tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-29858402844243728372024-03-04T23:22:22.781-08:00The Proximal KitchenRandom thoughts on shopping, cooking, eating, and drinking locally.Rorschachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00042642692322503431noreply@blogger.comBlogger43125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2985840284424372837.post-28230328487775953692010-10-07T08:24:00.000-07:002010-10-07T08:24:25.268-07:00We're Moving<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9cpl2KVRU7IuYWj8nA-R6p2lWyvOoUhypsO9tS3Fi0dkxPgFWhvrUJCkDrLRAhN7-dj9vDepfpme1DKLe6nsaNUHjXVOsM5ackEXroGq5DH7Lh09zDIOpWxdNfTX9K74smVwNSCi6VJo/s1600/construction.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" ex="true" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9cpl2KVRU7IuYWj8nA-R6p2lWyvOoUhypsO9tS3Fi0dkxPgFWhvrUJCkDrLRAhN7-dj9vDepfpme1DKLe6nsaNUHjXVOsM5ackEXroGq5DH7Lh09zDIOpWxdNfTX9K74smVwNSCi6VJo/s320/construction.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>The Proximal Kitchen blog is in the process of moving to our new semi-permanent home at the <a href="http://proximal.blogs.pressdemocrat.com/">Santa Rosa Press Democrat</a> - please visit us there!<br />
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(I will try to maintain this site as I transition the content over, but will inevitably fall behind...)Rorschachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00042642692322503431noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2985840284424372837.post-4037152646493310882010-09-24T14:14:00.000-07:002010-09-24T14:14:48.945-07:00WTF is up with 'Man v. Food'? <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhow_Z5-Yy_TYggKmUsxvL0l8j5iPdBKSgLcxwfz3f9IDR3A-uu06WlC9KxQXG4mrljEE-oJBtueW0D_IRS7CaEmq9eqouFBloKoemVJ-XfE1lF8FKkcnh978SquO91yyco_Xk6cNNzlk/s1600/mvf_ss_sacramento_008_596x334.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; cssfloat: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="179" px="true" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhow_Z5-Yy_TYggKmUsxvL0l8j5iPdBKSgLcxwfz3f9IDR3A-uu06WlC9KxQXG4mrljEE-oJBtueW0D_IRS7CaEmq9eqouFBloKoemVJ-XfE1lF8FKkcnh978SquO91yyco_Xk6cNNzlk/s320/mvf_ss_sacramento_008_596x334.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Truth In Advertising: The Knucklehead Challenge<br />
(photo credit: <a href="http://www.travelchannel.com/">http://www.travelchannel.com/</a>)</td></tr>
</tbody></table> Lying around in full couch tuber regalia, following the heartbreakingly tantalizing 49er game, I had the misfortune to channel-surf through the treacherous waters of Monday Night Television, only to find my mental Minnow festooned around the awful coral head of Adam Richman's Man v. Food. As if driving past an overturned car in a highway ditch, or probing a sore inside a cheek, I sat there, glassy-eyed and I must suppose mildly brain-damaged, for perhaps 15 minutes (an amount of time that, at roughly 0.00003% of my expected life span, strikes me as too long by at least half), transfixed, seemingly incapable of averting attention from either Mr. Richman's ham-handed narrative or the grotesque display of gustatory abuse which forms the dubious premise of the show.<br />
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This particular car-wreck happened to be an episode in Philadelphia, in which the host must face down a single, titanic cheese steak from Tony Luke's, the sandwich in question (although to call it that is surely to insult the Earl's good memory and proper sandwiches everywhere) weighing in at an appalling 5lbs in total, and constructed from 3lbs of meat, 1lb of American cheese, and a half-pound of fried onions, all stuffed into a 20"-long sub roll, which I suppose we're meant to infer weighs another half-pound. This is not the foul pile of landfill masquerading as food and pictured above-right; that unfortunate distinction belongs to Parker's Hot Dogs in Sacramento, home to yet another 5lbs of televised obscenity at the hands of said Mr Richman. But even to debate the particulars is to offer the offer the show far more quarter than it deserves; the what he eats is irrelevant in comparison to the why.<br />
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I've been puzzling over what bothers me so much about the show for the last couple of days: Notwithstanding the puppy-dog eyes and smarmy winks, Mr Richman himself seems inoffensive enough, and arguably knows what he's doing, both in front of the camera (he studied drama at Yale) and in the kitchen (he claims to be a trained sushi chef); nor is it the quality of the food itself, as he generally chooses destinations of some culinary merit (I have nothing against his roadie-food strong suit of cheese steaks, chili dogs, and burgers), or at least so they seem prior to his blasphemous display of eating whatever it is that they make. No, I think the problem lies with the premise of the show itself, the very idea that eating - to me, an inherently pleasurable, and literally life-giving, enterprise - should be reduced to a contest between the eater and the stuff on the plate<br />
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The great writer and patron saint of food bloggers everywhere, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher, once said that the "enjoyment of the art of living, as well as of eating... are, or can be, synonymous." Man v. Food is predicated on nothing less than the complete moral inversion of Ms Fisher's guiding principle - the title itself proclaims mouth and fork to be enemies - and I'm guessing that that is what chafes me like a dull razor. Food is (or at least should be) enormously enjoyable and, served in proportion to its purpose, satisfies one of the most basic conditions for life; the absence of food implies hunger and death (the millions so afflicted are a tragedy of global proportions and a blight on our collective social conscience), and food in excess implies death by means other than hunger, but death just the same (we are a nation of over-eaters, on this the data is incontrovertible). And yet here is a major television production that exists solely by virtue of our ability to transform good food into something dangerously unpleasant. Worse still, this transformation is effected by the application of quantity: What would otherwise be nourishing, or at least tasty (I'm not sure if even the finest chili dog could ever be called 'nourishing'), becomes a threat, simply because of the sheer size of the serving.<br />
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I know, I get it, it's all just entertainment, you don't need to post a reply with a litany of even-worse sins; we can just stipulate that competitive eating likely fails to represent one of the clear and present dangers to civilization as we know it, and that there are any number of significantly more disturbing examples of televised programming (certainly, The Swan and anything even peripherally related to Toddlers and Tiaras would rank higher on both lists). But its relative innocuousness in relation to graver threats in no way obviates my argument with Mr Richman and his self-destructive quest for ad revenue: The fact remains that the Travel Channel, by aggrandizing gluttony for a nation of the epidemically obese, sells our collective good sense of what food can and should be right down the river.Rorschachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00042642692322503431noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2985840284424372837.post-87464113902786377172010-09-17T09:08:00.000-07:002010-09-17T09:08:43.530-07:00Should I buy local wines at Costco?<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDoas8eWGsSOSA_IregPyamq_ETtEsURpSAfRN_vaYt2DfMPMaD0AyRZXCFBNtbqagfY0ci-7ZZ71v3TL21VUDQNEe-RhOmqfeg9_ElUcMJ8dOZ7Kb46ZazUaMruIvhZl6q44ArBvAJhE/s1600/winesfromcostco.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDoas8eWGsSOSA_IregPyamq_ETtEsURpSAfRN_vaYt2DfMPMaD0AyRZXCFBNtbqagfY0ci-7ZZ71v3TL21VUDQNEe-RhOmqfeg9_ElUcMJ8dOZ7Kb46ZazUaMruIvhZl6q44ArBvAJhE/s320/winesfromcostco.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Outstanding local Pinot Noir at big discounts</td></tr>
</tbody></table>We've <a href="http://proximalkitchen.blogspot.com/2010/07/in-defense-of-costco.html">talked about Costco</a> before, a conversation in which I argued that monolithic, small-business-destroying category killers still have a place in the kitchen, even proximal kitchens, if for no other reason than because saving money on staples allows us to allocate a larger share of our budget to the locally produced goods of premium quality (and, let's be honest, at a premium price), that we like to cook with. But what about buying <i>locally </i>produced goods at the Big C?<br />
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If the identical local product is offered at the farmer's market, the local health food store, and Costco, and I choose to buy more of it, at a lower price, at Costco, should I pat myself on the back for being such a savvy, sustainably-minded locavore and supporting the production of good, local food, all while saving my family money? Or, should I offer myself up as whipping boy <i>du jour</i> for the inevitable and copious tongue lashing and politically correct cacophony emanating from the barbarous hordes of checkbook liberals and self-described apostles of some quasi Pollan-esque faith lying in wait?<br />
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Let's consider the case of wine: The <a href="http://www.allbusiness.com/consumer-products/food-beverage-products-alcoholics/5141446-1.html">wine industry is Sonoma County's largest single employer</a> (directly accounting for some 19% of all jobs county-wide, excluding all the ancillary but clearly material employment in restaurants, hotels and gift shops generated by wine country tourism), and <a href="http://www.sonomawinegrape.org/history-0">total wine-related revenues account for 40% of the County's entire contribution to the nation's GDP</a>. So one thing is clear: Where and how I spend my wine dollars matters to Sonoma County.<br />
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Or does it? If I buy Bordeaux in-bond from a broker in London, then you might argue that I'm not doing much to support artisanal winemakers (not that that should stop anyone from drinking the occasional Bordeaux, mind you - the road to deprivation is littered with the carcasses of overzealous locavores, and I, for one, have little interest in dinner-table asceticism), but it's far from obvious that I'm doing harm to our local economy. Suppose I take the total number of dollars that I would have otherwise spent on Sonoma County wines, at tasting rooms and specialty retailers in my neighborhood, and instead spend those same dollars, on the same wines, at Costco? Who wins, who loses, how much is at stake, and should I care? The answer is not as obvious as you may think. (Unfortunately, this post is about to run quite a bit longer than usual; call it the curse of the two-handed economist. I promise to get back on-thread tomorrow.) <br />
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Costco, <a href="http://www.wine-business-international.com/Retail_Profiles_Costco-_The_high_quality,_mass_market_retailer.html">the nation's largest (although I'm never sure if this statistic refers to volume, revenue, or both) wine retailer</a>, is the elephant in the cellar, and their fine-wine pricing can be very competitive, provided you can separate wheat from chaff, because their selection, and the price/quality ratio thereof, can be inconsistent; the prices are never bad, but some of the wines are distinctly mediocre, and at prices no better than you'll find in about 5 minutes on Google. That being said, here is what I picked up the other day on a completely random visit, 3 outstanding examples of Sonoma County Pinot Noir (out of at least a half-dozen options), each from a premium local winery that I could easily drive to, and collectively a representative sample of just what is at stake, from my wallet's perspective:<br />
<ol><li><a href="http://www.kellerestate.com/Store/index.php?_a=viewProd&productId=2">2006 Keller Estate "La Cruz Vineyard" Pinot Noir</a>. Costco price: <b>$18.49</b>. Winery: <b>$44.00</b> (current release, 2007). </li>
<li><a href="http://www.jwine.com/Wines/Varietal/Pinot%20Noir/J%20Pinot%20Noir,%20Russian%20River%20Valley/9_2007/">2007 J Vineyards "Russian River Valley" Pinot Noir</a>: Costco price: <b>$24.99</b>. Winery: <b>$35.00</b> (identical bottling).</li>
<li><a href="http://www.pellegrinisonoma.com/pellegrini/catalog/view_product.jsp?product_id=1109&cat_id=1009">2008 Pellegrini Family Vineyards "Olivet Lane" Pinot Noir</a>. Costco: <b>$19.99</b>. Winery: <b>$35.00</b> (identical bottling)</li>
</ol>Thus confronting the data, we find an average savings of 43% of retail, or better than $200/case, and moves a few of what I would otherwise consider "luxury" wines back into the "maybe not for every day, but plausible and guilt-free" category. Still, while total dollars spent remain constant, who gets those dollars does not. I'm a trained economist with a weak suit in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microeconomics">micro</a>, so I enlisted the help of former classmate and top-shelf game theory wonk, Mad Dog, and we came up with the following economic implications:<br />
<ul><li>My wallet, and my palate (although perhaps not my liver) win, because I get to consume more and/or better wine for the same outlay.</li>
<li>The County coffers are indifferent, because my total taxable consumption, as well as overall wine industry receipts, remain constant. </li>
<li>The wineries are a slightly trickier story: Definitively, some of what they would have made now goes to Costco, and their gross margins suffer; their cost-of-goods-sold likely falls (e.g., less labor, no tasting room lease), but I think it's safe to assume that, on balance, winery profits decline on a per-bottle basis. But there is a price and volume story here: It's entirely possible that the winery sells so many additional bottles, by virtue of the Costco distribution channel, that the absolute level of winery profits actually increases.</li>
<li>Even if total profits in the economy may remain unchanged (it's hard to see them falling, or else why would the business model persist), the reallocation of profits from the winery to Costco would shift some income out of the County, inasmuch as winery <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_%28economics%29">capital</a> is locally owned and Costco <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_%28economics%29">capital</a> is not. Still, that does not necessarily imply a net loss to the County, because of gains from trade: If Sonoma has a competitive advantage in making wine but not in selling it, then we, collectively, will be better off if we "pay" Costco to sell it for us, thereby reallocating our resources to more productive ends. (This is, essentially, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gains_from_trade">"gains from trade" argument</a>. Don't let the "anti-globalization" whack jobs bamboozle you, they have no idea what they're talking about, a world without trade would be a far darker, colder, and generally poorer place for nearly everyone.)</li>
<li>Employment at Costco gains, but at the expense of jobs at the wineries. I'd rather work in a tasting room than Costco, but that's a purely personal preference, it's not my place to say which job is "better". I do, however, think it's fair to assume that Costco labor is more <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity">productive</a> (in the economic sense, i.e., it takes less person-hours to sell the same dollar volume of wine), which would imply fewer total jobs for the County. However, one has to be careful, because that does not necessarily imply a net loss of income, but rather a reallocation of the share of total profits away from labor and toward capital, which is unequivocally bad only if you're still reading that threadbare copy of Marx from your freshman year.</li>
<li>All the preceding is an inherently <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_equilibrium">partial equilibrium analysis</a>, and there may be more complex, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_equilibrium_theory">general equilibrium</a> considerations, particularly along the temporal dimension: It is possible, for instance, that the winery will eventually go out of business by selling via Costco, even if doing so maximizes its short-run profitability (or minimizes its losses, as the case may be). The Keller wine is a case in point: I don't know what Keller's cost structure looks like, but I seriously doubt they are <i>making </i>money by selling a $44 Pinot for well under $19 (remember, Costco has a margin in there too, of that we can be certain). More likely, they <i>lose less</i>, which is a perfectly rational thing to do, but hardly a sustainable business model. It is at least possible, therefore, that I will contribute to the demise of the local wine industry by consuming its wines exclusively through Costco. (General equilibrium analysis can get very complicated: One could argue that the failure of an otherwise unsustainable business leads to a more overall economic efficiency in the long-run, in which employment, consumption, and tax receipts could all actually be higher in the absence of the business than they were in its presence.)</li>
<li>You could argue that one should "shop locally" in order to "support" the local economy, which is all fine and dandy, but starts to get awfully close to subsidization, if not outright charity. While I've got no axe to grind with charity, it's not at all clear what that should have to do with my consumption decision: If I want to subsidize a winery, I don't need to overpay for their wine, I should just write them a check and save everyone the trouble. And if you don't think that makes much sense, then you probably didn't want to subsidize them in the first place. </li>
</ul>For all that, I think the lesson is pretty simple: First and foremost, you should buy the wine you like to drink at the best possible price. If knowing the wine is local confers other, non-pecuniary benefits (e.g., it makes you feel better about yourself), then by all means, buy locally - heck, I <i>like </i>our wines, <i>and</i> purchasing them makes me feel good. Similarly, if tasting rooms have value to you - as they do for me - then, again, buy some wine directly from the winery. If you can only afford to drink local wines from Costco, don't sweat it - you may be doing more for the local economy than you think. Above all, don't kid yourself: The wine aisle at Costo is neither good, nor bad, it simply <i>is</i>, and where and how you spend your wine dollars is nobody else's business but yours.Rorschachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00042642692322503431noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2985840284424372837.post-32448348313193408662010-09-15T11:54:00.000-07:002010-09-15T12:02:01.348-07:00We're Moving!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqW0Frp3TF8UQO4e3qCcQQgtX_ohpCmhUxlmNqSrtIW37C-xJzi4w7aHnQcZJUhQXqY6yNeF0FnjzQATi7oCJeEagsfjHCnqGxgROf5OawOLtT1tTvMJUi3TDOmndV4AG6wa5TUgArh28/s1600/uc_sign19.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqW0Frp3TF8UQO4e3qCcQQgtX_ohpCmhUxlmNqSrtIW37C-xJzi4w7aHnQcZJUhQXqY6yNeF0FnjzQATi7oCJeEagsfjHCnqGxgROf5OawOLtT1tTvMJUi3TDOmndV4AG6wa5TUgArh28/s320/uc_sign19.gif" /></a></div><br />
Dear friends, family, fans, and followers:<br />
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The Proximal Kitchen blog is in the process of migrating to its <a href="http://proximal.blogs.pressdemocrat.com/">new home at the Press Democrat</a>.<br />
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I am going to try to keep the original site populated but will inevitably fall behind, particularly during the transition period. <br />
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Also, although new material will be going up all the time, you may notice some or even all of my old posts reappear in slightly modified versions on the new site, until the new site is fully populated with my old archived stuff.<br />
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Thanks again for your support, and come check out our new home!<br />
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- RorschachRorschachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00042642692322503431noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2985840284424372837.post-6616297078190685982010-09-11T14:33:00.000-07:002010-09-11T18:13:01.159-07:00Alexander Valley Chardonnay Calls BS on ABC (Part 1 of 2)<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0-r2iR0bl7XqmEZfMDGDEofy0zrYif5EbS3tSFL8Trkl7xfsdkMSh1xMKGi_5UQAi68QBsUBUc4tTiXmacBXtriVU5PN7OsqamkOiVce33R-8iZdRzoIqYIp4kKEMJN990GJcj59b_Vo/s1600/AVexit2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="184" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0-r2iR0bl7XqmEZfMDGDEofy0zrYif5EbS3tSFL8Trkl7xfsdkMSh1xMKGi_5UQAi68QBsUBUc4tTiXmacBXtriVU5PN7OsqamkOiVce33R-8iZdRzoIqYIp4kKEMJN990GJcj59b_Vo/s320/AVexit2.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Preparing to enter AV Chard Country from the 101 North</td></tr>
</tbody></table>Google "ABC Anything But Chardonnay" and you'll get something on the order of 19,000 hits in the first few tenths of a second. The oldest reference I could be bothered to find dates to 1995 in a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/30/garden/wine-talk-465895.html">column by Frank Prial for the NY Times</a>, but as recently as 2008, someone actually took the time to write a <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1584796618/sr=8-1/qid=1206422202/ref=olp_product_details?ie=UTF8&me=&qid=1206422202&sr=8-1&seller=">book</a> with the same dated and misguided tag line, so we know that wine writers, at least, have had the ABC bug up their collective keester for the better part of 15 years now. A cursory review of the literature, such as it is, will tell you that the ABC crowd (or "movement", as they are wont to call themselves, if they're feeling more plucky and self-important than usual) represents a backlash against the hegemony of that ubiquitous style of California Chardonnay that assaults the palate in a blitzkrieg of sweet butter, vanilla, and sodden oak.<br />
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The ABCers have a valid argument, to a point: Too many California Chardonnays taste too much alike, lacking both individuality and varietal character. <a href="http://johnonwine.com/2010/01/01/the-era-of-abc-anything-but-chardonnay-is-well-over/">I have read</a>, but cannot confirm, a plausible hypothesis that the tsunami of monolithic and uniform Chards washing over the marketplace some years ago was the industry's natural reaction to Kendall-Jackson selling of hundreds of thousands (millions?) of cases of wine in the 80s and 90s that were made in that particular style. Whatever the roots of its family tree, this style - the oenological equivalent of Marshmallow Fluff - reaches its dubious apogee in <a href="http://www.rombauer.com/index.cfm?method=storeproducts.showList&productcategoryid=84dc4abf-e46b-0ec4-30c3-0a577e867ed6">Rombauer's eponymous bottling</a>, which I used to care for, truth be told, but - both to its winemaker's credit and ultimate failing - now strikes me as inscrutably cloaked in wood and stupefyingly uniform, regardless of the vintage, with an inescapable impression of chewing on a handful of buttered-popcorn Jelly Bellys while licking an oak tree. Maybe that's harsh, and a bit unfair to the Rombauers (whom, unlike downmarket Marshmallow Wines that spend the tender days of their vinous youth literally soaking in a bath of oak chips, at least produce a product of quality), but one thing the ABC folks got right is that too many Chards taste indistinguishably alike in a not-very-Chardonnay sort of way, and where's the fun in that?.<br />
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What they got wrong, however, is that Chardonnay is somehow ill-suited to oak barrels and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malolactic_fermentation">malolactic fermentation</a>, and that Americans (or anybody else, for that matter) would stop drinking Chardonnay: In the first instance, not only do the undisputed heavyweight champions of the Chardonnay world - counting amongst their ranks the who's-your-daddy of all Chardonnays and possibly all dry white wines, <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/subjects/w/wines/burgundy_white/index.html"><i>Le Montrachet</i></a>; some of the world's finest Champagnes (any <i><a href="http://www.gayot.com/wine/top10prestige-cuvee-champagnes/main.html">Tete de Cuvee</a></i> designated <i>blanc de blanc</i>, including such luminaries as Salon, Taittinger, and Krug's mythical <a href="http://www.forbes.com/2005/12/13/cx_np_1214featslide.html">Clos de Mesnil</a>); and New World "cult" offerings (such as those from John Kongsgaard and Helen Turley) make extensive use of new oak and ML fermentation; and as to the second claim, it's just plain false. To wit, <a href="http://www.wineinstitute.org/resources/winefactsheets/article98">Americans guzzle 5-10% more California Chardonnay each year than the one previous</a>, and have done so since that very same NYT article appeared in 1995. <br />
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So what gives? A winemaker friend of mine once told me, "Americans talk dry, but drink sweet". He was talking about the oaky, extracted, blue-black ink wells of Cabernet Sauvignon that continue to define most of our neighboring Napa Valley, but I think the song remains the same further west as well, here in the Land of Chard: We, the American palate, like to fill our glasses with big, rich, succulent, gobs of toasty, creamy Chardonnay unctuousness. Decry it all you want, but the sales statistics don't lie, and I, for one, am proud to hold my hand up as one of the many whom they represent, provided the wines in question reflect their varietal character and a retain a sense of balance between fruit and wood, richness and structure, winemaker and vine because, at the end of the day, these are flirty, sexy, flattering wines, and a well-made, sexpot of a Chard is the sort of wine that will get you lucky. <br />
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I may live in the Russian River Valley - indisputably, home court to any number of world-class Chardonnay winemakers - but I'm here to tell you that, if well-made, sexpot Chards are your thing, then you need to get your Chard-guzzling booty over to the Alexander Valley, and <i>stat</i>. You won't find nearly the selection (the simple math of fewer wineries making less wine), you'll drive a few extra miles (it's a sparsely populated region), but for quality, value, and, especially, stylistic consistency, nobody is producing better hooch than the cellar rats of the Alexander Valley.<br />
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If you can picture RRV Chardonnays as the archetypal beauty queens of today's cinema (think Nicole Kidman or Michelle Pfeiffer), and Sonoma Coast as the edgy up-and-comers (say, Emma Watson or Kristen Stewart) of tomorrow's, then AV Chards would have to be the voluptuous <a href="http://www.bombshells.com/gallery/index.php">blonde bombshells of the classic silver screen</a>, all Mae West, Marylin Monroe, and Betty Davis, with their graceful curves, inimitable class, and breathy sex appeal. What I find so special about these wines is that, much like these actresses, they each maintain a fierce individuality, one might even say <i>attitude</i>, while at the same time sharing an unmistakable common thread, a sense of place or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terroir"><i>terroir</i></a> that even the most die-hard ABCer would begrudgingly respect, that sets them apart from their more westerly cousins. <br />
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All of which lines me up for The World's Best Unpaid Job: I'm going to spend a few days next week soaking up the postcard-perfect scenery of the Alexander Valley, bar-hopping the tasting rooms of 128 (yes, I'll spit), and talking to the men and women that grow these special wines. Check back in for Part 2, coming soon to a theater near you.Rorschachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00042642692322503431noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2985840284424372837.post-16934449198239532942010-09-08T11:48:00.000-07:002010-09-09T07:54:20.896-07:00Just Three: Tomatoes, Chilis, and Parsley<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhicX4CXs1xF29yXTkZR_o0LHFMRBsQVbBVej-2_hBbFKP1JoWDjKuRnLUrYmTau6w5nIZw0-pspjaw99qYLPOd8iI_rQEcyTLa0nsorSc0Vxnlv7B_13qZJ8JaLEb7aU70_KaIMDqLSXk/s1600/tomatovinaigrette2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhicX4CXs1xF29yXTkZR_o0LHFMRBsQVbBVej-2_hBbFKP1JoWDjKuRnLUrYmTau6w5nIZw0-pspjaw99qYLPOd8iI_rQEcyTLa0nsorSc0Vxnlv7B_13qZJ8JaLEb7aU70_KaIMDqLSXk/s320/tomatovinaigrette2.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tomatoes, dressed with tomatoes, and not much else</td></tr>
</tbody></table>If you've spent any time at all with me, you already know I talk too much, so today's project is to keep it <i>tight</i>. Tight lips, tight keys, tight dish. Put up or shut up. Make it count. Insert cliche here, but make sure it all nets down to a tight little post.<br />
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As I've already <a href="http://proximalkitchen.blogspot.com/2010/08/putting-down-roots.html">confessed</a>, I'm a pretty lousy gardener, but - as with most things in life - luck trumps skill, and Lady Luck planted a big, wet snog on my tomatoes this year. Seriously, to judge by my Green Zebras, she might even have used some tongue. If you're lucky enough to live here in the 707, you already understand that <a href="http://proximalkitchen.blogspot.com/2010/08/what-would-mae-west-say-tomato.html">tomato season can acquire near-mystical qualities</a>, spoken about in the same hushed tones normally reserved for yield, brix, and how badly hosed the wine industry may or may not be in the latest rags, so I take this bit of fortune seriously: What can I do to flatter all this sexy fruit?<br />
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Yesterday's project: Construct a complete tomato dish that even my kids would eat, using only three ingredients, all of which we grew. To hand: Tomatoes (Lemon Boys, not technically an heirloom, with their lower acidity and mildly tangy sweetness; and the aforementioned Green Zebras, their distinctive, racy zing a great match to the Lemons), chili peppers (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serrano_pepper">Serranos</a>, a great go-to chili for heat and flavor, and particularly good raw), and a bed full of herbs (a whole Simon-Garfunkle reunion of parsley, sage, rosemary, and culinary thyme, alongside basil, lavender, and chives), from which - basis the chili - I could have plucked basil, but thought the flat-leaf parsley a bit more interesting and marginally less obvious pairing. The clever if likely unoriginal (296,000 Google hits in 0.21 seconds) insight: A vinaigrette, described (as far as I know) by none other than Thomas Keller as "the perfect sauce", consists of nothing but acid, oil, and seasoning. So, why not use tomatoes <i>as</i> the acid, for a tomato vinaigrette? (A truly excellent discussion of vinaigrettes, citing all my favorite cook-book sources and getting it right, can be found <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2010/may/13/making-perfect-vinaigrette">here</a>.)<br />
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<u>Tomato Salad with Green Zebra Vinaigrette and a Fresh Parsley and Chili Garnish</u><br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYTMhyphenhyphen1-ILoFgbfiEE0ZwWXd68C9V59sA5oaFBYgwk2WWyv0ipwSwbfJIq4hIRSE-5QtUNXHtMqIyS9z_6DWMUyi-rmJFAm2CibBPImmphixEMskbwhcl8Wd-SJx6L4L6mywIhD0_2Hjw/s1600/tomatovinaigrette1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYTMhyphenhyphen1-ILoFgbfiEE0ZwWXd68C9V59sA5oaFBYgwk2WWyv0ipwSwbfJIq4hIRSE-5QtUNXHtMqIyS9z_6DWMUyi-rmJFAm2CibBPImmphixEMskbwhcl8Wd-SJx6L4L6mywIhD0_2Hjw/s320/tomatovinaigrette1.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The same tomato-tomato salad, but fast-plating version</td></tr>
</tbody></table><ol><li><i>Concasse </i>a few Green Zebra tomatoes, maybe 1/2 to 1 tomato per salad (click the <a href="http://www.foodista.com/">Foodista </a>widget below for an explanation of the proper <i>concasse</i> technique) and, while slightly annoying, can be done in bulk, stored, and used later in any number of preparations). Seed, rib, and finely mince a fresh Serrano (or other red, say Arbol) chili pepper. Pick a handful of small leaves off the parsley.</li>
<a href="http://www.foodista.com/recipe/FFXBMT3V/tomato-concasse" style="-moz-border-radius: 2px 2px 2px 2px; background-color: #c36c6d; border: 5px solid rgb(196, 79, 80); color: white; display: block; font-family: arial,helvetica,clean,sans-serif; font-size: 13px; overflow: hidden; padding: 4px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0pt; width: 200px;"> <img src="http://cf.foodista.com/static/images/widget_logo.png" style="border: medium none; float: right; height: 25px; margin: 0pt; padding: 0pt; width: 70px;" />Tomato Concasse <img src="http://dyn.foodista.com/content/embed/z1.png?foodista_widget_FFXBMT3V_RDZ6C322" style="display: none;" /> </a>
<li>Push the tomatoes <i>concasse </i>through sieve or ricer or whatever to get a smooth texture and ensure that all the seeds have been removed (tomato seeds tend to add an unpleasantly bitter flavor and odd texture to smooth sauces) into a small mixing bowl. Season with a dash of white wine vinegar, finely milled salt and fresh white pepper (you don't want black flecks in it).</li>
<li>Whisk olive oil into the tomato base, in roughly equal proportions (a typical vinaigrette requires a 3:1 ratio of oil to acid, which would be fine here as well, but I prefer to let the tomato remain center stage, and its textural weight seemed to hold the oil just fine in this ratio), and adjust seasoning as required.</li>
<li>Spoon the dressing to cover the bottom of shallow pasta bowls.</li>
<li>Cut the Lemon Boys, remaining Green Zebras, and/or whatever other tomatoes you have to hand (Tangerines, Cherokee Purples, and Early Girls would all look and taste phenomenal; you can't go wrong, just try to balance the zesty acidity and color of the greens with sweeter, and yellow-red colored, cousins) into roughly uniform medium-dice. </li>
<li>Sprinkle a little of the minced chili on the sauce and judiciously place the tomato cubes (skin-side up or not, depending on their look) on the sauce, adding a leaf of parsley to the top of a few of the not-green cubes. </li>
</ol>As a speedier alternative, simply give the parsley and the whole tomatoes a rough chop, toss the tomatoes with the sauce, and then sprinkle the chili and parsley over the top.Rorschachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00042642692322503431noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2985840284424372837.post-25243551048160445922010-09-07T15:31:00.000-07:002010-09-08T08:27:59.210-07:00Just Three: Polenta, Eggs, Mushrooms<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrQH2bemRXC2Uu1k-FHN-PgpT3u8tRIr99-QLeCA34IlFtcDS2_ONnhf76bW_FbvHnjYJ_ueAKUe-_fZ-mSFfLcumxOphbN67PaYLOMhPH1bFmJ-tGWGPFKnXCZrfVQTQyKLghBPNJlio/s1600/eggspolentamushroomscloseup3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrQH2bemRXC2Uu1k-FHN-PgpT3u8tRIr99-QLeCA34IlFtcDS2_ONnhf76bW_FbvHnjYJ_ueAKUe-_fZ-mSFfLcumxOphbN67PaYLOMhPH1bFmJ-tGWGPFKnXCZrfVQTQyKLghBPNJlio/s320/eggspolentamushroomscloseup3.jpg" /></a></div>Which came first, the bottle or the plate? Chicken/egg, TV/commercial, food/wine, show-me-yours/I'll-show-you-mine. In our house, such questions carry weight, a seriousness you might consider more properly reserved for electrocardiograms, or matters of national security. The thing of it is, in wine country, at least in the fractional hectare of the 707 area code delineated by my family's split-rail fence line, the debate over the hierarchical structure of food vis-a-vis wine matters, not least because you'll be neither fed nor drunk until we've settled the matter. And I seriously doubt that I'm alone in building menus around bottles at least as often as choosing wines to match food. <br />
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Context, perhaps, is warranted: My wife is on what I can like to call a <i>Chard bender</i>, and the wine racks where we keep our whites look a bit like the maples of her youth (she's a transplanted Right Coaster) come the first snows of November: You know they <i>were</i> full, you can quite clearly remember seeing them shot through with color and promise (although you can't quite place the date), but all that stands in front of you today is dry wood and the lonely spaces between. This is, to be clear, an issue of frequency, not of quantity, because my wife doesn't really drink all that much. However, and here again I count my blessings, she is happy enough to drink small quantities frequently, thereby encouraging both my regular raids on the family cellar and my predilection for pigging, but also - when the Chard bender is in full effect - leading to Saharan absences of the one white varietal that will acceptably whet her cute little whistle.<br />
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Result: Me, along with my youngest daughter, the inimitable Miss M, on a late afternoon restocking mission. I wanted to go to Alexander Valley where, we think - heretically, to most of my Russian River Valley neighbors, given its warmer climes and historical affinity for Cabernet - some of the very finest Chardonnays in the New World are produced (if you're skeptical, check out <a href="http://www.stuhlmullervineyards.com/index.php">Stuhlmuller Vineyards</a> and <a href="http://www.ryew.com/">Robert Young Estate Winery</a> first, and then we'll talk). Unfortunately, poor little M was not feeling well, so rather than strap her into the back of the car and drag her around the next valley over, we played <i>turistas </i>and tooled around the Healdsburg plaza, her with an organic chocolate frozen yogurt from <a href="http://www.yelp.com/biz/snowbunny-yogurt-healdsburg">Snow Bunny</a> (outlandishly overpriced by the calorie, but healthy and delicious all the same), and me with a visit to one of my favorite makers of local Chardonnay, <a href="https://selbywinery.com/">Ms Susie Selby of Selby Winery</a>. Another very accomplished winemaker (<a href="http://www.whiteoakwinery.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=60&Itemid=107">Bill Parker, currently making outstanding wines for White Oak</a>, and previously for Matanzas Creek and BR Cohn) once told me that Chardonnay, more than any other varietal, reflects the influence and intentions of the winemaker, and I've repeatedly found this to be the case: Just as a great vineyard will display its <i>terroir</i> in the wine that it births, so too will a fine Chardonnay reflect the hand of its maker. This turns out to be great news for Chard drinkers, because it means that if you can find a winemaker whose style of Chardonnay agrees with you, you can pretty much stop worrying about the rest.<br />
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My wife and I share an affinity for the style of Chardonnay, somewhat unfashionable these days, defined by a dense core of fruit framed in toasty oak and featuring flavors like sweet butter, toasted coconut, and <i>creme brulee</i>; we're much less keen on either the overtly tropical, almost sweet, or the steely and austere styles that have become so much the rage in our Valley. To get back on point, Selby makes just the sort of Chard we love, from local fruit (one of her vineyards is across the street from our kids' elementary school, an endearing factoid for me), using classical techniques and French oak barrels. Plus, we think it's kind of cool to support female winemakers: Not only do women, in my opinion, tend to have finer palates than men but, like professional chefs, their presence in big-time wine making keeps growing, despite the inversely stacked odds of an industry historically dominated by men. The other really cool thing about Selby is that the White House (not just Obama's - this has been going on for quite some time, which says great things about the ability of good wine to transcend poor politics) regularly serves her Reserve Chardonnay at big-wig state dinners, and the menus are all over the tasting room walls. This provides a serious tactical edge to the home cook who, like me, having already fallen in love with the wine, now needs to build a menu around it. Engage your mental palate and taste the wine while you peruse the menus, and I will assure you of this one thing: You <i>will</i> want buy the wine, and you will almost surely try to cook some scallops or corn to match.<br />
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I adore scallops, but my wife inexplicably doesn't (and she loves seafood, which strikes me as peculiar, almost like saying that you love Italian cheeses but not mozzarella, but maybe I'm biased and it's more like saying you red wines but not Merlot or something), and in any case I still had <a href="http://proximalkitchen.blogspot.com/2010/09/just-three-cornmeal-ham-cheese.html">leftover polenta from a recent edition of Just Three</a>, so I figured, why press my luck, just go with the corn. We also share a love of breakfast-for-dinner, and the rest, as they say, is history. This is a <i>really</i> easy recipe and a good way to leverage leftovers and stuff you've probably got lying about; the only downside is the number of pans, but I think you could quite easily do the polenta first, then the mushrooms, hold them both, and finish with the eggs, all in one pan).<br />
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<u>Crispy Polenta with Sunnyside-Up Eggs and a Creamy Mushroom Sauce</u><br />
<ol><li>Get your pans hot. Then, rewind time and spread the leftover polenta from the other night's dinner onto a lightly oiled sheet tray and stick it in the fridge (yes, I actually did this the other night - it's second nature now, I almost always double the polenta recipe specifically so I can do this, the possibilities are endless and the effort minimal.) Carefully turn the sheet of polenta onto a cutting board and cut in triangles (or squares, or use a cookie cutter for fun shapes - the kids will love it). </li>
<li>Cook the polenta, the tray-side down, in a little butter or olive oil, over medium-low heat, until it forms a crunchy, golden-brown crust. This can take some time.</li>
<li>While the polenta is cooking, wash and thinly slice a bunch of mushrooms. I used criminis (I like the vaguely truffle-like quality of criminis with the corn and eggs, but anything, or a mix, would be great). Sautee with a little butter over medium heat until the 'shrooms have lost most of their volume, their water is gone, and they start to color up. Season liberally with salt and pepper. If this wasn't "Just Three" and I still didn't need to use eggs, I'd say toss a teaspoon or so of fresh thyme leaves in with them - thyme and mushrooms do amazing things for one another.</li>
<li>While all this is going on - it sounds like a lot happening at the same time, but it is all trivially easy - pour the eggs, two by two, into small nonstick pans along with a little butter and a few drops of water. Cover with foil and cook over very low heat.</li>
<li>When the polenta is done and the eggs are nearly so, deglaze the mushrooms with a few tablespoons of heavy cream (again, if I had another ingredient, I'd use a little white wine first, cook it off, and then add the cream). As soon as the cream bubbles and begins to thicken, plate and serve.</li>
</ol>Rorschachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00042642692322503431noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2985840284424372837.post-23828368506759909012010-09-06T11:04:00.000-07:002010-09-08T08:28:39.645-07:00Mac-n-Cheese, Cheese, and More Cheese (v3.0)<div style="text-align: right;"></div><div style="text-align: right;"></div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_7UITXF9Ks1bw7XvNFOAz7FZ0mpplD48TMCIBw3gNUyZeqsSOunxLy38oLLwMbu5ngRhuDlXh4XFGHFHe4uh5-3JdqFkRnYAjPCQkzxdIB2AHIWf50zmjgnqtskTLmchyphenhyphenhYE971Wuyh0/s1600/macncheesemimappgruyamer2tilt.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_7UITXF9Ks1bw7XvNFOAz7FZ0mpplD48TMCIBw3gNUyZeqsSOunxLy38oLLwMbu5ngRhuDlXh4XFGHFHe4uh5-3JdqFkRnYAjPCQkzxdIB2AHIWf50zmjgnqtskTLmchyphenhyphenhYE971Wuyh0/s320/macncheesemimappgruyamer2tilt.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mac-n-Cheese, Cheese, Cheese and Cheese</td></tr>
</tbody></table>I think all cooks, from the diligent amateur to the dedicated professional, have at least a little bit of OCD in their bones. Consider the working cook: Why else would someone repeatedly construct the same thing, in precisely the same manner, under extreme and unrelenting pressure, with the specific aim, not only of doing it <i>well</i>, but of doing it <i>the same way</i>, every time that knife meets board or a pan clangs down on a flat-top? Not that that's a bad thing. To the contrary, that trendy new place you've been gagging to try, the innumerable souls saved by much-needed hangover brunches, and every great sushi bar all depend on it. Can you imagine playing Russian roulette with the crust at your favorite pizza joint, the temperature of your steak, or the hardness of your egg yolk? Take away the obsessive cooks, and we'd all be eating Swanson's Hungry Man or instant ramen with a plastic spork.<br />
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All of which is a roundabout way of rationalizing my third installment of <a href="http://proximalkitchen.blogspot.com/2010/08/why-im-trying-to-make-perfect-mac-n.html">Why I'm Trying To Make Perfect Mac-n-Cheese</a>. My wife will testify to the mountains of grated cheese, the errors like some pagan fortune engraved in burnt milk at the bottom of a sauce pot, the sweet, nutty smell of flour frying in butter that filled the house as I worked my way through <a href="http://proximalkitchen.blogspot.com/2010/08/mac-n-cheese-v10.html">v1.0</a> (a white version, based on Italian cheeses), on into <a href="http://proximalkitchen.blogspot.com/2010/08/too-much-of-good-thing-mac-n-cheese-v20.html">v2.0</a> (a cheddar-like orange version, with breadcrumb topping), and - finally - to where I am today, Mac-n-Cheese, Cheese, and More Cheese (v3.0), wherein I learned that, unlike Crisco or tickles, if some is good, then more is better.<br />
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I can't claim that <i>my</i> perfect mac-n-cheese will also be <i>yours</i>; we may, and likely do, have different ideas about the Platonic ideal of this American classic, as heterogeneous as it is ubiquitous. I can, however, state definitively that I'll not try to make a better one, because <i>this </i>bad boy - all gooey, creamy, sharp, melted, cheesy goodness, with layers of richly textured pasta, glowing with a natural orange that Kraft's chemical engineers would envy, and infused with a distinctly adult intensity and depth of flavor - is, as far as my palate is concerned, <i>the shit. </i>My kitchen, my blog, my palate - get on board, or get your own! Seriously, I think it's the benchmark that matters in a project such as this: You need to be able to see and taste clearly, to define without ambiguity or waffling, precisely what it is that you're trying to do. If your ideal is warm in the middle, or you're certain that chocolate pudding means milk chocolate, then I probably can't help you, but that shouldn't stop you from trying to perfect it anyway. You just need to accept that, like my ideal my mac-n-cheese, the elusive version behind the shadows on the cave of <i>your </i>palate remains intensely personal.<br />
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All that being said, if you love mac-n-cheese (and if you don't, well, you may want to get "help"), I can't recommend strongly enough that give this one a shot. It's a bit of a pain in the ass, particularly for so pedestrian a dish, and one for which a far more modest effort can still produce acceptable results. But this isn't about <i>acceptable</i>, it's about <i>perfect</i>, and that means there are a few more corners not to cut, longer blocks to traverse. (In truth, you could cook <i>almost</i> the same dish with a lot less hassle by skipping the <i>onion brulee</i>, the milk-poaching of the pasta, and the layering of the noodles. It will still kick ass, but inevitably you'll be left wondering whether merely near-perfection was worth the time saved. Still and all, better to skip those steps than never to have made this dish.)<br />
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<u>Mac-n-Cheese, Cheese, and More Cheese (v3.0)</u><br />
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<div style="text-align: right;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdFerbyylS1V3f5Lx-W4q26gULJUcv7ho4G_wS2E0v6_z9WahTPws_o1Y4hrJsWhg8T0zjflB60LGglWopQ0afe5pBwP6oRX9go-CFUZqPedS1iWf9cSjNPbRRI6vziAW_gQ50JPbG3Kg/s1600/oinionbrulee.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="160" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdFerbyylS1V3f5Lx-W4q26gULJUcv7ho4G_wS2E0v6_z9WahTPws_o1Y4hrJsWhg8T0zjflB60LGglWopQ0afe5pBwP6oRX9go-CFUZqPedS1iWf9cSjNPbRRI6vziAW_gQ50JPbG3Kg/s200/oinionbrulee.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A typical <i>Onion Brulee</i> in pan</td></tr>
</tbody></table><ol><li>Bring a gallon of salted whole milk to a gentle simmer (don't scorch it - if you do, throw it out and start over, it will be irredeemable and will ruin the entire dish) in a pasta pot and prep a half a sweet (Vidalia, Maui, Walla Walla) onion and make an <i>onion brulee</i>: Stud the onion with a few cloves, put a single bay leaf in a knife-slit in the top, and grill it in a plan until the onion begins to soften and the underside turns a deep caramel color. Preheat a 350F oven.</li>
<li>Grate 1+1/3 pound of aged Mimolette and 1/3 pound each of cave-aged Gruyere, Appenzeller, and yellow American cheeses (grate the American if off a block, but slices are fine as-is) cheeses and, once the <i>onion</i> is done, add it to 6 cups of whole milk and warm it up (it doesn't need to boil but it does need to be hot, or the sauce will get lumpy). While the milk and <i>onion</i> are warming, cook 1/2 cup of flour into 3/4 cup of butter for a light blonde <i>roux</i> in a sauce pot. </li>
<li>Add two pounds (it might be 1kg, depending on the brand) of high quality boxed <i>penne </i>(preferably not <i>regate</i>), three whole, peeled cloves of garlic, and some white pepper corns to the pasta pot and poach the pasta until just shy of <i>al dente</i>: If it's a good Italian brand, you'll want to take it off about 1 minute before the lower end of their suggested cooking range (it should be just barely too undercooked to eat, as this will allow it to finish cooking in the sauce). Stir the pasta from time to time to prevent the noodles from sticking to each other (the milk makes this a little trickier than normal).</li>
<li>While the pasta is cooking, make the cheese sauce; Whisk the hot, <i>onion</i>-infused milk into the <i>roux</i>, in order to make a thick <i>bechamel</i>. If it lumps a little, don't stress, we'll strain it out later. Bring up to a gentle boil, back off the heat, and season with salt, white pepper, and nutmeg (something like a and 1/8 teaspoon each nutmeg and pepper, bu you'll need to adjust to taste - it should be neither salty nor peppery nor bland, with just the slightest background note of baking spice from the nutmeg). Whisk in 1 teaspoon each of mustard powder and sweet (not hot) paprika (the paprika should have a rich, dark red color; if it looks dark brown and dirty, it's either too old or of poor quality). Grind a small pinch of saffron threads between your fingers and stir in. In addition to flavor, the mustard-paprika-saffron seasoning is the secret to a great color. Finally, once the base for the sauce has been finished, stir in 1lb of the Mimollette and all of the Gruyere, Appenzeller, and American cheeses, working in large handfuls. When the sauce is uniformly blended and smooth, check the seasoning, and turn off the heat. If it has any lumps, or hard ends of cheese, or anything else that is not uniformly smooth, run it through a chinois or fine-mesh strainer.</li>
<li>Either during or after making the sauce, drain the pasta when finished, making sure to remove the garlic cloves and peppercorns. Shake the noodles gently so that they don't clump together. </li>
<li>In order to assemble the casserole, lightly butter a 9x13 baking dish, and alternate single layers of pasta and <span id="goog_1619385933"></span><span id="goog_1619385934"></span>sauce, and beginning and ending with a layer of sauce. When laying down the pasta, line up the little pencils end to end in neat, parallel rows, alternating direction by 90 degrees - check out the picture. (Yes, it's a pain, but it looks really cool and, more importantly, allows the final product to set up and to be cut in neat shapes for service.)<span id="goog_1619385947"></span><span id="goog_1619385948"></span> After the last row of pasta, add an extra thick layer of sauce, and then top it with the final 1/3lb of the grated Mimolette. (Note, based on your exact baking dish, pasta quantity, evaporation while cooking, and personal touch, you may or may not use all of the pasta, sauce or both - it's not a big deal, just make sure that each layer of pasta is covered and that you begin and end with sauce, the rest will take care of itself.)</li>
<li>Bake at 350F for 20-25 minutes, until bubbling up the sides. Remove, let rest for 10 minutes, return to the oven and broil the top until golden brown and bubbly - this will ensure that you can serve neat, "set" pieces, that they food is piping hot, and a cheesy crust on top, all important features, as long as we're going for "perfect".</li>
</ol><br />
<span id="goog_1619385930"></span><span id="goog_1619385931"></span><span id="goog_1619385936"></span><span id="goog_1619385937"></span><br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhECATPRo0LytqQ88NE8bXl_NC46CW8QIZ8UMyn1QSPO0HQcJodqAq0ws2IkFZuHH6pu1UFmjWBkPlXuBvPzz2AaZgSMlyPw_8MkdG3SW9J7fy_ycpE2Ll0cmvRLmfTGSEjJ3Y4sAKGzuA/s1600/macncheesemimappgruyamerlayering.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhECATPRo0LytqQ88NE8bXl_NC46CW8QIZ8UMyn1QSPO0HQcJodqAq0ws2IkFZuHH6pu1UFmjWBkPlXuBvPzz2AaZgSMlyPw_8MkdG3SW9J7fy_ycpE2Ll0cmvRLmfTGSEjJ3Y4sAKGzuA/s320/macncheesemimappgruyamerlayering.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Layering pasta and cheese in rows</td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>Rorschachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00042642692322503431noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2985840284424372837.post-27147868176933180002010-09-03T12:20:00.000-07:002010-09-03T20:16:01.207-07:00Just Three (Leftovers): Rib Eye, Mac-n-Cheese, Onion Marmalade<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYzvdkCrvrrccKkrUG2wVblJcggd2-MeGKaHovGr9rm09PtEIfsDfIC1ILYjLbZBmj-phdjiyMyhdkUDFZWoR0WMfwcg6M8dzA33f_vLHFhffPn8i4PYq0ANo0lVo1VE_pkFBU0IGtWss/s1600/ribeyeinpan2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="246" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYzvdkCrvrrccKkrUG2wVblJcggd2-MeGKaHovGr9rm09PtEIfsDfIC1ILYjLbZBmj-phdjiyMyhdkUDFZWoR0WMfwcg6M8dzA33f_vLHFhffPn8i4PYq0ANo0lVo1VE_pkFBU0IGtWss/s320/ribeyeinpan2.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Stove-top Rib Eye, basted in Butter and Fresh Herbs</td></tr>
</tbody></table>A clear violation of my self-imposed rules of "Just Three", using leftover like this, but the principal advantage of blogging, and self-imposed rules generally, lies rooted in the simple fact that one may ultimately do whatever one wishes. Of course, your readers may kvetch, but that's part of the game.<br />
<br />
I could drape my transgression with pearls of wisdom and wit, or I could lean on my earlier arguments (e.g., <a href="http://proximalkitchen.blogspot.com/2010/07/leftovers-wild-salmon-two-ways.html">here</a>, and <a href="http://proximalkitchen.blogspot.com/2010/08/mac-n-cheese-v10.html">here</a>) that leftovers play a fundamental role in the kitchen - the avoidance of waste, the efficiency of leveraging time already invested, and, above all, the enforced discipline of making something new out of something old - but the simple truth is that I cooked for company last Saturday night and one of the invited couples was a late-day no-show. Ergo, come Sunday, I had a spare steak (a rib eye from <a href="http://www.paintedhillsnaturalbeef.com/animal_ethics.php">Painted Hills</a>, who really do things right, by the way) and several cubic meters of seriously high-density Mac-n-Cheese (recipe forthcoming from the thread started <a href="http://proximalkitchen.blogspot.com/2010/08/why-im-trying-to-make-perfect-mac-n.html">here</a>). I was also pretty sure I had some more of my <a href="http://proximalkitchen.blogspot.com/2010/08/cooking-with-friends-sous-vides-pork.html">spiced onion marmalade</a> somewhere on an upper deck, and a plan came together, a plan with the elusive trifecta of zero prep, zero shopping, and a single pan.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><u>Stove-top Rib Eye with Spiced Onions and Mac-n-Cheese</u><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNPPAgcQxrzXa8Fd_QZDYNcmBweNRrXZ_rlK_mWC23Y6pJQwu9jSMIwdJj4sGFHjkLCx934hgEvqR2vXZs0VzbPUpzPx0HFdi1ofZenziNB2SNCo_nWg9tPFVpz0orCIVpKSAPlHKxYHg/s1600/ribeyemaconions2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNPPAgcQxrzXa8Fd_QZDYNcmBweNRrXZ_rlK_mWC23Y6pJQwu9jSMIwdJj4sGFHjkLCx934hgEvqR2vXZs0VzbPUpzPx0HFdi1ofZenziNB2SNCo_nWg9tPFVpz0orCIVpKSAPlHKxYHg/s320/ribeyemaconions2.jpg" /></a></div><ol><li>Get a good rib eye. Make sure it's thick - less than an inch and you'll struggle to get a crust on the outside and keep it rare and juicy on the inside. Try to get one that was grass fed, humanely raised, nicely marbled. Or buy whatever you want, I'm not a zealot about it, but it will taste better, be better for you, and let you sleep easier knowing your cow had a nice life before being brutally slaughtered for your dinner.</li>
<li>Take the mac-n-cheese out of the fridge cold, and cut it into cylinders using a biscuit cutter. Warm them - SLOWLY, or the cheese sauce will break - in the oven. Maybe 250? Or, horror of horros, nuke 'em on low power. Warm the onions (and yes, a microwave is perfectly acceptable for this task, just be sure to stir them afterward).</li>
<li>While the pasta is warming, get a cast iron pan good and hot (the rarer you like your meat, the hotter), and season both sides of the steak liberally with kosher salt and pepper. Put a knob of butter in the pan and add the stead as soon as the butter foams. Toss a few sprigs of rosemary and thyme and a couple cloves of whole, peeled cloves of garlic in the pan while the steak is cooking - this will smell incredibly good, and adds a subtle but impossibly good aroma and background flavor to the meat. Once you turn the steak, baste it repeatedly with the herb-infused butter and fat in the pan. </li>
<li>Do not, not, NOT overcook the steak - it will taste crap, and it's an insult to the animal that died for your pleasure. Also, remember that it will continue to cook as it rests (and it must rest - good discussion <a href="http://www.seriouseats.com/2009/12/how-to-have-juicy-meats-steaks-the-food-lab-the-importance-of-resting-grilling.html">here</a>). Please try to avoid the temptation to cut the damn thing to see what it looks like; use a probe if you must but, if you're going to cook steaks, you need to get over the temperature thing and just go by the feel of it when you press down gently (you can gauge the done-ness of most proteins by comparing how it responds to pressure to the flesh of your thumb muscle, or whatever that muscle is called, as shown <a href="http://www.ehow.com/how_4736390_determine-doneness-steak.html">here</a>, although you'll have to tweak those guidelines to your own hand and musculature).</li>
<li>After the steak has rested, slice thinly and layer on the plate, alongside a mac-n-cheese cylinder and a quenelle of the warmed onion marmalade.</li>
</ol>Rorschachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00042642692322503431noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2985840284424372837.post-89736736536617612462010-09-02T09:22:00.000-07:002010-09-03T12:33:08.124-07:00Just Three: Strawberries, Tomatoes, Balsamic<div style="text-align: right;"></div><br />
<div style="text-align: right;"></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgB7t6rvqFzIkHABxfpkEfyGYP2vUmXZIJ7spaMDe_V3Zbg5ISIE2TObH1KHWNQtEJHQ8zqjD594xJwTJdunD3krFaWYGJ3aXlxgUx3Nttbrqy3jp9GI3coAHOova5AOTgtefzX73Vxnks/s1600/breadpreston.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgB7t6rvqFzIkHABxfpkEfyGYP2vUmXZIJ7spaMDe_V3Zbg5ISIE2TObH1KHWNQtEJHQ8zqjD594xJwTJdunD3krFaWYGJ3aXlxgUx3Nttbrqy3jp9GI3coAHOova5AOTgtefzX73Vxnks/s200/breadpreston.jpg" width="183" /></a></div>Cruising the <a href="http://proximalkitchen.blogspot.com/2010/08/day-at-market.html">Tuesday market</a> with my youngest daughter, under strict orders to return home with the makings of a salad but little other guidance, we walked by <a href="http://drycreekvalleyassociation.com/people/neighbors/56-neighbors/95-preston-of-dry-creek-an-organic-family-farm.html">Lou Preston's</a> stall, and were stopped in our tracks by Lou's strawberries. As a rule, I'm not a big fan of strawberries, finding them a poster child for the over-engineered style of supermarket fruit: Big, firm, nice to look at, but overly dry and hard to the tooth and utterly devoid of taste. On Tuesday, however, with the oblique angle of the late day sun glancing off their perfectly ripe, almost impossibly red skins, Lou's teeming baskets of rubescent little berries were like traffic lights stopping our egress down the aisle. <br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtu0YrwodX8WVqESn_0jX8osE08mQ-pedOfosS8RVvFj2KyNrO2RlL4MezyFya-9xWOTx5RDn6ei9d76m9sOKUVKl6Bcf_V2NGGKuYNcYk1qlcBDo-NaRY3DncRCv2UqR0olamq0D7tgY/s1600/pepperspreston.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="141" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtu0YrwodX8WVqESn_0jX8osE08mQ-pedOfosS8RVvFj2KyNrO2RlL4MezyFya-9xWOTx5RDn6ei9d76m9sOKUVKl6Bcf_V2NGGKuYNcYk1qlcBDo-NaRY3DncRCv2UqR0olamq0D7tgY/s200/pepperspreston.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>Farmer's markets are all about quality over quantity, and the rest of the stall was a case study: Small, compact, efficient, and I wanted to eat everything in it, the rainbow-in-a-box of plump tomatoes, the short and squat sweet peppers and the long, lean, twisting, and vaguely sinister fiery ones, the progressive shading of green into crimson and yellow tracking the late-season maturation of the fruit. On the corner of the table, a wicker basket full of crusty sourdough loaves, labeled "country white", but, to my taste, more closely resembling a dense, chewy version of the classic <a href="http://www.classicfrenchfood.com/traditional-french-bread.html">French <i>miches</i></a>, with its distinctive tang of rye flour. (Etymological specificity notwithstanding, I took a loaf home. It barely lasted through breakfast the next day.)<br />
<br />
<i> </i><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6MkzcUtTEd2t6lY7i6lvUPdrqsaZ9rh9uUPmfzpr3M64m_Ph7WjDxm7VS1YTWhNZtdDR6Dp97nQqeNR3s11x-O1LQ_XQxkTijkHI74z8KTzwgu6519BpcCXcsQ9ATP7BMd_ETvoP5iRs/s1600/tomatoespreston.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6MkzcUtTEd2t6lY7i6lvUPdrqsaZ9rh9uUPmfzpr3M64m_Ph7WjDxm7VS1YTWhNZtdDR6Dp97nQqeNR3s11x-O1LQ_XQxkTijkHI74z8KTzwgu6519BpcCXcsQ9ATP7BMd_ETvoP5iRs/s200/tomatoespreston.jpg" width="150" /></a></div>Anyway, back to dinner, and our latest installment of "Just Three". Armed with strawberries of such high sugar content, I wanted something with a bit of bite to provide ballast to the dish: <a href="http://www.edinformatics.com/math_science/science_of_cooking/heirloom_tomatoes.htm">Green Zebra heirlooom tomatoes</a> (the little guys in the upper left corner of the picture), with higher acidity and more tartness than most of their heirloom cousins, would balance the flavor profile and a splash of color at the same time. Now, strawberries and tomatoes may or may not sound odd to you - they are both <a href="http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/page/199">fruits</a>, after all - but the what makes the match particularly interesting is that the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry">tomato <i>is</i> a berry, while the strawberry is <i>not</i></a>: A botanist will insist that most of what we instinctively classify as berries (with the notable exception of the blueberry, which is a true berry) actually comprises a peripherally related cousin-class called <i>aggregate fruit</i> (many little fruits grouped together), while tomatoes (and bananas, which always surprises me)with their fruit, comprised of flesh from a single ovary, are true <i>berries. </i>Lest you think that's the end of the story, the strawberry is, in fact, neither berry nor aggregate fruit, but is instead an <i>accessory fruit</i>, in which the edible portion has not been produced from the ovary (apparently, the little bunches of seeds are the true "fruit" of the strawberry, but I don't really get that). <br />
<a name='more'></a>The rest, as they say, is history, because I was now short one, and only one, ingredient, and there is no more classic accompaniment to either strawberries or tomatoes than balsamic vinegar. You could make a reasonable case that balsamic vinegars, ubiquitous throughout professional and home kitchens alike, have developed into something of a crutch, and I'd likely agree. Certainly, when encountered in excess (and in increasingly suspect applications, such as a heavy-handed drizzle on the cloyingly sweet, sticky pizza I <span id="goog_848887382"></span><span id="goog_848887383"></span>recently had the misfortune to order), their oaky sweetness has a tendency to become monolithic and wearing on the palate. Still and all, for my money, you'll not often go wrong if you drizzle balsamic vinegar on your strawberries or tomatoes (I would almost always add olive oil and certainly salt and pepper to the latter, although not to the former, and not in combination, as in this "salad").<br />
<br />
I served this as a dessert<u></u>, to rave reviews from a 10- and an 8-year old with particularly finicky, and not wholly adventurous tastes, so I'm thinking it's pretty solid.<br />
<br />
<br />
<u>Strawberry-Tomato 'Salad' with Balsamic Syrup</u><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjt32mLlrpW_VMtbmtXwneqFkLmWrV29URx0TrxuuOyMhTiom1ZVnhKNOqPlC4BH7g-rbx9Fa7TeWH_Kx3KP_Ea8AfIIs99GSJwK57QW6dI1ArdkpRlDHVrjAXIEi27VbhmEe4JseDVHJo/s1600/3strawtombalsamic.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjt32mLlrpW_VMtbmtXwneqFkLmWrV29URx0TrxuuOyMhTiom1ZVnhKNOqPlC4BH7g-rbx9Fa7TeWH_Kx3KP_Ea8AfIIs99GSJwK57QW6dI1ArdkpRlDHVrjAXIEi27VbhmEe4JseDVHJo/s320/3strawtombalsamic.jpg" /></a></div><ol><li>Pour a quarter cup (this is for about 4 plates) of good balsamic vinegar into a small sauce pan and reduce to a syrupy consistency. Watch the heat carefully - balsamic vinegar scorches easily, and even before then, with all the sugar, it will turn into caramel, which you can't work with (if it starts to foam, start over, because by the time it cools, it'll be a hard, sticky mess).</li>
<li>While the vinegar is reducing, wash the fruit and cut the stems off the strawberries perpendicular to their long axis (i.e., so that they will stand straight up when plated on the cut side). Cut the Green Zebra into uniform small or medium dice (I cut them small and plated them in piles, but it turned out they were a little tricky to eat; I think I'd cut them larger next time, and keep the fingers out of the sticky vinegar drizzle).</li>
<li>Once the vinegar syrup starts to cool and thicken, drizzle or splatter the plate and arrange the fruit on top (do it in that order, it'll look cleaner).</li>
</ol><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>Rorschachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00042642692322503431noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2985840284424372837.post-21920239072191444242010-09-01T13:04:00.000-07:002010-09-01T22:38:41.183-07:00Just Three: Cornmeal, Ham, & Cheese.<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgNxF7kJ3wFFZylIdSba7chrRas-dxC5qK2BMxiZKQe2hn6NOTh2-38vZ7wJ3wc9DefKkqR9PuB37y8eV21hs8L5ifKrt2fz14Gf553IOJjl7C1bGBIZ5ja5T3IkKNkVHw1NVBs9ttkOE/s1600/3cornmealserranoraclette2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgNxF7kJ3wFFZylIdSba7chrRas-dxC5qK2BMxiZKQe2hn6NOTh2-38vZ7wJ3wc9DefKkqR9PuB37y8eV21hs8L5ifKrt2fz14Gf553IOJjl7C1bGBIZ5ja5T3IkKNkVHw1NVBs9ttkOE/s320/3cornmealserranoraclette2.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Polenta </i>with Crispy Serrano Ham and Melted Raclette</td></tr>
</tbody></table>I'm going to try something new and sort of gimmicky: I'm going to see how many different dishes I can make, <i>using</i> <i>just three ingredients</i>.<br />
<br />
The idea came in response to the frustration of cooking for my kids. Don't get me wrong: I love, <i>love</i>, to cook for, and especially with, my children; I find great joy in bringing children into the kitchen and watching them learn to cook, and I believe strongly that it is every parent's responsibility to help their littles learn what real food tastes like, what tastes good to them, what doesn't, and why. Nevertheless, when the homework hasn't been finished, the bath is getting cold, and our routine is less off-track than it is careening-off-the-rails into some life-imitating-art version of Wiley Coyote piloting a locomotive into a swan dive off the rim of the Grand Canyon, I will readily confess that I find preparing three separate versions of a dish, just to accommodate this week's litany of idiosyncratic likes and dislikes, exceedingly trying.<br />
<br />
I recently found myself staring down the barrel of yet another Monday night meal (Mondays are always the hardest, for me, maybe it's the hangover from cooking fun stuff straight from the market all weekend; or perhaps the kids are grumpy with the first homework assignments of the week; and of course, there are lunches to be made; the TV is crap; all in all, I suppose it's mainly that the whole family has lived in some semblance of Party Mode since we all got let out on Friday) and figured, why not put the question back to them? I did a quick inventory of the cupboards and laid out the simplest (for me) and most likely to succeed (for them) options: The ubiquitous pasta-with-butter; some leftover mac-n-cheese; a breakfast burrito; <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polenta">polenta</a></i>; or, barring one of the above, go get yourself a bowl and a spoon and have some cold cereal, because I'm done. The <i>polenta </i>took it by several lengths, leaving me with the sort of problem I like best: How should I transform a simple ingredient into a main-course dish with a minimum of fuss?<br />
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Another quick scouring of lower and forgotten drawers, a few experimental unveilings of mysterious shapes shrouded in plastic wrap or foil, and a quick mental palate-check succeeded in coughing up a few slices of still-good <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serrano_ham">Serrano ham</a> and a hunk of really stinky (in a good way - the unique ability of fine French cheeses to make "gym-locker aroma" a compliment), washed-rind <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raclette">Raclette</a>.Without really thinking too much about it, certainly without any conscious attempt to use only three ingredients, a dish came together:<br />
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<u>Polenta with Serrano Crisps and Raclette</u><br />
<ol><li>Prepare a basic <i>polenta</i>, as described on the package or <a href="http://www.post-gazette.com/food/20000622polenta1a.asp">here</a>. I've heard that you can make acceptable <i>polenta</i> with a "no-stir" method, and <a href="http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Creamy-Polenta-107758">Marcella Hazan agrees</a>, but I've not tried it; I do know that if you do it the right way, it takes a little work, but it's not hard, and the result is outstanding.</li>
<li>While the <i>polenta</i> is cooking, separate several slices of the ham (Serrano is particularly good, but you could use a Prosciutto or any number of thinly sliced charcuterie and get much the same effect), tear it into pieces, and saute it over low to medium-low heat, either in a nonstick skillet or a lightly oiled fry pan. Flip and toss the meat from time to time, breaking it up with the edge of a spatula, until it is lightly crispy (it will scorch easily, so be careful with heat). Reserve on a paper towel. </li>
<li>Grate the Raclette (again, it needn't be Raclette, but try to use something with a pungent flavor and good melting qualities) across a microplane or the smaller side of a box grater.</li>
<li>When it's finished, mound the <i>polenta</i> in the middle of a pasta bowl, cover with a handful of the cheese while the cereal is still piping hot, and top with the ham chips.</li>
</ol>Rorschachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00042642692322503431noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2985840284424372837.post-29973989190615754382010-09-01T09:06:00.000-07:002010-09-21T10:41:42.181-07:00Piles of Possibility / Farming on Freeways<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirHTyFJXF4iTqf2aMhdq83t1T9bSfABRtkk7ngvRIL53DRDIhy70sR9QyqHrxRYsWHBKGJmPvY7MvhtsrMmNtXQ4aZXyLgPpae919m2Jrnhycvy3WOhm8goPBlOwSN79MUl51HXPYu99o/s1600/flowersfreeway.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEirHTyFJXF4iTqf2aMhdq83t1T9bSfABRtkk7ngvRIL53DRDIhy70sR9QyqHrxRYsWHBKGJmPvY7MvhtsrMmNtXQ4aZXyLgPpae919m2Jrnhycvy3WOhm8goPBlOwSN79MUl51HXPYu99o/s320/flowersfreeway.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Farmers Zoey & Jay (photo credit www.exploratorium.edu)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>Walking by a cracked and decrepit freeway on-ramp - reclaimed from the morning commute and relegated to the urban wasteland by the Loma Prieta earthquake - two San Franciscans, thinking more like old-school farmers than new-age city dwellers, look at the cracked blacktop bleeding with weeds and saw, incredibly, an <i>orchard</i>. And the topsoil, so manifestly absent in the windswept concrete col, in which these imagined trees would sink their roots? Heaps of rotting compost, strap-compressed cardboard, leftovers from nearby markets, and landscaper clippings - organic detritus, otherwise sentenced to serve out a capital term as landfill, from across the City.<br />
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The best bit of the slide show, the whole point really, is the lens through which the farmers see this hard, raw wasteland: Where you and I see trash and blight, they see "piles of possibility". Making soil out garbage. Growing fruit trees on a freeway. Why? Because these farmers believe that everyone - even those of us that, by choice or happenstance, live in high-density, high-land-cost forests of concrete, glass, and steel - should be able to grow at least some of the food that they eat, and that vacant space, by the miraculous fact of its mere presence, offers an invitation (an obligation?) to do so. <br />
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The punchline, o at least rwhat resonates most deeply about the project for me, is its preordained impermanence: This orchard can only ever be transitory, because, as we all know, the Bay Area's great armies of cars march through their morning commute with all the inevitability of a glacial ice floe. The trees will be uprooted; the soil scraped away; the pavement once again returned to its urban birthright as. This is not speculation: The City <i>will</i> take the land back - there is no question about this - and yet (or perhaps because) the farmers persist, and until such time as the rubber of our tires replace the soles of their work boots, people will, of all things, <i>eat</i> off that land. I don't know about you, but I think that is just <i>uber</i> cool. <br />
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<a href="http://www.exploratorium.edu/media/index.php?cmd=browse&project=99&program=00001137&type=slideshow">The slide show</a> will eat up about 5 minutes out of your life - which, truth be told, at about 4 minutes, 30 seconds longer than I typically allot to any given byte of digital cellulose, is quite a bit. But it will repay your investment every time you pass a dusty vacant lot, or wonder what to do with your terrace, your windowsill, or that weedy scrap of long-forgotten dirt in the far left corner of your yard.Rorschachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00042642692322503431noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2985840284424372837.post-79945219323504485622010-08-31T12:48:00.000-07:002010-08-31T12:55:08.701-07:00The Intransitivity of Taste: Pickles, Cheese, and Chocolate<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEKNv_dcW0jR-WmUGP6NS8aHNOVoE1RPH8keVMnbfLfUpZfNL2KpCXLFET3GEaoP4O9B_g6kRk4ibZpEsYnqy5QaTS4GQziJtGekBIOsUHWClELNqFgoFV4vggsEy17az9sU1y97C0LAs/s1600/3chocracletpickle.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEKNv_dcW0jR-WmUGP6NS8aHNOVoE1RPH8keVMnbfLfUpZfNL2KpCXLFET3GEaoP4O9B_g6kRk4ibZpEsYnqy5QaTS4GQziJtGekBIOsUHWClELNqFgoFV4vggsEy17az9sU1y97C0LAs/s320/3chocracletpickle.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Which of these does not belong?</td></tr>
</tbody></table>Pickles, cheese, and chocolate: Three ingredients, three possible pair-wise combinations, two really good and interesting tastes, and one impossibly disgusting mouthful of gag reflex (no prizes for guessing which). If I like chocolate with cheese, and I like cheese with pickles, why don't I like chocolate with pickles? I mean, other than the painfully obvious - in point of fact, it tastes even worse than it sounds - why the apparent lack of transitivity? <br />
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As an amateur cook and a professional economist, I find this apparent logical inconsistency of the human palate fascinating. If you ever signed up for an economics course - or, like my family, found yourself living with an economist - one of the very first things you learned was how economists think consumers make choices, what it means to assume that people are rational, and the behavioral implications of that basic assumption. If you study economics for long enough, you'll find that these first-semester models form the bedrock for pretty much everything that follows, from the ubiquitous demand curve to sophisticated general equilibrium models of the macroeconomy. Grouped under the catch-all heading of "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_choice">choice theory</a>", these models are simple, elegant, and powerful. However, just like the Brooklyn Bridge, Newtonian physics, and the portfolios of residential mortgage backed securities held by banks, they tend to fracture, and even topple over in spectacular fashion, if you tinker too much with the underlying assumptions. <br />
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Newton needed his <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_laws_of_motion">Three Laws of Motion</a>: Bodies at rest tend to stay at rest; for every application of force, there is an equal and opposite reaction; and of course, the simple little formula that put man on the moon, Force = Mass X Acceleration. That bridges generally remain standing and astronauts usually return to earth constitutes a powerful argument in favor of Sir Isaac. Less so, the big banks: To nearly everyone's (although, importantly, not absolutely everyone's) surprise, home prices actually <i>could</i> go down as well as up, the Upper West Side and Upper East Side of Manhattan, despite the fact that New Yorkers think you need a visa to travel between them, were <i>not</i>, in fact, two uncorrelated real estate markets separated by a big lawn, and - this being one of the Big Lessons of the past two years - if you violate these two basic assumptions, then a multi-trillion-dollar edifice will collapse on your collective heads like the crescendo of a James Cameron movie.<br />
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Economists, for their part, require "reflexivity" (if good A and good B are identical, I will be indifferent between them), "monotonicity" (if I like A, then I prefer more A to less), "completeness" (faced with a choice of what to consume, I am capable of making a decision), and - the centerpiece of today's conundrum - "transitivity" (if I like A more than B, and B more than C, then I also like A more than C). Transitivity, at least, seems not to apply to the sensation of taste. But why?<br />
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I recently <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/17/flavour-thesaurus-cook-niki-segnit">read a review</a> of a fascinating book called <i>The Flavor Thesaurus</i>, by Niki Segnit (at least I hope it fascinates me, as I'm planning on purchasing the thing new and in hardcover). Her basic them, as I understand it, is to break down as many foods as possible into 99 distinct components (grassy; fruity; earthy; zesty...), and then to consider why some of the 4,851 possible combinations thereof taste good, while some - like chocolate and pickles - make you, and I now know this from bitter, personal experience, wish you were sucking on a day-old sock, or worse. I believe, but cannot yet confirm, that Ms Segnit discusses the chemistry as well as the gustatory dimensions of the problem, thereby providing a molecular basis for food pairings and, in the process, suggesting new and interesting things to try together, with a more scientific roadmap than my usual home cook's idea closet, filled as it is with ideas spun from too much wine and half-remembered meals prepared by chefs of "cutting edge" status, or some such. <br />
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What I can't say, at least note yet, is whether the intransitivity of taste will ultimately figure prominently in the theoretical foundations of classical microeconomic theory, or whether we could have avoided the mortgage meltdown simply by acknowledging that pickles and chocolate really suck when you put them in your mouth at the same time. Sociologists and psychologists (and - increasingly - behavioral economists as well) will debate the appropriateness of the "rationality" assumption, and - increasingly - it seems to me that they have the data on their side. Certainly, I've come across legions of irrational fools in my life (I even live next door to a couple of them right now), and that is only speaking from direct, personal experience; I've not bothered to so much as footnote the broader historical record of human folly, much less the consummate evil of the modern terrorist. <br />
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I can say, however, that I would like to know a bit more about how our sense of taste works, and why I nearly vomited cheese, chocolate and pickles all over the butcher's block. I'm hoping the book is really cool and I get to do a bit more of this.<br />
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<u>Pickles, Cheese, and Chocolate</u><br />
<ol><li>Secure a few chunks of bitter chocolate (I used 85% cacao), dark, no milk - dairy is a different cup of tea entirely.</li>
<li>Choose a stinky, wash-rind cheese (I used French Raclette).</li>
<li>Slice up a good dill pickle (I used Alexander Valley Gourmet's Spicy Bread and Butter pickles - the sweet, hot, vinegar-y tastes made the results literally pop on your tongue).</li>
<li>First try the two combinations with cheese (doesn't matter which, but cleanse your palate in between). The stinky cheese and pickle is just awesome - the acidic, sugary crunch of the pickle really contrasts nicely with the musty, creamy cheese. Now try the pickle-and-chocolate. Sounds weird, but really it isn't (even somewhat "conventional" - <a href="http://megan-deliciousdishings.blogspot.com/2010/04/wine-cheese-and-chocolate.html">here</a> is a blog that describes a whole "tasting" of cheese, chocolate, and wine at a well respected restaurant); the bitter, earthy chocolate fits nicely with barnyard impression from the cheese. Finally, steel yourself, and take a bite of the pickle and chocolate together. WTF!</li>
</ol>Rorschachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00042642692322503431noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2985840284424372837.post-63095186608715329022010-08-30T13:49:00.000-07:002010-08-30T19:03:13.373-07:00What Would Mae West Say? A Tomato Manifesto.<div style="text-align: right;"></div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIOb4mjmI5NxTArZLbKpPnkH1ANtMaolMBhxTAp2_T8TYgC63LGApo_DllHm0vgMUQ8Ihzchc0U8SInEKUi7MAGfnW-uizzn4lUUnzblli9eG6MzaGqVbaWm-FfSlkgs-PpFL6V75c_eM/s1600/tomatoesfirstofseasononcranbread.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIOb4mjmI5NxTArZLbKpPnkH1ANtMaolMBhxTAp2_T8TYgC63LGApo_DllHm0vgMUQ8Ihzchc0U8SInEKUi7MAGfnW-uizzn4lUUnzblli9eG6MzaGqVbaWm-FfSlkgs-PpFL6V75c_eM/s400/tomatoesfirstofseasononcranbread.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Lemon Boys and Pesto, on Cranberry-Semolina Sourdough</td></tr>
</tbody></table>I thought it was <a href="http://allaboutmae.com/quotes">Mae West</a> who said something about good sex being great, and bad sex being pretty good too, but I can't find the attribution, so maybe I'm wrong; apparently of similar mind, I did come across one Jimmy Williams (and again, I'm honestly not sure which, but my money is on the old Red Sox manager), who <a href="http://thinkexist.com/search/searchquotation.asp?search=sex&q=author%3A%22Jimmy+Williams%22">said</a>, “Sex is like money, golf and beer - even when it's bad, it's good.” Whatever the case, I'm going to argue that sex is a really lousy analogy for tomatoes. <br />
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Because the thing about tomatoes is this: There is perfect, there is nearly perfect, and there is wholly unacceptable. "Middle ground" is a term better reserved for debating the relative merits of cooking beef to rare vs. medium-rare specifications, or figuring out how to get your tween daughter to clean her room. No, with tomatoes, the territory between "good" and "bad" is more like a DMZ: It's right there in front of you, it's clear and well-defined, and if you spend too much time inside it, you're likely to end up shot. Or, if we're talking about the kitchen, with a mouthful of mealy, watery, flavorless red mush of only the most casual, and likely offensive, relation to what your palate had greedily anticipated. Come to think, maybe that's the better analogy: If your favorite, wisened grandparent, full of love, spark, and pithy bits of folksy wisdom, were a succulent, ripe <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heirloom_tomato">heirloom cultivar</a>, then the drab supermarket tomato, mass-farmed for the ketchup-and-shitty-pasta-sauce market, picked sufficiently close to granite-like hardness that it will endure hundreds (if not thousands) of miles of open roads, piled en masse atop eighteen-wheeler bin trucks, without suffering so much as a blemish, is a bit like that woebegone uncle or black sheep cousin in a Chevy Chase family vacation movie (or, perhaps, from your own Thanksgiving table). You know that if you actually went out and ran a DNA test, it would confirm that he does in fact share genetic code with the rest of the family, but no empirical evidence, physical nor behavioral, exists to support that conclusion. <br />
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To bite into a fine tomato- one grown from an old school cultivar with a funny name like Purple Cherokee, Early Girl, or Green Zebra, and then picked from the vine within a day or two of true physiological ripeness - dressed with nothing but a pinch of good salt, is to hear a the voice of a properly tuned instrument: It attacks your palate, demanding attention, with notes of acid, sweet, and salty in varying degrees of dominance; it is simultaneously firm and contained (as your tooth pierces the skin), and supple and explosive (as the flesh comes apart in your mouth). Maybe there is a bit of Mae West in the tomato after all, so long as it's a <i>good</i> tomato? Never forget that the <a href="http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/page/199">tomato is a fruit</a>, and, really, it ought to taste a lot more like a fruit than a vegetable. But the <i>not-good</i> tomato, that is another story entirely, it is the festering swamp to the crystalline mountain lake, the yellow jacket to the honey bee, the mani/pedi to the ingrown nail. The skin is either as taught as a drum and nondifferentiable from its own flesh, or slack and loose as a failed botox, a wrinkled skin slipping across the mealy flesh underneath; the flesh will be hard and grainy if it has only just reached been unloaded from the truck; or it may be soft and farinaceous, if it's been on left on the shelf for too long. I'm not sure which version is worse, but it doesn't really matter, because they all suck. And I haven't even talked about the flavor: The most optimistic impression on the palate will be that of an unadulterated <i>lack</i> of flavor, because whatever flavors it does possess - bitter, green and vegetal - will, like the ne'er-do-well cousin come home for the holidays, inexorably offend.<br />
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Fortunately, there is an easy answer: <i>Don't Eat Out-of-Season Tomatoes. </i>We are, here and now and forever, adding this to the Proximal Kitchen's semi-official manifesto of eating. Or, to paraphrase the child-labor advocates over at Nike, Just Don't Do It. If it were up to me, I'd have everyone follow the approach of the crew over at the <a href="http://www.healdsburgbarandgrill.com/">Healdsburg Bar and Grill</a> who, during the many long months of Tomato Winter, will only put a tomato on your burgers if you <i>force</i> them to do it, over the chef's printed admonition on the menu, and at a grossly inflated charge (presumably intended to compensate the kitchen for the forced abrogation of the cook's Hippocratic oath only to serve you food that they actually believe will taste good as much as it is to disincent your poor decision). <br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSJCVRPWM3bHHrwos3klUo_CugS2eovpU53or7NKSF6jlksmZglWRG4ctnQGWqqdp4Wpdlo8Vw2U5LY3iaJrrZCpfmJXUR1Bt4NGFi-SToF0t3Q4P0EEUf7w3aKGD9uJx7cahph8hzrkM/s1600/tomatoessodarock2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiSJCVRPWM3bHHrwos3klUo_CugS2eovpU53or7NKSF6jlksmZglWRG4ctnQGWqqdp4Wpdlo8Vw2U5LY3iaJrrZCpfmJXUR1Bt4NGFi-SToF0t3Q4P0EEUf7w3aKGD9uJx7cahph8hzrkM/s320/tomatoessodarock2.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Saturday's Tomato Matinee, couretesy of Soda Rock Farms</td></tr>
</tbody></table>The good news, at this particularly proximal moment, is that our local tomato season, has truly sprung. Not exactly on-time, however. More like, Finally. As in, Finally, it's about [expletive] time, because I live where some of the finest tomatoes in the known universe grow, and it's just plain wrong to make me wait until late August to get my fix. To live in Sonoma County is hardly to subsist amongst the forced deprivation of an extended tour on a nuclear submarine or offshore oil rig; I could certainly purchase the irredeemable supermarket facsimile year-round, and I've seen a few, peripherally local, heirlooms, since the last real vintage in the fall of 2009; but, as I've already tried to explain with a vigor equal to its , I won't - I can't - subject my family's taste buds to such effrontery, and neither should you to yours. Finally, however, the farmer's market is literally teeming with tomatoes, at the stalls of the dedicated specialists (Soda Rock Farms), as well those of the many other outstanding growers I'm lucky enough to shop with (Wyeth Acres, Preston Vineyards, and Early Bird Farm, to name but a few). I'm even getting regular contributions from my own garden, and I really suck at <a href="http://proximalkitchen.blogspot.com/2010/08/putting-down-roots.html">growing tomatoes</a>. <br />
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I'll cook all sorts of things with tomatoes over the next couple of months, and you'll hear about some, if not most, of it here. Once in a while, I may get a little cutesy and try to dress them up a bit. For years I've been tempted, but failed to muster the courage, to mount an assault on <a href="http://www.alain-passard.com/">Alain Passard's</a> legendary <i><span id="search" style="visibility: visible;">tomate farcie confit aux douze saveurs</span></i> at L'Arpege. Still and all, I will typically treat a tomato much the way I'd treat a peach, erring on the side of simplicity over complexity, mainly in an effort simply not to screw up a good thing. However, unlike a peach - the peach being one of those rare foods that seems almost impossible to improve either by fiddling with or adorning it - the tomato is a remarkably versatile foil, tolerating heat to cold, playing condiment to centerpiece, presentable from highly processed to nearly naked, served as an accompanying element in a dish of anything from seafood to steak to cheese. The first tomatoes of the season, however, deserve a special respect, a period of honest assessment and contemplation, and this - and here, I'm sure, Mae is with me - seems best done naked, or at least nearly so.<br />
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Thus, as we continue eat our way through the first few batches of ripe little gems from our own garden, the dominant themes resonate around salads and sandwiches. The variations are truly limitless, but I really liked the most recent incarnation, as pictured at the top of this post, so here you go:<br />
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<u>Heirloom Tomato Sandwiches on Cranberry-Semolina with Pesto, Olive Oil, and Salt</u><br />
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You could use virtually any tomatoes here, and - ideally - I think you'd serve a few different ones, both for variety of color and flavor. A red-toned beauty (Purple Cherokee, Pink Lady, or Early Girl), a yellow (Tangerine or Lemon Boy), and a green (Green Zebra) would provide a gorgeous array of color as well as a distinctive breadth of flavors, sweetness, and acidity. Similarly with the bread, you could use anything, really, but a lightly toasted, crusty sourdough works particularly well. I hadn't planned it ahead of time, but this one - Cranberry-Semolina from the <a href="http://www.yelp.com/biz/full-circle-baking-co-penngrove">Full Circle Bakery in Penngrove</a> - really worked well, with the chewy, sweet-tart bite of the cranberries adding just the right balance against the acidic tomatoes and the licorice notes in the pesto.<br />
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<ol><li>Toast some slices of the bread, preferably a crusty sourdough with a baked-in dried fruit (cranberries, apricots... nuts in the bread, for some reason, sound unpleasant to me, although I can't say why, because nuts and fruits go well together, there are already nuts in pesto... hmmmm...)</li>
<li>Top each slice of bread with a thick slice of tomato - ideally, a few different color - and then top each slice of tomato with a small <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quenelle">quenelle</a> of pesto. (Why bother with a quenelle? Because it takes almost zero effort and the uniform shape will look nice against the slightly irregular backdrop of the heirloom tomato and crusty bread, and because it will show off the effort you put into your pesto.)</li>
<li>Sprinkle with fleur de sel and drizzle the plate with olive oil, preferably from Dry Creek, such as that from <a href="http://www.prestonvineyards.com/a2b.html">Preston </a>or the pricier, but unimpeachable (qualitatively speaking), <a href="http://www.davero.com/">Da Vero</a>. </li>
</ol><u>Classic Pesto (from M Hazan)</u><br />
I've talked at length about <i>pesto</i> and its Mediterranean cousin, <i>pistou</i> <a href="http://proximalkitchen.blogspot.com/search/label/Pesto">here</a>, and I like all sorts of variations, and many have a particular place (with cheese; without cheese; for fish; for pasta <i>Genovese</i>), but nothing - and I've made and consumed many hundreds in my life - is ever quite the equal of the classic Italian variety, and no version seems quite so perfect as the simple food-processor method of M Hazan's, described accurately, along with some pretty decent comments and observations, <a href="http://www.notderbypie.com/marcella-hazans-pesto/">here</a>, in case you don't have the book (<i>Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking</i>, which, by the way, is one of my few "must have" cookbooks, certainly a Top 10, maybe a Top 5).<br />
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Hazan's is so easy, and so perfect, that I can not possibly add anything without also diluting it. However, I will emphasize that, if you're going to make <i>pesto</i>, in addition to following Ms Hazan <i>to the letter</i>, you must heed a few basic rules (these are, of course, common to all cooking, but the simplicity and intensity of <i>pesto</i> offers even less slack than usual):<br />
<ul><li>Use good basil. You really ought to grow your own - it's cheap and easy, even for a challenged gardener like me. Make sure it's the Genovese varietal: There are many basils, but you only want to make classic <i>pesto</i> with the particularly aromatic Genovese basil and its distinctive note of licorice.</li>
<li>Use good olive oil (it needn't be your best - <a href="http://proximalkitchen.blogspot.com/2010/07/in-defense-of-costco.html">Costco's</a> organic extra virgin is just fine, in fact), something with leaning more toward the grassy style, rather than a really buttery one.</li>
<li>Use only freshly grated Parmigiano Reggiano and Pecorino Romano cheeses. Seriously, don't buy the waxy, shrink-wrapped, Swiss-cheese-tasting crap from the market, don't buy it pre-grated in tubs from Trader Joe's, and never, not <i>ever</i>, shall you pour grated cheese from a shiny green can.</li>
<li>Be careful about your garlic: First, try to find a grower that offers more than one kind, and that can describe the difference. Some are just way too hot and spicy. Rose de Lautrec is my go-to garlic if I can only have one, but obviously whatever the Italians classically use for <i>pesto</i> would be fine. Just be careful, because they are not, not at <i>all</i>, all the same thing. This extends to measurements: What, precisely, is a "clove" of garlic? The same bulb could have cloves varying in size by a factor of 4; and different types of garlic could have their heat vary by a factor of 4; so you could have a recipe calling for "2 cloves" and it could mean 2 or 32, from one extreme to the other. There is no way to deal with this uncertainty except to learn to do it by taste, to learn the garlic you use, to learn how much for <i>your pesto.</i></li>
<li>Don't forget to season it, but don't risk over-salting until all the cheeses are incorporated, as Romano in particular is very salty.<i> </i> </li>
</ul><br />
The only other thingRorschachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00042642692322503431noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2985840284424372837.post-73981487091639075442010-08-25T11:35:00.000-07:002010-08-25T11:35:23.712-07:00Meat, Braise, Love II: Chocolate & Lamb. Seriously.<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgFpRJpOESaOIyS8AnX8GyFkzPr0Znzaxmt9eGKVKbbPY1VKY-cDU94PpnJZykonReY59PPlVUZFxJFLXeNzOXQGRnHbZaCnxzs_CsK1VyIkKmh-LF6Mww9OLhq2yo5D1GOJ5hNwQRFkM/s1600/LambChocRose2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="390" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgFpRJpOESaOIyS8AnX8GyFkzPr0Znzaxmt9eGKVKbbPY1VKY-cDU94PpnJZykonReY59PPlVUZFxJFLXeNzOXQGRnHbZaCnxzs_CsK1VyIkKmh-LF6Mww9OLhq2yo5D1GOJ5hNwQRFkM/s400/LambChocRose2.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Braised lamb w/ bitter chocolate-rosemary sauce, preserved Meyer lemons, and minty <i>gremolata</i></span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
Sometimes, despite all the planning, the search through my personal Library-of-Congress of cookbooks, the endless page views on <a href="http://www.epicurious.com/">epicurious.com</a>, and all that frigging prep work, I'll find out the hard way that it's what I <i>don't </i>have, what I <i>didn't</i> plan for, what I <i>can't</i> do, that ultimately determines my success or failure in the kitchen. Maybe it's a forgotten ingredient, poor time management, or, most frequently, just a simple mistake, something I've done with ease dozens of times, but that, in the presence of friends/kids/wives/copious wine/whatever, suddenly becomes daunting. <br />
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Typically, the requisite discipline will be imposed by some highly technical flaw, like spacing out on the kitchen timer when I'm roasting nuts (great tip I read somewhere but can't place: always put a nut on your cutting board as a reminder whenever you're roasting nuts) - a clear indication if ever there was one of too much fun, too much wine, and too little focus on the task at hand. Typically, but not always; sometimes, discipline is imposed because, for a lack of a better turn of phrase, stuff happens.<br />
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To wit, I was recently tooling around the market in anticipation of a visit by our dear friends, the C's, and the dinner I had volunteered for. I wanted most of the cooking to be done in advance, the weather was still unseasonably cool, I had a great bottle of Syrah floating around, and I had just been chatting with Deborah Owen of the Owen Family Farm about their humane and healthy ranching - in short, we were having braised lamb. In keeping with our MO here in the Proximal Kitchen, my intent was to keep it as simple as possible, to highlight the quality of the ingredients in a simple, well executed dish, so I decided on a classic preparation: Shoulder of lamb, in a braise of Syrah wine with lots of garlic and rosemary from our own garden. The catch? Ms C does not, <i>can not</i>, eat garlic. But of course, I wouldn't find this out until all the marketing was done and the meat was literally searing in the pan, mere minutes before the garlic cloves were destined to meet their flaming cast iron maker.<br />
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The thing about a garlic-and-rosemary scented lamb is this: In the absence of the garlic, something important - depth, spice, aroma - will be missing, and the dish will fall short of its potential. But I had neither time nor resources to reconfigure my dish, other than to look around the kitchen and see what was to readily to hand. I can't say why (if only because I don't know why) but <i>chocolate</i> came to mind. Perhaps it was the first time that I had herb-infused chocolates, easily a decade before such things were <i>de rigeur</i>, from the brilliant <a href="http://www.joel-durand-chocolatier.fr/chocolate-sales-online.html">Joel Durand</a> in St. Remy en Provence (see the letter "R" under the "Alphabet"); or maybe it was the ragu of game with Barolo and bitter chocolate at <a href="http://www.yelp.com/biz/scalini-fedeli-new-york">Scalini Fedeli</a>, with its peripheral echo of my lamb and Syrah, that I still remember from an anniversary dinner with my wife several years ago, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/25/dining/25guid.html">before they lost - correctly, in my opinion, their Michelin star</a>.<br />
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Whatever the case, I dropped the garlic in deference to Ms C, and reworked my recipe around Syrah, Rosemary, and Bitter Chocolate, and set to work on garnishes. I had already planned on using some preserved Meyer lemons from the folks at the <a href="http://www.sharpandnutty.com/">Cheese Shop</a>, and the salty-citrus bite of the lemons only sounded better and better against the chocolatey undertones that were now to be a part of the sauce. The only remaining puzzle at this point was my other garnish, a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gremolata"><i>gremolata</i></a>, which contains a bunch of garlic and is classically paired with <i>Osso Bucco</i>. But again, the forced discipline was also the liberator: Lamb and mint jelly at my grandmother's house... chocolate and mint, in all its myriad and uniformly tasty variations... why not substitute mint for the parsley, drop the garlic, and call it <i>minty gremolata</i>? If you spend enough time mixing ingredients together and tasting the results, you can usually tell when something is going to work, and I just knew this would fly. So there you have it: A new dish, certainly more interesting and arguably just better than what I had planned, all because I couldn't do what I wanted and had to deal with it.<br />
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<u>Braised Shoulder of Lamb with a Bitter Chocolate- Syrah Reduction, Preserved Meyer Lemons, and Minty Gremolata</u><br />
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This dish is considerably more complicated than the vast bulk of what I do; frankly, it is something of a pain in the ass. But I did it, and I'm telling you, it will impress the heck out of your next dinner party.<br />
<ol><li>Start with a 3lb (+/-) shoulder of lamb from a good local rancher (you could use a couple of shanks; I just used the shoulder to do something different, and because I knew I was going to pick the meat for replating anyway). Prepare as for a <a href="http://proximalkitchen.blogspot.com/2010/08/meat-braise-love.html">basic braise</a>, with the following substitutions: (a) Use a Syrah-based wine, something stylistically similar to a Gigondas, with it's leathery, gamey notes; (b) Add a few sprigs of fresh rosemary to the braising liquids; and (c) add a couple of tablespoons of unsweetened chocolate, either melted into some of the cooking liquid or - easier - made into a paste from powdered baking chocolate and water. An untempered bitter chocolate, such as the 100% cacao from local purveyor <a href="http://www.chocovivo.com/flavors/">Choco Vivo</a> would work particularly well, and could simply be crumbled into the braise.</li>
<li>While the meat is cooking, cut the lemons into neat dice and prepare the <i>minty gremolata</i>: Mince up some fresh mint and mix gently with the zest of a lemon (preferably Meyer, to match the other garnish, and for its wonderful and not overly aggressive smell). Note that this can and should ideally be combined close to service, as the citrus will cook the mint.</li>
<li>When the meat is done and while it's resting, strain the liquids and reduce to a syrupy consistency, skimming for grease and impurities. <a href="http://www.webexhibits.org/butter/glossary-ho.html">Mount</a> with a few chunks of cold butter to give it body and shine and adjust the seasoning with finely milled salt and pepper. </li>
<li>In order to plate, pick the meat from the bones and use a ring mold to set it neatly in the center of the plate. If you're feeling particularly motivated, or you already have some <a href="http://proximalkitchen.blogspot.com/2010/08/cooking-with-friends-sous-vides-pork.html">Onion Marmalade</a> (recipe at bottom of that link) sitting around, first heat and then layer the onions thinly at the bottom of the ring mold - it's another step, but this is a very rich, dense dish, and the extra acidity does wonders for it. Finally, arrange some of the lemon dice, drizzle the sauce around the disc of lamb and top the lamb with a spoonful of the <i>gremolata</i>. </li>
</ol><br />
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<div style="text-align: right;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgr94Sd-npuvuE_1HTsWKR6mxx9JmtdDl45pGnXfhvJxkLT28yJRlMe0Czq_vJ7nbA_7L0e16FIcl_5hMAr3J8L0-5RKU1V_zMLrJeVKkEUFrkDrjcV8zIWhJJaddl3j-RquRRW4LyeAZ0/s1600/LambChocRose-new.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a></div><div style="text-align: right;"></div><div style="text-align: right;"></div>Rorschachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00042642692322503431noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2985840284424372837.post-13193500213541567962010-08-23T14:52:00.000-07:002010-08-24T07:56:28.066-07:00Cooking With Friends<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><u>Cold Sandwiches of Pork Loin Sous-Vide, Onion-Cranberry Marmalade, and Pt Reyes Original Blue</u> <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigLN2MTrK7C_FbY-i7d5-tI9lpc1Q0SZGsXMkbWBTuK223120kld6dZv-wPoPizPOmr8gFGwN0TkG8ECuAQkvqxcibwQndyrknEyWDsP44l_KPTKc4GhgsnkDuuLeJQZRhLFnR3VffQ9Y/s1600/porkonionsando2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigLN2MTrK7C_FbY-i7d5-tI9lpc1Q0SZGsXMkbWBTuK223120kld6dZv-wPoPizPOmr8gFGwN0TkG8ECuAQkvqxcibwQndyrknEyWDsP44l_KPTKc4GhgsnkDuuLeJQZRhLFnR3VffQ9Y/s320/porkonionsando2.jpg" /></a></div>Cooking <i>for</i> friends and cooking <i>with</i> friends can both be immensely rewarding, but they require different rules, different ways of thinking about food, different ways of physically traversing the kitchen floor, of juggling burners, pots, and knives, because - no matter how social the event and how much enthusiasm (and aptitude) for minor prep, plating and service the guests show up with - cooking <i>for</i> company remains an inherently solitary undertaking, while cooking <i>with</i> company is as much about social interaction as it is about food. Partly, this is a function of logistics (unless you're talking about a pot luck or whatever, but a pot luck is not <i>cooking</i> with anybody), but not principally. True collaboration, my home turf, with another cook whom, in all likelihood, I've never shared a kitchen, requires humility, compromise, and adaptability - three words that, truth be told, I very nearly had to spell-check, as rarely as they enter my lexicon. I am not, as a rule, much beholden to the way other people things should be done, and I tend to cook that way. Of course, I also drive that way, talk about politics that way, and do math that way, so this is hardly a unique pattern. And, really, it's a reasonably effective pattern, so long as I have room to maneuver and I more or less know what I'm doing; the downside is that the converse - in which I'm boxed in, confused, and resolve turns to obstinance - isn't pretty, but that's a story for another post. <br />
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The thing to remember, if you invite a friend to come over and help you <i>cook</i>, is that it's a good bet that they aren't expecting to show up for the express purpose of prepping your <i>mise </i>or doing your dishes; no, they'll want to contribute, in some way related to the application of heat and knife-force to starch and protein, to the final product. Indeed, they're likely already to have a dish, or at least a central component of one, in mind, if not par-cooked and in-transit. And, of course, they may well fail to appreciate that you <i>know</i> the right way to do something, all of which necessitates a degree of flexibility I generally lack: Seasoning to taste, presentation, and the menu itself all become a product of more than one person's labor. But that needn't be a bad thing, and that <i>is</i> the point of this post: To the contrary, it means less work for me, a chance to check out someone else's chops and maybe even learn something, and - this is the key, really - the opportunity to come up with something, working together, that neither would have come up with alone. Courtesy of my friend B, his love affair with thermal circulators (the technical gastro-toy used to cook <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sous-vide"><i>sous-vide</i></a>), and an escalating afternoon party at our casita, I recently had just such an opportunity, and received the commensurate payoff: A near-perfect little sandwich, constructed on a foundation of B's perfectly<i> </i>prepared <i>homage</i> to swine, accompanied by some of my favorite local goodies from the previous day's famer's market, and all tied together with a recent experiment of my design, an Onion-Cranberry Marmalade that I adapted from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Colicchio">Tom Colicchio</a> and a staple of many years' worth of <a href="http://www.gramercytavern.com/">Gramercy Tavern</a> menus.<br />
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Despite my undying enthusiasm for the popularity of <i>sous-vide</i> cooking, the technique (to say nothing of the required infrastructure) remain outside my culinary bandwidth. My inadequate bandwidth is hardly restricted to gently warmed, tightly monitored water baths - there are all sorts of interesting ways to cook that are either beyond my ken, my natural abilities, or simply strike me as an upside down cost/benefit analysis given my limited resources of time, money, and storage space - but offers up a perfect example of how and why collaboration can work effectively: I simple would not have made this dish (the dish in question being, as I understand it, a pork loin, dressed in bacon fat, and then cooked in the usual <i>sous-vide </i>fashion, cooled, and sliced), and yet it played perfectly off things that I would, and in fact did, cook (grilled cranberry-semolina bread from the <a href="http://www.yelp.com/biz/full-circle-baking-co-penngrove">Full Circle Baking Company</a>, <a href="http://www.pointreyescheese.com/cheese.html">Pt Reyes Original Blue</a>, and a home-made onion-cranberry marmalade, the recipe to which follows). The sweet spiciness of the onions, the salty tang of the cheese, and the melt-in-your-mouth richness of the pork, all contrasting with the hard crust of grilled semolina sourdough, combined to make, I have to say, one of the better sarnies I've had in quite some time.<br />
<br />
So I let B do his thing (he absolutely killed it), let his cooking taking the driver's seat, and played off of that bass line: Add some thin slices of the cranberry-semolina bread to a grill pan for texture and color, layer with medallion-like slices of the pork loin, and topped each medallion with a dollop of the onion marmalade and a small chunk of blue cheese (the cheese and onions can easily overwhelm the delicate pork - a little goes a long way). Garnish with fresh thyme flowers or, as pictured here, lavender blossoms. Damn good finger sandwich.<br />
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And I never would have had it, had I not let someone else screw around in my kitchen.<br />
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<u>Onion-Cranberry Marmalade</u> (Adapted from T Colicchio, "Think Like a Cook")<br />
<ol><li>Heat a large pan over medium-low heat and slice 4 medium onions, preferably Vidalia or Walla Walla. </li>
<li>Put a small amount of neutral fat in the pan - canola, peanut, or similar oil - and add the onions, along with few pinches of salt and a tablespoon of mixed spices (I used roughly equal proportions of cloves, ginger, nutmeg, and white pepper - the key is to incorporate some of those "baking spice" flavors without letting them become overpowering).</li>
<li>Sautee gently until the onions are all soft and begin to give up their water and shrink down in the pan. Do not let them caramelize or develop texture - they must remain soft and translucent. </li>
<li>Add about a half-cup of good balsamic vinegar, a quarter-cup of sugar, and a 1/2-1 cup (depending on what you want to serve it with) of dried cranberries. Turn the heat down to low, and cover the pan (it needn't be air tight, aluminum foil is fine). Continue to cook, checking and stirring occasionally, for at least an hour - probably close to 90 minutes. If the onions begin to dry out, taste them, and more balsamic vinegar or water, depending (they onions should take on a deep reddish brown color and should have a pronounced acidity, balanced by sweet spice).</li>
<li>Adjust the seasonings and cool. This is quite a lot of the stuff, but it should keep for weeks in the fridge.</li>
</ol>Serve cold on pork or turkey sandwiches, in a stinky cheese tart, or warm over steak or game.Rorschachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00042642692322503431noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2985840284424372837.post-6933080846868820062010-08-23T13:09:00.000-07:002010-08-23T13:09:04.380-07:00Palate Fail<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4LpLYfTdF714Rm86R7evXt-tkyQAX1OSUvUUrVrxuY3Yywn9242yzjG0FKwEejm1bwsygCCvTBuwsjNYsvE34P0MoGXCM-YUwfgYmi98tbuoUKtrKYeLZIXPzH_ijBG9FSk8Wu1TyXo0/s1600/coffeebluebottle.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4LpLYfTdF714Rm86R7evXt-tkyQAX1OSUvUUrVrxuY3Yywn9242yzjG0FKwEejm1bwsygCCvTBuwsjNYsvE34P0MoGXCM-YUwfgYmi98tbuoUKtrKYeLZIXPzH_ijBG9FSk8Wu1TyXo0/s320/coffeebluebottle.jpg" /></a></div>I have a pretty good palate, generally speaking. I don't lay claim to the sensory capacities of a professional cook, merely to the ability to perceive, in a broadly objective sense, whether or not a dish <i>tastes right</i> - whether or not it has been properly seasoned, is in or out of balance, consists of flavors that work well or poorly together, that sort of thing. The flip side of training one's palate to taste objectively (OK, fine, "objective taste" may be conceptually oxymoronic, but I'm sticking to my guns on this one - there <i>is</i> such a thing as objective quality with respect to food, and no matter how many shades of subjective gray might litter the middle of the spectrum, the "good" and "bad" at the extremes remain unequivocal) is that one must - eventually and, more likely, frequently - face the fact that what is <i>good</i> and what one <i>likes</i> do not always describe the same mouthful.<br />
<br />
Case in point: Coffee. I recently <a href="http://proximalkitchen.blogspot.com/2010/08/it-matters-where-its-roasted.html">posted</a> about the merits of local, "micro" roasters, and specifically why freshness - of both the roast and the percolation - has such a dramatic impact on the flavor of coffee. The thing is, once you understand why the flavor of coffee goes bad (it's all about the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redox">reduction-oxidation</a> process, as explained by the Specialty Coffee Association people <a href="http://www.blackbearcoffee.com/question_of_freshness.htm">here</a>), you must also accept that the most popular, commercially available "fresh" beans are overcooked: Heat is ultimately an enemy of coffee aromatics, so really hard roasting, at least as practiced by the industry leaders such as <a href="http://www.starbucks.com/">Starbucks </a>and <a href="http://www.peets.com/fvpage.asp?rdir=1&">Peets</a>, inevitably raises the proportion of "bad" flavors and certainly degrades the proportions of many "good" ones. My personal coffee mea culpa is this: I like bad coffee. Not shitty coffee: I care not at all for the taste of two-day-old-and-tasting-of-burnt-gym-socks coffee, of low-grade beans apparently canned sometime during the early days of the Cold War, of Dunkin' Donuts or McDonald's "Cafes". <br />
<a name='more'></a>But I do love my Peets. Starbucks may be a godsend in an airport or the middle of Interstate 5, but otherwise, you can keep your SBUX. But seriously - all those bitter, smoky, dark-chocolate flavors in a good cup of Peet's? If the price is that I lose some subtlety, that I should probably buy blends in preference to "single origins", that maybe there is just a hint of burnt? I will happily settle up on those terms, because everything else strikes me as watery or, worse, dirty. That being said, I can also recognize when I'm wrong, and in this case, I'm wrong - Peets uniformly roasts their beans for too long, or too hot, or both - I'm not sure which - in order to get their exceptionally dark roast. And while I love it, I also accept it for what it is, and more importantly, what it isn't: If I really cared about the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terroir"><i>terroir</i> </a>of coffee the way I do about wine, I would buy it from somebody like <a href="http://www.bluebottlecoffee.net/">Blue Bottle</a>, or our own local roaster, the <a href="http://www.yelp.com/biz/flying-goat-coffee-healdsburg">Flying Goat</a>: Both specialize in fair-trade, organic beans of the highest quality, emphasize the importance of individual <i>terroirs</i>, and - in order to express this specialization, both roast to a significantly lesser degree than Peets or any of their ilk.<br />
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The impetus for this particular post is that we just received a gift of Blue Bottle <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Sidamo_%28coffee%29">Yirgachefe</a> from our good friends, the B's. I hadn't heard of Blue Bottle, but the B's, by any definition, remain unrepentant foodies, and I tend to take their views of local purveyors of just about anything that goes in my mouth quite seriously. Roast date? The 20th. Not bad, as my wife J brewed up our fine gift into an extremely fresh cup this morning. We dutifully let the water come off the boil; we patiently await the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_press">French press</a> and tolerate its sludge; in short, we give this coffee whatever chances we can to show its true colors. The result? Pretty damned good, if you like it in all its medium-roasted, slightly dirty glory. It is more balanced, more complex, more unique than my Peets. But still and all, I'm sorry, but give me the black-as-night, stain-your-gums brew any day. I know I'm wrong, but I just like it that way.Rorschachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00042642692322503431noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2985840284424372837.post-50434168396532583572010-08-22T07:57:00.000-07:002010-08-23T06:58:54.354-07:00Naughty and Nice: Salty Vodka Whipped Cream<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-DFL7j4deY_ZiHtNrPH00OuSmysB3PMq_FptF8FqEGCzglAHqAtyfRdK0ZmVnSf2ChN06Qaz-GHl8GhGbvDn91_Hx5MJl_iUZQGvTkXzWdHLzcsVZhotLsEf4PtIcw9AmS3agdeRZ4VM/s1600/whipcreamvodka2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-DFL7j4deY_ZiHtNrPH00OuSmysB3PMq_FptF8FqEGCzglAHqAtyfRdK0ZmVnSf2ChN06Qaz-GHl8GhGbvDn91_Hx5MJl_iUZQGvTkXzWdHLzcsVZhotLsEf4PtIcw9AmS3agdeRZ4VM/s320/whipcreamvodka2.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Vodka Whipped Cream: Naughty & Delicious</td></tr>
</tbody></table>Last Saturday night was date-night-at-home for us. In and of itself, this was not an uncommon occurrence - our preference for what passes, in our house, for a big Saturday evening oscillates between getting a sitter and going out like real grown-ups, and spending the evening raiding the wine cellar and figuring out what do with whatever we picked up earlier at the farmer's market - but it was a particularly special one, because we were celebrating the opening of my wife's new business. If you've ever watched anyone open their own business (much less done it yourself), I think you'll agree that there aren't many better reasons to celebrate; and if you like to eat (much less cook it yourself), surely you'll agree that big celebrations and great meals flatter one another like familiar lovers, both habitual and new, relaxed and exciting, and loads and loads of fun.<br />
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Armed with such an excuse, I'll often feel inspired to spend half the day prepping and to concoct some relatively elaborate dish; but at least as often, either I won't have the time or inclination to spend in the kitchen, or perhaps I just won't be in the mood to do something complicated. Indeed, increasingly I find my tastes, both in the eating and in the cooking, running to the simple rather than the complex - finding a few really good ingredients and trying not to screw them up being a sort of Proximal Kitchen mantra. In any case, the choice was made for me yesterday, because between my wife's open house and the munchkins, I simply didn't have the time. So I took the kids to the market with a loose sketch for dinner: Something based around whatever we found at the market; something suited to my wife's palate; something relatively quick and easy; and something very adult, even a little naughty even - this was, after all, to be a <i>date night</i>. Oh, and in an ideal world, something suited to Champagne.<br />
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The market was really rocking, with lots of stuff - tomatoes and peppers in particular, having waited through our abnormally cool summer - the best it has been all year. But in keeping with my tactical objectives, I grabbed a dozen eggs from the good folks <a href="http://www.wyethacres.com/">Wyeth Acres</a>, purveyors of good vegetables and even better meats, thinking that breakfast-for-dinner might be just the ticket: Eggs and Champagne are a classic combination, not too much prep, and a house favorite. Next stop, a loaf of <a href="http://www.yelp.com/biz/full-circle-baking-co-penngrove">Full Circle</a> sourdough for toast and some just-dug Yukon Golds from <a href="http://www.foggyriverfarm.org/">Foggy River Farms</a>. Other than the wine and a bit of color for the plate, I figured I was just about done. But, as good as I know it would be, it wasn't quite <i>enough</i>. After all, this was a <i>celebration</i>, and a <i>date night</i>. In short, I wanted to dress my country breakfast in a suave dinner jacket.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtLEhf4coF3Qd0UER_POUth6MGPoVt0Fd1t5lJlLFvlvfFz4N-seigIk99xDemN7vFr6RHHbKxXGHp3KwYV7n5XkPJbXk-JsPp3_bcFBvhSheR0w5vL_R8nJGjGOa3CLgcm20IYOQFNUc/s1600/eggswhipgallete.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="182" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtLEhf4coF3Qd0UER_POUth6MGPoVt0Fd1t5lJlLFvlvfFz4N-seigIk99xDemN7vFr6RHHbKxXGHp3KwYV7n5XkPJbXk-JsPp3_bcFBvhSheR0w5vL_R8nJGjGOa3CLgcm20IYOQFNUc/s200/eggswhipgallete.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>Luckily, I remembered one of my favorite recipes to steal from: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Outhier">Louis Outhier</a>'s fabulous <a href="http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/printerfriendly/Caviar-Eggs-350244?printFormat=photo">Caviar Eggs</a>, popularized (and I believe still served) by Jean-Georges Vongerichten at his eponymous NYC restaurant. However, I didn't want to deal with the egg shells, and I wanted to use the potatoes, so I figured I'd make potato gallettes, top them with creamy scrambled eggs, and garnish it all with Outhier's outrageously decadent Salty Vodka Whipped Cream. A dollop of caviar on top - with its shot of dark color, bright, salty tang, and ability to shine with Champagne - but, alas, for all the cosmopolitan development of our little wine country town, nobody had caviar. The horror! I should have thought of using some smoked salmon instead, for the same reasons, and serving it with a pink Champagne, but I wasn't thinking; in the event, it wasn't half-bad without the fish - but, to be clear, it would have been better. I'll get around to posting the full recipe (scrambled eggs are a chapter unto themselves - so simple, so good when done properly, and yet so frequently butchered in the kitchen), but for now, here's my adaptation of Outhier's topping. It is outrageously good and could just as easily be used on top of fresh berries for dessert as with eggs or caviar.<br />
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<u>Salty Vodka Whipped Cream (adapted from L Outhier)</u><br />
<ol><li>Whip a half cup of heavy cream until stiff</li>
<li>Whisk in a tablespoon of good Vodka and a large pinch of salt - maybe as much as half a teaspoon. It should taste savory, not sweet.</li>
<li>Optional, and depending what you're serving it over (e.g., impeccable with caviar, but skip the cayenne for berries), whisk in 1-2 teaspoons of freshly squeezed lemon juice (Meyers, if possible), a pinch of cayenne, and - if you want a little color - some very finely minced lemon zest.</li>
</ol>Naughty and nice. Trust me.Rorschachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00042642692322503431noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2985840284424372837.post-27554858069730752642010-08-20T09:09:00.000-07:002010-08-20T09:13:55.539-07:00Putting down roots<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIK7hwxgdi4insrZzv7oQlgeL73FIhCPXJW4rpl1IU2PAzZA0vtML7iJbCwQX6Z7-1bboNp-VR_VebUce83gNVTGypE8vDhZEmA4GQOJ2HU3iJU963giobEThu9iQE08-zE4OIgst6eYI/s1600/tomatoesfirstofseason.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIK7hwxgdi4insrZzv7oQlgeL73FIhCPXJW4rpl1IU2PAzZA0vtML7iJbCwQX6Z7-1bboNp-VR_VebUce83gNVTGypE8vDhZEmA4GQOJ2HU3iJU963giobEThu9iQE08-zE4OIgst6eYI/s320/tomatoesfirstofseason.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Salad of Purple Cherokee, Green Zebra, & Roasted Peppers</td></tr>
</tbody></table>I'm a slow learner. I can live with that, provided the emphasis ends up on the noun rather than its descriptor, at least in the main. You might think that slow learners would also be gradual learners, that the rate at which we assimilate knowledge might be in some sense proportional to the time it takes for the process to complete. You might think that, but you would be wrong, as I just learned from the tomato plant.<br />
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No, by far the more common experience is a long period of time spent hacking away at a thicket of ignorance, with far more heat than light to show for the effort, punctuated by occasional, if profound, moments of clarity in which the constant drone of spurious noise dies down, cause and effect delineate, and logical patterns emerge. Certainly, that was my experience with physics in high school, calculus in college, most of what I studied in graduate school, and virtually everything I've learned out in what I'll summarily dub the real world. Watching my youngest daughter learn to ride a bicycle this week, I strongly suspect that the same basic pattern is at work there, too, but whether that indicates an inherited flaw or an immutable law of human behavior ultimately makes no difference: The important thing - and this is equally as true of riding a bicycle as it is of basic calculus - is to <i>get it.</i> In the long run, <i>getting it</i> will eventually work out for you, provided of course that you do in fact get it. <br />
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Back to my case-in point: Tomatoes. The <a href="http://www.tomatofest.com/tomato-growing-zone-map.html#top">climate zone (14) in which I live</a> should, by all rights, be tomato mecca: Cool nights and mornings, lots of sunshine, great soils, all very friendly to Mediterranean plants. So, for several years, I have dutifully planted a few tomato seedlings - classic beefsteak styles for burgers and salads, some Roma types for sauce. And for several years, I've grown mediocre tomatoes. Like, really mediocre, as in, often not worth eating. To add insult to injury, the best tomatoes I have ever in my life eaten are grown just up the valley from me, by <a href="http://9068creative.com/healdsburgmagazine/dan-the-tomato-man-soda-rock-farm/">Dan Magnuson of Soda Rock Farms</a>. (To be fair, Dan's tomatoes are tied for first with a giant heirloom of impossible redness that I picked up at a farmer's market in Aix many years ago, one of my personal Proustian madeleines.) Years go by, each season's crop is as mediocre and fundamentally disappointing as its predecessor; I learn nothing.<br />
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So this year, I tried something different: I bought the best rootstock I could, from the guy that I know, with absolute certainty, grows great tomatoes - I bought big, beautiful, <a href="http://www.tomatofest.com/what-is-heirloom-tomato.html">heirloom tomato</a> seedlings from Dan. (You might think that that was an obvious solution and you may well be right; but you'd be forgetting that I'm a slow and episodic learner.) We just started picking the first of this year's crop - a year, by the way, characterized by unusual cool and generally lousy growing conditions - and, lo and behold, miracle of miracles, our tomatoes <i>rock</i>. They're not just good, they are frigging <i>awesome</i>. I got excited as soon as I bent down to pick the first one to ripen - a gorgeous Purple Cherokee - and I could smell ripe tomatoes, because the best guide to a fruit's flavor is how it smells before you even cut it; my confidence rose as the blade of my knife pierced the flesh, because you can judge tomato by the way it cuts (the skin should be taught but easily cut, the flesh should feel firm but offer no resistance); I was almost sure when the first slices fell away, and I saw the richness of the color and uniformity of texture all the way through. And then I tasted it and I knew: I grew a kick-ass tomato. A drizzle of olive oil, a dash of vinegar, a pinch of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleur_de_sel"><i>fleur de sel</i></a>, a grind of pepper, and - feeling more than a little chuffed - a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiffonade"><i>chiffonade</i></a> of Genovese basil, also from our garden: If there's a finer salad with fewer ingredients, I'd love to know about it.<br />
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The moral of the story is that the quality of your rootstock matters. Like I said, this may not be news to you; it certainly doesn't strike me as particularly insightful. And yet, for years, despite all the accumulating evidence, I persisted in my belief that all this sunshine, all this great soil, would inevitably produce great tomatoes, and I went on planting mediocre seedlings, with what I now see were predictably mediocre results. <br />
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This year, I <i>learned</i> something. Maybe next year, I'll figure out how to apply the lesson to more than my tomatoes.Rorschachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00042642692322503431noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2985840284424372837.post-49773781483013664982010-08-19T10:45:00.000-07:002010-08-20T09:14:33.293-07:00Too Much of a Good Thing? Mac-n-Cheese, v2.0<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEit8OUVI-pc9AEsUShqTQ3T1c1UyM_1XGPyJhODUo1qOQslxTAjNGFboG-HkuWFNxodohK3yeHt1ipx43ddGpPBKUA1ocDWxTEZ5nuvTGaqfQBohst55XcoNzF4FP_1kwsqP1cHzVWuRNg/s1600/macncheesemimolette1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="248" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEit8OUVI-pc9AEsUShqTQ3T1c1UyM_1XGPyJhODUo1qOQslxTAjNGFboG-HkuWFNxodohK3yeHt1ipx43ddGpPBKUA1ocDWxTEZ5nuvTGaqfQBohst55XcoNzF4FP_1kwsqP1cHzVWuRNg/s400/macncheesemimolette1.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">All-American Super Cheesy Mac-n-Cheese</td></tr>
</tbody></table>In our <a href="http://proximalkitchen.blogspot.com/2010/08/why-im-trying-to-make-perfect-mac-n.html">first post</a>, we waxed philosophical on the gustatory wonder and sundry therapeutic benefits of a classic macaroni and cheese, but offered precious little in the way of actual cooking. On <a href="http://proximalkitchen.blogspot.com/2010/08/mac-n-cheese-v10.html">our next pass</a>, we began to think about actually making the dish, and wondered about the the appropriateness of breadcrumb toppings, cheeses other than cheddar, and the optimal pasta shape. While the end result - ziti baked in a sauce of bechamel, provolone & parmigiano - was good, maybe even satisfying, it nevertheless fell short of transporting. And a truly classic mac-n-cheese must, above all else, transport us somewhere: Perhaps to a time when we were younger, or in circumstances more care-free, or maybe precisely where we are now, but with softer edges. <br />
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With this schmaltzy sentiment firmly ensconced, for this week's installment, I decided to try a riff on the undeniably classic, if not particularly gourmet, version from 1937 known simply as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraft_Macaroni_%26_Cheese">Kraft Macaroni and Cheese</a> (or, if you're Canadian, Kraft Dinner). What could be more iconic than a lifeboat-orange, rib-gluing plate of Kraft? The problem, of course, is that it basically tastes like crap. Which is not surprising, considering you could probably whip up a box from the original 1937 production run and probably eat it without getting sick. Hey, give credit where it's due: I've fed it to my kids, more than once, and I invariably sneak a bite. So what I'm after is the essence of Kraft - a thick, creamy sauce; a blazing orange so rarely found in nature - but with the taste of real cheese, minus the food colorings, some texture to the pasta, and ideally a consistency a bit less like Elmer's. <br />
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The tricky part was the color: Even with loads of sharp cheddar, it's going to be a distinctly pale orange by the time you melt it into your bechamel (without which you won't get the right sauce). No substitute for primary research, so I took a quick trip down the cheese aisle, and lucked out: <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimolette">Mimolette</a>. </i>Mimolette - the hard, aged, dark-orange French take on Edam - is not one of my favorite cheeses, generally speaking; it has relatively little flavor until it's been aged at least 6 months, and then the texture becomes a bit hard to chew. However, for our purposes here, it seemed like an ideal candidate: Lots of color (naturally produced using <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annatto">annatto</a>, by the way) and a sharp tang not unlike an aged cheddar. <br />
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I was worried about its melting properties, but figured to solve that by tempering it into the bechamel and rounding out the sauce with - insert horrified gasp here - processed "American" cheese. (How sad is it, by the way, that the only cheese whose proper name contains "American" is a "processed cheese product". No wonder the French send us all their Beaujolais Nouveau and wheels of unripened, characterless brie cheese.) It turns out that the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Processed_cheese">processed cheese</a> - e.g., "American cheese" - offers some distinct technical advantages to the aspiring builder of a great mac-n-cheese. Because processed cheese has been emulsified (with water, whey, and/or milk, typically), it melts smoothly and does not "break". Try to melt an aged, orange cheddar on its own and see what happens: Fats and solids separate, the melted cheese gets grainy, it's just plain nasty, and has no place in my mac-n-cheese. Still, I didn't want to serve a Cheese Whiz casserole, so I kept the proportions 2:1 in favor of the French.<br />
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For all this talk of Kraft, I still wanted to dress up the final product, to end up with an all-grown-up homage to the iconic childhood classic that resides in our collective cheesy consciousness, a dish for the 40-something toddler that lurks just beneath the surface of well-adjusted adults everywhere. To that end, I added a few bells and whistles, some of which you could probably short-cut around and not miss too much, but which, when taken together, transform the humble, baked casserole into a deeply complex, satisfying plate of pasta. And, while it's certainly several branches removed from where we started - with a blue cardboard box on the mac-n-cheese family tree - I think you'll agree that the family resemblance remains unmistakable. .<br />
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<u>Mac-n-Cheese II</u><br />
<ol><li>Turn on the oven and set a large pot of salted water for the pasta to boil, and make an <i>onion brulee</i> (for the life of me, I can't find a link to a simple description, so here's my own: To make <i>onion brulee</i>, split an onion in half, stud it with several cloves, and make a slit into which you slot a bay leaf. Drizzle with a little oil and put under a broiler until the onion begins to char. That's it.). As long as you're working under a broiler, quickly toast several thick-cut slices of sourdough bread. While the <i>onion</i> is in the oven, whisk together 1/2C (each of flour and butter) into a blonde <i>roux</i>.When the <i>onion</i> and the toast are out of the oven, set the temperature to 350F.</li>
<li>Scald two cups of whole milk with the <i>onion brulee</i> and cook the pasta (I used <i>cavatappi</i> in order to get the classic "elbow shape", but you could certainly use classic elbows; really, any tube-style pasta will do, it just depends how Kraft-like you want the final look and how you want it to set up for service. Don't overcook the pasta! If you're using a basic Italian boxed pasta like Barilla or De Cecco, take the <i>lower</i> end of their suggested cooking range, and <i>subtract 1 minute.</i> Pull the pasta - it will be slightly too tough still - and drain. </li>
<li>Make the sauce, beginning with a <i>bechamel</i>. This is <i>the key</i> to this particular recipe - it is all about this sauce. Remove the <i>onion</i> and whisk the hot milk into the <i>roux</i>. Bring to a very low simmer and, while it cooks, prep the cheeses: 1lb of Mimolette, coursely grated, and 1/2lb of Kraft yellow American cheese, either cut in strips or grated, depending on the form in which you buy it. Season the <i>bechamel</i> with salt and freshly ground nutmeg and white pepper and add the cheese in batches. Once all the cheese has been incorporated, whisk in 1/4C of beer, 1 tablespoon of dry, ground mustard, 1 teaspoon of paprika (use a decent quality paprika - nice and deep red - or the color will be off), a few dashes of Tabasco sauce (you don't want a spicy sauce, this is just a background note), and - the other secret weapon for color - a <i>small</i> pinch of saffron threads, ground between your fingers. The saffron is really just there to bring up the yellow in the sauce which, together with the dark red of the paprika and the orange of the Mimolette, will result in an almost impossibly bright and Kraft-like orange. While the sauce comes together, chop the toast slices, whiz them in a food processor until they are a uniform bread-crumb consistency, and gently saute them with some butter, salt and pepper. Remove from the heat, cool, and toss with a handful of finely grated Parmigiano or Romano cheese. Check the sauce for seasoning and adjust - it should be pretty sharp and a little salty, remember it has to flavor all that pasta. It will be very thick - that is fine, and what you want.</li>
<li>Fold the pasta and the sauce together gently. You may have too much sauce, so reserve a cup or so until you know. The pasta should all be thickly slathered. Pour into a buttered 9x12 (-ish) casserole dish, or pie plate or crock pot or whatever you like, of similar volume. Press down gently to pack it together and get rid of air between noodles. Pour the breadcrumbs over the top, cover with foil, and place in the 350F oven for 20-25 minutes, until it's bubbling and just starting to brown at the edges. Remove the foil and return to the oven until the top is a deep golden brown and the bread crumbs are nice and crunch, taking care not to burn - 5, maybe 10 minutes tops. </li>
<li>Let is set for at least 10 minutes and cut in slices. Enjoy!</li>
</ol>Rorschachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00042642692322503431noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2985840284424372837.post-31692589155052168912010-08-18T12:48:00.000-07:002010-08-21T08:07:24.233-07:00Meat, Braise, Love<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhumveYbSFFYwC8_coMxbjP77-69hzvVzWxVvbSKzo58I9oaRzcplITVwI9vXml9pRNJXJSiz1FgzzXl7jDHnd1BOHltCS5lsCLMvAUkTDBZl-S053zkg7b6nH51oUV0xXr8Mia5O6l7SQ/s1600/shortribs2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhumveYbSFFYwC8_coMxbjP77-69hzvVzWxVvbSKzo58I9oaRzcplITVwI9vXml9pRNJXJSiz1FgzzXl7jDHnd1BOHltCS5lsCLMvAUkTDBZl-S053zkg7b6nH51oUV0xXr8Mia5O6l7SQ/s320/shortribs2.jpg" width="313" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Short Ribs, Carrots, and Potatoes in a Zinfandel-Chili Braise</td></tr>
</tbody></table>Just for the record, I've neither read the book, seen the movie, nor, for that matter, given any serious consideration to either, for the simple reason that, fairly or unfairly, I'm reasonably certain that I'd be repulsed but, like a car accident, find it impossible to look away. I strongly suspect that the experience would be very much like being force-fed Indian desserts while attending one of those made-for-TV mega-church Sunday sermons: Cloyingly sweet and offensively preachy, all at the same time. Although, come to think, perhaps there's a novel strategy in there for producing a decent <i>fois gras</i>. <br />
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Still, while I don't really mind dishing out snippy reviews of books I haven't read, this post is about food, specifically the sort of food that you get to smell all day long while it cooks, that makes you want to open your best red wine and eat in your PJs at the same time, the sort of food that can make a girl's toes curl. For better or worse (likely both), my wife doesn't really eat land animals, so my best shot at getting a toe-curling endorsement, inasmuch as cooking is concerned, is probably mac-n-cheese, but that is the subject of <a href="http://proximalkitchen.blogspot.com/2010/08/why-im-trying-to-make-perfect-mac-n.html">another post</a>. Today, I want to talk about <i>braising</i>. Specifically, braising hunks of prehistoric-looking meat, wrapped in butcher's paper and replete with large bones and the potential to disturb small children when first unwrapped. Producing a braise in your own kitchen is a bit like making porn in your own bed: It rewards practice, because if you can get it just right, it's the best you'll ever have, and all the times you can't, it'll still be a long way from sucking. <br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhld7P3262T0r0Xd_Scif7TQ_D1KpRdqikTj-d2xIDikR6AbqG8rxvTUJ67vh-0tAh6yAVf2V9qyf4BwvMfxerBOZUVK_bFdTZoqCQDAJRbxlJ8aHI8pHUrHlH98zM1E0Ej8CcW_aC4PbI/s1600/shortribs1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhld7P3262T0r0Xd_Scif7TQ_D1KpRdqikTj-d2xIDikR6AbqG8rxvTUJ67vh-0tAh6yAVf2V9qyf4BwvMfxerBOZUVK_bFdTZoqCQDAJRbxlJ8aHI8pHUrHlH98zM1E0Ej8CcW_aC4PbI/s320/shortribs1.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The zin-chili short ribs pictured above, re-plated for service.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>There is so much to love about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braise">the braise</a>: Purely from a gastronomic perspective, no other cooking technique, at least in my kitchen, comes close to creating the depth and concentration of flavor that I can get from a properly executed braise. It rewards the intelligent use of cheaper cuts and transforms, as if by magic, what would otherwise be too tough to chew into fork-tender nuggets of gustatory gold. It produces exceptional sauces and gravies as a byproduct, almost as if by accident. It can accommodate protein, starch, and vegetables all in one pot, which can then be served family style in the cooking vessel or re-plated and dressed up in style. And provided one follows some basic principles, an effective braise provides the cook with an exceptional amount of interpretive girth, requires no careful measurements, no indentured servitude to recipes and cookbooks. <br />
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I'm not going to provide recipes, except for maybe one really basic catch-all, in this post - I've got lots of favorites, some entirely mine, some not, and I'll put a bunch of them up over time. All I really want to do here is to inspire anyone who hasn't braised to do so forthwith, and for everyone who has, to do it better, and more often. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larousse_Gastronomique">Larousse</a> describes a braise as "a moist cooking method using a little liquid that barely simmers..." and goes on to point out that the classical technique involves browning the meat in a little hot fat, which is then arranged on a bed of cooked vegetables, partially covered in cooking liquid, and allowed to simmer slowly in a tightly covered pan so as not to lose moisture (or flavor) to evaporation. That pretty much sums it up, although there are some other basic guidelines (e.g., you want to use a cut with some connective tissue, you want to have some acid in the liquid, some aromatics, some general sense of how the flavors all work together, to work in proportions that fit the pot, to finish the sauce at the end) that, if followed, will invariably improve the results.<br />
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In his essential <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGee_on_Food_and_Cooking">On Food and Cooking</a></i>, McGee further advises that the meat be kept in relatively large pieces; that the initial browning kills microbes in addition to creating flavor; and - in a departure from most of the cookbooks I've read - recommends starting the pot in a cold oven and restricting the final cooking temperature to around 200F, which is considerably cooler than most recipes you'll find. I have, in the past, used pre-heated oven at a temperature of anywhere from 250-350F, depending on the particulars of the cut the dish is based upon. However, I make a general rule of listening to McGee, so I'm going to do another one soon using his particular technique.<br />
<br />
<u>A Basic Braise</u><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMox_XzV0u5jay2g6tb4P-uzc_Uw59mXwzmMRODmaUtC-RZBsHKsMmanPF7Br503EWiCrw_n6kWNypUa-OcZdv-WBEY-7sUEVKRtdlaTDf1LTmMJ3uzbz1qrk3-Wl_Bz42Ay8agqtpwFE/s1600/LambShoulderBraised.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMox_XzV0u5jay2g6tb4P-uzc_Uw59mXwzmMRODmaUtC-RZBsHKsMmanPF7Br503EWiCrw_n6kWNypUa-OcZdv-WBEY-7sUEVKRtdlaTDf1LTmMJ3uzbz1qrk3-Wl_Bz42Ay8agqtpwFE/s320/LambShoulderBraised.jpg" width="305" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Shoulder of lamb in a Syrah-Rosemary-Garlic braise.</td></tr>
</tbody></table><ol><li>Choose a cut such as a shank, shoulder, or short rib - something that is flavorful, adequately fatty, and has collagen and gelatin in the connective tissue and bone that will break down during cooking and thicken the sauce. Grass-fed beef and especially lamb from a local rancher would be obvious choices (if you're in the 707 or surrounding environs, I've been using meats from Black Sheep, the Owens Family, and the grass-fed locker at Willowside meats, all with great results). Make sure the cut will fit in your pot. (The pot, by the way, must be tall enough to accommodate the meat, vegetables and liquid below the top, be oven-proof, and must have a heavy bottom and lid that fits.). Figure at least a half-pound per person, assuming it's a bone-in cut.</li>
<li>Put a small amount of neutral cooking fat in the pot and get it good and hot, medium or medium-high. Pat the meat dry with a towel, season reasonably aggressively with salt and paper, and thoroughly brown in the pan on all sides, turning to ensure even cooking and to avoid scorching.</li>
<li>Remove the meat, turn the heat down to medium or medium-low, and add a couple of cups of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirepoix_%28cuisine%29"><i>mirepoix</i></a>. Thomas Keller, in <i>Ad Hoc at Home</i>, suggests putting the vegetables in a sack of cheesecloth to keep the meat and sauce separate from particulate matter (in typical Keller fashion, much like wiping down prep bottles to avoid getting fingerprints on plates, perfectly emblematic of how, for all the well-deserved hype, he is a <i>cook</i> first and foremost); I think it's a terrific idea, but must confess that I'm typically too lazy to bother. After the <i>mirepoix</i> has been cooked through and caramelized, add a tablespoon or so of tomato paste; continue to cook until it gives off a sweet aroma and loses its raw-tomato taste. </li>
<li>Deglaze the pan with some wine, maybe a quarter- to a half-bottle, scraping the bottom and sides to release all the concentrated bits of flavor. A hearty dry red is the smart-money bet, not necessarily too fancy, but - as ever - only cook with what you'd drink (a Cotes-du-Rhone or modestly priced Syrah from the Russian River Valley would do wonders for lamb, and a merely decent Sonoma County Zinfandel would pair perfectly up with short ribs, pot roast, <i>osso bucco,</i> you name it.)</li>
<li>Arrange the meat on top of the vegetables and fill the pot with enough stock to reach about 2/3rds of the way up the sides of the meat. Home-made stock would be ideal and will improve the final product immensely, but you can make an awfully good one with store-bought chicken or beef stock, provided you're careful to get the one with the shortest list of ingredients, and preferably without salt (pre-seasoned stocks will screw you up later, because they'll reduce heavily and mess with your ability to adjust seasoning at the end). Cover with the lid and transfer to an oven pre-heated to around 300F (200-250 for a really long braise, maybe 350 for a shorter one).</li>
<li>You will ultimately braise the meat this way in the oven for a total of 2-3 hours (a baby lamb shank could take as little as 90 minutes, a tougher, larger roast might want 4 or more hours), basting with the cooking liquids from time to time, and adding water if the pot begins to dry out. However, if you are adding vegetables, and you are going to want to - classically carrots and potatoes, but you could try mushrooms, turnips, or peas with great confidence - have them cleaned and prepped into medium-sized, uniform pieces, and add them 45-60mins before the final cooking time is up.</li>
<li>The meat is ready when it is fall-apart-fork-tender. If the veggies are ahead of schedule, you can always remove them and reserve until the meat is done.</li>
<li>Once the food is cooked, carefully remove the meat and vegetables to another plate and make the sauce by straining out the <i>mirepoix</i> and any other particulates left over from cooking and heating in a clean sauce pan. De-grease it as you go. The sauce, when finished, should have a smooth, glossy texture and should have the nap to coat the back of a spoon. Check the seasoning and adjust. </li>
</ol> All those astoundingly good short ribs that seem to have made their way on to every menu in the City? That's all they are. Really.Rorschachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00042642692322503431noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2985840284424372837.post-13999416819180800622010-08-17T11:15:00.000-07:002010-08-20T09:16:30.687-07:00It matters where it's roasted<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizVIXVKVCtj21HTVDc5VOo1H2foQPgLfycEnL68AeZs0Jhsdotm49viygF9UmrfyI61_DmRoqgKEIsgIAjcUzEW1QekkKk2Y_Krqhu5hK8EpccNw2t12boJRDHEFNo8lTWUnv3KMrbeZM/s1600/coffee2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="264" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizVIXVKVCtj21HTVDc5VOo1H2foQPgLfycEnL68AeZs0Jhsdotm49viygF9UmrfyI61_DmRoqgKEIsgIAjcUzEW1QekkKk2Y_Krqhu5hK8EpccNw2t12boJRDHEFNo8lTWUnv3KMrbeZM/s320/coffee2.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Buy it, grind it, brew it, and serve it. Fresh.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>I hate the taste of oxidation. Or, having puzzled over the chemical processes involved, I should say that I hate <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redox">the change in flavors and aromas caused by reduction-oxidation</a>, but that takes too long, and efficiency matters in the kitchen. Furthermore, while my math skills may be passable and I find physics fascinating, chemistry has, at least since the 7th grade, given me a headache: Something about all that rote memorization and what I always took to be an unhealthy and mind-numbing emphasis on the "what" at the expense of the "how".<br />
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In any case, suffice it to say that the taste and smell of foods - and, more to the point, beverages - changes due to contact with the air we breathe, and most of these changes are <i>not</i> for the better. Oxidation creates that nasty metallic taste, the perception of acridness, of overcooked. This process is particularly acute in two of my favorite beverages, wine and coffee (water, by my accounting the only other liquid truly essential to the sustenance of life, seems a bit more stable).<br />
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In the case of coffee, the important thing to know is that the process of oxidation begins immediately, and the engine for this process is heat (the excellent if slightly more technical discussion I base this on may be found <a href="http://www.blackbearcoffee.com/question_of_freshness.htm">here</a>). <br />
<a name='more'></a>As soon as the bean is roasted, its taste and smell begins to degrade, in ways both subtle and profound: The compounds responsible for "good" flavors fade away, and the concentration of those responsible for "bad" flavors increases. The good news is that Mother Nature is also a coffee lover and, as is her wont, she designed the bean in a particularly clever way: First, the external structure of the bean itself traps and protects many of the desirable features of coffee's flavor profile inside; second, even after grinding, some of the aromatics remain inside the coffee by virtue of the bean's naturally occurring oils and waxes known as lipids.<br />
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So what's a deeply entrenched caffeine addict to do? <br />
<ol><li>Buy your beans in smaller amounts, as frequently as practical, and as close as possible to the date on which the beans were actually roasted. Clearly, this gives a huge edge to your local micro-roaster, and not because it's "free trade", or "local", or even because they buy better beans (all of which may, or may not, matter to you), but because<i> the chemistry itself dictates that locally roasted coffee will taste better</i>. Funny how often this basic lesson seems to come up so frequently in food and cooking, and how much better suited to good eating (albeit more time consuming) is the old-school model of grocery shopping, in which we would buy our daily bread from a baker, our vegetables from the produce stand of a farmer who grew them, the fish from a fishmonger who just caught it. Easy rule: If you can't figure out when it was roasted, you probably don't want to buy it.</li>
<li>If you're going to store your beans for any length of time (and we do this as a matter of course - there is idealism, and there is keeping the family sane and the parents well-fueled at all times), try to get them in vacuum packs (to reduce air contact), and store them in the freezer (to mitigate the deleterious effects of temperature).</li>
<li>Grind it when you're going to drink it, and only brew what you're going to drink. I don't know about you, but I just don't buy the argument that grinding your own beans is messy and time-consuming; and since the actual science tells me that I can drink better coffee simply by grinding my own, that seems to me a pretty cheap and easy way to consume a superior product. If you must brew a larger quantity first thing in the morning, then at least transfer it to an airtight carafe or thermos or whatever in order to slow down the nasty effects of heat and air on your beverage. </li>
</ol>There is, as ever in the kitchen, a moral object lesson in all this: Simply by buying my coffee fresh and close to home, by preparing it when I actually want to drink it, and by only making the quantity that I actually want to drink, I will get to drink better coffee.Rorschachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00042642692322503431noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2985840284424372837.post-37151743307689060862010-08-16T10:01:00.000-07:002010-08-20T09:17:15.762-07:00The Pirate Lord of the Hot LinePrologue: Two cross-country flights with three young children and unavoidable transfers in both directions, separated by less than 72 hours in-country, on my non-native coast, for a theocratic church wedding packed with in-laws and people I don't know well enough to drink with... Clearly, quality reading material is essential packing, somewhere just below, and possibly preceding, a decent pair of shoes and a clean shirt for the wedding itself. I show up to SFO without so much as a day-old copy of the Times.<br />
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Actually, I'm taking at least a little literary license. Not with the horrors of the 15 or so hours my family would spend in the care and company of commercial air carriers, not with the other factual particulars, but with the implication that I forgot to pack something to read. I spent many years traveling for work in a previous life, mostly long-haul, and, while I have forgotten virtually every essential one can forget at one point or another (passport, socks and underwear, foreign currency), I have learned - the hard way - never, not ever, to travel without a book. If at all possible, not without backup. I left our house without a book on Thursday morning because I knew we'd be at the airport with loads of time and access to a passable bookstore, and I really, really like picking out new stuff to read with my hands: The tactile sensation of the pages, their weight in one's hand, even the font chosen for printing - all these things matter. While I, like you, buy most of my books online for convenience and price, I will mourn the inevitable death of the physical bookstore, and I regret that my children will, in all likelihood, never even know what I'm talking about.<br />
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Also, for the record, any insinuation that either my in-laws, or the family they're marrying into, were anything other than lovely would be grossly unfair: They were, to a name, lovely people who had the foresight to cater cute little mac-n-cheese ramekins and chicken in zinc buckets for the kids alongside plenty of booze for the grownups. I can't speak to the wedding cake, except to say that it looked very classy, without so much as a single square meter of overworked fondant in sight, and it got raves from the munchkins. (Granted, the bar for that last bit consists of little more than sugar, but still.) Even the church service was manageable, and I say that as a non-practicing Jew: I don't think we had to spend more than a few hours on our knees or otherwise flagellating ourselves. Kidding. <br />
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In the event, I bought two books with vastly inflated, travel-desperation sorts of profit margins: "All The Pretty Horses", by Cormac McCarthy (arguably America's greatest writer of fiction and whose work I carefully ration in order to extend for as long as possible the literary cherry-popping that only a McCarthy first page can deliver), and "Cooking Dirty", by Jason Sheehan (a food writer I had not previously heard of and whose book I bought largely on a whim). Jay Sheehan's book is a revelation if only because, like food itself, so much of what is produced is irredeemable shite, the moral equivalent of an Applebee's salad bar, that one often forgets what the real thing, done properly, can be like. <br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
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Sheehan writes well. Not just well-enough, mind you, but the sort of writing that makes you wonder how he ever got that good, that seems somehow unfair. He also happens to have a vast wealth of personal stories about working in kitchens that, for the most part, strike just the right balance between making the reader cringe and laugh out loud. He also knows an awful lot about professional cookery at all levels, in and of itself a worthy diversion, because it's not every day that you get to hear a cook talk intelligently about the short-order counter at Waffle House and Escoffier's preparation for oxtail <i>consomme</i> with equal respect, enthusiasm, and first-hand knowledge. And the book is dirty: Filthy, in-the-gutter, foul-mouthed, grossly-inappropriate, richly-laden-with-highly-questionable-lifestyle-choices dirty. You like him in spite of his Himalayan faults. Did I mention that he's funny? I'll say it again: You'll cringe, but you'll be laughing. Out loud. He's also the perfect antidote to a foodie culture that considers the candy-ass veneer and slapstick cookery of Guy Fieri or Rachel Ray in any way relevant to the actual preparation of real food.<br />
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The other thing, maybe <i>the</i> thing, that makes the book so successful is that, despite being about nothing but cooking, it is really about everything but cooking. It is kitchen-as-parable: His career in the kitchen, while fundamental to the story line, including his descent toward near-dearth and the eventual righting of his life, is also just a means of explaining what I took to be much larger truths about the choices we all make in our lives, loves, and work. The point is made most succinctly and directly when, near the very end, he tells us that the most important thing for any would-be restaurant critic to understand is that the food is always the least interesting part of the review. <br />
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In a perfect world, I'll be able to say that here, in this blog, as well.Rorschachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00042642692322503431noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2985840284424372837.post-36618789420442538552010-08-12T06:37:00.000-07:002010-08-20T09:17:48.968-07:00Why do wedding cakes usually suck?I've probably had a good slice of wedding cake, but I can't recall it. My wife and I went to some length to make sure ours was better than average - we ordered carrot cake w/ cream cheese icing, figuring that we'd have better odds if we could avoid entirely the words "butter cream" and "genoise" - but, in the event, it was disappointing. Don't take this personally,but in all likelihood, your wedding cake sucked, too.<br />
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But why? I'm about to spend all day on an airplane in order to attend a wedding, so I have vested interest in the answer. On the face of it, the problem is not a budget constraint: We Americans spend, by most counts, between $3 and $5 per slice on our wedding cakes. A slice of cake from a quality baker generally costs a bit more than that, but I've had plenty of very good slices of cake for that sort of price, and that is <i>by the slice</i>. Clearly there are economies of scale to cakes: The cost of the ingredients may be roughly proportional to the number of servings, and perhaps even declining, because you use less frosting per unit of cake as the cake gets larger (butter costs more than flour, and ratio of surface area to volume should fall with size); and the larger input, labor, should clearly exhibit increasing returns to scale (it takes no more time to bake 2 layers than 1). <br />
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So if we spend enough to get a good cake, why do so often fail to do so? <br />
<a name='more'></a>My pet hypothesis is that two factors come into play. First, the cake supplier is often secured in some "captive" fashion: Many spaces (this was true of our wedding) insist that you use their florist, their baker, whatever, with predictable results. The incentive conflict is clear. Second, we, the consumer, have exhibited a preference for visual aesthetics at the expense of taste, and it is hard to make a big cake look good. Ergo, the money that should have gone into better baking skills gets reallocated into fancier decorations. And, to be fair, it takes a lot of time and effort to make a cook look pretty. I'm not saying this is a bad thing: It may be perfectly rational to exchange the taste of a great cake for the images we fantasize about.<br />
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But I am saying that it comes at a cost.Rorschachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00042642692322503431noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2985840284424372837.post-18007576978913619542010-08-11T15:41:00.000-07:002010-08-11T15:41:09.303-07:00In praise of street foodWhat could be a more proximal kitchen, at least from the consumer's perspective, than street food? In my own cooking, I generally think about the proximity of my primitive food sources to my kitchen, but the cart warrior offers another perspective: He (or she) cooks it fresh, all day long, right in front of you, not in some glass-walled, Michelin-starred kitchen, but <i>on the sidewalk.</i> I don't know about you, but I reckon whipping up massive quantities of super tasty food, on a sidewalk in midtown Manhattan, without giving your customers food poisoning, with Mobius-like repetitive consistency, is one of the great culinary feats of our times. I mean, seriously, <i>are you </i><i>kidding me?</i> The best of the best of the street food community - not to be confused with the ones serving stale pretzels and three-day-old boiled hot dogs, I mean the ones preparing food of real quality, fast, cheap, and on the street - is, if you'll excuse the language, the effing <i>bomb</i>.<br />
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This particular thread occurred to me because <a href="http://streetvendor.org/vendys/finalists-2">the finalists for the Vendy</a> - the biggest award in the street food hierarchy, the moral equivalent of a third Michelin star or a food-tops rating in Zagat's - were just announced. If you're not familiar with NYC street food, and you get the opportunity, I highly recommend working off of <a href="http://nymag.com/restaurants/features/33527/">NY Mag's list of the <i>Concrete Elite</i></a> (it is to the undying credit of the city and the vendors that this list, while dated, remains virtually unchanged by either name, location, or qualitative scale). Seriously, the Vendys are fine, but why bother buying tickets and fighting the throngs on Governor's Island? If you had the choice, would you rather have Thomas Keller cooking for you in his own kitchen at the French Laundry, or at some kitschy demo for the Food Network? I say, go to the carts. You can do unfathomable arterial damage well inside of a 10-block radius in midtown, so why mess with it?<br />
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I have not had the pleasure of eating at any of this year's finalists, but I was in NYC last month, and I made a point of visiting what I take to be The Best Halal/Gyro In The Known Universe, the guys on the southwest corner of 53rd St and 6th Ave. There are dozens of impostors, and many within a one-block radius, so if you go, be sure to check the corner; you'll know when you're there, because the line is longer than the competition by a thoroughly justifiable order of magnitude. What other gyro-style stand has <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_and_Rice">its own Wikipedia page</a>? Who else make lamb-on-rice so good that you can get knifed for cutting in line (yes, it really happened). Where else have the customers taken to referring to the white sauce as "crack sauce"? Trust me, it's worth it.<br />
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I'm sure the other guys (they are almost exclusively guys, sorry) have their own merits, but if I were to do the street-meat tour, and I faced either temporal or gastrointestinal constraints, I would - in addition to the Halal gurus above - make sure to stop by <a href="http://midtownlunch.com/2007/10/24/hallo-berlin-cart-is-still-the-best-october-lunch/">Rolf's Hallo Berlin sausage cart</a> at 54th and 5th (between the Democracy Special and the Dictator Special, you can't go wrong) as well as <a href="http://nymag.com/listings/restaurant/kwik_meal_1/">Mohammed Rahman's Kwik Meal</a> at 45th and 6th (the only street chef I know of who trained at the Russian Tea Room and marinates cubes of lamb - not pressed into gyros, fresh cubes - in his own concoction of papaya juice to tenderize it - be sure to try it with a side of his freaky, very hot, not-quite-Middle-Eastern green jalapeno chili sauce).Rorschachhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00042642692322503431noreply@blogger.com0