Archive for the “Food” CategoryThrew together a nice pot of minestrone today: Italian passata. (a lot of) organic spinach. lots of onion and garlic. curious minestrone-friendly pasta pieces from an Italian cafe. Rich chicken stock. browned bacon for taste.
 frequent water changes during the pre-soak removes the gas-causing properties from the bean liquor Bought six ripe Australian mangos today.
Pureed four of them. The fifth, chopped into cubes. The sixth, in reserve. Puree + hot water + evaporated milk + plain gelatin powder + cubes of mango + cold = mango pudding.  Never mind the spillage Luke, like everyone in Asia, enjoys eating the Japanese junk food, Pocky: chocolate (or chocolate analog)-covered biscuit sticks. So like nuggets, I decided to make my own out of respectable ingredients without all the preservatives and things. I took a simple breadstick recipe (flour, milk, butter, salt) and threw in a good handful of allspice, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Let that sit for 30 minutes (while I fussed with McNuggets) and the gluten developed quite well in the organic whole-wheat flour I used. Then Matilda and I tried to play Italian Grandmother and roll these into uniform, #2-pencil sized pocky sticks.  Nude Pocky We didn’t exactly meet Dr. Deming’s standard of Japanese Manufacturing Consistency, but they were good enough. I baked them in my Lainox forced-air oven for about 15 minutes and got them crisp, but not burnt. My original idea was to melt some organic milk chocolate for the coating, but candy chocolate neither melts nicely, nor behaves nicely once applied, so I stole what my mother-in-law calls coating chocolate. She and I painted several meters of pocky tonight.  Painting Pocky Verdict? Pretty decent. The spice in the Pocky stick made them taste a bit better. Next time I’ll trim the ends so, even if they are not uniform lenght, they have uniform thickness. Otherwise the narrow tips bake a bit too fast compared to the middle. I always figured Chicken McNuggets were nasty. I read today that by FDA rules chicken skin is not distinguished from chicken meat. And that whatever little “meat” is in a nugget which is not chicken skin fat is, instead, “recovered meat” (bits of semi-soft tissue that’s high-pressure blasted off the bone) Gross.
So today I made my own for Luke. Mmmmmmmmmmmm I tossed a bunch of lean chicken breast fillets into the food processor, along with some minced-up carrot and broccoli. Then on top of that, a pile of fresh thyme and oregano and salt.  Coated with flour, which a let sit for 15-20 minutes. Then the egg+breading grips much better
Minced up, I then squished them into nugget-shapes, breaded, and pan-fried the things. They actually tasted reasonable. Too mild for my tastes, but for Luke, just nice. When I piled some of Matilda’s homemade Myanamar mint/chilli sauce, then they tasted quite good.
 Ronald McTilda frying up some Nuggets Another book I read during my ridiculous week was Michael Pollan’s ‘In Defense of Food.’ It’s the most logical book I’ve ever read on diet. You can read the book too, which is not really necessary, because you can instead watch an hour-long lecture by Pollan that covers almost all the same material, or you can skip to the succinct: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” I stumbled onto this recipe article for a Bloody Mary. I love how thoroughly savory he makes it. My only criticism is that he uses vile V8 juice. Yuck. Going to all that trouble for the rest of the mise-en-place, he then degrades himself with V8??? How hard can it be to juice up some tomatoes, celery, and a few other random farmer-foods and make a real vegetable juice + kosher salt ? 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. 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.
What did we (three or four of us) drink?
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.
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) The understated plate of French cheese we had last night 1. Fromage D’affinois 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.
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:
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. |
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