9 posts tagged “cooking”

Hello hello hello! I sent off an article and a bunch of other stuff that was hanging over my head, which makes me flop happily on the ground. Flop flop. So gratifying. Flop.

And don't forget, you are stuuuupid.

There is an awesome episode of Dexter's Lab called "Dexter and Computress Get Mandark!" A six-year-old made up a story about Dexter and recorded it on a tape, and sent the tape off to the producers. They correctly identified it as excellent and animated an episode to go with it. All the sound comes from the kid's tape, and the animation is a charming, kid-style version of the show. They do a great job wittily matching the action to his narration, with a few little gaps in the story bridged very neatly in dialogue-free moments, and fantastic visualizations of the kid's revisions, odd transitions, and trailing off moments. The plot is that Dexter's nemesis Mandark has a sister, or perhaps brother, Computress, who is ticked at Mandark and decides to team up with Dexter to get his/her revenge. They build a shrinking ray to shrink Mandark's head, but Computress accidentally sets it to "grow". As a result, Mandark's head grows and grows and grows until it explodes, causing a ton of little Mandark heads to rain down upon the earth and Dexter to tell Computress that she/he is stupid.

Anyway, one of the clever bits is that Dexter and Computress have a plan to get DeeDee (Dexter's sister) too, sort of incidentally, and the plan is that "instead of having a free spirit, she would have no spirit." I thought that was surprisingly witty, especially for a six year old. Last night I told Snark that instead of a free spirit, I had a nose spirit. When I am displaying my nose spirit, I mostly just poke my nose over whatever he is reading and say "I have a nooooose spirit." It cracks me up every time. Pretty sophisticated over here, that's me!

Iyz-n-the-Hood

I bought new ice cube trays. They are a sort of horrible shade of pink, because that's what they had at the store, and made of silicone, so they're bendy. Also they don't smell weird and freezer-ish like our old trays. But what is really exciting about them is that the ice cubes they produce are really-truly cubes, with eight whole right angle corners. So far, I still find this entirely exotic. Every time Snark brings me an iced drink (which is every night, because I must have my daily bourbon on the rocks, which by tradition Snark makes for me, because I am a 1950s salaryman, I guess) I cry, "My ice is a cube!" My ice is a cube. Is yours?

We finally shoveled out the driveway yesterday -- the landlord had been just parking at the bottom and we don't drive during the week, and so none of us pulled it together until the weekend. Alas, the bit where he pulled in and out each day was good and packed down, and still is. I have a special loathing of shoveling packed-down snow obtained in my middle-school years, when I was always sent out to shovel the front walk after it had been trampled on all day. And though I am certainly puny now, I was even punier then, making the whole endeavor protracted and pathetic, much like my adventures mowing the bumpy lawn with my mother's very dull-bladed hand mower. I do not think it built character, I regret to report.

Anyway, the three of us got it pretty well cleared out yesterday afternoon, and then it snowed some more in the night. So Snark and I had to give it another go-over by ourselves before we could take the car out for shopping this morning. That was some heavy snow! Also, for a good bit of the way there is nowhere handy to dump it, leading to lots of damp dense shovelfuls hucked up and over a five-foot fence. Turns out that though I am not so puny as my twelve-year-old self, I am also not particularly in shape for so much upper body activity and now I feel like an old old man. Creak, creak.

While we were hacking away exhaustedly at the ice at the end of the driveway, a neighbor from a few doors down began to make conversation about our landlords' new pet. "How's their puppy doing?" I found it less than delightful to be called upon to make small talk just then. What do I know of how their puppy is doing? Fine, I suppose. Like a puppy. Like someone else's puppy that I care about not in the slightest. PLEASE LADY LET ME FINISH THIS UNPLEASANT TASK IN PEACE. I think I grunted politely enough, so maybe I did aquire a little bit of character somewhere back there.

Since then I have read a bit, cooked a bit. The big hit of the week I think will be eggplant in Manchurian sauce. This is along the lines of a particular Indian "Chinese" (which I believe is about as authentically Chinese as chop suey) dish called Manchurian Cauliflower. Instead of battered fried cauliflower florets, in this case, we have eggplant cut into one-inch cubes, salted, rinsed, tossed in olive oil, and roasted in the oven before being dumped into the delicious glossy gingery tomatoey orientalist sauce. Smells and looks lovely.

Applesauce spice bars, I think these are called, from the newest Dorie Greenspan cookbook. Pretty good looking at this size, even better at 400 x 300 pixels, without the extra unsharp mask or whatever happens in the resizing process, which has a way of making the cake look a bit dry. It isn't! I thought these were fi-yeene. We left about a third of the batch at someone else's house, to share the wealth and avoid scarfing down every last one. I hope they aren't all "Christ, these suck." That would be a pity.

Applesauce spice cake

The cookies in question are called Lusikkaleivät, via a Celia Barbour recipe in Gourmet magazine. They're made with browned butter, which imparts a mysterious deliciousness of a sort that seems like it must come from the addition of some rare and subtle spice, but does not. They are so good (and also something of a pain to make) that it would be a shame to dilute their wonderfulness by making them too often, so once a year it is. Last year I packaged them individually in little clear drawstring bags before giving them away and I think I will do the same this year, since I still have plenty of the bags. It helps to make them seem like an occasion.

The browning is a bit dicey, I find; perhaps there's a trick to make it easier to see what's going on at the crucial moments, but if so, I don't know it. First you clarify the butter by heating it over a moderate flame, until a cloudy foam covers the top and then eventually (mostly) precipitates out, leaving the milk solids on the bottom of the pan and the clear butter on top. Then it's your job to gently keep on cooking it until the little grains of milk solids go from ecru to pale caramel to a rosy brown but NOT black, or else the butter will be ruined. Unfortunately, just at the stage where this begins to happen, a new thick layer of opaque bubbly foam, like a very tenacious dense bubble bath, appears over the top of the butter. I find it very hard to get it out of the way long enough to keep an eye on the butter below. Though I've done a good job with guessing when to take the pan off the flame so far, this seems a suboptimal method. Let me know if you know something better.

Anyway, then you cool the butter by resting the pan in a sink filled with a couple of inches of cold water and use it to make the very simple dough of butter, sugar, vanilla, flour, and baking soda, which then rests for a couple of hours at room temperature or in the fridge until you're ready to move on. You form the cookies by pressing the dough into the bowl of a pointy-tipped teaspoon and sliding it out, to make little domed bas-relief egg shapes. After they're baked and cooled, you make them into sandwiches with a thin layer of preserves -- I like seedless raspberry. Finally, you must let them age for at least two days before you eat them, as the texture and flavor both change sublimewardly thereby.

Today we bought a bag of frozen, peeled roasted chestnuts at Trader Joe's. Now I am wondering what on earth I should do with them. Any excellent (vegetarian) suggestions?

Tonight am finally making mapo tofu (or "doufu" or however you like it), which state of affairs S. has been patiently awaiting for a terribly long time. We use vegetarian sausage where pork should go, and I find it very amenable. This used up our jar of toban djan, or douban jiang -- again, however; it's a paste of fermented beans and chiles -- so I'll have to order some more. I didn't really expect that to happen, but here we are. There are worse fates. Soon I'll want to order more Sichuan peppercorns as well. I do love a Sichuan peppercorn, and all the more so now that I've properly absorbed (a) that you must toast them in a dry pan until they smoke, and (b) that you should, indeed, sift them after you grind them up to dispose of some of the useless husks. So tongue-numbingly delicious!

I would like to order every one of the most vile-looking and -sounding of the Victorian sweets at Mrs Browns Victorian Sweet Shop. Particular winners include coltsfoot rock, pontefract cakes, and berwick cockles.

Coltsfoot Rock is a stick of crumbly rock made from extracts of the Coltsfoot plant, with a delicious flavour of aniseed, liquorice and herbs, a very old fashioned sweet and a very popular one too!

S. points out an apposite passage from Gravity's Rainbow.

...Impatiently, he bites into it, and in the act knows, fucking idiot, he's been had once more, there comes pouring out onto his tongue the most godawful crystalline concentration of Jeez it must be pure nitric acid, "Oh mercy that's really sour," hardly able to get the words out he's so puckered up, exactly the sort of thing Hop Harrigan used to pull to get Tank Tinker to quit playing his ocarina, a shabby trick then and twice as reprehensible coming from an old lady who's supposed to be one of our Allies, shit he can't even see it's up his nose and whatever it is won't dissolve, just goes on torturing his shriveling tongue and crunches like ground glass among his molars. Mrs. Quoad is meantime busy savoring, bite by dainty bite, a cherry-quinine petit four. She beams at the young people across the candy bowl. Slothrop, forgetting, reaches again for his tea. There is no graceful way out of this now. Darlene has brought a couple-three more candy jars down off of the shelf, and now he goes plunging, like a journey to the center of some small, hostile planet, into an enormous bonbon chomp through the mantle of chocolate to a strongly eucalyptus-flavored fondant, finally into a core of some very tough grape gum arabic. He fingernails a piece of this out from between his teeth and stares at it for a while. It is purple in color.

Tonight I made chilaquiles with some of the salsa verde I'd made over the weekend. Properly I should have been using stale tortillas that I fried up myself, but instead I used my current favorite commercial tortilla chip, the happily thick and toothsome Tostitos Gold. I did not regret it. And I read a post on eGullet recently, actually, in which someone said a Mexican friend of his, whose family tends to demand chilaquiles every single day for breakfast, whether there are extra tortillas lying around or not, uses Fritos (!) in a pinch.

Chilaquiles are not exactly what you would call health food, being essentially the components of nachos in a different proportion and preparation, and I did not stint with the cheese, but it is hard to feel like putting away that much pureed pure vegetable at one time can be too terrible. Tomatillos feel more sparkling and filled with good things than tomatoes do, and the brightness of chile adds to the effect. Anyway, these were super delicious and very easy, and only used up a third at best of the total salsa proceeds. That giant $3 basket of tomatillos was a great deal. If we manage to use it up this week, I'll buy them Saturday too and do it all over again.

We've been away and busy so much of late that it's been quite a while since we've been able to eat proper homemade food consistently. I'm very happy that this week will be different, and have been cooking all day today, as I like to do, so that eating well during the week is largely a matter of heating up and assembling elements I already have on hand. Then I can feel like I have a kindly attendant who just happens to always cook the things I know and like. ("I have taken the liberty, madam, of preparing these delicious vegetables for you." "Oh, Bunter, you're a wonder.") This week, so far I've made:

• Ratatouille (we especially like this decanted into a little casserole, with two little indentations into which I crack an egg apiece before grating a little cheese over top and putting the whole thing in the oven to cook through)
• Little corn puddings in ramekins
  
• A truly remarkable quantity of salsa verde -- chilaquiles in our future!
• A massive frittata, which we will mostly eat for lunches, I think
• Roast vegetable and pine nut spread, once again
• A cute little baking dish's worth of eggplant parmesan
  

There are also fixings for tomato salad, and if we get bored, I could throw together some kind of quinoa salad, too. In the house as well are the supplies for various legume curries and mapo tofu. In fact, though, I suspect that at least one of these nights we're going to wind up eating glorified drinkie-nibbles as supper -- crackers and cheese and go-alongs of various sorts -- because we've got an awful lot of things that work well for that in the house at the moment.

So it turns out that all those nice Middle Eastern dips you make with various things plus tahini are rendered infinitely more wonderful if you use the same principle but grind up your own toasted pine nuts instead. Today I made one with roasted zucchini, which is a lovely thing to make into a puree, as it becomes beautifully creamy in both color and texture. It tastes nice too. The basic method goes like this:

1. Slice the vegetables you want to roast -- I think eggplant and zucchini or some other young squash probably do the best as the base here, but there's no need to stop with them. Add some peppers, maybe, or onions. (About three quarters of a pound of veg to start is about right.) Or of course you could use chickpeas or some other legume as the base. Brush the vegetables with olive oil and pop them under the broiler, or grill them.  If they aren't cooked through by the time they're golden brown, you can take them of the heat and stack them so they steam to completion.
2. Meanwhile, toast a handful of pine nuts in a dry skillet until they're all roasty-toasty.
3. While the vegetables go on cooking, grind the pine nuts in your mortar and pestle with a clove or two of garlic and some salt, until you have a rough pine-nut-and-garlic butter.
   
4. Chop the vegetables roughly.
5. Now, if you have a nice big mortar, you can do this all in there. That will give you the nicest texture, to  my taste, but a food processor will do as well. Either way, add the vegetables to the pine nuts and grind or whirr to a rough puree.
   
6. Taste for salt and add some chopped herbs: mint, basil, parsley, what you like. Add lemon juice too if it pleases you, or some olive oil, or both, or neither.

By the way, my pine nut secret is Costco. I can get a ridiculously large bag of perfectly nice pine nuts for $11 or something, and so my fridge is always well supplied.