Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Category Archives: Food
Michelle’s E-list
Here’s some linky love to go with your morning coffee:
Michelle posted a great list of editing tips. No matter how many of these lists I read, I always learn something new.
Michelle has also been infected by the cheesecake meme. First, Dean feted us with calories, and now Michelle wants to make me fat, too. But you won’t see me posting any cheesecake recipes. My son doesn’t like it and my wife never eats more than a slice. I’ll give you one guess who winds up eating 90% of the cheesecake.
I’m feeling loose this morning. Do you have a post you want hyped? Leave a comment, and I’ll give you some hot linky love.
D.
I’m begging you, please: brulee my creme
I have to write a post about food tonight. Why? Because, thanks to one of my faithful readers opening my eyes to a novel non-culinary use for ginger, I might otherwise write something which would get me in trouble with my wife, my patients, my hospital, and most likely the law.
But . . . damn. Just when I thought I had heard of every kink known to man or beast, I learn something new.
Back to creamy yummy things that don’t burn when you shove them where the sun don’t shine: creme brulee.
One-upped, snap!
Restaurant openings don’t make front page news in Brookings, but they should. They’re rare as golden goose eggs and (as far as I’m concerned) every bit as valuable. Imagine my delight that we have two new upscale restaurants, a reopening under new management of one of my favorite Mexican restaurants, and an expansion of my friends’ Elliot and Suzie’s restaurant, Suzie Q’s.
I had to share this knowledge with the first person possible: my favorite pharmacist, whom we’ll call Nicole.
“Some new restaurants opened up,” I said.
“Yeah, I know. The Grill is great. Good food, good service, reasonable prices. I’m going to the Nautical Inn tonight, though.”
“Eeeew.”
“Oh, I don’t want to hear that,” said Nicole. “I heard they were good.”
“They’re painfully slow. I hope you like spending all night waiting for your food.”
“Nicole’s an awesome chef,” said Stevie, Nicole’s pharm assistant.
“Really?” I said. “We oughta have a cook-off.”
“You’re a chef, too?” said Stevie. Nicole smiled like the Cheshire Cat.
“Yeah,” I said, bold as Keanu Reeves in Speed. (In other words, a total doofus who acts ballsy, and does a damned unconvincing job of it at that.)
“WELLLLLL, Nicole went to Cordon Bleu, and stayed on as faculty.”
For a moment, we all listened to the sound of tens of thousands of pills settling in their respective bins.
“You’re kidding me,” I said. “Then what the hell are you doing here?”
Nicole told me that the only folks who make any money are the executive chefs. Unless she landed one of those gigs, she’d be making eleven bucks an hour. What she really wants is to save up enough money to open a bed and breakfast.
“So what’s your best dish?” Stevie asked me.
In the face of the real thing, I gagged. No, really. Now I can think of my best dish (sweet potato ravioli in sage and brown butter sauce), but at the moment, I could only come up with focaccia.
“At least, my family seems to like it,” I said, suddenly and unusually humble.
“Yeah,” said Nicole, “focaccia’s easy. Not too many ways to screw it up — you just need to avoid overworking the dough.”
I thought: I knew that.
“Desserts are my weak suit,” I offered, now wallowing in my newfound humility.
“I would have been a pastry chef,” said Nicole.
“She makes an incredible Bundt cake,” said Stevie. “Oh, gaaawd.”
“I’m not baking for you,” Nicole told her.
“How’s your spaghetti?” Stevie asked.
“Nothing special,” I said. “But I do great meatballs.”
“Round meatloaf,” Nicole said.
“Nothing special,” I agree. “But they’re from Marcella Hazan’s cookbook and they’re awfully good.”
“Nicole has tons of cookbooks.”
“I’m drowning in them,” Nicole said.
***
Meanwhile, I’m thinking, I must cook for this woman.
Maybe she’ll reciprocate.
D.
A Brief History of Falafel
I had me some more of Cap’n Dyke’s beet salad tonight, which means I’ll be peeing a fine Robert Mondavi Rosé for the next two or three days. And in honor of that observation, I changed the blog’s subtitle. See above.
A combination of tonight’s dinner and an otherwise blank slate from the blog muse led to tonight’s topic. Drumroll, please, for a brief history of falafel . . .
Cap’n Dyke’s aphrodisiacal beet salad?
Delicious, but it needs to come with a warning.
You are not peeing blood.
You are not crapping blood.
It’s the beets.
D.
Butterflies, sweetbreads, and pommes frites
Seattle has two butterfly exhibits, one at the aquarium and one at the zoo. We’re not big butterfly fans (Karen, you’ll recall, is a tarantula-keeper, Jake loves his kitties, and I’m into poison dart frogs), but there’s still something mighty cool about being surrounded by hundreds of gorgeous butterflies.
At the Pacific Science Center, you enter and leave a large greenhouse-like enclosure through an antechamber. That way, the butterflies have a harder time making a break for it. The docents are vigilant about brushing butterflies off the path, so we didn’t see any colorful corpses.
Weather, for Seattle, was unseasonably hot and rain-free. The butterfly enclosure felt like a sauna. Still, how often do you get to see so many of these cuties in one place?
As for the zoo, their tarantula collection impressed Karen. Hers is better (of course!) but she was happy with their obese Poecilotheria regalis. (Arachnophobes, don’t click on that link.)
We just missed the lions having sex by about two minutes. We were within earshot and it was kind of obvious. Roar. Roar. Roar. Roar roar roar roar roar roar . . . eh, you get the idea.
(more…)
‘Tis the season
May has been talking about cast iron pans — and, yes, I agree, there’s nothing as indispensable as a well-seasoned cast iron pan. I use mine to make pan-fried steak or pork chops, chicken marsala, just about any meat recipe which requires the development of a sauce from a fond. A properly seasoned cast iron pan cleans up in a snap and requires little or no fuss.
How do you season a new pan? I looked around on the ‘net and discovered that some cast iron pans have a protective coating of wax. This needs to be scrubbed off prior to seasoning. I’ve never had to do this, so perhaps there are regional differences.
I found a number of formulas for seasoning. Some claimed you had to use bacon grease or lard for seasoning, since vegetable oil leaves a sticky coating. This is only true if you season the pan in a low temperature oven (300 F or lower). With my high heat method, vegetable oil works well.
Seasoning
Coat the pan ALL OVER (top, bottom, handle, the works) with vegetable oil. Put it in a 400 F oven. Turn off the oven and leave the pan in overnight. Alternatively, leave the pan in the 400 F oven for two hours, then carefully remove it.
I repeat this two or three times until I see a thin, almost shiny coating covering the entire pan.
Cleaning
The sources I checked claim you can use hot, soapy water to clean your pan. Since I was taught to never, never, never use soap, I’ve found other ways to deal with a greasy mess. I use rock salt to scrub off anything that sticks to the bottom and then I rinse with hot water. I wipe any remaining grease away with a paper towel.
For really messy jobs, try boiling water in the pan before scrubbing with rock salt. Kosher salt works, too.
More Seattle travelogue tomorrow.
D.
Chicken for Michelle
This is a variant on velvet butter chicken. If you look at that recipe, you’ll see a good deal of similarity to this one. I wanted to cut down on the butter and cream, however, and to do that I added yogurt. The resulting sauce is more sour compared to velvet butter chicken, which may be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your tastes. For what it’s worth, the three of us liked this variation as much as the original.
This is low carb but not low fat. I suppose you could cut back on the butter and cream, and use nonfat yogurt, but I can’t vouch for the results.
1 smaller can (12 oz? 16 oz?) diced tomatoes
1 cup plain yogurt
2 heaping tablespoons of fresh ginger, chopped into small pieces
1 tablespoon of chopped fresh garlic
Put these ingredients into a blender. Blend until smooth.
Melt 1 stick (1/2 cup) of butter in a heavy-bottomed pot — I use my Le Creuset Dutch oven for this. Add the tomato/ginger mixture and simmer, stirring constantly, until the sauce thickens, about 6-7 minutes. Add:
2 heaping teaspoons cumin
2 heaping teaspoons paprika (I like to add a little hot smoked paprika)
1/2 yellow onion, chopped fine
1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes, more or less to taste
2 teaspoons salt
1/2 cup of cream
Stir well and simmer, stirring constantly, for another 5 or 10 minutes. You can, by the way, cook the onions in the butter at the beginning, but I forgot to do this and added them in late. No big deal.
I used three half chicken breasts for this recipe. I sliced the breasts (thickness, 1/4 inch to 1/2 inch) and added the slices to the sauce. Continue to simmer, stirring, for another ten minutes or so. You don’t want to overcook the breasts. The sauce should be fairly thick before you add the breasts; as the chicken cooks, it will give up a lot of juice, and that will thin out the sauce.
Taste and adjust for seasonings.
Add 1/3 to 1/2 cup chopped cilantro and a heaping teaspoon (or more, to taste) of garam masala. If you don’t have garam masala and can’t find it in your supermarket, use ground coriander and a pinch or two of ground cloves.
This goes well with Basmati rice, homemade naan (if you’re into that sort of thing), or focaccia.
D.
My life in food
Before we get down to any serious foodie goodness, I want to hype a post Dean wrote yesterday on the joys of the mature feminine form. Here’s a snip:
And that is beautiful; the realization that there are more important things than false nails and eyelashes and having exactly the right shoes to go with exactly the right skirt to show off your legs. Men who truly appreciate women don’t look at those things. We are attracted by laughter, intelligence, the creamy expanse of cleavage or the delicate curve of the collarbone, by the sexiness of hair falling from a braid or by the beads of water on softly tanned shoulders.
Romance crowd, if you don’t know Dean already, check him out. If I could write about my wife the way Dean writes about SxKitten, I wouldn’t have to write posts like these.
Back to FOOD, or, Why We Go On Vacation.
Thirteen things I bought
Jake’s growing up. Here he is enjoying a hunk of bread in Il Terrazzo Carmine.
We rented a lightweight wheelchair for Karen for this trip, and Jake insisted on doing most of the pushing. (Except down steep hills. Karen kept flashing on Kiss of Death; I kept imagining the chair careening downhill, Jake bouncing along behind it, saying, “I can handle it! I can handle it!”) He didn’t put up a fuss when we went out for sushi or dim sum, and he even tried most of the dishes. He likes dim sum now. Hallelujah!
We didn’t get into any major rows, either, for which Jake and I both deserve praise, but since Jake isn’t the adult, he gets most of the praise. Grumble. Anyway, all in all, this was a highly successful vacation. I’ll tell you more about it later, but for now: thirteen things I bought on our vacation*.