at least have a grasp of how all the parts work now. (For instance:  what’s baking powder?  cream of tartar (acid) + baking soda (base) = gas = leavening. Double-acting just means two round of gas production, from two different acids that react at different heat levels). So I worked on two recipes today. One, a recipe for wheat-thin style crackers.  The other for regular bread.  The bread dough is still rising. (It called for using a starter, which I didn’t have, so I maybe don’t have as much water as I should in the dough)   The wheat thins are cooked and largely eaten.  I used high gluten bread flour and a helping of buckwheat flour. They have a hearty taste.  The recipe includes 50g of sugar, which makes the crackers taste nicer, however, I really wish I had included some salt directly into the dough.  Salt doesn’t stick on the cracker well by itself.  The only leavening was from water in the dough steaming.  Hard things?  getting it rolled 1/16″ thick.  I tried using the pasta machine, but it could not get a grip on the butter-slippery dough.  I was stuck with using a roller pin.  I found it easier to roll directly onto some aluminum foil.   Think next time I’ll add salt to the recipe as well as some herbs de provence, and maybe a bit less sugar.  

Last time I was in Saigon, Ling and I enjoyed a fine meal at L’en Tete.  I made that my first dinner appointment during my second trip.

Fish Soup in a Marseille style

I love how the French make a fish soup.  In Chinese cuisine, they try to strangle the taste and smell of the fish away with ginger.  The Indians use tumeric like you’d use baking soda on bad smells.  The French, however, they reduce, reduce, reduce the stock until it is unabashedly FISH.

The croutons made a nice texture with the soup along with some cheese shavings (sort of an emmental cheese, though I don’t know the exact species).  The saffron-tainted mayonnaise I could do without.  I didn’t really get the point of it.  Its flavor can’t compete with the fish. As well, it doesn’t blend very nicely into the soup.  Perhaps I didn’t use it properly.

Tartiflette

I asked for something authentic and they suggested this unusual dish.  It’s unusual because a casserole of potato, onion, and cream is more often a meal after skiing in the Alps for a day, not in the Tropics.  However, they say it is a continually popular dish in Saigon, so they serve it.  In fact, it was quite nice, matched up with a dry white wine(*).    The kitchen’s skill was evident.  In twenty minutes they prepared the dish. Now obviously you can’t bake potatos done inside twenty minutes, so they (as I later clarified with the owner) par-boil the potatoes first, then slice and mix them in with some  onions.  They have beautifully calibrated the process.  The potatoes kept their sharp edges like glacial scree, but were entirely cooked.  The onions were  softened in butter before mixing into the tartiflette, so their taste was much more developed than if theyd simply been tossed in, raw.

Reference Dessert: A Crepe Suzette

I  enjoy a hearty Crepe Suzette when I eat at L’Angelus.  So I ordered one here (they are very comparable restaurants).  L’en Tete’s  Crepe Suzette is much more elemental.  Prepared in the kitchen (not tableside), it had barely any taste of the Grand Marnier liquor it was flambeed in.  The crepe itself wasn’t a fay, pale pancake, either. It had dark brown splotches of a assertive pan.  Even the sugar was immensely coarse, surviving in the mouth to give counterpoint to the wet crepe.  It was a nice variation to what I imagine a Crepe Suzette to be like.

Anyway, it was a very nice meal all around.  The owners have a fine kitchen and a gracious dining room.

(*)  I asked for the owner to pair a wine with the tartiflette.  What did he suggest?  The cheapest win on their list of French.  I wish I could export some of his honesty to the cut-and-thrust wine stewards of Singapore.

Five friends came over yesterday and we demolished lunch into dinner into midnight.

• Ate six 1.5kg (3.3pound) Hokkaido tarabakani (which are, essentially, Alaskan King Crabs)
• Followed with seafood risotto, grilled sole and dory, and a pile of Hokkaido hotate (scallops)
• Concluding the savories was a spinach/blue cheese/bacon/onion salad
• For dessert, started with Italian wine-and-blueberry cake (this one rose higher than the first I made)
• For after-dessert, slices of Shizuoka rock melon (imagine something like a cantaloupe, but where for each tree, they prune away all but one of the cantaloupes, so that maximum flavor/energy/development/perfection concentrates there) and strawberries from Shizuoka.

What did we (three or four of us) drink?

• Six liters of Kirin beer
• Six bottles of wine, everything from NZ Sauvignon Blancs, to French bordeaux, and someone’s Christmas gift donated to our cause — a $1,000 bottle of Saucerne dessert wine.
• And a 1.8 liter bottle of absolutely beautiful sake

You can imagine how spry I felt this morning.

Now I’m overseeing the production of gallons of crab stock from the left over shells and guts — a Virtuous Cycle.

I sat in the pantry late this afternoon and browsed Nigel Slater’s Kitchen Diary. I was vaguely hungry when I started, so I ended up inspired to try two dishes.

Mixed up coarsely shredded zuchinni and some gently sweated onions (from last week’s dinner!) on low heat. Thickened with flour and egg, at the last minute tossed in a large bunch of chopped fresh dill and a bunch of crumbled feta. Pan-fried the wet patties. Was supposed to serve with chutney, but I forgot to serve it. It’s ok, they were tasty by themselves, although they were really too wet to have much more than a thin outer crust. They were in no way the hashbrown-like consistency of the cookbook photo.

Chopped into large cubes tomato and eggplant, tossed into a roasting pan with oil, coriander, salt, olive oil and heartily roasted for 45 minutes. Pulled out, tossed with basil leaves and chickpeas while I fried mortadella (instead of prosciutto) with some homemade harissa (*) sauce until the mortdella was crispy panes that I served underneath the warm salad. Also very nice.

Suprisingly filling, this lot of vegetarian food.

(*) Harissa: supposed to use some cannned stuff, but instead I made it myself using some chipotles, anchos, and guajillo chillis softened in hot water and a lot of garlic. Hot and flavorful to me, impossibly hot for Ling, impossibly weak for Matilda.

I had a bunch of friends from my office (amazing, yes, I actually do have them!) for a dinner. They left around 11:15. Although it was contentious with Ling, the dinner turned out well.

For appetizers…

Mushroom Gratin Crusty, heavy french bread with a baked layer of four types of mushrooms softened and sweated in a thyme, butter sauce, and covered with very nice parmesan.

Onion Gratin In my mind, the suprise winner of the night. Crustless french bread covered with a pile of very-thinly-sliced onions sweated with bay leaves, covered in a heavy crust of the same very nice parmesan.

*The trick with gratins… DON’T TOUCH THE CHEESE. Put it on heavy, but let it lie fluffy. It will brown forever, carmelizing beautifully, and never burn. Press it down, compact it, touch it, and it turns into some gross mozerella slop.

A Tuna Salad, Tonno Sott’Olio This absolutely sucked. Flavorless, heavy, crude, gross. It became the joke of the night. Enough said.

Nice goat cheeses.

Herb Frittata.  The thyme was distinctive and refined.  I well-salted this, so it had presence.

For the first…

Seafood risotto. 800g of risotto cooked with the crab stock from last year’s crayfish boil. Squid, prawns, sole, and scallops. It was very correct and people enjoyed it.

Secondo…

For a few who made noise, I marinatedi some rear lamb loins in Herbs De Provence for 3 days. Grilled on harsh heat until medium rare. They were well-regarded steaks, although I didn’t eat one.

For the rest of us, Salsa Genovese, braised pork shoulder with onions. For four hours I braised 8.8lbs (4kg) of pork shoulder (butt) in 3kg of onion and toasted chillis (from the stock I bought in the USA). The onion/chilli sauce really makes it nice. We have tons of this left over, so it will be nice mixed with pasta.

Desert…

Homemade Lemon Sorbet. I kept it pretty tart.

Torta al Vino (wine cake with grapes or berries). I used bluberries. Nice.

Apple Crisp Parfait made with Brown Sugar Crumbles: hand-whipped cream + brown sugar crumbles + softened, sweetened tart apples.

Wines…

Domaine Olivier Le Bievaux Santenay (2005)

Chateau Des Tourtes Sauvignon (2005)

Ruffino Riserva Ducale Oro Chianti Classico (2003)

Alain Paret 420 Nutts (2004)

for dessert, the most interesting wine, Floreal Maury. Much like port, but more civilized, feminine. Can still taste traces of wine in it — not a thumping port.

Ling was putting Luke to bed.   I try not to be around, because it means I have to sit in the dark and wait for him to fall asleep.  It’s trying.  So instead, I took my bike out and went to a Jazz Club that I had heard about.  Unfortunately, I went there at 7pm. At that point there are no customers and there is no music.  Band doesn’t start until 9pm.

So I went off in search of something else.  I ended up stopping at a totally random street-food place that was quite busy.  I pointed at what the other tables were eating and said I’d have that.  One table was eating towgay (bean sprouts) which I love to eat.

They brought me a heineken, this bean sprout dish, and a plate of, basically, fried rice.

The heineken was cold.

The towgay dish was bean sprouts stir-fried with mixed animal organs and quail eggs.  I don’t know exactly what parts, but things like bits of kidney, liver, esophagus, lung, whatever.   The towgay wasn’t cooked adequately so it had that nasty rhyzome/green taste to it.

The fried rice was quite oily, but what was weirder was that it was cooked to the point that %25 of it was cooked to a crisp.  Not very pleasant.

Then I looked under the tiny table I was sitting at (everyone sits on tiny stools 6″ off the ground and tables 14″ off the ground), kicking away all the waste paper and squeezed limes, to reveal approximately a half-dozen gnawed-on chicken claws-and-calf.  That was pretty rude.

Ling’s mom bought home several bags of Solea potato chips. They are really superior. They look homemade. Thick, irregular slices peeled straight from a Washington Russet. They’re browner than most chips. They are seasoned thoroughly and the seasonings (salt, garlic, pepper, etc) taste real, not fake or like chemicals. They are terribly good. Brilliant with nice cheese.

I haven’t tried all “Eight delectable varieties: Sea Salt, Rosemary, Cracked Pepper & Salt, Garlic, Blue, Sweet Potato, Trio and new Parmesan.” But I can definitely vouch for the Garlic being incredibly good.

Although they’re called healthy, I wouldn’t count on these being too good for you, but if you’re going to eat some junk food, these are an excellent candidate.

Went through some old cookbooks in the pantry and found a set of satay recipes in an out-of-print cookbook.

• Satay Ayam Bakar (Grilled spiced chicken)
• Satay Lembu or Satay Kambing (mutton or beef satay w/ peanut sauce)
• Satay Ayam or Satay Babi (pork or chicken satay)
• Simplified Satay sauces

Most of the ingredients are easy to find. The balance of them you can find at any asian grocery store. I haven’t made any of these recipes, I am not a fan of satay, but they look correct to me, and this comes from a well-respected Nonya cookbook.

Went out with some friends last night.  Had a shockingly expensive Yakitori dinner.  Yakitori is normally just bits of grilled chicken and vegetables on skewers, with sake.  This was yakitori from another planet.  A heavy-weight Japanese friend-of-a-friend got me the best seats at the counter and sorted out the waiters and sake for us.  It was seriously nice sake, really strong, really smooth, and really nice taste.  We had a couple different bottles of that.  In between traditional yakitori items we had some really nice pieces of wagyu beef,  some beautiful grilled fish, the nicest shishito I’ve ever eaten, tako (octopus) kimchi, and, Momma’s all-time favorite, a few platters of puffer fish.

We were all heavily hammered but the sake was so good that this morning I had almost no hangover.  While I was picking over the bill in astonishment I realized they actually forgot to charge us for the puffer fish. That would have surely made the bill even more mad than it already was.

Oh well, was quite fun, and now it’s friday night.

I enjoy eating grilled fish at Kuriya restaurant.  They bring out a whole fish, covered in  salt, and grilled, skin-on, with some lemon and grated radish.  The best fish in the world, Kinki, is brilliant this way, but damn expensive. (At the height of the season (now) it can be $140SGD for a small fish)  Recently I enjoyed Nodokuro (a rare fish even to Edoites and Google, according to a Japanese friend) and the less-expensive Threadfin.

Ling  was out tonight, so she bought me a  Threadfin from the grocery store. Now admittedly it had probably been frozen earlier, and wasn’t airflown from Japan, but it looked fine.  Total cost?  $2.

So what’d I do?  Turned the oven on top broiler element, to max heat.  Preheated a La Creuset iron roasting pan.  Then I split the fish’ belly so that it would sit upright in the pan, rubbed it down with sea salt, and threw it in the oven for, maybe, 15 minutes.

Turned out brilliantly. Nice tasting flesh, few bones, and crispy, salty skin. Really good, really cheap, and impressive (even though it’s cheap and easy).  What else can you buy for 2$ that tastes so good and is so healthy?

I’m going to get an infrared grill and broiler from Rinnai for the 41 Springleaf Height, so this will be perfect for preparing these kinds of simple, good dishes.

We’re finalizing our kitchen equipment selection. I’m planning on buying a state-of-the-art Lainox “The Cube” combi-oven. It’s incredibly capable.

I was reading through the manual for it today. The appendix contains a number of recipes in various sections. This was the cover page for the Hors D’Oeuvres section:

I really have never seen anything grosser. Just beyond words gross. Fish skins, mystery pate, veiny cabbage, congealed egg yolks. The only missing ingredient is a hair-and-shit-covered goose egg.

The idiosyncratic and unusual list of Burgundies and Bordeaux we had last night

1. Chateau de Villars Fontaine Hautes Cotes de Nuits 1991 (white)
2. Clos Saint Denis Grand Cru Domaine Georges Lignier 2003
3. Corton Bressandes Grand Cu Domaine Cornu 2005
4. Bonnes Mares Grand Cru Domaine Jean Louis Fougeray 2005
5. Chateau Lauduc Divin Bordeaux 2003
6. Chateau Lauduc Divin Bordeaux 2005
7. Chateau de Valcombe Cuvee Garance Costiere de Nime 2003
8. Chateauneuf du Pape Chateau La Gardine Cuvee Generations 2005
9. Fixin Domaine Huguenot 1976

The understated plate of French cheese we had last night

1. Fromage D’affinois
2. Fourme D’ambert
3. Ossauiraty
4. Fleur du marquis

By midnight I was pretty useless. I made my way to Ohsho and had a plate of Gyoza and Nagasaki Champion (vegetable) ramen. I think the ramen stock and ice water made my hangover less bad today than it otherwise might have been.

I think next friday I have another Big One to attend. I just saw the menu and it was something like a dozen wines over six courses. :-&

I’ve tuned my diet a bit more. My last cholesterol check was much higher (220) than my previous (185). Since I don’t smoke and have other risk factors, I’m still not at a danger level, but I want to get it down anyway. Thus I’ve drastically cut back the amount of red meat and other cholesterol-rich foods that I eat. I rewarded myself this afternoon with a picnic basket of booty brought directly from France in a suitcase.

Two cheeses and two dried sausages.

The white cheese was a soft double-cream. The other one is absolutely mold-green. It looks like a large tuna tin covered in bread mold. The rind smelled of ammonia. However the cheese was fairly mild. Tasted savory, like a Gouda, but with a slightly softer texture.

The two sausages were very, very hardpacked. The one in the checkered apron was covered in white that I thought was mold, but after eating some of it, realized it was brine from the preservation process. The other sausage is rolled and wrapped in cumin seed. The cumin seed added a nice taste and was Ling’s favorite. By a small margin I preferred the other. These sausages were quite dry. Neither had an exceptionally strong taste.

Ling and Luke returned from Sydney today, accompanied by her sister Tien-Lee. So in anticipation of their arrival, I prepared dinner.

Dinner was:

1. Seafood crepes: large scallops and hunks of snapper in a homemade bechamel sauce wrapped in homemade crepes, baked.
2. Crab Cakes
3. Creamed Spinach. (which gets to use the same bechamel sauce I made for the crepes.

Seafood crepes were excellent. Really brilliant Hokkaido scallops (these are so fine they can be eaten raw as sashimi) and the fish wasn’t overcooked. The bechamel had enough seasoning to add taste, not just be a flavorless white gravy.

Creamed spinach was nearly as nice, or as nice, as Morton’s. I could have used richer cream (the recipe called for half-and-half) or perhaps added more onion or garlic spices, but the heavy dose of nutmeg I gave it told me it was 95% of perfection already.

The crab cakes? :-& Fuck me.

Recipe called for a pound of crab lump. Grocery store had nothing in the fish department (it’s small) so I went to the frozen section. There they have large packages of frozen lump crab from China. Looked a bit brown, gray, but basically ok, and sufficient-sized lumps.

Took that home (3x $9 packages) and let them thaw. Halfway through the thawing process, I realize I’ve been scammed. The 6″ x 6″ x 2.5″ ingot of frozen crab, is actually a 5.8″ x 5.8″ x 2.2″ ingot of ice coated in a veneer of enormously poor quality crab dust. I mean it was just a total scam. And the crab I did get, I didn’t even want. It was dry, rude, flavorless, and when cooked, smelled like a bitter metal. Atrocious. Truly awful. Staggeringly bad, in fact. Such a pity, because everything else, include the wine was really good tonight.

Anyway, I don’t think any of them cared, they’re on a 3hr jetlag anyway, and would normally be asleep four hours ago. Means I’m free to stay up late tonight playing Settlers of Catan online with Matt and Adam.

I bought two fresh roots of horseradish from Whole Foods Pittsburgh.  It’s a noxious weed, so it doesn’t seem to hard to grow.  I planted them this morning in a couple wide pots.  Didn’t make the mistake of giving them too much nitrogen like I spoiled my tomatoes with last time.

Hopefully I’ll have some nice, fierce horseradish roots later this year.

Woke up around 0600 today. Vestiges of jet-lag put me to bed early and wake me up early. It also makes me dinner-hungry at breakfast-time.

But boy, did I have a solution today.

Diced up a 3″ stub of Claypoole Bologna, courtesy of Dear Aunt Mary, browned it in a pan, then scrambled it soft with three fresh eggs. Concurrently I prepared a latte for myself and Matilda made me wheat toast. How absolutely dignified that was. Tasted phenomenol.

If you watch one Alton Brown ever, make it the “Egg” episode where he shows how to make scrambled eggs. (a pinch of salt, a small tbsp of milk, fold the egg over itself while cooking, and take it out when it still looks wet [”eggs that look done in the pan will be overdone on the plate”]) Such simple, accurate instructions.

I have about 80% of my bologna ring left.

Made a Nigel Slater recipe for dinner today…

Bought a kilogram of pork belly.  This turns out to be a nearly-revoltingly fatty piece of meat. More like bacon, in fact, than a normal cut.  Scored the fatty skin (which still had two nipples on it), rubbed it with salt and pepper, and tossed it in a roasting pan.

Around the pork I laid the critical onions. I thinly sliced four onions, chopped up eight garlic cloves, and softened them in olive oil.  To this I added a few tablespoons of fennel, and a pile of chopped rosemary, thyme, and bay (all friends of pork).  After I made that a nice soffrito, I dissolved the sticky bits with some lemon juice, and tossed it in the roasting pan around the pork.

Roast one hour.

Serve by cutting the pork into very small bits.  I had some very nice soft sandwich rolls which I buttered and grilled till they toasted.  Serve the pork with the onions and some baby arugula (the bitter weed).  They were really tasty little sandwiches.

I have enough for lunch for the rest of the week.

Bay leaf - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Mountain laurel leaves are poisonous to certain livestock and are not sold anywhere as a spice (cousin species) (britannica). However this has led to the mistaken belief that bay leaves should be removed from food after cooking because they might poison humans. Bay leaves are safe to eat. However, a person may accidentally swallow a leaf, and the leaves remain stiff even after several hours of cooking. Also, if you grind or crush the bay leaves before adding to your cooking, the leaves will impart more of their desired fragrance than if used whole.

4:45pm is the most irritating minute of the day here at 18Robin Close. Boy is cranky, Parents are tired, house is at its torpid hottest. On top of that, I had a migraine arriving.

Went into the kitchen and decided to make a drink.

• fresh lemons (8)
• handful of leftover rosemary from last night’s fish
• old can of half-eaten peaches languishing in the refrigerator
• few trays of ice

Juiced the lemons, pureed the rosemary and three half-peaches, combined it with a few trays of crushed ice. Stole a little bit of “juice” (corn syrup, probably) from the can of peaches. Now I have a civilized glass of lemonade to conclude this hot afternoon. The rosemary does make a difference.

Update:   I made this today, but with pink grapefruit instead of lemons. And I skipped the peaches and sweetner. It was better and not so sour.

I think I figured out the secret to good meat patties. Not hamburger patties, but patties of things where you blend meat and other ingredients, then pan-fry (or maybe bake? (yuk)).  Often they turn out to be very dense ingots of Things.

I was making a thai-style dish tonight.  Pork, pancetta, lemongrass, lime leaves, chilli peppers, garlic.  Rather than buying minced pork, I bought a piece of pork collar.  To avoid the heavy, ingot-y feel, I prepared the “mince” they same way good French restaurants prepare their steak artare — I hand minced it with a knife.  Basically I painstakingly cut the meat into loose bits approximately 1/4-1/3 cubed.

It resulted in a much nicer texture to the patty and it also seemed to cook faster. Perhaps because there is more space between bits for the steam and oil to permeate.  The little patties turned out damn good. It also helped that I didn’t over-cook them — just canola oil pan-fried on hight heat till they made a nice hard, brown crust then flipped.

I have a plate left of them. They could do better served with something sweet against them. I told Ling to prepare julienned carrots and corn tomorrow, softened in butter with a bit of dark sugar.  That should offset the heavy spice of the chilli padi I used.

I was browsing the cookbook section of Borders today. I saw they had a version two copy of my Alton Brown “I’m Just Here For the Food” book. I picked through it and saw his recipe for pressure-cooker chilli again.

There’s not much to it. He just cooks really nasty, tough, sinewy pieces of meat in a pressure cooker, so that it cooks really quick. (twenty-five minutes instead of six hours or whatever). Beyond that, there isn’t much recipe, and I dispute his lack of beans or tomato (except for what is in the can of salsa).

Anyway, so I went next door to Japanese grocery store Seiyu and bought the cheapest pieces of beef and pork they had (which weren’t all that sinewy or bad, frankly) and took it home.

I made a few variations:

• I did add a can of kidney beans
• I did add a can of stewed tomatos (in addition to a jar of medium salsa)
• I made my own proto-adobo sauce — about six cloves of slivered garlic and an onion, softened to a soffrito, and deglazed with balsamic vinegar, sherry vinegar, and cider vinegar.
• I made my own chilli powder from red chili flaked fried lightly in oil along with garlic and onion powder, a lot of cumin, paprika, cocoa, cinammon, and… that’s all I guess.
• I used a small can of Kirin rather than a mexican medium ale.

The thing Alton Brown goes on about the pressure cooker is that it cooks 2/3rds faster, just because it gets so hot. Ok great, but it doesn’t magically eliminate the principle of “carbon based food at really high temp burns.” Which is exactly what happened to me. I smelt a tinge of ‘burnt’ in the steam, so I quickly took it off the heat and vented it. Sure enough there was a quarter-inch of carbonized char on the bottom of the pot. Fortunately nothing stirred the pot, so it never mixed up with the food, so actualyl the rest of the chilli tasted great. But I am not sure what to do about this, I guess it means I need to cook with more water.

The beef tasted really soft and nice. It benefitted from the cooking. I think the pork was a little lean to begin with, so it tended to be drier and less pleasant, but was still totally edible. The thing that go me was the pressure cooker…

Anyway, verdict was cheap and good. Especially with some cheddar cheese and sour cream. It takes longer to cook than he implies because the pressure cooker takes a long time to cool down on its own, but still it can all be done in less than an hour, which is not bad for a non-hamburger-based chilli.

Here is some wisdom on scorching food in pressure cookers.  I cooked my stuff too hot. As well, it was a tomato based product (hard to do, they say) and I mixed in corn chips from the beginning, according to Brown’s recipe, which adds corn starch/flour, also advised-against by this guide.  Next time I’ll try less-brutal heat.

I had a long, and busy week.  I felt festive by the time we ran our friday evening PNL reports and so I popped downstairs to have several beers with colleagues before Ling came to pick me up. I didn’t have a car since I dropped it at the Ford shop today.  The bushings on my struts had worn out and my Ford Focus made an awful racket whenever the car’s center-of-gravity changed.

I felt inspired for dinner so said we’d go to our favorite french place, L’Angelus.  New item on the menu, Steak Tartare, I ordered. I’ve never had it before.  Imagine raw meatloaf mixed with an egg and some mustard.  Kind of a savory semi-freddo, if you will. mmmmmmm it was quite a pleasant meal.   I’m sure my mom is dying to try it.

In other news, I have absolutely nothing to say. Good evening.