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Hi all,

So I am back from Morocco now, but will continue posting at scarlettscion.blogspot.com. I will come over here to check up on friends pages and see what's going on in your lives.

My new blog gets many more readers than this ever did (don't ask me...) so I think I will be deleting many posts previously posted here, and editing others, because they are from my pre-Internet-caution era.

Over and out.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/17/AR2006031701969.html


"At Kraft Foods, recipes never include words like "dredge" and "sauté." Betty Crocker recipes avoid "braise" and "truss." Land O' Lakes has all but banned "fold" and "cream" from its cooking instructions. And Pillsbury carefully sidesteps "simmer" and "sear."

When the country's top food companies want to create recipes that millions of Americans will be able to understand, there seems to be one guiding principle: They need to be written for a nation of culinary illiterates."


Most good cookbooks have a glossary of these terms anyway, and most halfwits should be able to figure it out after a few flubs.....heh.

It's an established fact that when I'm tired or under stress I crave sugar. Well, that's not so wierd, I think most people do. However I don't just crave sugar, I start craving all sorts of bizzarre foods, all at once. It's very confusing. Right now I would kill for Monk's french fries coupled with copious amounts of their Holiday Beer I had last time. MMM, cardamon and hops and barley, oh my.

I almost sent B. out to buy potatoes so I could make fries, and then sighed and realized, once again, that french fries are in the sad list of foods I will only eat at a restaurant because they are too. much. trouble. Do you have any idea how much OIL it takes to make fries? And how hard it is to keep it at the correct temperature? And the fear of overturning a huge boiling vat of badness onto your legs?

Not fun. So, instead of French fries and beer, I'm having carrots, homemade hummus, and loose green tea with a slice of homemade multigrain bread. I'm so healthy I make myself nauseous. Gah. Boo.

Haven't had a lot of culinary highlights of late, but I did find a fantastic multigrain bread recipie, which I'll put in the next post, and killed my old rooster and stuck him in a pot with some nice pig fat and a bottle of red.

OK so not really, but I did make coq au vin. It's the single unhealthiest thing I have ever cooked....you never realize how much calories you save not cooking with lard (or schmaltz, come to think).

You make coq au vin the old school way by taking slab bacon, cutting it into hunks, and then rendering all the fat off said hunks. Then you brown the chicken in the rendered pork fat and add a bottle of wine and some vegetables. I tried cooking wine, but next time I'd use something a little nicer. I also left in the chicken backbone to give the whole thing more flavor, which worked splendidly. The whole thing was a tad "meaty" for us quasi-vegetarians, but arcessita seemed to like it well enough. I served it with a mushroom ragout, mashed potatoes, and asparagus. Yum!

(I must say I was humbled by trying to cut the whole chicken up. I've never done it, don't have the knives for it, and am ashamed to admit that yanking legs and wings out of sockets squicks me a little. Blech.)

The week before that I did finally manage to make a crispy chicken by using melted butter and oil, plus letting the bird roast at a higher temperature. Worked nicely although it is still not that dark crisp color. Might try honey next time as well. Of course, B. decided to pour the pan juices over the chicken carcass and then refrigerate it, so we ended up with a nice chicken confit by accident....fat preserves meat remarkably well. Of course, it's also impossible to extract bits of meat for say, a sandwich or any other useful purpose without melting the whole bloody thing.

(he promised not to do it again)

My favorite dish of the week was probably the sweet potatoe and chickpea curry I put over rice..soft, flavorful, and comforting.
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Tonight I'm making hamentashen for B., we'll see how that turns out. If it works I'll do a little entry on it and the history of the cookies. Everyone seems to know how to make this mysterious "poppyseed filling" as three different recipies refer me to several filling concoctions OR "the poppyseed filling". Right! Yeah! The Poppyseed Filling! I know just how to make that....thanks!

I was watching a cute romantic movie just now, and I sort of shifted my attention to watch the end, and this thought flitted through my head

"wow, that's awfully heteronormative"

I have offically been in school too long. I was in class today and didn't even protest that Freud had no evidence so why are we still talking about him? I have truly fallen from scientific grace....

Can anyone tell me why I mist the tops of breads to make them come out crispy yet I am supposed to dry my chicken to make IT come out crisp?

I have found the perfect honey whole wheat bread compromise. Comment if you're interested in the recipie (that pretty much goes for anything up here, btw)

I save the pan sauce I make from roast chicken, refrigerate it, and use it to cook risotto in. Gives it lovely intense flavor with zero work. This time I put sprigs of rosemary, garlic and mushrooms in the pan, buttered the chicken so the butter and fat would drip down, then took the cheap disposable metal pan, put it on the burner, and added half a cup of wht wine to deglaze. Then I cooked it down for a minute and poured it into a container. mmmm....fat.

In the spirit of all the "food homages" that people seem to be paying to New Orleans lately, it dawned on me that I'd never tried bread pudding. It just sounds so good...like bread dipped in sweet hot stuff. Ultimate comfort food, like French toast on crack. I'd been frightened by some awful shit Don's s.o. cooked, though. Still, figured mine would be better.

It's so yummy! It's a bit fo trouble to make, and the most cholesterol laden thing EVER, but truly yummy simple goodness. Although apparently, according to Irma, "fashionable hostesses at the turn of the century festooned them with meringes at formal gatherings"

Oh really? Festooned, yet? My, my. Guess it wasn't always so simple. Neither is the process of making it, or at least what goes on in the oven. Apparently making low fat custard is "a tricky busness," because custards work when the egg protients just barely collide enough to form a flexy net, and fat and sugar make the protiens take longer and slower to bind so there is more of a margin of error in how long you cook the custard. However in theory one CAN make cream brulee without cream! It's just hard. If you overdo it, the egg protien balls up into clumps and seperates entirely, so you have clumps floating in skim milk. Sad, very sad. That's also the reason you cook it in a water bath...regulates the temperature so it all cooks evenly and slowly.

First, and very random, bit of neato knowledge:

Nutella (or more correctly blending hazlenuts and coca into a spread) was invented after a Napoleonic naval blocade of Italy blocking their chocolate supplies from South America. Chocolate makers in Italy blended crushed and roasted hazelnuts from Piedmont with their coca to make it stretch longer until the blockade was broken.

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Now, as for the soup: I am a squash nut, and am always trying to do new things with the basic butternut squash soup. I've tried a bunch of stuff, but saw one neat recipie this week and tried another one I made up...

The one I saw involved a 50-50 ratio of browned butter to pureed seasoned squash...hmm....heart healthy? I think not...that;s a little much fat even for ME.

The one I tried is loosely called "Ginger-Garlic Winter Squash" in my head...because it involves ginger, garlic...oh yeah, and squash. I never was that creative a child. Anyway, it's a 3-4 lb butternut with about six inches of chopped ginger (1/3 cup? didn't measure), 4-5 garlic cloves, an apple, an onion, some black pepper, and a bunch or two of sage leaves. I sautee everything for a bit and then cook it in chicken broth for 30 minutes, then puree it in the Cuisinart.

It came out quite well. Still, the amt of ginger is too pungent unless you are planning to cream the soup a bit, which I did. I'm still looking for ways to break away from the sweet-squash combo of flavors. The ginger was a step in the right direction, but its hard to get most spices or herbs to break through the squash taste, which is why sweeter flavors work well. Maybe I'll add some browned butter next time, and try more sage. I've also thought about ainseed and even soy sauce, although I've got serious misgivings about 'em, and I DO have to eat when I cook every night, so...limits experimenting a bit.
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I bought a kosher chicken for dinner yesterday. Kosher is a good way around all the "organic" or "free range" nonsense...those rabbis keep the factories' asses in line, they do. No burned off beaks, fewer chickens per building, no antibiotics or hormones. They're expensive, but I am reassured by expensive meat that it wasn't unduly cheap to mass produce...

Anyway, so the chicken. I wanted to roast it. I wanted it to come out of the oven with a fantastic, crackling brown skin like the ones you can buy at the store. You know, where the skin is dark brown and they are turned all those creepy chicken bodies on the rotisserie? Yum.
So I read through my meat related cookbooks. I figured if anyone would know, it would be Julia and Irma (Julia Childs and the Joy of Cooking woman). Julia said that she likes to give the chicken a nice butter massage because "I think the chicken likes it." Hmmm, allright, I've invested enough in a happy chicken so far, so why not? Irma says to paint it with melted butter. Since I fear the melty butter might drip off, I go with Julia. Set out butter, wait for it to soften, mush it up with chopped parsley..and massage that kashrut chicken till it begs for mercy. I even select a certain roasting technique, propping the bird on its side and turning it twice so the meat cooks evenly.

Come time and the meat is yummy and tender, flavorful...and the skin is sort of a tepid beige-brown. Why G-d why? I bought your special chicken---I didn't even put dairy in the rest of the meal? Please? It's like every other chicken whose skin has failed to crackle. Could it be my oven? Does one require a rotisserie? Should I rost it at a higher temperature? With oil instead of butter? Should I buy that thingie I keep threatening to where you skewer the bird through its body cavity so it stands up like a good little soldier in the oven?

I am defeated...oh well. The meat was good.

Apparently a company was able to build an entire business of preslicing apples, dipping them in a fixative that keeps them fresh for a month, and selling them to the public.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/magazine/12apples.html

Right. So it has come to this? We'll buy seven dollar chocolate bars with notes of bergamot and wood mushroom but we can't find the time to eat *an apple* without someone preslicing and preserving it?
I admit, I am a wierd girl with my apples. I'll eat a peach in a second, but apples I have a little problem with. I take them to class with me, thinking they will be the perfect snack. I take them out of my bag in class, hold them, admire their greenness, feel their roundness and the weight of them. Occasionally I'll rest my face on them for a minute. And then, nine times out of ten, back into my bag they go. B. always looks at me askance when I take the same apple out of my bag that I put in it that morning. This can go own for days.
It's just that once you bite into the darn thing, you have to finish it. It's not like a sandwich, which you can eat half of and throw back in the Ziploc. And if you don't have a napkin the juice gets all over you. Also, if you're eating it in class there are those wierd munching, crunching, and juice sucking sounds that elicit wierd stares from your older colleagues while you listen to them discuss Balzac.
But I won't make bread in the bread machine, I don't buy premixed salad, and I won't buy cut up apples, damnit. Hmp! Just going to have to eat them like a real grown up person. (She says, eyeing the apple sitting next to what remained of a nice fat piece of fresh baked foccacia drizzled with honey on her breakfast plate.....I'd get the bread again before naturally eating the fruit)

Now as for this chocolate business I've been reading so much about lately. It's a little pretentious, I think. I love good, dark, high quality chocolate as much as the next girl. But free trade chocolate? Single origin chocolate? "Tastings" of chocolate? The panel in Gourmet magazine that recommended seven dollar Valrhona chocolate bars as the best for brownies???

I think not. I tried the five dollar chocolate bars (Lindt, Gourmet said they were "good, but not overly complex") in brownies. Good brownies. MMMM. Better than mix. Expensive as hell. I then tried Hershey's baking squares, oh so conveniently seperated into ounce-each foil wrapped packets. Equally yummy. Bitches. The secret to fanatastic brownies isn't the uber expensive chocolate...it's melting real chocolate instead of cocoa powder or using mix. OK, you do want decent chocolate. I wouldn't use chocolate chips or milk chocolate, but Hershey's semisweet does the trick just fine. Point is, if you are mixing it with vanilla, eggs, and flour and then baking it, the fancy pants notes of flavor aren't coming through anyway.

Now I do admit that those same seven dollar bars are goooood when I want a bar to eat by itself at room temp. Yep. Worth the money. Although I still won't buy organic chocolate. There's no gaurantee it's organic, first of all. And as for single origin, what's the point? The best chocolates are blends. I have little interest in being able to tell an Africa coca bean from a South American one. My favorite chocolate company in the world (Recchiuti in SF if anyone has a sudden irredemable urge to send me a box...) doesn't make a big deal out of single origin chocolate. And I admit, their chocolate is good enough that I might actually stop to think about the secondary "notes."

OT note:

I also learned how to make truffles have that "snap" on the outside...I was at Reading and some fellow was demonstrating regular truffles and I asked him. So he grabbed a truffle, dunked it in the melted chocolate he was using to coat the strawberries, and said "there you go!" The reason why some of them dont "snap" as nicely as others has to do with how fresh that coating is and how many times they had to dip it to get it smooth. If anyone wants the recipie comment and I'll post it.