Silver Case

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.

Did more pizza work this weekend.  I experimented with the cheap, high-gluten ‘Flying Fish’ brand flour.

I made a batch of dough yesterday, letting it double in size, and then sticking it in the refrigerator.   It was shit. Heavy and undeveloped.  I made a mistake involving either amount of water (not enough) or amount of kneading (not enough).  I am pretty sure it was the lack of water.  Water is needed for the gluten development.  I never caught the mistake because I stupidly didn’t check to see if I could make a ‘baker’s window pane’ (translucent film) with the dough.

When I realized what a turd I had in the bowl this morning, I got pissed, threw it away, and made another batch.  This time I made it a bit wetter and after a good long beating with my kitchenaid (idiotically the hinge/kingpin of the blender isn’t keyed, so vigorous blending walks the kingpin out of blender. Inevitably a catastrophic failure) I could make a perfect windowpane.

But alas, I made anoter mistake (I think).  I put the dough to ferment and came back about 75-90 minutes later.  When I went to play with the dough I realized once again I couldn’t make a windowpane.  I think the mistake I made was over-fermenting the dough.

Disgusted, I considered throwing it out, but for some reason didn’t.  Instead i made a pizza with it. It was my best pizza yet!  This is where I learned a few new things:

• I like a medium crust.  If I make the dough crust a lot thinner than I think I want, this winds up being a medium crust like I prefer.  Same goes for the crust lip. I don’t like a big dough handle, so I make the crust lip pretty small, but it still grows big or bigger than I want.
• I like my crust crispy.  So this time I baked the crust blind (no sauce) for about seven to ten minutes, and very close to the bottom oven element to get the bottom as crisp as possible.  Generous spritzing of olive oil on the crust, too.  By the time it was fluffed up and starting to brown, then I added on my sauce and toppings and baked it on the middle rack.  This made really crispy, brown pizza crust.

A few things for next time:

• Increase amount of olive oil in the crust and decrease the sugar.  Sugar attracts water.  Oil fries the crust.  Should mean a crispier shell.
• When I’m mixing the dough ingredients, I’m going to let half the flour soak in half the water for thirty minutes first. This will give better hydration to the flour and should result in better gluten development.
• In throwing the crust, I realized if I twirl the crust at eye level using my fists, I can generate the centripetal force needed to stretch out the dough. It seems unecessary to launch the thing to the ceiling (at least at first).

This afternoon a wild hair grew up my ass to try this recipe.  You’re supposed to soak the chick-peas twenty-four hours until they triple in size.  After four or five they’d already tripled, and when I bit one, it was soaked through, so I went ahead with the recipe, eighteen hours early.

I followed approximately his recipe.  If you watch the film clip on the NY Times site, you see him using an idiotic, weak blender. He turns the falafel into a runny paste, which really isn’t how the recipe describes it.  I used my monstrous magi-mix food processor, so I had everything nicely diced and cut up, but not pureed.

The chronic problem in my kitchen is that my stove really isn’t hot enough for deep frying.  It’s got to be going downhill in fifth gear before it barely creeps up to 350F and as soon as a passenger gets in, it bogs down to 300. This sucks because it means there is not enough steam generated to keep the oil at bay.  It way ok for the watery falafel (not grease-logged) but means it’s impossible to make french fries.  It also means an ice-cream sized scooper makes balls a touch bigger than suitable for my pot.
I put in more spices than he called for, and I wish I had put in even more.  Next time I’ll add some fennel, too.

The best touch I provided was mixing some plain, homemade yogurt up with a teaspoon of cinnamon.  Cinnamon in yogurt eaten with savory things gives a refined little *pop* to the meal.  In fact, that might have been the best thing from my trip to Dubai, eating camel at a morroccan restaurant, the yogurt had cinammon taint.  (The camel kofta was totally uninteresting.  If you had told me it was lamb, I would have believed you.)
I have some falafel left-over.  Mister merrily gobbled one down.  Mona sniffed and licked hers, but ultimatley abandoned it. She is pure carnivore.  Mister is a grazing pasture dog as far as we can tell.  Loves to go eat bit of sweet grass next door and loves fruit and vegetables.

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The Minimalist
For the Best Falafel, Do It All Yourself
By MARK BITTMAN

YOU cannot say enough about falafel. These seasoned fritters are among the best things you can make with chickpeas, they’re easy and rewarding to fry (perfect for novice deep-fryers) and they are vegetarian.

Unlike other bean fritters, falafel is made from uncooked beans. The cooking goes best when the beans are soaked for a full day in plenty of water.

Yes, you can make falafel with canned beans, but the difference in both texture and taste is pronounced. Dried beans are the way to go.

There are two keys to making good falafel. First, keep the amount of water you use when grinding the beans to an absolute minimum. More water makes grinding easier, but it also virtually guarantees that the batter will fall apart when it hits the hot oil. If this happens, bind the remaining mixture by stirring in a little flour.

For this reason, a food processor or very powerful blender is essential; you don’t want a blender that isn’t strong enough to grind the beans without adding too much water.

The second essential step is to get the oil hot enough: 350 degrees or a little higher. If you don’t have a thermometer, just wait until the oil shimmers and then add a pinch of the batter. When it sizzles immediately, sinks about halfway to the bottom, then rises to the top, the oil is ready. If it sinks and stays down, the oil is too cold; if it doesn’t sink at all, the oil is too hot.

Once you get the batter and the oil right, your little patties or balls will brown readily and evenly; they won’t spatter at all.

You can serve falafel in a pita with lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers and other raw vegetables; or with a green salad.

If you want a fast tahini sauce, mix equal amounts of tahini and yogurt, and season to taste with a little salt, pepper, cumin, raw garlic if you like, and lemon juice. Not-too-hot chili paste is another good accompaniment.

Recipe: Falafel

Time: 1 hour, plus 24 hours’ soaking

1 3/4 cup dried chickpeas
2 cloves garlic, lightly crushed
1 small onion, quartered
1 teaspoon ground coriander
1 tablespoon ground cumin
Scant teaspoon cayenne, or to taste
1 cup chopped parsley or cilantro leaves
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 tablespoon lemon juice
Neutral oil, like grapeseed or corn, for frying.

1. Put beans in a large bowl and cover with water by 3 or 4 inches; they will triple in volume. Soak for 24 hours, adding water if needed to keep beans submerged.

2. Drain beans well (reserve soaking water) and transfer to a food processor. Add remaining ingredients except oil; pulse until minced but not puréed, scraping sides of bowl down; add soaking water if necessary to allow machine to do its work, but no more than 1 or 2 tablespoons. Keep pulsing until mixture comes together. Taste, adding salt, pepper, cayenne or lemon juice to taste.

3. Put oil in a large, deep saucepan to a depth of at least 2 inches; more is better. The narrower the saucepan the less oil you need, but the more oil you use the more patties you can cook at a time. Turn heat to medium-high and heat oil to about 350 degrees (a pinch of batter will sizzle immediately).

4. Scoop heaping tablespoons of batter and shape into balls or small patties. Fry in batches, without crowding, until nicely browned, turning as necessary; total cooking time will be less than 5 minutes. Serve hot or at room temperature.

Yield: 6 to 8 servings.

I made pizza again monday.  It was the best yet. Its success came  from patience. Resting overnight in the refrigerator, sitting out, giving the dough time.   I was stupid about prepping the dough for tossing, so it came out in a weird heart-like shape, but it otherwise tasted good.  I used that metal pizza pan Mom sent me and that helped its crustiness.

So I made another round of pizza dough, this time trying the technique of letting the dough rise overnight in the refrigerator.

This is the second time I’ve tried this technique and the second time I say, “it totally fucking sucks.”  The yeast doesn’t rise enough and the gluten never develops into a nice texture.   The pizza dough had a texture similar to a cross between a nasty country biscuit and white bread.  Fucking foul.

On top of that, I accidentally tossed a tablespoon (20ml) of salt into the flour rather than a teaspoon (5ml).  I thought I fished out enough of the salt from the flour, but no no no.  Now imagine a cross between a nasty country biscuit, white bread, and a salty brine.

A while ago I tried to work toward  making ideal pizza.   I didn’t get that far.  Recently I watched an Alton Brown episode on pizza.  He advocated mixing the dough for fifteen minutes and then letting it rise for 24 hours in a refrigerator.  (Well, in that recipe. Apparently he’s published some other, different, recipes for pizza too).

I tried to follow his recipe today and it sucked.  His proportions made really really sticky dough. It needed way more flour than he called for.  Unfortunately I never got it floured enough and so I eventually just tossed it out as shit.

I was irritated by this because I had already prepared a nice tomato red sauce for it.  Following his cue, I made a standard soffrito of onion and celery and carrot, but then broiled it with the tomatoes, while I reduced the canned juice with some sherry, sugar, and spices into a thick syrup.   It makes a really nice sauce, I must admit.  Next time I’ll play with a roasting pan to try to make more carmelization.  Today’s preperation was too wet for much.

Anyway, I was pissed by this failure and brooding that I’d have to wait another round or more of twenty-four hours before I could try some more.  Then I stumbled onto a site I’ve seen before, The Ridiculously Thorough Guide to Making Your Own Pizza.  He talks about making a crust in approximately forty minutes.  I felt like giving this a shot.

I blended his recipe and alton brown’s.  I was low on flour, so i used the rest of the bread flour I had, and topped it off with mostly wheat flour (which should have some decent gluten content).   I used the alton brown technique of mixing it for 15 minutes to encourage gluten formation.  Once again the recipe made a too-wet dough, so i had to supplement with more flour.  The recipe said this would make enough dough for “two big pizzas” so I divided the dough into four.

Rather than a tedious blow-by-blow, what did I learn?

• Seems like lots and lots of rest for the dough makes a huge difference. The dough becomes much more plastic and elastic.  It turns out to be a painfully long time from start to finish to make the pizza.
• I need to work more on getting a thinner edge, I tied up too much dough around the edges, consequently the center could tend to thin.
• Keep the oven on max heat to cook the pizzas.  I forgot that last time I proved the metal pizza tray makes a crisper crust than the pizza stone.
• Maximize the gluten. Next time I will use “bread machine” flour, as it has the highest gluten content.  I’ll also mix it plenty long, and schedule nice long rests for it.  This ought to enable me to get closer to being able to toss the things so that they’re nicer and more uniform.

The sauce tasted very good, as did the mix of jack/mozarella/cheddar.   I cut thin slices of real pepperoni I bought in Sydney. It was nice.

Bought all the ingredients for authentic Okonomiyaki at Meidi-Ya today and we tried it for dinner. It came out quite well I think. Putting on the right otafuku brown sauce and some japanese mayo definitely goes a long way to making it taste ‘right’.

I followed a recipe of:

1) pour on batter mixture

2) cook uncovered for 3 minutes.

3) add any toppings (like bacon or mochi) and cover

4) cook for another five minutes

5) flip, re-cover, and cook for another five minutes

6) cover with otafuku, ao nori, bonito flakes, and mayonnaise

• Remarks? More batter, less cabbage, otherwise it is a too-loosely bonded coleslaw.
• Don’t try to make massive okonomiyakis, they are too hard to flip.
• Cook on the lower end of medium heat. If it’s not browned sufficiently, add two minutes to a phase time.
• If you add sakura ebi (tiny, dried prawns) grind them up before you use them, otherwise you get too many stray antennae and things in your mouth while eating, and it feels like you’re eating grasshopper pie.
• Kim-Chi Okonomiyaky? Yes, but add a lot of kimchi and replace the cabbage on a 1:1 basis.
• If in doubt, lower heat, don’t rush it.

If you are curious how it looks, there are endless okonomiyaki videos on youtube.

Have  been nursing a terrible hangover all day.  The only solution is to drink lots of water, but for some reason water tastes really, really bad to me when I’ve got a hangover, so it’s quite a vicious cycle.  I tried to sneak around the problem by making an ice drink (it’s really hot here today).  I was sort of lazy, sort of stupid.  I peeled the hide off of three oranges and two grapefruits and liquidified them with my hand-blender, pith and all, and then mixed that broth with a big bucket of shaved ice.   It was absolutely horrendous, there was a peel-like bitterness that I could not escape.  I tried to add sugar and all that resulted was a bad drink that tasted like peel + undissolved table sugar.  Then I poured ‘passion fruit’ syrup from my aborted Hurricanes at the Crayfish Boil.  That also just added more to the sweet note, but the bitter/peel note was undiminished.  Ling liked it, but I poured mine down the drain.

Ling was telling me about their visit to one of our friends who has a 1yo girl.  While they played Luke hit her on the head with a toy hammer, so she cried.  He didn’t really know how to respond (this often happens when he does things impulsively [he is 21 months after all]) and sort of stood there sheepishly, distressed by Alissa crying and wondering what Ling and Alissa’s mom would do.  The poor little guy doesn’t have a lot of tools in his emotional response toolbox, so he used that one that normally gets the best response from us:  he started tap dancing and making a hopeful smile.

There are a pile of Japanese restaurants at Robertson Quay. We went there tonight and ate a restaurant (forgot the name) that serves “Taiwanese Food in Japanese Style.”  Best dishes were a crab/bamboo/vegetable omelette.  Their gyoza was ok, though not teriffic.  Had Dan Dan Mein which was pretty darn good.  Ordered a taiwanese spring onion omelette which I thought was horrible (like an old, tough, oily prata) but for some reason Ling LOVED it.   Briefly, i guess I’m not making this sound like such a great restaurant, but we actually did enjoy it and would go back.

Popped next door to ‘The Chocolate Factory’ and had a cake and a coffee.  The chocolate candy room had some really beautiful candies on display.  The place was really busy though (9pm on  a Saturday night) and the French  chocolatier looked… umm…. prickly, so we figured we’d come back some other day to pick over the chocolate selection.

Tomorrow I am doing a test-run of okonomiyaki recipes.  Didn’t realize that the batter-binder uses not only flour, but a starchy stick Chinese yam.  I’ve found a lot of good recipes and guides, so I think i have a fighting chance of making some on-spec okonomiyaki.

What else?  Still hovering around 76.8kg.  I didn’t go light the last few days (yakitori last night) and haven’t been running, plus I fell behind on my Japanese.  Doing some catch-up tuition with なおこせんせい　(my teacher, Naoko) and my membership at the hote health club next door start imminently, so i can swim at lunch time.
A bunch of travel coming up.  Hong Kong and Dubai the final weekend of this month.  Japan in mid-April i think.  Next weekend hosting a small party to finish off the last of our three frozen hokkaido tarabakani king crabs. That will be bittersweet.  The Okonomiyaki party is mid-April.  Around April 30th will probably host a deep-friend turkey as three of us have birthdays on April 29 or 30.

Living off Toby’s Estate beans I brought back from Sydney.  The Espresso Rico is their best espresso blend by far.  I spilled some of a ristretto yesterday, and it was almost black as lacquer. Really good, chocolaty stuff, perfect for milk-based espresso drinks.  I need to get some green beans to play with in my iRoast2 after I use up my current stock of beans.

A grilled squid stuffed with tomato, onion, and ginger (skillfully cooked, almost fork tender – excepting the crunchy, crackly tentacles – and very smoky), served with a soy and vinegar-based sawasan (dipping sauce),

I would like to try this and I would be curious to try to make it. It’s a rural phillipines dish without a name. Might be a bit of a challenge.

My maid is Filipino.  I just asked her about it. She didn’t know the dish specifically but seemed to realize the vinegar-based marinade you’d use on the squid.  I guess the remaining problem is figuring out how to bbq a squid. I don’t have bbq facilities here.

Irritating fucking day.  Thought I was —>|  |<— this close to rolling my Fujita (So did Rob).   Alas I seem to have deteriorated.  Rob said I was doing the component steps better than I did the first day, but somehow when I was upside-down underwater syncing them all together wasn’t coming together. I managed one roll only.  I don’t want to leave here not learning how to have rolled properly, so I booked another three-hour session tomorrow. He is going to teach in a different pattern tomorrow, pedagogically, and I am going to watch a video I have for rolling, and hopefully it will all click tomorrow.

I paddled his fiberglass Impex sea kayak. It’s a lot more lively than my boat and I can lock myself in tighter. One thing I’m going to do when I get back to Singapore is put some padding to tighten up my interior so that I get more positive connection to the boat.

Tonight Lee is bringing a colleague back for dinner.  I’m going to make a spinach risotto.  Starter will be some combination of guacomole (I have a lot of avocados), asparagus wrapped in Italina prosciutto, or melon and prosciutto. Or all of it, I don’t know.  Desert will be a shortbread pastry with some mango and custard I think.

The ISP I am using here is a piece of shit. It seems to block nearly every port I try to use. Even my flickr and picasa uploading tools are being firewalled.  Irritating, but I am tired and not in the mood to get into the router and make it behave.

2″ thick scotch fillets of freerange pork, marinated all day in green,
fresh rosemary, thyme and olive oil. Seared heavily and then cooked
under medium heat until light pink.

Seems the secret to a good sear is to not have much liquid or oil in the
pan, to not move the meat at all, and to get the pan good-and-hot.

I bought Lee a pretty expensive teflon-coated tefal skillet. It has a
terribly heavy base and is about 14″ diameter, so it can handle a big
load. I like it quite a bit. It’s a bit unctuous/poserish because it
is a “Jamie Oliver” endorsed pan, but it is truly a good performer. You
just have to realize that it takes a long time to heat up. But once
ready, has strong, even heating.

Accompanied the pork with roasted cubed potatoes tossed with rosemary
and some baked, “crinkly” tomatoes, ( not round, they have edges and
grooves), topped with balsamic vinegar and fresh marjoram(*). (the
marjoram was an amazing accompaniment to the tomatoes). On the side
were large dollops of the mango chutney I made yesterday. Ling liked the
chutney, again I felt I hadn’t made it hot enough.

Speaking of hot enough, today was the second day in a row that I maced
myself while preparing chiles. This time in making dessert (pineapples
covered in chiles, carmelized in sugar) I manged to get chile juice all
up inside my nostrils (clean fingers?) and it burnt to the point I had
to take a shower and lay on the bed for twenty minutes. hahaha idiot.

Haven’t been drinking wine while I’m here, trying to avoid going off the
calorie rails.

Lunch, I had a falafel pita wrap that was really good. Actually haven’t
searched out much artisan espresso yet, but the random places I’ve
picked shots up have been pretty good themselves.

(*) that marjoram taste is haunting me, and in fact screaming out for me
to prepare a pizza sauce from it and some fresh oregano and a truckload
of those roma tomatoes in my refrigerator. Think I’ll pursue that
tomorrow. I am sure I can get a nice slab of mozzarella here, too.

The “humor” has never been a reason to enjoy Alton Brown episodes. It’s more been a reason to use the fast-forward button.  Tonight was an exception, however, and I found myself snorting in laughter at least a half-dozen times.

How was the food?  The chili recipe was interesting.

• Notable absence:  beans.
• Notable presence: a can of salsa instead of bothering to chop up lots of onions and peppers and tomatoes.
• Notably enviable ingredient:  having a variety of dried pepper species that he could heat with cumin seeds and blend grind into his own fresh chili powder.
• Notably odd ingredient:  crushed tortilla chips to serve a binder to the chili (rather than some Mexican variety of corn flour)
• Notable quick cooking time:  used a pressure cooker to cook the chili in 25 minutes rather than stewing the tough stew meat for “six to twenty-four hours in a dutch oven.”

I would like to make this, but the big problem is I simply can’t get all these beautiful peppers (ancho, cascabel, and arbol) to make the chili powder. (unless I find some in Sydney next week)

I bought three packs of noodles that look like what I’d conventionally call ‘Ramen’. I have no idea what the differences are — they look identical and their ingredient list is identical:

Nishiyama Jukuseimen Noodle: wheat flour, salt, egg white
Nishiyama Komugi Men Noodle: wheat flour, salt, egg white
Nishiyama Tsuke Men Noodle: wheat flour, salt, egg white

Got home late tonight. And quarrelsome.

Fixed Ling some instant ramen shit.  I tried to dress it up for her a bit, so I put in some wakame (wow, the stuff I brought from hokkaido fair was explosively fragrant compared with the tired old confetti we had before), some chopped up bits of tofu, some fried garlic, and lastly some slices of what is called ‘szechuan preserved vegetable.’

I occasionally eat at a  very authentic Szechuan restaurant here in Singapore. It is monstrously hot. I’m told by my colleague, a native of Wuhan, that the heat, regardless, is still toned down from the heavy stuff in Szechuan, but it is still plenty hot. Anyway, one of the starters they serve is slices of some unknown preserved vegetable. Hard to describe the taste.  It’s almost like a pickle, but without the dill-ness or sourness or the sweetness. Some mysterious Other flavor.  Anyway, it’s tasty.  I bought a bag of it a few days ago.

For myself I took the rest of the tofu, cubed it up, got some sesame oil frying, tossed that in, along with several spoonfulls of my wicked szechuan-style chilli paste (a half cup of peanut oil brought to 400F, then toss in a half cup of diced up dried red szechuan chillis and several tablespoons of ground black pepper. It makes noxious tear gas, foams, and then falls down.  Will keep indefinitely I expect).   I also tossed in some of this mystery vegetable and cracked an egg over it.

Wow, that vegetable is way way way salty.  It was ok as a seasoning in my dish. Inedible as a food item.  Unfortunately it leeched way too much into Ling’s ramen broth.  Apparently you use it for soups, or else you soak it for day(s) to leech out so much of the salt, then it is edible as a snack.  So that is what the two remaining balls/bulbs/lumps of the mystery vegetable are doing now — de-brining in a few liters of water.

Ling is going to a CNY party tonight. I am not. Before she left, she asked what I was making myself for dinner. Her party would be a lot of chinese barbeque (in other words, gross).  So I said I’d do something.

Figured it should be vegetable-centric, as I gave myself a CNY indulgence today and ran to Choupinette, the French Bakery, and bought two strawberry beignets that were, literally, still warm from the kitchen.  Unbelievably good.  Donut flesh as soft as a boob, but filled with strawberry jam, instead of watery milk.

Saw a few worthwhile ingredients, a box of fresh spinach, a bag of thin French beans.  I had a brick of feta and some ham from last week’s sandwiches.  Simple matter to make a plate of beans and a spinach salad.  Lightly sauted the lean ham and made a vinaigrette. Haha I’m quite smitten with this “handprocessor” and its massive whisking properties.  I have some learning to do, however.  I poured some 10 year old balsamic vinegar into a bowl and then drizzled in some nice olive oil, whisking it with my Braun.   I don’t have much emulsion experience, and the whisking action was exhilarating. Suddenly I found myself with a mayonnaise-like  vinaigrette jelly that was firmer and stronger than a meringue.  I could have held the bowl upside-down.  Oh well, it tasted good, so I knocked it down a bit with some blasts in the microwave, then it was pourable.
To cook the beans, I used the technique described in “Staff Meals” — put a thin layer of beans in a pan, fill with cold water to half-depth of the beans, lots of kosher salt, a knob of butter, and bring to high boil until tender. Then out they go, onto a plate, a blast of salt, and they’re ready.  They were nice. Good color, good smell, nice texture, and the touch of salt made them munchable.

Speaking of not-munchable, I tried to use some of the old peanut oil from our turkey and a couple russet potatos I picked up yesterday and make potato chips. Yuk. Burnt, inedible, grease-logged junk.  So I tried another potato into french fries. Practically as bad. I decided not to waste any calories on that slop and tossed them out.  The fundamental problem is that my stove is a fucking piece of shit.  I’m lucky in that it uses piped gas, not LPG canisters, otherwise it would be even weaker. But basically what I have is four shitty, tiny burners that are as controllable as a camper stove. They’re mostly just tiny-diameter point flames with little adjustability.  There is a snobbish taint to things like Viking stoves, but on the other hand, those are big, controllable burners.  There is no reason a stove shouldn’t be able to bring a pot of oil easily to 350F and fucking keep it there. Since I couldn’t keep the oil hot enough, the potatoes couldn’t generate enough steam to keep the oil at bay, thus the grease-logging.

To finish up tonight I took some soon-to-spoil packages of raspberries and blueberries from the refrigerator, some unsweetened yogurt Ling made ?when? and some confectioner sugar. Into her little ice cream maker and ran it till it was like a sorbet.  Her icecream maker is clever. The big mixing boil is basically a giant icepack that you keep in the freezer until you need it.  Then the mixing arm latches on top and stirs your ice cream till it’s done.  The mixing bowl is about a quart size but seems to have pretty strong cold ‘horsepower.’

That’s all.  Going to finish up my Japanese vocab now… nearly done with the list.

Wasn’t planning anything extravagant for dinner, in fact had nothing in mind at all, after having feasted on a king crab for lunch.  I remembered a recipe for a chilled tomato soup in Nigel Slater’s Food Diary, so I looked it up.  I approximately followed his directions.

• Prepared a tray of five red momotaro tomatoes, a box of yellow cherry tomatos,  a yellow capsicum pepper and a few Japanese sansho peppers.  Dressed them in kosher salt, ground black pepper, chopped garlic, and olive oil.
• Baked for about forty-five minutes at 220c till it was a simmering, bubbling puddle, the skin of the tomatoes and pepper’s lightly burnt.
• Picked a few handfuls of basil from my old basil plants outside (they’re still kicking) and tossed that in a pot with a few hundred ml of chicken stock
• Poured the tray of roasted vegetables in with the stock and briefly boiled it.

At this point I broke away from his recipe. He called for letting some fraction of the tomatoes undisturbed, so that each soup bowl would have some chunkiness in it.  I realized that I didn’t chop my basil up anywhere near as much as it would require, so there would be a lot of nasty leaf matter in the soup if I didn’t puree it.

Long ago Ling bought what Braun calls a ‘handprocessor’ — a blender on a stick, essentially. I always thought it was gimmicky and remained a food processor snob.  But just over the last two days I started using it and find it frightfully good.  It is seriously powerful. I disintegrated an entire orange into nothing but juice and the finest pulp with it.  Ling uses it to crush ice for smoothies.  I used it to liquify the tomato soup while it was still in the pot.  It’s a lot more convenient than a food processor.  It helps that Ling bought the 600w monster.  I’d recommend this before I’d recommend any traditional blender.  A food processor doesn’t blend as well, but it does slice and dice things, which this cannot.

Anyway, now I had a liquified soup that was seasoned about as well as I have ever managed to season something.  I guess I had enough salt in it, plus the black pepper and a bit of heat from the japanese pepper finished it nicely.

The soup was supposed to be chilled, but I didn’t have a half day to wait, so I distributed it into a few a small stainless steel milk frothing pitchers, stuck them into a ice water bath and waited a while. I found that the cooling was quickest when I stirred the soup itself inside the pitcher (as opposed to moving the pitchers around in the ice bath).  In 15 minutes they were ready to eat, and by then I had prepared tiny, thin ciabatta toasts to float on the chilled soup.

The last thing I did was pour the soup through a strainer to catch rogue bits of tomato seeds, skin, and connective tissue. Tomato seeds are bitter when bitten, and since it was a smooth cool soup, I saw no reason to have lumps. Glad I did.

It turned out to be a really nice soup. We finished up our broad bean/dill hummus, and that was our entire dinner.  Mmmm.

Today is the first day of Chinese New Year. Most everything is closed except indian restaurants and fast food. Ling and I were trying to figure out what to eat for lunch. Fastfood is off the list for sure, and Indian didn’t sound very good — heavy and oily. Ling had a smart idea of eating one of the hokkaido king crab tarabakani we had in the freezer.

It was a simple matter to steam that and prepare some clarified butter, but I did something additional that was a really nice side dish. In the latest Nigel Slater book he talks about a hummus-like dish made from broadbeans and dill. So I put that together

• 250g broad beans
• 10g (a package) of fresh dill
• half a lemon’s juice
• olive oil
• salt and pepper

I blended it together with a hand mixer then ate it with ciabatta bread I brushed with olive oil and toasted on the electric grill.
It was good in its own right, but the serendipitous twist was this: dill is a great herb for crab. They complement each other.   So the hummous side dish and crab were great accompaniments.

Now I have the crab remains and some old vegetables turning into stock under the pressure cooker.

This evening I made my first stab at cooking Dan Dan Mein.

My approximate recipe:

1. Made a soffrito of onion and garlic in a heavy-bottomed sauce pan. Wok-cooking doesn’t work for me. I’ve never seen how to do it properly and my stove burners are too anemic anyway. Plus, I don’t think that high temperature flash-searing is appropriate for what I was doing anyway.
2. Tossed in several handfuls 1/8″ thick slices (cut across the grain) of fresh boiled bamboo along with some more peanut oil, rice wine vingegar, and some sort of dark Chinese cooking wine.
3. Browned in a small packet of ground pork. Perhaps two cups’ worth max.
4. Added several teaspoons of ground szechuan pepper, a handful of szechuan red chillis, and a teaspoon or so of chilli oil.
5. Let cook a bit and then tossed in the ya cai preserved vegetables and poured in some hot water to make the whole mess more soupy
6. Kept tasting and periodically adding more spices… especially chilli oil and ground pepper. Also put in sugar, tamari sauce, and salt.
7. When there was enough water to make it soupy, I ladelled in several tablespoons of tahini as well as a generous handful of freshly-roasted, ground peanuts.
8. I couldn’t get the heat to the level I wanted, so I kept adding more chilli oil and dried chillis. I’m not sure how much difference it made.
9. Threw some packets of frozen udon into the boiling water. They cook nearly instantly are reasonably decent. Not too sticky or gelatinous.
10. Handful of udon in each bowl covered with a generous ladle or two of the dan-dan mixture.

Results? I’d give it a C and think I can get it to a B- or B with some changes:

1. Put the ya cai in last. In cannot withstand much simmering before it disintegrates.
2. Give it more liquid. It was too dry for my taste. I want a hot liquid to slurp that is spicy enough to curl my tongue.
3. Ling thought the heat level was fine, but I would have liked it several degrees hotter. I am not sure what I need to do to give it that kick. What is the appropriate spice to use? The ground pepper doesn’t seem to make the dish much hotter, only gives it a stronger black-pepper taste. The chilli oil also seemed to lose its efficacy at hight dosages. Perhaps the dried red chillis I used I should have been using either far more, or chopping them up finely, or letting them simmer for a long time to drive the heat out of them and into the food. I don’t care for basic chilli powder spice — it tends to be crude, hot, and uninteresting. Perhaps I just woefully underestimated how much chilli oil a good dan-dan mian requires? (for that matter, the chilli oil is little more than sesame oil with chilli powder, so maybe I shouldn’t be so cavalier in dismissing simple chilli powder as the answer).
4. Not sure if there are some other dimensional flavors I could add. I think I maxed out the sesame/peanut vector nicely. The heat fell short. Wonder if I should have pushed some other dimension harder, like sour or something.

Anyway, not a bad dinner. It was too much calories today though. That tahini and peanut and pork plus noodle adds up. I’ll have to write off the idea of eating anything else tonight.

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Followups… read a description of szechuan flavor as coming from lajiao you (ground roasted chilies “cooked” in oil) and huajiao (Sichuan peppercorns). Next time I’ll chop and fry the red chillis in sesame oil first and try to produce more heat.Here’s a fragment of a recipe for making chilli oil..

1. For the chili oil: Heat the oil until it is just beginning to smoke.
2. Remove from heat, add the hot red pepper flakes, and stir.
3. The mixture will foam, and will smell very strong!
4. It can be kept for months under refrigeration.

I just tried this. I’ll put a photo essay on Flickr.

The thing I like most about this recipe is that it provides for all the guests to mix up their own sauce to their own tastes. It sounds like a very nice family time.

Had a craving for really salty pretzels yesterday. Of course they sell pathetic little dried out, low-salt things here. Decided I should make my own.

Was wondering where I could find sufficiently large salt crystals for some real nice salty pretzel rods. Then when I reviewed the recipe in my Baking and Pastry: Mastering the Art and Craft book I remember what stopped me the first time I thought of this.

It wasn’t the need for big salt crystals (I guess i could grow my own anyway). It was the fact that to get that beautiful, tough, thick brown coating on pretzels you have to seak the pretzel in bath of lye before you bake them.

Not sure where I’d get lye in the first place, and not really sure how motivated I am to play with it in the second place.

But boy, it could be nice if the recipe worked nicely. Make up a box of 36 giant pretzels with some yellow mustard. mmmmmmmmm

Maybe I’ll gather up the gumption to do it later. I don’t want to make the sissy lye-free recipes and produce some chewy, bready, blonde pretzels. Yuk.

My colleagues in Tokyo generally eat as a pack that dashes out between trading hours for a no-nonsense thirty-minute meal somewhere. Each time I go there, at least once per week they go to various Chinese restaurants for something they call Tan Tan Mian.

Most restaurants cook the dish differently from each other, but my favorite manifestation of it is as a quite-spicy soup in a thick broth strongly tasting of peanuts and sesame. The noodles are fairly plump.

Looking around the web for decent recipes for it I find many that seem to be a much more meaty/less brothy recipe. It looks more like a bolognaise sauce than noodles in a hearty broth.

I’d like to make exactly what I eat at the best place I’ve tried in Tokyo, but I guess that is going to take some experimentation because I don’t see much consistency among the recipes.

Ingredients I am guessing I’ll need:

• Some of these recipes call for “Szechuan red peppercorns,” or “huajiao” (“flower pepper”) in Chinese. These give Szechuan food its distinctive taste. Cayenne or red chili peppers are NOT interchangeable with Szechuan peppercorns! Huajiao is inexpensive and can be found in many Chinese specialty groceries stores.
• My guess is the sesame/peanut taste principally comes from using tahini. Not sure if there is a Chinese variation to Tahini. Most tahini I’ve bought is more of a North African ingredient.
• Wheat noodles.  Not sure if buckwheat counts.  I guess I could try soba, but I remember the noodles being thicker, more substantial than soba. So perhaps udon is a better choice. I like udon more, anyway, and is also made from wheat.
• Ya Cai or some other preserved vegetable. I can always find something decent from a Japanese grocer.  They love preserved vegetables too.

I guess this will be a weekend experiment at some point. All the sesame paste and noodles doesn’t make for an especially low-calorie meal, so I shouldn’t hurry to do this.

Watched an Alton Brown episode on Cheese while I ate a Cuban sandwich. The bread, very fresh Batard, was the best thing about the sandwich. I’m afraid I overcooked the pork so it was dry and doesn’t have much flavor.  Oh well, will try again. I bought “I’m Just Here For the Food,” so I think I will learn more about the right way to cook succulent pork loin.

This cheese episode was pretty lame.  It was a terribly superficial coverage of all the major cheese families.  Superficial at a useless level really.  Cheese is so deep a subject that I think it would be better covered in a series in they style of Floyd Uncorked.