Philoculture

Casserole 911

2011-05-29T21:29:00.000-04:00

It's always nice to make something nice with a few day's preparations, but there is a special sense of accomplishment when you come into a strange kitchen and make something tasty out of whatever you might find.

I had that experience when the pizza to be delivered to a friend's house turned out to be not so delivered. How to feed a lot of large, hungry men folk. The yeast was a bit out of date so I couldn't just make some pizza from flour and such. A feijoada or cassoulet is another sure fire crowdfeeder, but no dried beans or big hunks of beast. A couple of pounds chicken though. Many cans of diced tomatoes. Canned black beans. A giant tamale casserole? Perhaps.

I had an ace in the hole in that I bought a ridiculous amount of butter to replace and supplement what I use making brownies and/or other baked goods in this person's household. No need to be shy with that.

Melt 4 tablespoons butter in a giant pan. Brown 3 lbs chicken meat, cubed, working in batches, until browned. Reserve browned meat. Add 3 onions, chopped, to fat in pan. Add 4 more tbsp butter. Fry, scraping, until softened. Add about 1-1.5 cup masa harina, or corn meal if you don't have masa, but if you have some corn chips make a cup or two of corn chip crumbs and use those instead (corn chip crumbles make fantastic tamale pie). Fry for a few minutes. Add 1 tbsp chicken bouillon, 1 tsp oregano, 2 tbsp chili powder, 1 tbsp garlic powder. Stir until that's all incorporated. Fry until aromatic, then add 2 cans canned diced tomatoes. Stir until a gravy like substance is formed.

Open two cans black beans.

Shred at least 2 cups cheddar cheese.

Get a 12" oval casserole, or larger, really, and put down a layer of half the tomato gravy, half the chicken, half the beans, half the cheese. Repeat once more. Put the assembled casserole in a 350 degree oven for about an hour. Remove and preferably let stand for 12-30 minutes. It should produce a nice, slice-able casserole.

Serves six hungry people.

Shanghai Vegetable

2011-05-25T20:40:00.001-04:00

Another batter for the sub 200 supper is a minimal stir fry. This time we're introducing carbs but in the form of friendly bok choy.

12 oz fat free chicken tenderloins or pork tenderloins, sliced very thin against the grain.

.5 cup soy sauce

.5 cup rice wine vinegar

1 tbsp red pepper flakes

1 head bok choy, slice green parts and keep separate, slice white parts into 2" pieces on the diagonal

4 quarts water and 4 tbsp salt

1 tbsp minced ginger

1 tbsp minced garlic

6 scallions, green parts only, sliced into 1" pieces

Combine first 4 ingredients in a zip lock bag, squish around to combine, and let marinate for 10-30 minutes. Room temperature is fine, there is so much salinity and pH in there bacteria don't want a piece of that action.

Bring 4 quarts of water with salt to a boil. Put white parts of cabbage in there, boil for 1m45s or until it is crisp-tender. Drain, refresh with cold water until completely cooled.

Drain the meat from the marinade, squeeze in colander to get excess off.

Heat a nonstick pan on medium high heat until water drops dance on surface when spilled there. If you are not watching calories quite so carefully swab 1 tsp oil around the pan before heating, and add meat when oil is shimmering.

Put meat in skillet and allow to brown, about 90 seconds, depending on how thin you sliced it. Stir it around a bit, deglaze if necessary. Remove browned meat to bowl.

Put ginger and garlic in pan, stir until aromatic, about 15s. Add cabbage greens and fry, stirring, until wilted. At this point or really any point during the stir fry process, if the pan scab is going from brown to black, add a splash of water to deglaze the pan, but remember to reduce the liquid again or you'll have soup. Try not to overcook the greens. For that reason perhaps it's better to deglaze after the meat is browned, I dunno.

Add the whites of the cabbage to the pan along with the reserved browned meat, stir until everything is warmed through. Serve, giving some rice to the carbophiles.

I've seen recipes that use the same technique but with crab, tofu, any number of meaty proteins really. I say go nuts, but cook the whites and the greens separate. In bok choy it really is like two vegetables in one.

Skinny Southwest Soup

2011-05-24T09:25:00.000-04:00

Soup is great stuff for the calorie restricted. Here we see the same secret ingredients of unflavored gelatin, psyllium fiber, and egg whites that we saw in the slimgolemono, but with a different spice pack. The gelatin does a really good job of making the soup seem greasy, when there is nary a drop of oil in it.

The following recipe delivers a flavorful sub-200 calorie meal for 2 diet-tortured folks. It's about as satisfied as you'll ever be on less than 200 calories.

12 oz fat-free chicken tenderloins, cut into .75" dice.

Some nonstick cooking spray

2 cups water

2 tsp Tone's chicken base

1 tbsp chili powder

1 tsp cumin

1 tsp liquid smoke

2 tbsp paprika

1 tsp thyme

1 tbsp garlic powder, rehydrated in 2 tbsp water

3 tbsp lime juice

1 packet unflavored gelatin

3 tbsp egg whites

1 tbsp psyllium fiber, obtained by emptying 6 fiber capsules

handful cilantro, chopped

This recipe really needs some smoke flavor, which means browning the chicken is worthwhile. Working in batches, brown the chicken dice in nonstick cooking spray. You only really need to brown one side of the dice, but more flavor never hurts in this calorie range.

Once that's finished browning, add the rehydrated garlic to the pot, fry until fragrant, 15 seconds. Add the water, chicken base, chili powder, cumin, liquid smoke, paprika, and thyme. Cook until chicken is falling apart, 20 minutes on high pressure in the pressure cooker.

While that's going on bloom the gelatin and fiber in 1/3 cup water.

When the chicken's done, whisk in the gelatin-fiber disk until dissolved. Take off the heat. Whisk in the egg whites- it's OK if they scramble a bit- then stir in the lime juice. Test for seasoning- it might need some salt, or more paprika if it is not quite red enough. Serve, sprinkle each serving with the chopped cilantro.

This recipe was crying for 1/3 cup of frozen sweet corn kernels thrown into it just before the last paragraph, but it would up the calorie count and blow the carb compliance right out the frickin' window. So, maybe keep that in mind if maybe you're not low-carbing.

Slimgolemono

2011-05-19T18:49:00.003-04:00

Mediterranean cuisine has an egg yolk fetish I've never really understood. Maybe it's the fact they don't have lots of butter and cream, or maybe they don't have the right grains to thicken things. In any case, it's the home of the Provencal Bourride, a weird but nevertheless very tasty egg-thickened fish stew, served with a sauce made of more eggs- a spicy mayonnaise, usually. The Med is also home to avgolemono, an intense lemon and egg soup, usually made with chicken and rice.

The challenge is that I had to make a light lunch soup with no carbohydrates (no rice), maximal protein, and weighing in at less than 500 calories for a 4 cup portion for 2 (no egg yolks either). I scratched my head for cooking knowledge and a sort-of-avgolemono game out: the slimgolemono. I didn't think I could satisfy two adults on a meal totaling 450 calories, but it worked. The gelatin and fiber added a nice bit of body as well.

16 oz fat-free chicken tenderloins, cut into 3/4" pieces

1.5 cups water

2 tsp Tone's chicken base

2 tsp oregano

2 tsp fresh ground black pepper

2 tsp garlic powder

1 tbsp unflavored gelatin

1 tbsp psyllium husk (empty 6 tabs fiber capsules)

2 tbsp lemon juice

3 tbsp egg whites

Put first 6 ingredients in pressure cooker, cook on high pressure for 20 minutes, until chicken falls apart. While that's going on, in a mixing cup mix gelatin, fiber, and 1/3 cup water, allow the gelatin to bloom. Unlid the vessel with the chicken and stir in the gelatin/fiber disk. Bring the mixture to a simmer. When the gelatin is dissolved, whisk in the egg whites, stir until soup is thickened. Add lemon juice and serve.

Sandwich of the Big Shoulders

2011-05-17T21:27:00.007-04:00

I wanted to make a Chicago-style Italian beef sandwich but had the same problem I had with risotto: I had not eaten it yet at an actual restaurant. So I made a sandwich that tasted the way I imagined an Italian beef to taste like. Hopefully it went as well as the risotto, but I won't know until I try an actual Italian beef for myself.

First problem was that I had no bread. Italian beef is a soggy mess, served in eight different ways (where each way means "drippy") and it needs serious bread. A recipe's worth of pizza bianca would work. Pizza bianca in its Roman incarnation is a concoction that is absolutely nothing like pizza. It's basically a really good crust with seasonings on top. It also happens to be super easy. Whisk 3 cups bread flour with 1 2/3 cups water- no chlorine water, it kills the yeast, use bottled water if you have to- and, eh, 1.5 tsp table salt. Mix until combined, let sit for 30 minutes. Sprinkle 1.5 tsp yeast, 2 tsp sugar on top, then mix for fifteen minutes, until it gets glossy and starts pulling away from the side of the bowl. Oil another big bowl, then plop the dough into the oiled bowl using an oiled silicon paddle. There's a theme here, oiled, and the theme is that this stuff is sticky. Oil the top of the dough, wrap bowl in saran wrap and let rise 2-2.5 hours, until it has doubled or tripled in volume. Using your oiled spatula again, sort of scroop the dough into an oiled, rimmed baking pan. Smoosh it out into the corners with your oiled spatula. It's very liquid dough, which makes it much more bubbly on baking, a good thing. Throw some rosemary and kosher salt on top, or whatever else you want, really. Let it rise again for about ten minutes until bubbly. Preheat the oven to 450. Bake for about 30 minutes in the middle of the oven until crispity crackly and golden brown.

Italian beef is supposed to be made out of either round or top sirloin if you're fancy. I had neither. Some chuck on hand that needs to get used, and which, if you couldn't guess by now, is one of my favorite all purpose beef cuts. Seriously. Meatballs? Throw it in the food processor with some bread, milk, parmesean, parsley and a little egg. Hamburger? Same as meatballs but without any of the frou-frou. Stir fry? Done. Curry? Hells yes, Thai or Vindaloo. Pot roast? Is that a question? You serious?

Anyway, 20 oz chuck. Cut into 1.5" cubes, brown cubes in pressure cooker, add 1 cup beef stock, 1 tsp rosemary, 1 tbsp oregano, 1 tsp thyme, 1 tsp rubbed sage, 1 tsp black pepper, 1 tsp red pepper flakes, and 1 tbsp garlic powder. Stir to dissolve brown bits. Lid, cook on high pressure 55 minutes, or forever if you're oven braising (3 hours covered at 300 degrees). Remove meat to bowl, bring cooking liquid to a rapid boil, reduce cooking liquid by 3/4. Shred reserved meat, then add back to reduced cooking liquid. Thicken with slurry of 1 tsp cornstach to 2 tbsp water. That's the "sort of Chicago beef".

Slice your pizza bianca into planks, then cut each plank down the middle and put the meat slurry in between. Stuff some hot giardiniera in there and you have, if not a genuine Italian beef, something that is at least Chicago-beef-inspired. Hey, it's tasty.

You'll have plenty of pizza bianca leftover too.

Now excuse me, but I think I need to go on a diet.

Postscript: I might use the giardiniera for a diet, too, actually, it's pretty good for you. Recipe after the jump.

Post Postscript: Sometime I need to go to Tony's Italian Beef down in Sarasota and get the real thing. After a diet.

Bonus recipe: Hot Giardiniera

2 green bell peppers, diced

2 red bell peppers, diced

8 fresh jalapeno peppers, sliced

1 celery stalk, diced

1 medium carrot, diced

1 small onion, chopped

1/2 cup fresh cauliflower florets

1/2 cup salt

water to cover

2 cloves garlic, finely chopped

1 tablespoon dried oregano

1 teaspoon red pepper flakes

1/2 teaspoon black pepper

1 (5 ounce) jar pimento-stuffed green olives, chopped

1 cup white vinegar

1. Combine green and red peppers, jalapenos, celery, carrots, onion, and cauliflower, salt, and fill with enough cold water to cover. Wrap and chill 24 hours.

2. The next day, drain and rinse. Add rest of ingredients, chill 2 days before using.

Beef and Broccoli

2011-05-17T08:48:00.001-04:00

I sort of suck at stir fries. "Suck" might be a bit strong. I also suck at cake baking, and by "suck" I mean I don't do it often enough to innovate. I have to sort of cling to whatever recipe I have because I don't know enough to do anything else, and I know if I deviate I'll break the thing.

The thing is I have great cake recipes and maybe not so great stir fry recipes. Well, that's not quite true either. I do have great stir fry recipes but from an enormous and very authentic Mandarin cookbook which needs ingredients like sow blood and moon pepper. Someday I will make something according to a recipe in this cookbook and it will be amazing, but it will require an independent trip to the oriental grocery and a lot of gesturing. So I have generally used Betty Crocker stir fry recipes, which were, well, they were OK, but without enough soy or ginger to really punch through the middle-America barrier. The Betty Crocker cookbook is amazingly consistent in how good its recipes are, but in the stir fry department it really wants to stay in its comfort zone, which happens to be right in the middle of a vat of mac and cheese at a church social in Arkansas.

So I got a request for stir fry. Complicating things is an impending move which requires me to make use of existing ingredients, and I had some beef chuck and some frozen broccoli I needed to get rid of. So I found a beef broccoli that worked really, really well. I didn't have flank so I sliced the chuck roast very fine and it went fantastically, the fattier cut making a much more beefy, velvety sauce. I also didn't have red bell peppers or scallions, and I subbed rehydrated garlic for fresh where needed, as well as some other things. Before you scoff, yes, garlic powder works fine, it just needs to be rehydrated in water before it is added to other ingredients.

.5 pound chuck, sliced into 1/8" slices or as thin as you can get it.

1.5 tablespoons soy sauce

1.5 teaspoons marsala

.5 tsp chicken base or bullion

1 tablespoon water

2.5 tablespoons oyster sauce

1.5 teaspoons sugar

.5 teaspoon toasted sesame oil

.5 teaspoon cornstarch

1 tsp red pepper flakes

1 tbsp garlic powder, rehydrated in 1 tbsp water

2 tsp minced ginger

Some oil

14 oz frozen broc florets

1 cup rice, 2 cups water, a bit of salt, a bit of oil

1. Combine beef and soy sauce in medium bowl; cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate at least 10 minutes or up to 1 hour, stirring once. Meanwhile, whisk next 8 ingredients in measuring cup as sauce mixture. Combine garlic, ginger, and 1/2 teaspoon peanut oil in small bowl. Cook broccoli in microwave for 3 minutes or as directed on package. Start the rice on another burner.

2. Drain beef and discard liquid. Heat 2 teaspoons peanut oil in 12-inch nonstick skillet over high heat until smoking. Add beef to skillet and break up clumps; cook, without stirring, for 1 minute, then stir and cook until beef is browned around edges, about 30 seconds. Transfer beef to medium bowl.

3. Add 2 teaspoons peanut oil to now-empty skillet; heat until just smoking. Add broccoli and cook 30 seconds or until browned, remove and place aside with beef ( I used the same bowl for that). Add a bit more oil, let it heat, then add garlic and ginger and cook, mashing mixture with spoon, until fragrant, 15 to 20 seconds. Return beef and broccoli to skillet and toss to combine. Whisk sauce to recombine, then add to skillet; cook, stirring constantly, until sauce is thickened and evenly distributed, about 30 seconds. Take off the heat and serve over rice. If you have some scallions chop them and scatter over each serving.

Serves 2, but it scales pretty well so long as you don't try and do more than 1 lb of beef at a time. Remember to not crowd the pan when browning meat or you get steamed meat instead of browned meat.

Borderline

2011-04-03T16:33:00.003-04:00

Wonderland Trail

Summerland to Nickel Creek

09-10-2010

I crawled out of the tent into the coldest morning so far, somewhere around freezing, with the clouds filled back in, promising the thick mist Northwesterners call "rain". My ground pad isn't holding air anymore, which shouldn't surprise anyone, as I've had the thing since 2004. I put down some brush under the tent last night to help insulate my sleeping body. Bag gets rolled, incidentals go in the incidentals bag, eat my protein bar, then down tent and up onto the stepped climb to Fryingpan. The visibility declined, making the climb feel more episodic, as you could never quite see where the pass was, and every climb felt like the last. I passed though krummholtz meadow, ice lakes all around, and then up a glacier so large I couldn't see either side in the middle of it. In the middle of the glacier crossing I heard falling rock above me. If I dodged or moved quickly I would certainly slip down the glacier and crash into the rocks three hundred feet below. I heard the fall and stopped, looking around, putting all my faith in the low probabilities of a rock passing through the same space I currently occupied. It passed ten yards behind me.

I started to learn some basics on moving around on ice. Without crampons, it's vital to keep both poles on the ice while stepping. Don't pivot on your feet. Don't stay in one place too long or else the ice melts under your feet and spills you. Above all, speed doesn't win here. Crampons are a definite buy for the High Sierra.

After a final ice crossing I crested Fryingpan gap and began the steady drop into the cirque and the Indian Bar campsite. I was passed by a Northwestern Fitness Leprechaun, who mentioned that the conditions were "borderline". Good to know. "You'll be alright, though, guy like you, in your, what, mid-forties?". I smiled sadly at him. He laughed apologetically, and I paced him to Indian Bar. Goddamn fitness leprechauns. The guy was running down the mountain and was older than my dad was when he died.

Indian Bar is one of the prettiest spots on the trail, at least in those conditions, just below the cloud ceiling, so that the floor of the cirque could be seen for a few hundred feet before rearing into the clouds. It had a shelter, which allowed me to cook a hot lunch for myself and relax. The fitness leprechaun zoomed ahead to meet a friend at the Steve's Canyon road crossing. He was replaced with a squad of Microsoft guys trying to do the Wonderland in a four day weekend. They were hoofing twenty five mile days and suffering from a kaleidoscope of muscle and joint trauma. I handed out ibuprofen, moleskin, and duct tape, it being my turn to be the medic. They thanked me and set out for White River.

I wondered if I could do such a feat. I probably wouldn't unless I lived up here. Pulling a twenty on this sort of trail would involve shutting down a lot of sensory input. Mp3 player would be going, pounding trail. For a flatlander like me, though, the fact that I would probably never come this way again meant I needed to savor this. Every moment. Especially this Mountain House Lasagna.

I packed up and girded myself for the climb out of Indian Bar, which I had read was pretty strong. Strong it was, but afterwards came a very un-Wonderland section of ups and downs following an unnamed connecting ridge to Bald Rock, before the plunge down to what would be my final campsite on the trail at Nickel Creek. Goodbye to the high country..

The weather was definitely determined to clear. Several times folks said to me, "Florida! Wow, what are you doing out here? Enjoying our October?" My weather research had not been wrong then. This was weird weather for the mountain in early September. Several rangers were worried about the late spring combined with an early winter, and its effects on wildlife. I was worried I wouldn't get to see the mountain again.

I set my tent up at Nickel and went to the relatively bug-free drafty area by the creek. I ate much of the rest of my provisions, and thought, and ate some more. I tuned into the water noise and got to hear what sounded like a bluegrass concert. I was convinced there was a big party somewhere down river. But of course it was just the mountain talking. There must be a way in life to make sure as many moments like this happen as possible, but I don't know what it is.

Sunrise Cleaners

2011-04-03T15:40:00.002-04:00

Wonderland Trail

Sunrise to Summerland

9-9-2010

The landscape yesterday had been dazzling even in the gloom, white sheaths of ice on grey rock, piercing drafts of wind and water punching us walkers roaming the waste. I dropped from a high pass to a meadow, then climbed again to a gravel lot that marked the end of the Sunrise-Longmire road. Somewhere on that road was a food drop and perhaps some shelter; I had heard already that the snack bar was closed for the season, so I had gotten over the fact that there would be no trail hamburgers this trip out. I legged it down the road. The reputed vistas of the Sunrise area were hiding behind the more or less constant drizzling overcast, and I wasn't totally sure that I hadn't missed the Wilderness Information Center and my food drop. I had passed a loud generator sound, and I hoped that wasn't it. A pickup came up and I flagged it down.

"Afternoon. Is the WIC down this way or did I pass it?"

""Nope, just a mile or so down the way. You gettin' off?"

I smiled and shook my head, "I think it's going to be faster just walking back to Longmire."

This was a bit of a lie. If I couldn't dry my bag out at Sunrise I would be seriously thinking about getting out. The weather forecast had proven less than accurate, and the hypothermic adventure at Mystic had frightened me and left me a little nauseated. It would, however, be disheartening, and besides, what better place is there to be than freezing and soggy on Mt. Rainier?

Lots of places, it turned out. The rangers at the WIC let me dry and warm myself as long as I cared to. I feasted on some canned treats in my food drop, and met some outrageously funny prison guards out for a stroll.

"You sure you don't want to come down with us?"

I reaffirmed my commitment to walk out, and parked myself in the sheltered area outside the men's room to wait out the heavier rain. It would be my last temptation to get off the mountain, but it was a good temptation. I'm pretty sure I would have had a blast with those guys.

Another duo of hikers were bound and determined to camp out in the dry and heated men's room, which was tacitly approved by a WIC staffer. "No one ever checks in here at night". Wink. The pair were unloading their food drops on the diaper change table, which was sort of a decider for me. Sure, I might get a little soggier in my Shires Contrail, but I would have less of a chance of getting some horrifying parasite. At the Sunrise camp I chatted with a gregarious trekker who bore an uncanny resemblance to one of my favorite former co-workers, Keith Fulsom. I had my ego battered for a bit, not unpleasantly so, by the awesome fitness level and general woodsiness of Northwesterners. Not the first time or last time that happened either.

The journey from Sunrise to Summerland tantalized with its constant promise of a break in the weather. I got some good views down into the White River area, and gazed ahead at the Goat Island prominence. The trail descended through White River camp- two road crossings in two days!- and went around Goat Island on a gentle grade, then up Fryingpan Creek on what has become a sort of trademark Wonderland grade. Steep enough to make you go deep inside yourself, but not so rugged that you become frustrated.

Summerland had better cell reception than I get at home, incidentally. I took advantage of it to call the wife and relate the details of the trip so far. The summerland shelter was booked solid, but the folks there were happy and bundled in several dozen flocks' worth of down. I was reminded again that I might have some genetic factor for dealing with cold. "Did you bring anything besides rain gear?" Some, yeah, but the sleeping bag does the heavy insulation. With rain gear inside your bag, you can stay toasty indeed.

That night the clouds almost parted, showing a glacial climb ahead, full of ice crossings and high passes. I can't imagine what this place looks like then the weather's good.

The chipmunks have suddenly become insane. It's a hilarious task kicking them out of your tent while you're trying to roll up your sleeping bag while trying to avoid the thick web of condensation on the inside of the tent. They will steal food from your beard if you leave any there. Brass little bastards.

Hiatus

2011-03-26T16:13:00.001-04:00

An apology for the hiatus to the Philoculture blog.

The Rainier adventure will be completed from voice logs, and coverage of lovely recipes shall continue.

Something Hidden

2010-09-14T23:08:00.003-04:00

Wonderland Trail

Mystic Lake Camp to Sunrise

9-8-2010

Today is the first day that the sky has officially deviated from the weather forecast I bought my airline tickets for. They were cheap tickets, but with rain today the official vision for what the trip should have been is out the window. The official vision had me, in a mental image that is distinctly svelter than usual, struggling up a verdant slope to see, consciousness clobbering in its immensity, The Mountain. I would face down the Evil Me and beat him until his soul came out his urethra. I would have great overpourings of emotion and catharsis, etc, etc, etc.

That official version is of the same sort of offal that comes from the mouths of people that fantasize about war but have not spent more than thirty seconds with an actual veteran. It's gym offal. Tough guy crap. It's the same sort of offal I tell myself that makes me walk in a box for a few minutes a day before I truck myself off to another torture box where I can point at glowing boxes on a screen for money, moving less than two hundred feet in a ten hour stretch. Gym time has nothing to do with being here, on the mountain, no more so than ten seconds on a rifle range can tell you about 1943 Stalingrad.

On the mountain there is no existential animus. There is no lost maiden, or a skulking ruiner to thwart. There are the sweating trees, my heaving lungs. Marmots waddling across the heath. Stupid youtube songs about the Soviet Union and Tetris. Protein bars. My personal cloud of vaporized water, the molecules smashed into the air by the kinetic energy of my skin. Each and every one of these things is more beautiful, ipso facto, than the phenomenon of the mountain itself, which I have memorized from every possible angle. I hadn't actually seen it very often. It might not even be there. It might be more powerful yet if it were not.

Sometimes I hope I never seen my mountain*, and with that thought another lock turns in the door to happiness. The mountain is in my heart. It can not be claimed or bought or laid off or divorced. The only thing it can do in my heart is be loved, loved more each tomorrow than it is today.

#######

*So long as it's not just a model made by the Washington Commerce Committee.

"Yah, what yah think would make people come to our godforsaken state, eh?"

"Why don't we build a model of a great honkin mountin, dochaknow. Make pretty videos of it like that hobbit guy did with New Zealand. Then people could come up from places like Florida where they don't have any great honkin mountins".

"WHY?!"

"To see the big honkin mountin, donchaknow"

I am reasonably sure Mt. Rainier is not just a fiberglass model.

Wet Down

2010-09-14T20:02:00.003-04:00

Wonderland Trail

Ipsut Creek Camp to Mystic Lake

9-7-2010

I stayed late at Ipsut Camp this morning, waiting to see if the rain that had increased over the night would let up for the day's climb. It was a solid four thousand to Mystic Camp, but more importantly, I'd be staying at that elevation, and Mystic Camp is surrounded on three sides with glaciers. I didn't want to be wet there. I met a nice couple at Ipsut who were also heading up to Mystic that day. Also, I was delaying because the bathroom at Ipsut was so gloriously warm and dry. I wish I could say it was the first time I considered sleeping in a bathroom. It wasn't the first time and it certainly wasn't the last. It was a nice bathroom. The rain steadily increased throughout the day.

Ipsut was simultaneously homey and spooky. Picnic tables, car parking areas, blank informational boards telling you about nothing at all. I heard trail crews working in the hillsides and realized that Rainier NP is a backpacker's park. The floods had nibbled away at the auto access, but the park service was in absolutely no great hurry to restore the car camp services. Contrast this with the reconstruction of the WT after those same floods. More than seventy percent of the WT was utterly destroyed. Looking at the glacial basins it's not hard to see why; it looks like a unidirectional Nagasaki. The WT, though, was ready for business in a couple of month's time. Not so Ipsut Camp.

This sounds bitter, but it's really not. I understand what the NPS is doing. Backpackers just don't cause the same sort of mass obnoxiousness as Bubba McLubbitz from Pabstown, with his feeding the wildlife and chucking empties at marmots. It's just that my grandparents raised my parents car camping, and my parents raised me car camping, until some weird combination of brain chemistry and circumstance led me to this. If I had spawn at the normal time in the human life cycle I probably would have reverted to car camping as well and given my pack to some college student. The car camp, though, is the gateway. It's how this starts, this, the greatest thing in the world. It's a window into the freedom every kid fawns at when his parents irritate him. If only I could get out of this car and into those hills! They'd never find me there! When you get older you realize what a double-edged statement that is. Without car campgrounds, though, the opportunity for that type of growth may never occur.

So I had to leave my cozy bathroom sometime. Rain and wind. Four thousand feet. I broke one of my taboos and plugged in my mp3 player until it shorted out. It got me past four thousand feet. Carbon glacier is just barely visible in this mist and rain, an enormous gray-white back, like a nightmare Moby Dick. I climb past it. Is this mist or steam from my body. Steam, rain, both. Clearing Moraine Park I am beginning to not feel very well. I throw up a protein bar I ate at Carbon River bridge. Super Chocolate Chunk. I don't stop. It is only the mid forties, but the wet and the wind make this feel far worse than the eleven degrees I hiked through in the Carters that September four years ago. There are flowers up here that are like four foot wands with pom poms on the ends. The pom poms are wilted in the rain and the whole plant looks rather ridiculous, like a plant version of the marmot. Perhaps ridiculousness is a survival strategy up here.

I come to Mystic Camp. It's deserted. All the people who made reservations have cancelled them. I hang the food bag and throw up the tent in the rain. More of my stuff is wetter than I'd like. It's very bad. I try and get warm inside a damp down bag. It's lost all of its insulating power and is holding a range of joules somewhere between jack and squat. I give up trying to keep anything dry and put on the polypro on my wet skin, then rain gear, all socks, gloves, sleeping bag. Tent's turning into a sauna from my body. I went up too fast, it's three PM. I fall asleep for three hours and wake up roasty toasty. Burning. I make my way out of the tent and to my hanging food bag. Somehow I manage to eat a Super Chocolate Chunk. Not sure how I could do that after tossing one up earlier but that's the hunger for you. Then a bagel. Then a wedge of cheese, some nuts. Jerky. Did I eat another bagel? I don't know. Everything is delicious. I'm feeling pretty good. Actually I feel fantastic, like I just did shots of some exotic vodka made from nougat and angel tears. I go back to my sodden tent and wet bag and fall asleep again, rain knocking condensation off the inside of the tent onto my face. I stuff my head in the hood of the rain jacket and snore very loudly.

Late, late that night, after eight, the couple comes in. I talk to them in the morning. They are getting out at Sunrise, my next camp and last food cache. They're done with wet and cold. They invite me with them- they can get me as far as Steve's Canyon. I'd have to hitch from there, but I tentatively agree. The bag is wet. It's a down bag. A wet down bag is worse than nothing, at best it's uncomfortable, but it can be (and has been) a death sentence. I wasn't coming down from the heights until this thing was almost through, after Summerland, two nights away, and I was not going to spend another night above five thousand with a wet down bag.

The Nature of Man

2010-09-14T18:59:00.005-04:00

Wonderland Trail
Golden Lakes to Ipsut Creek Camp
9-6-2010

Ten miles around and down the South Mowich basin, then four thousand feet up to Mowich Lake and my first food cache, then down Ipsut Pass to the camp. Longest day yet, sixteen miles. When I imagined food caching on the WT, I have to admit I was coming at it from a somewhat spoiled Easterner's perspective. I imagined rosy-cheeked rangers inside heated offices, handing out the buckets we mailed so lovingly weeks before. "Here ye go, mi'lad", they'd say. "Be careful out there!". It turned out to be a bit of a search in the rain around a car campground. I found a side trail on the east side of the lake that led to a patrol cabin that looked like a bomb had gone off in it. In front was a plain metal box. Clumsy chilled fingers explored the edges of the box, lifting. Locked. A sign on the other side of the box. FOOD CACHE. Latches to deter bears. They're stuck and my arms are weak. Lever it with the pole, gently, don't break your trekking pole for god's sake. It clicked, I got my first food drop, and the rain broke. It was a happy time. The food shortage had finally ended. Would the rain?

I climbed around the lake and met my first daytrippers. Mowich has road access, which means it was also the first place I was tempted to get off the mountain. Some car campers offered a ride to Carbon River ranger station. Logistics more than anything else kept me from saying yes; getting from Carbon back to the car at Longmire would be a four hour drive even if I had a car, and I don't know how easy hitching is out here. Besides, "it's going to clear up tomorrow". I'd keep going. I wouldn't be taking the scenic route through Spray Park, though, because it's not going to be that scenic since it's above the five thousand foot cloud deck.

Ipsut Pass, just beyond Mowich Lake, was genuinely impressive. It's as if someone went to Tuck's Ravine on Mt. Washington NH and put trees all over it. The trail just drops down a grand and a half in a couple of miles, then another two thousand in another couple of miles. One older lady hiker I met earlier near Pyramid Creek scoffed at this section. "I don't know why they make that the route then spend all their time making Spray so pretty. If they want people to go through Spray they should just tell them to go through Spray". I'm of a different opinion, as this is the best view I've had in days, since it's entirely under the deck. Ipsut camp should be nice, also, as it's an old car camp abandoned after the 2006 floods. Should have a toilet with a roof. I am living the high life here, people.

The lesson for the day was, "stop fretting". I spend, and I'm pretty sure most people spend, too much of themselves worrying about how they feel about something, how they are supposed to feel, and whether they should feel anything. Feelings are rubbish. It's this doing that matters. Striving, moving. Don't fall! It's the heart of the world. So, I say to the internal worrywart. What about me? I hike. What about you?

Some Wilder Heaven

2010-09-14T16:38:00.004-04:00

Wonderland Trail

South Puyallup Creek to Golden Lakes

9-5-2010

Coming into South Puyallup yesterday was, for the eastern hiker, a Brobdingnagian experience. Everything was three times as large as its eastern counterpart. The mountain, three times as high. Glaciers. Gorges three thousand feet deep, as a rule, and not the exception (the only three thousand foot gorge I recall on the AT was Webster Cliffs in NH). I woke up in South Puyallup and packed up for Golden Lakes, anticipating more head-blowing-off wonder.

Clouds began rolling in by about ten, however, which set the tone for much of the rest of the trip. Not so much with the views. Quite a lot with the spooky menace. This was going to be a conditions endurance contest. I had an oldish down sleeping bag with no waterproofing, some crappy Dri-Ducks, and polypro long johns. Gloves, extra pair dry socks, sock liners, and hubris. The gaps I filled in with duct tape. Standard hiking wear is a capilene shirt, shorts that don't dry out nearly fast enough and a pair of underarmour to prevent "macho he-man inner thigh rash". In short, not enough clothes. I fell to relying on the old Appalachian Trail technique of not stopping. The problem on the WT is that you have to stop, unless you're a Seattlite Fitness Leprechaun, which I am not. When you stop, when you're wet and it's forty degrees out and windy you have half an hour before your hands start shaking too much to be usable. I didn't stop. By the time I got to my campsite I was not feeling hungry at all, which is good, because I underpacked this leg of the trip. I set up the tent as fast as I could and got out of wet things and into polypro longjohns and rain gear. Still cold.

Golden Lakes, though, rippled under clouds, the rain canted off into a wind-blown mist. A thoughtful young man told me about pathfinding across the Rockies in Idaho, and a trio of apparently immortal old ladies burst into a perfect harmony, some Nordic song of wandering and redemption. The young man said the ladies do six mile days for most of a month, just wandering the mountain. They sound like angels of a wilder heaven. I'm not feeling hungry but I'm not feeling terribly cold anymore either.

######################################

As a post-script, thank goodness for my Meathead Brand Protein Colossal bars. I would never eat them off trail because they're like five hundred calories apiece, but if you did the math I think the majority of my calories came from these things, and on cold days they were all I would eat. Sort of like Snickers bars for AT hikers in Maine. I also noticed that I didn't have the calf and thigh soreness I should have had after all those big climbs. Either the weight room time is helping or the increased protein intake. Beats the hell out of snickers anyway. At these temps you can barely bite into chocolate.

Only the kind hurts kill

2010-09-14T15:45:00.004-04:00

Wonderland Trail

Longmire to South Puyallup Creek Campsite via Pyramid Creek

9-4-2010

Yesterday was a baby day. Three point five miles from Longmire over Rampart Ridge to Pyramid Creek campsite, which incidentally lay closer to Pearl Creek than Pyramid. No sooner had I gotten my tent up at Pyramid than I was beset by insects. When the weather is fair on the Wonderland Trail, you have to contend with the insects. Otherwise you get the freezing rain. I took my food bag and hustled to Pearl Creek to spend a very relaxed afternoon.

When you listen to falling water for a long time it sounds like all kinds of things- a goth-industrial club, laughing girls, your dead father. There is this damn "History of the Soviet Union Told Through Tetris" song that would not leave my head. Then the techno again. There is a reason that these mountain streams always have demigods living in them, in the old tales. They talk to you, and the act of auditory perception can not shake it. If it weren't for science I would think there were spirits there too.

The next day I set out for South Puyallup via Indian Henry's Hunting Ground, and the patrol shack that sat on the site. This was the second day of good weather I was to have on the trip, but I was preoccupied because I had inadvertently swapped my first food drop with my second. My first leg is a bit longer than the second, so I was going to be hungry.

This is not usually a problem on the first days of hiking trips, because I am so wiped that I can't bear the thought of food. It helps drop those first ten or twenty pounds right off. For whatever reason, though, the WT was making me hungry. Probably because it wasn't bestially hot like most places. Also, every day was like climbing Katahdin twice. That will put a fire in your belly.

So I lazily sliced pepperoni with my dollar knife from Wal-Mart. Wow, this knife sucks, I remember thinking as the knife rolled right over pepperoni and down three quarters of an inch into my thumb. Gosh darn it. For the love of Ueshiba I managed to inject myself with raw pepperoni on the second day and pump out a fair amount of the red stuff besides. The last time I saw that much of my insides on my outsides it was on an interstate and I wasn't very conscious because I just kissed a concrete sidewall at seventy miles per hour. Various bits of wilderness survival lore started swimming around in my brain and making me do almost sensible-seeming things. It's not spurting. You can use your water bag to generate a pretty high pressure stream, irrigate the wound, clean all the pizza topping out of there. Don't put peroxide or betadyne inside the wound, it denatures the tissue and necroses for sure. Dry it out, wrap it in gauze, duct tape the flesh flap down hard. Secure with more duct tape. Finish lunch and move on. Oh, and duct tape your heels back together, the skin's coming off. I feel like I should have spoken the previous paragraph in a gravelly SOCOM sort of voice, but this was a sandwich mishap, not another damned bear fight. The phrase "sandwich mishap" immediately robs any situation of whatever testosterone it might have once possessed.

The thumb was on my mind for the rest of the day because it was dripping a bit, but it was always gnawing on the back of my brain for the rest of the trip. When at night I changed the dressing I studiously sniffed the awful thing, checking for the maggoty odor that would send me off trail and into a walk-in clinic. I'm actually pretty amazed it's healing up as well as it did, given the fact that after the fourth it rained for a week, making it impossible to keep the wound dry. But I would be damned if I got put off the Wonderland Trail by my lunch. "Hey, what got you?" "Hypothermia" "'Bout you?" "Blizzard" "And?" "Pepperoni. A pepperoni bagel to you, mister!"

Crossing the cable bridge over Tahoma Creek (Pull y'all up! Ha ha, just kidding, it's pronounced pew-all-up) made my knees go wobbly for thirty minutes. It's a hundred foot span over a hundred and change foot drop, with a particularly uncivilized looking glacial creek thundering below. You can look at it through the bridge's floor, made of loose slats, as the bridge sways up and down, right and left in the freezing wind

(All winds on glacial creeks are freezing because the giant mountain chills the air until it is so cold it flows downhill like water, rushing through drainages like the Tahoma. See "katabatic wind".)

Your hands throb and some blood drips on slats, some falls between the slats down into the torrent below, and you reflect for a moment on whether or not the fall would hurt dramatically. Then marvel on how it is the kindest hurts in life that kill. The cruel ones flense you against the mountainside, against your loved ones, against the rock of the interstate. Like the spirits in the waters, they are speaking also, but what they are saying I am not sure I can accept.

Earth Made God

2010-09-12T00:15:00.002-04:00

The attitude of Seattlites regarding the mountain is unmistakeable. He's feeling grump today,they might say. Look at him showing off. Or when the tip peeks out of the cloud they might say he is feeling shy. In all ways and forms Rainier is a demigod of sorts in this area and like all gods he has a very nice makiroll named after him. Rainier is earth made God. The MT. Rainier roll is delicious, though.

It becomes more and more apparent why this is so as you drive closer. At fifteen miles the mountain makes up much of the sky. I had to concentrate to stay on the road.

Today had been a very lazy day. Three and a half miles to pyramid creek from longmire. I am feeling fairly strong but I underpacked on food for this leg. Not much of a problem as I am carrying Aaron decent amount of food in my belly. Some of the bagels have molded which is another pinch in the larder.

The rangers also very nicely agreed to split up a twenty mile day from sunrise to nickel creek. Now it only sunrise to summerland then summerland to nickel. Hooray.

Well it is time to turn in. The new shires contrail tent is very cozy the sleeping mat is full and the bag is fluffy. The privy is without walls however meaning that precautionary calls of POTTY CHECK will echo throughout the night.

Seattle

2010-09-02T11:23:00.004-04:00

Steve and Jen agreed to take me in and generally cart me around before and after my hike on the 93 mile Wonderland trail. I shall make them musaman tofu and other good things in exchange. They are also showing me Seattle. It's gorgeous. There's the Boeing plant with its possibilities and the air with its magical low humidity and salt tang. There is Rainier ominous and huge though it is seventy miles away. Tomorrow I go there and start walking at its feet. It is one giant huge thing. At this distance you could barely make out katahdin, but then again miss k is one third the size.

Jen reminded me that Seattle is wearing its party dress when visitors are about, however, just like Florida in January. It's not always like this but seems to like acting this way when out of towners drop by. This time of year it puts on its nice things and sidles up to you while putting rufies in your drink. Then when you wake up it's December and Seattle is in a paisley nightgown with a bent cigarette clamped between frosty seadamp lips. "HI THERE SAILOR" she growls cancerously, as you grip sheets in horror and wonder if you can remember what the sun looks like. So it's good to remember that every place can have its good sides and down sides.

The people here are pretty awesome though. I lost track of times when I thought I Steve would get run over as a pedestrian, but traffic stopped as if by magic, or even by traffic law. It is a strange sight for a visitor from the savage south. I feel like I should be carrying a super soaker loaded with sausage gravy so I could hose down vegans with it. HOW YA'LL DOIN'?

Probably won't get a chance to post again for at least a week, either from Sunrise or when I get back to Jen and Steve's, when the walk is done.

EDIT:

I actually met the real Ms Seattle while walking to get mexican food from a place near Saltwater Park. From across the road, a bulbous humanoid in a mumu intoned, "Do ya wanna DO IT?!". I laughed. She started belting out Broadway songs. Belted them out pretty well, actually. Think of a genetic melange of Steve Perry and Ethel Merman. As my host identified, "Ah. Not so much street walker as street crazy person". I wish Sarasota street crazies sang Broadway tunes. It would beat the current habit of swinging around lampposts with their winkies out.

Layered Ratatouille

2010-08-23T11:38:00.001-04:00

My working recipe for ratatouille has always been the variant popularized by Julia Child, in which the vegetables are separately browned before being layered, lasagna style, into a casserole and briefly braised. A nice side effect of this method is that you a bit of a fond on the bottom of the pan, which you hoover up as you make the tomato sauce. It also makes a nicely slice-able end product.

I've made this dish often enough that I don't remember the exact recipe anymore, and was able to make it for Pacer (GA-ME 2006) and his sister Cari on a break from the Appalachian Trail in Washington, D.C. Wow, that was more than 4 years ago. Whoosh.

Anyway here we go.

2 medium sized eggplants, peeled, sliced into .5" rounds
3 good-size zucchini, ends removed, sliced into long strips.
4 or 6 nice yellow squash, sliced into rounds.
1 green bell pepper, seeded, halved
1 yellow bell pepper, seeded, halved
1 big yellow onion, peeled
8 roma tomatoes, stems cut out.
A handful basil
A handful parsley
6-12 cloves garlic, minced
Tbsp paprika
1 heaping tsp red pepper flakes
Some kosher salt
An awful lot of extra virgin olive oil
Medium sized casserole dish, 2.5 quarts, maybe a bit bigger.

Salt the eggplant rounds on both sides and lay out on a very thick layer of paper towels. Wait 30 minutes, then flip them, and wait another 30 minutes. They should be very limp, very meaty. Rinse any excess salt from the rounds and keep them handy. This is called purging the eggplant and it rids the berry of its nastier flavors. Try and pick boy eggplants and not girl eggplants. Boy eggplants have a round belly button, girls have an oval belly button. The boys have fewer seeds and are thus less bitter.

Get the sauce fixings ready while the hopefully boy eggplant is bring purged. I like to get the sauce components ready in the cuisinart because this is a time sucking recipe, and I don't want to give this recipe more time than it already demands. In your food processor, pulse the onion until very coarsely chopped, then add the bell peppers (seeded, please), pulse until they are coarsely chopped. Reserve in a separate bowl. Put the tomatoes in the food processor, whir until everything is smoothed out, reserve. Finally, whir the basil and the parsley until chopped, reserve.

In your biggest skillet, heat a couple of tablespoons of the extra virgin until shimmering on medium-high heat. Brown the eggplant, turning once. You might need to add more oil between batches, especially with the eggplant, because that stuff sucks up oil like nobody's business. If stuff starts turning black in the bottom of the pan drop the heat to medium. Reserve all those fine browned vegetables, eggplant in one bowl, squishes in another.

Now that you are done with the eggplant and squishes, add some more oil to the pan and throw in the onions and green peppers. Just a bit of salt to help them sweat, but be careful with the salt, as there's enough in the eggplant already. Cook on medium heat until everything is softened. Add the garlic and red pepper flakes, cook about 30 seconds. Add the tomato mixture, stir to loosen all brown bits from the bottom of the pan. If it doesn't look red enough add paprika. Cook this mixture down on medium heat until it is almost dry, like thick oatmeal. Add the chopped basil and parsley, then remove from the heat.

Heat the oven to 300.

In the casserole, put down a third of the tomato mixture, then a third of the eggplant, a third of the squishes. Repeat until all ingredients are used up.

Put in the oven for anywhere between 30 minutes to 1 hour. Watch the casserole carefully to make sure it doesn't scorch on the sides or on the top. Pull from the oven, allow to cool to just warm, then slice into rectangles and serve.

This dish gets much, much better when it is stored for a few days in the fridge. It is also surprisingly good cold, and works well as a pasta topping or savory crepe filling. It's also low-carb, and makes a good subsitiute for potatoes when you are serving roast beast of some form.

Creamy Tomatoes

2010-08-02T08:53:00.001-04:00

Sometime in early September I'm walking around Mt. Rainier in Washington State, on a thing called the Wonderland Trail. It's generally considered by the hiking public to be the most gorgeous long trail in the United States. Mile-for-mile, it also has the second-most cumulative altitude gain of any long trail in the United States, right behind Vermont's Long Trail. Walking around the big volcano and its lahores and moraines you clamber down- and consequently climbs out of- many many deep gorges. What this means in terms of a cooking and hiking blog is that a diet is coming. Time to clean out the fridge and the pantry of ingredients sure to add knee-destroying body weight. I'm looking at you, pasta and cream.

Even if you aren't cleaning out the pantry, this is some pretty good pasta. It's also surprisingly quick and can be whipped up on a weeknight after work.

3 tbsp butter
1 oz prosciutto (I used the lean parts of some slab bacon and it worked fine.)
1 small onion, minced
1 bay leaf
.5 tsp red pepper flakes
4 cloves garlic, minced
2 tbsp tomato paste (Incredibly I didn't have any tomato paste, but I used some tomato puree I'd reduced until dark)
2 oz sun dried tomatoes (I didn't have these, but normally I use the sun-dried tomatoes from Sam's, which are packed in olive oil).
.25 cup white wine
14 oz canned diced tomatoes, whirred in the food processor until smooth (Hunt's diced tomatoes are very good, Muir Glen is supposed to be good also)
1 pound penne
.5 cup heavy cream
.25 cup fresh basil leaves, chopped (I used the squeeze tube of basil, about 2 tbsp)
Fresh grated Parmesan (I used sheep milk Pecorino as we entertain a lot of lactose-intolerant folk)

Put a big pot of salted water on to boil for the pasta.

Melt your butter in a big saucepan on medium heat. Add the bacon, cook until it's gotten some color. Make sure the butter doesn't turn brown. If it does, turn down the heat. Add the onion, bay leaf, pepper flakes, pinch of salt, cook until onion is soft and a bit brown. Add garlic, cook until aromatic. Crank the heat up to medium-high, add the tomato paste and sun dried tomatoes. Cook, stirring, until darkened. Frying tomato paste like this is something you see a lot of in Creole cooking, it adds a certain long-cooked tomato flavor without the actual long cooking. Add the wine and cook until liquid is evaporated, scraping the bottom for any stubborn paste bits. Add the whirred tomatoes, but reserve, eh, .25 cup for later. Bring to a boil, then turn down the heat to low and simmer, stirring occasionally, until the sauce is quite thick. You know it's thick enough when you pull the spoon across the pan and you can see the pan.

While it's simmering cook the pasta until al dente. Drain and refresh in the colander with some cold water so it doesn't overcook.

Back to the sauce. It's thick now, right? Take out the bay leaf. Add the cream, the .25 cup reserved whirred tomatoes, a splash of white wine, and heat until the cream is warmed through. Try to not let it come to a boil. Add the basil, stir to combine, then add the pasta and toss to coat. Serve with the fresh grated cheese.

Grilled Salmon

2010-07-26T09:24:00.002-04:00

Another recipe from "Superfood Friday" was grilled salmon. This was a hit even with folks that didn't like fish; "Wow I know it's salmon but it tastes like ham. How did you do that?".

Doesn't sound like much, I know, but it's a compliment from someone who generally doesn't roll with the pleasures of the sea.

Grilling fish can be problematic. The borderline OCD Cook's Illustrated recipe advises you to be able to spy your reflection in the grate before trying this. Packaged with advice to clean your coffee grinder for use especially as a spice mill, maybe right after you organize your pans by capacity . . for the day . . before you disappear in a Zoloft haze. Anyway, spit shining your grill isn't necessary, and you can even grill fish in a smoker as filthy as mine. The filthiness is necessary for delicious smoked pork, ask the nearest Southerner. You can grill your salmon in your filthy pork smoker. It's OK.

First and probably most important, you must use salmon filets with the skin on. These will be side cut filets, with the skin on one side and flesh on the other. This can be a problem in the winter, when wild salmon isn't generally available. Farmed salmon, the kind you get in the winter with no skin and lots of blobby fat, have no skin. They have to skin farmed salmon because their skin is a carnival of pathogens thanks to the industrial-grade antibiotics they have to swim around in. So if you have to use farmed salmon it's going to need a little savvy. More on that in a second.

Second, grilled fish needs a marinade but not too long and not too acid. Either will change the structure of the waterlogged proteins and make them more delicate, which you definitely do not want. I haven't wandered far from the soy sauce reserve on this one. Stick the filets in a gallon ziplock and submerge in teriyaki sauce for 30 minutes to 1 hour. Definitely don't take it over an hour. Don't have any teriyaki? Fine. Whisk together 1 cup soy sauce, 1 tbsp rice wine vinegar, 1 tbsp honey, 1 tsp sesame oil, 1 tsp red pepper flakes, and 1 tsp garlic powder, pour over fish, marinade as with teriyaki. That will work fine.

Start your fire as close to the grilling surface as you can get it. This is the third rule. Fish needs hot fire fast, to firm up the outside of the fish before the inside gets a chance to overcook. Spread the coals out, put the grates on, and heat the grate 5-10 minutes.

While that's going on, remove the salmon from the marinade, dry with paper towels, and lay flesh side down. Spray the skin side with nonstick cooking spray. If you are doing this with skinless filets, lay the salmon flat side down on some aluminum foil, and trim the foil around the edge of the filet so that it makes a fake skin. If you use this technique be warned that the fish will probably not be cooked all the way through. More on that in a second.

Using tongs, wipe down the grill with some paper towels soaked in canola or peanut oil. Any oil with a high smoke point will do.

Immediately slap the salmon down on the grill, skin side down. Put the thickest pieces in the middle of the file, and the smaller tail sections around the edges.

Grill 5 minutes, 7 minutes for the aluminum-clad salmon at the outside. Always error on the side of rare for seafood, because it cooks while sitting on the counter after you pull it off the grill. Overcooked fish, however, stays overcooked. I've served medium rare farmed salmon to a lot of people at a lot of events and haven't sickened/killed anyone yet. So go 7 minutes with the aluminum salmon if you're a fraidy cat.

At the end of that time, spray the flesh side with non-stick cooking spray. There will be some flame here. Try to not let the flame ride back into the can and explode. Shrapnel wounds can stifle even the best of dinner parties.

Using tongs and a spatula, flip the filets. If some of the skin sticks don't fret, just pull the filet off the stuck skin, pull the skin off the grill, and flip the now skinless filet. The skin's done its job, but don't throw it out. Keep that bad boy. It's quite good, like fishy grilled bacon, and is a favorite scooby snack of mine. If you're using foil and the filet comes away from the foil, well, you can toss the foil. It won't taste like anything, really, except maybe LSD. Not that I would know what LSD tastes like, mind you.

After flipping, grill for 2 more minutes, until the flesh side gets nice grill marks. Carefully remove with spatula and tongs and place on platter.

Serve with some other healthy things. Salad lettuce is either a crunchy bore or wilts after ninety seconds. For salads made from raw materials that last longer than a fool's whimsy, I like slicing up 2 cukes, 2 tomatoes, and half a red onion, tossing with .25 cup extra virgin, 2 tbsp vinegar, 1 tsp black pepper and 1 tsp kosher salt. Throw in some mint if you have it.

Szechuan Stroganoff

2010-07-25T13:28:00.003-04:00

When I'm stepping out for a weekend evening, I get the urge to make up a nice meal for the wife. I was going to brew up either some "Simple Italian Meat Sauce" or some "Szechuan Noodles". I had more of the ingredients for Szechuan noodles, so that was what got made, and wow am I happy that was the case. This was some serious eats.

The recipe called for ground pork, but I used ground beef because I have some piles of it in the freezer than is flirting with freezer burn and needs to get used up in the next few weeks. The usage of beef gave the final dish a sort of oriental Hamburger Helper feel, a not unpleasant waxiness from the beef fat. My wife called it Szechuan Stroganoff, and I think that settled the description of the texture pretty well. I realize this is not selling the recipe at all, but make it before ye judge. It's really good.

8 oz ground pork- I used ground beef and I suspect any form of ground protein that can take browning would do fine here.

3 tbsp soy sauce

2 tbsp wine

2 tbsp oyster sauce

.25 cup "Asian Style Sesame Paste", well, I don't have that, but I do have tahini. I suspect smooth no sugar peanut butter would work well here also

1 tbsp rice vinegar

1.25 cups chicken broth

1 tbsp oil

6 garlic cloves, minced

1 tbsp minced ginger

1 tsp red pepper flakes

1 tbsp sesame oil

1 pound fresh chinese noodles, I used rice stick noodles that I keep around for pad thai, they worked great. Linguini would also work. If using dried noodles use about 12 oz rather than a pound.

3 scallions, didn't have these, used half an onion, sliced very fine

2 cups bean sprouts, substituted 1 red bell pepper, sliced very fine

Make up your noodles until they are al dente. I'm not giving any hard and fast rules for rice noodles because they are tricky bastards. Boil water, take off the heat, add rice noodles and wait about 10 minutes. They'll either be good or they won't, but that's about as accurate as I can get with those things. If you're using linguini your job is a lot easier in that department. Drain the noodles when they're done and shock with cold water to keep them from cooking in the colander.

Toss the ground meat with 1 tbsp soy, 1 tbsp wine, and a couple of turns black pepper. Set aside.

In another bowl, mix 2 tbsp soy sauce, oyster sauce, sesame paste, vinegar, and a couple more turns of black pepper. Whisk until smoothed out, then mix in the broth. Set aside.

Heat oil in your biggest skillet on high heat until shimmering. Add ground meat mixture and cook until well browned. Stir in garlic, ginger, and pepper flakes, cook about 30 seconds. Stir in the broth/sesame mixture, bring to a boil, then turn the heat down to medium-low. Cook until thickened, then pull off the heat and add sesame oil.

Stir in the noodles, onions, and bean sprouts-red bell pepper strips-crunchy veg strip of your choosing. Toss until everything is coated the meat more or less evenly distributed.

Serve and marvel at how Chinese people can be so skinny with food like this laying around. Must be why they never invade anyone. Who would invade another country when you can have another bowl of noodles? I might have one right now, actually. My overland tank army is dwindling as I speak.

Tempeh Chili

2010-07-25T13:02:00.001-04:00

When I tried this stuff, I thought, "Good stuff, although not chili. More like a chili-inspired vegetable chowder". Still worthwhile stuff, and darn useful when feeding vegans.

28 oz good canned dice tomatoes- Hunts and Muir Glen are the best

1 tbsp oil

8 oz tempeh

1 tbsp cumin seed

2 carrots, peeled

1 onion

1 red bell pepper

9 cloves garlic

2 tbsp chili powder

1 chipotle, minced

3 cups water

15 oz can kidney beans

1 tsp dried oregano

1 cup frozen corn

1 zucchini, halved, seeded, sliced into .5" slices

Handful cilantro

1 tbsp lime juice

Whir the tomatoes in a food processor until smooth. Reserve.

Fry tempeh in oil until brown on medium high heat, remove and reserve.

Pulse the carrots, onion, bell pepper, garlic, chipotle, chili powder, 1 tsp salt, 1 tsp black pepper in bowl of food processor until everything is coarsely chopped. Start with the carrots, then add everything else, otherwise you'll get some irregular large hunks of carrot.

Turn heat down to medium, fry cumin seeds in oil until they start jumping around. About a minute. Add some more oil. Add the vegetable and spice chop from the last paragraph. Fry until everything starts thinking about softening, about 10 minutes.

Stir in the processed tomatoes, water, beans, and oregano. Scrape any crusty bits on the bottom of the pan. Bring to a simmer and cook 45 minutes until mixture is very thick and somewhat reduced.

Add the reserved tempeh, the frozen corn, and the zucchini, cook until the zukes are tender. Pull from the heat, stir in cilantro and lime juice.

Serve with avocado, corn bread, chopped onions. Or cheese if you are feeding normal vegetarians.

Roast Broccoli

2010-07-25T12:51:00.000-04:00

This got made during a "Superfood Friday", where I replaced the comfort food with superfoods. It was one of the most popular dishes, and is also a handy trick to have when cooking brocc.

2-3 heads worth of broccoli florets, about 2 pounds.

3 tbsp oil

1 tsp salt

1 tsp sugar

Preheat the oven to 450. Put the rack to the lowest position. Put two baking sheets inside the oven on the rack and let the sheets get rocket hot.

Split the larger florets along the stem so each floret gives you a flat side and a puffy side. The flat side maximizes pan contact, which promotes browning. This browning pulls out and accentuates the brocc's natural sugars, maing it taste even more vegetal than it already does, and produces a lot of new flavor besides. Don't bother doing this with the smaller florets, they'll just burn if you halve them.

Toss the halved florets with the oil, salt, and sugar. Let stand 10 minutes. Pull the hot baking sheets from the oven. Working quickly, place the cut florets flat side down on the hot sheets. Start by placing the largest pieces around the rim first, then as the pieces get smaller spiral inward, until you dump the little pile of tiny uncut florets in the center.

Put the sheet into the oven and bake 10-15 minutes, until the bottom of the largest pieces is dark brown.

Immediately scoop hot florets off baking sheet into serving bown. Sprinkle some chopped walnuts and 1 tsp lemon. The lemon and walnuts are optional, the stuff is really good straight up.

This method works well also with cauliflower.

Chocolypse Now

2010-07-11T21:56:00.002-04:00

Your mission is to obtain a 12 cup Bundt pan and fill it with a batter that will, upon baking, separate into a cakey outer layer and a fudgelike inner layer or tunnel. The resulting baked confection is known by the locals as a "tunnel of fudge cake". Bake the day before and correct its orientation after a night's refridgeration.

Bake? You bake the tunnel of fudge?

Bake. With extreme prejudice.

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Grease a 12 cup bundt pan with shortening or butter and dust with cocoa powder. Crank the oven to 350.

Pour .5 cup boiling water into 2 oz bittersweet (60% cacao) chocolate chips, whir until combined. Allow to come to room temperature.

Put 2 cups walnuts in the work bowl of your largish food processor. Whir until coarsely chopped. Add 2 cups flour, .75 cup cocoa powder, 2 cups powdered sugar, 1 tsp salt, pulse until combined.

Beat 5 eggs with 1 tbsp vanilla extract.

In a large bowl, beat 1 cup sugar, .75 cup brown sugar, and 2.5 sticks (10 oz) softened butter until fluffy, approx. 2 minutes. On low speed, add the egg mixture and beat in until combined. Add the chocolate/water mixture, beat until incorporated. Beat in the flour mixture until just combined. Scoop the batter into the prepared bundt pan, smooth the top, and bake until the edges are beginning to pull away from the pan, 45 minutes. Remove from oven and cool on rack 1.5 hours. The cake will develop a trench inside of it that will make it flatten when inverted. If you care about such things, fill the trench with more ground walnuts glued together with some chocolate chips melted in the microware.

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Author's Edit: The New York Times recipe recommends flattening the trench after 30 minutes of cooling in the pan, then allowing it to cool 1 more hour before inverting the cake onto the serving tray and cooling it completely. Need to try that next time . . .

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After the cake has cooled for 1.5 hours, put serving plate over bundt pan and invert. Tap the pan a few times to make it drop out. This cake does not have a lot of structure so be careful. Allow to cool completely once inverted, 2 hours or overnight in the fridge. Once cooled the cake is very stable.

To make the ganache frosting, cook .75 cup heavy cream, .25 cup light corn syrup, 8 oz 60% chips, and 1 tsp vanilla on medium heat until smooth, then cool until it reaches a frosting-like consistency. Or, if you are in a rush, wait 30 minutes and pour over cooled cake. It will be a big mess and there will be leftover ganache.

Serve. Try not to send anyone to the hospital. It's pretty strong voodoo. I'm still finding bits of chocolate on the countertop.

The horror . . the horror . .

Tamale Time

2010-07-07T12:12:00.001-04:00

The decision to make tamales last night turned into something of an adventure. I had the ingredients, I had a plan, but I did not have a recipe. The internet was out, leaving me with just a couple of guidelines:
>Tamale dough is basically biscuit dough made with masa, lard, and chicken broth instead of flour, shortening, and buttermilk. I had to use masa, shortening, and veggie broth for vegetarian guests
>Tamales are wrapped from the wide end of the husk to the narrow end, with the filling/dough at the wide end. One end is left open to allow the filling to expand, which it will as it is chemically leavened with baking powder.
>Tamales just need about 30 minutes in a pressure cooker
>Since I was feeding lactose-intolerant vegetarians and had one guest with an unknown spice tolerance, the filling was a simple strip of sheep milk manchego and a strip of poblano.

First soak your corn husks. You'll need, eh, about twenty. Depends on how big the husks are and how good you are at making these things. I suck at it, so I used quite a few. Stick the husks in boiling water and weigh them down so they sit in it for an hour or so.

Make up the masa. In a bowl mix 2 cups masa flour, 2 heaping tsp baking powder, 1 tsp salt. Mix in .25 cup shortening into the flour until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Use your fingertips if you can. Slowly add 1 cup veggie broth, stirring, until mixture is sort of like mashed potatoes.

Lay out a corn husk. Put down 2 tablespoons of masa dough at the wide end of the husk, sort of to one side. Lay down the cheese strip and the poblano strip into the filling, then sort of roll the masa around the filling with the husk. Fold one of the long sides over the dough/filling, then roll it up the long way. Tie off the bundle with string. There is probably a much better howto video out there somewhere, accessible to folks with better internet.

Repeat this process until you run out of something. I ran out of masa dough first, which is fine, leftover manchego and poblano will certainly not go to waste.

Put down the steamer tray in the pressure cooker and fill the sucker up with tamales, open end facing up. Pour water down the side, avoiding the tamales, until the water level is right up to the bottom of the basket but not touching the tamales. Cover and steam on high pressure for 30 minutes or until the husk can be pulled away from the dough without a huge mess. These tamales are a little gooier than a meat tamale because of the cheese filling.

It's a testament to how forgiving this dish is that you can make it without having made it before, without even having a decent recipe, and still have it come out pretty damn good. As it is, I can't wait to do them again with pork filling and a proper recipe.

Steak au Poivre

2010-07-06T08:20:00.001-04:00

Steak au poivre is rocket fast and very good with some supplements from the farmer's market. With the right choice of side dishes it's also low carb, since it's basically just pepper steak in cream. Not exactly low fat, but for God's sakes, don't try and make filet healthy. I've sort of subverted the classical poivre by adding a second saute item (mushrooms) after the steak before the deglazing. Mushrooms have lots of liquid and won't let the fond burn, so stop freaking out, frenchie. You can leave out the mushrooms if you want and just flame the fond from sauteing the filet. You might want to do that anyway if you hate mushrooms.

2 6-8 oz filet mignon, 1.5" thick
1 cup heavy cream
2 big shots cognac
Lots of black peppercorns
Salt
1 tbsp butter
1 tbsp oil
12 oz Haricotes vertes- I'm not sure if I'm spelling this properly, but they're very very skinny green beans. They're really good.
Some more butter
.5 lemon
3 tbsp chopped parsley
12 oz mushrooms. White button are fine here. Rinse them off in the colander.
Good baguette

Salt the filet on both sides with large-grained kosher salt. Let it come to room temperature. Just let it sit for an hour, it's OK. Crush the peppercorns using a mortar and pestle or a frying pan and a brick. You don't want powdered pepper. Just sort of crack them. Press the cracked peppercorns into both sides of each filet. The juices drawn out by the salting should provide enough moisture and protein to stick the peppercorns on.
Put a giant pot with a gallon of water on high heat. Add a quarter cup kosher salt.
Crank the heat to medium high and put the oil and butter in the saucepan. Let the butter melt. When it starts to smell a bit nutty, maybe the foam starts turning a little brown, put the steaks in. Four minutes later, flip using tongs. Four more minutes on the other side. Take the steaks out and put on a dish. Tent loosely with foil. I hope you've got a decent hood system. If not, you can loosely cover the pan while cooking, it cuts down the smoke some.
Put the mushrooms in the pan, put the heat to medium. Cover the pan if things are looking a little too burnt in there; the liquor given off by the mushrooms will prevent burning if they're allowed to condense in there. Cook the mushrooms until tender. Try and time it so the pan is dry when the mushrooms are done. No mushroom water should remain. Remove the mushrooms to the steak plate. Put the pan back on the fire, crank it back up to medium high.
Take a shot of cognac. Take another shot and put it in the pan. Ignite the cognac with a fire device of some kind and swirl the pan until flames subside. Put in your heavy cream, stir until liquid is reduced a bit and very thick. Taste and correct seasoning.
The giant pot should be boiling merrily by this point. Dump in the haricotes and boil for 3 minutes. These little guys cook lightning quick, so be careful. Drain into colander, put back in pot with parsley, 1 tbsp butter, and the juice from the .5 lemon. Toss delicately.
Put the steaks in the sauce, turn to coat.
Plate steaks surrounded with green beans and mushrooms. Serve with baguette and the cooking pan with remaining sauce, for scoopin' and dippin'

Eggplant and Meatballs

2010-06-29T09:39:00.001-04:00

Leftover ground beef in the freezer had been calling out to be used for some time and the wife was thinking meatballs. What to go with said meatballs? Spaghetti or fettuccine would have been nice but ill-advised. Pasta is not a good thing to eat for the last meal of the day unless a late night run or deadlift fest is part of your bedtime ritual. Why not eggplant noodles? Purged and thinly sliced, the eggplant would provide a viable low-carb pasta substitute. To put the two together I glopped in some tomato sauce I had made a few days before.

Eggplant:
Peel 2 medium size male eggplants and slice very thin, about .25 inch. Male eggplants have tiny round navels, females have the big oval ones. Males have less seeds and are less bitter. Use them. Liberally dose both sides of eggplant with kosher salt, put slices on a healthy bed of paper towels. Allow to purge for one hour or until the eggplant slices are all floopsy. Wash off the salt, then squeeze the moisture from the slices. You can use your hands. Just pretend it's one of those stress-relief balls. You can squeeze a couple of slices at a time. Finely slice the squeezed and purged eggplant into long ribbons like fettuccine noodles. Set aside.

Tomato sauce:
Whir a half a green pepper, a medium onion, and 4 oz of mushrooms in the food processor until coarsely chopped. Heat some olive oil in a big pan on medium heat until shimmering, then cook the chopped veggies in the oil until the onion is translucent and the mushrooms have given up much of their moisture. Add 2 tbsp tomato paste and fry the paste until it takes on some color. Add 4 cloves garlic, minced, fry for 30 seconds. Add 1 tsp red pepper flakes. Cut out the stems from 4 good vine ripe tomatoes, throw in food processor, and whir until roughly chopped. Throw in pan, heat until bubbling, then cut heat to low, cover vessel and cook for 30 minutes. Swirl in .25 cup chopped basil at the end of cooking. If it's too tart, which it probably is, adjust with Splenda or sugar.

Meatballs:
Clean out the food processor, and stick in 3 slices sandwich bread, 4 tbsp plain yogurt, 2 tbsp milk, a handful parsley, 4 cloves garlic, 1 oz Pecorino, and 1 egg yolk. Pulse until this is a homogenous mixture. Thow in some more red pepper flake if your are so inclined. Add 1 lb ground beef (meatloaf mix would be better) and 2 ounces of cooked crumbled bacon (you can substitute finely diced ham, diced prosciutto would be perfect). Pulse until combined. Form 12 balls from this mass and refrigerate for 30 minutes. Or not. Chilling them just makes them easier to handle in the pan. My mistake was to chop the cheese instead of grate it, leading to bits of melted cheese stuck to the bottom of the pan. Make sure the cheese is ground into bits to keep this from happening. As it turned out the crusty melty cheese didn't burn enough to ruin the dish. Lucky.

Final Countdown:
Your sauce should be well and truly cooked, so spoon it out to a bowl and set aside. Clean out the saucepan with paper towels until virtually no tomato sauce remains. Medium heat, another tbsp olive oil in the pan until it is shimmering. Add the meatballs and fry until they are brown on more than one surface, 3 minutes on one side and 3 minutes on another works for me. Work carefully, especially if you didn't chill the meatballs beforehand. Remove the meatballs to a plate and reserve. Add the eggplant to the oil and accumulated drippings and fry until the eggplant has absorbed a good deal of the oil. Add the sauce to the eggplant, stir to incorporate. Put the meatballs around the periphery of the eggplant. You want the eggplant to cook, and the meatballs just want to simmer, so make sure the eggplant gets the lion's share of the heat. Dial the heat down to low, cover the vessel, and simmer, eh, about 30 minutes. Maybe less, maybe more. It's done when the eggplant is just a bit gushy and not too firm to the bite. Serve in big bowls. It gets better after a day in the fridge.

Great Balls of Fry

2010-06-28T14:14:00.001-04:00

Last week had a double header of dinner parties: a Fried Ball themed potluck and an afternoon tea. The afternoon tea I can get to in a later post, but the fried ball onslaught is well documented. I agreed to make two dishes: falafel (already covered back in June 10, 2009 in Fallin, Fallin, Falafelin In Love) and arancini, which are basically deep fried stuffed risotto balls. In Rome arancini are called suppli, or suppli al telefono when stuffed with mozzarella because when you pull one apart you get a cord of cheese connecting the two bits. Then you have to have an imaginary conversation with one end before you shove the whole thing in your mouth.

The day before, make up some risotto. I think I blogged risotto before but hey, it's easy, we can do it again. In your food processor, pulse 4 oz crimini mushrooms, .5 of an onion, 1 carrot, 1 rib celery, and 10 basil leaves until everything is coarsely chopped. Melt 3 tbsp butter in your pressure cooker on medium-low heat. Add the chopped veggies to the butter, fry until the mushrooms have quit giving up liquid and are quite dry. Add 2 cloves garlic, minced, fry 30 seconds. Add 2 cups arborio rice, stir, frying, until the rice grains turn sort of translucent at the ends where they absorb the oils. This is a pretty critical part of risotto making. It provides a little oily waterproofing for the rice grains so that they do not absorb too much moisture and get gushy. Good risotto is a blend of creamy sauce and al dente grain, not gush in gush sauce. Once the rice has been pumped with butter in this way, add .5 cup dry white wine or vermouth and 1 tsp salt. Cook, stirring, until the wine is absorbed. Add 4.5 cups chicken stock, stir to combine, then lid the vessel and set on high pressure for 6 minutes. At the end of the 6 minutes, dump the pressure, unlid the vessel, and set to simmer. Add .5 cup more stock while stirring, allow it to get creamier, absorbing more of the liquid, then add 1.5 cups shredded Parmesan, freshly grated. Stir until the cheese is melted and integrated into the sauce. Pecorino romano works here as well but makes it a bit saltier. Don't use the Kraft pregrated stuff unless you like grit; anticaking agents in pregrated Parmesan also prevent it from melting smoothly. Pour off 3 cups of the risotto and put it in the fridge to make the suppli. Serve the rest for dinner. Hey, look at that, two suppers in one.

The thing about suppli is that it almost certainly was invented to use up leftover risotto, which is notorious for degrading in taste and quality when stored. By stuffing small quantities of risotto with soft cheese, breading them, and deep frying, some of the risotto's original creaminess is brought back from the grave, this time with a crispy coating.

Put your 3 cups of leftover risotto into a big bowl and add 3 eggs, beaten, stir to incorporate. In a big plate, put about 2 cups panko bread crumbs. Dice 8 oz of mozzarella into .5" cubes. You'll want to use supermaket block mozzarella, the hard stuff, not the buffalo or fresh mozzarella from the gourmet deli, it's too mushy to work with here. Wet your hands. Grab a heaping tablespoon of the risotto egg mixture in your hands, then kind of push a mozzarella cube into the mass, making sure the risotto mixture completely covers the cheese. Shape into a sphere. Roll the sphere in the panko until it isn't sticky anymore. Put on a baking sheet lined with saran wrap. Repeat this process until you are out of something. You should have a full cookie sheet of ready-to-go suppli. Gently wrap the cookie sheet full of suppli with saran wrap. Don't crush the balls! Slide into the refrigerator for 30 minutes or overnight.

When you're ready to fry, unwrap your balls. If any got crushed, roll it around in your hands until spherical again, making sure no cheese is exposed. If there is it is an awful mess. Heat some oil up to 350, or as close as you can get. 300 seems to be the limit of an electric burner/big pot combination; if you have a purpose built deep fryer you can probably do better. 300 worked for me. Carefully, gently plunk each ball into the oil. Just hold the ball right over the surface of the oil, let go, and get your hand out of the way as fast as you can without knocking shit over. Think "feeding a tiger sardines". Fry the balls until they are deep golden brown all over. Skim them out with your spider. A spider's one of those wide mesh devices you'll see a lot of in Oriental food and gift shops. They're like three bucks, go and get one. Once the balls are crispy and delicious, remove and set the ball on paper towels to drain. Serve with good marinara sauce for spoonin' and dunkin'. Probably be a good idea to serve some Tums too.

Begun Pora

2010-06-17T11:02:00.001-04:00

For some reason or other, around this time of year I get a serious jonesin' for eggplant. It's a mystery. It does have the highest concentration of nicotine in any non-tobacco plant, so that could be one reason I like it so much. Sweet, sweet nicotine. It's also cheap in the summertime, especially in the farmers markets, because of its tendency to take over gardens when the weather is hot and juicy. More than any other reason, though, is the satin mouth feel in spite of eggplant's having nearly no carbs. That creamy, mashed-potato-like unctuousness pairs especially well with the eggplant's ability to take on any variety of flavored fats. Good in Indian food. And if there's one cuisine built of flavored fats it's Indian (and Chinese, but that's another eggplant post). Hey, look at that, someone's thought of it already, it's called begun pora.

Heat the oven to 400.

Slice a male eggplant in half, then into .5" semicircular slices. How do you sex an eggplant? A boy eggplant's stem is round instead of oval, and it tends to be longer and skinnier. Male eggplants have less seeds than their girly counterparts, and are hence less bitter. You can make this recipe with two eggplants if one isn't big enough.

Line a couple of baking sheets with foil, lube them up, then put in the eggplant in a single layer. High temp oil please, extra virgin or butter will burn at this temperature. Flip the eggplant in the oil so it has oil on all surfaces. Roast until brown on the bottom.

Chop up 1 big bunch green onions, 6 cloves garlic, and 14 oz of tomatoes (or open a can of tomatoes). Might as well chop up a handful of cilantro while you're at it, about 1 cup chopped.

Melt 3 tbsp butter in a big skillet. Add 1 tbsp dry mustard and 1 tbsp garam masala. You're supposed to use black mustard seed here, but it's not something I often have around, while I always have dry mustard around for vinaigrette, mayonnaise, bechamel . . all sorts of things, really. Fry the spices for 30 seconds. Add onions, garlic, 1 tbsp tumeric, 1 tbsp chili powder, 1 tsp cumin, 1 tsp coriander, and 1 tsp salt. Add a chopped fresh chili if you have one, if not, add 1 tsp red pepper flakes, or more depending on spice tolerance. Fry until the garlic is aromatic. Add the tomatoes and a bucket of sliced mushrooms (white button or crimini, about 8-12oz), toss to coat everything in gravy, then put a lid on it and simmer until mushrooms are soft. If the mushrooms have given off too much liquid, or if the gravy is just too watery, cook it down uncovered until thick.

Make sure you're not burning your eggplant. I always end up burning some of it. If it's done, scrape it into the gravy, add the chopped cilantro, and toss to combine. There's your begun pora.

Make up some raita. Finely chop 1 cucumber, 2 stalks mint, 1 tiny white onion. Combine with 3 heaping tbsp greek yogurt or sour cream and 1 tsp salt.

Serve the eggplant and raita with papadoum (low carb option) or some naan and basmati rice (delicious option).

Chill the Noodle

2010-06-13T00:24:00.002-04:00

Well, it's not exactly low carb, but soba noodles are nutritional powerhouses, especially compared to their blanched white hoodlum friends, semolina pastas. They also chill well with a simple dressing and a few odds and ends in the crisper drawer. I want to tap the well of Japanese knowledge on this subject- cold soba is apparently an everyday food in Japan- and it is too damn hot down here in the Sunshine State this time of year to cook anything not involving a grill.

Boil a gallon of water. Cook 12 oz of soba noodles according to the instructions on the package, assuming you can find some in English. Mine had a cartoon bear chasing some ghost creature with what looked like a gas can that had the number "6" on it. Six minutes of cartoon bear ghost chasing then. You don't want to know what the next panel looked like.

Decant the soba and rinse in cool water right away. You want to drop the temp on those soba as soon as you can because they overcook lightning quick. Drain and reserve.

In a big bowl, whisk .25 cup soy sauce, 1 tbsp rice vinegar, 1 tsp honey, .1 tsp ginger, 1 tsp wasabi, and 1 or 2 tsp sesame oil. Whisk and taste. Balance the flavors until you got something you like. Finely slice 3 medium scallions, add them to dressing.

Add some matchstick carrots, leftover coleslaw mix, thinly sliced bell peppers, thinly sliced cukes- you get the idea here. It likes anything crispy and not too terribly starchy. It is really forgiving. Just don't add something like, I don't know, mashed potatoes or baked beans or something like that.

Add the soba to the veggies and dressing, toss to coat. Adjust flavoring. Chill and serve.

Smoking Chuck

2010-06-12T16:37:00.004-04:00

I always thought pulled pork was my favorite kind of barbecue, but recent experiences in smoking beef chuck have changed my opinion. Smoked beef chuck is easier and better than its piggy counterparts, but is also on average a dollar per pound more expensive, sometimes more.

Fire up a chimney worth of charcoal. Make sure you have some hardwood chunks handy. Don't use mesquite. Get back inside to prep your meat.

Get about six pounds of chuck- 2 big pieces, or one big pack from Sam's. Cut each piece into quarters so that no piece is more than two inches thick on any axis. Dump a fair amount of fajita seasoning (I like Badia's mix) into a plate, then roll each chuck piece in the seasoning until coated. Put the coated pieces into 2 half-size aluminum pans- I think they're 9x13". Make sure they have some spacing or the smoke and heat won't be able to get to them.

Once the coals have a coating of ash, dump them on one side of your smoker, then scatter some hardwood chunks on the coals. Arrange the pans with meat in them on the side the heat isn't. Cover the grill, and close the vents to 20% or so. You want to be somewhere between 250 and 300 degrees, but keep it below 300.

When the two hours are almost up, preheat the oven to 300, retrieve meat from the smoker. Using tongs, flip each piece of meat so that the dry side is in the wet stuff. Cover each pan with aluminum foil and put in the oven for 2-3 hours, or until meat pulls apart easily.

Take meat out of pans and set aside. Drain cooking fluids into vessel, skim off 2 tbsp of fat, discard the rest of the fat. Reserve the non-fatty cooking juices.

Put the reserved 2 tbsp of fat into a saucepan and heat over medium. Cook 1 onion in the fat until soft. Add 6 chopped garlic cloves and 1 tsp chili powder, cook until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Add the reserved cooking juices, 1.25 cups ketchup, a tsp of instant coffee, .5 cup cider vinegar, .5 cup brown sugar, 3 tbsp Worcestershire, 1 tsp ground black pepper, and 1 tsp liquid smoke. Cook this mixture down until thickened.

Shred the meat using two forks, then add half the sauce, stir to combine. Serve with the reserved sauce.

Plate Lunch

2010-06-08T10:53:00.003-04:00

Plate Lunch

How many popular foods have maintained their place in our culinary universe through the use of fun names? A fun name makes a food stick around for longer than it probably should, because people love saying the name enough to buy it. Like a Big Mac. Big Macs are god awful but they stick around because it's fun to say. I think they're still on the menu, anyway. I haven't eaten at a McDonald's since high school, but living and working in a toxic cave in the aerospace industry will do that. At least I'm not a freakishly proportioned law enforcement officer with a food novelty for a head. http://www.google.com/images?hl=en&q=Officer%20Big%20Mac&safe=images&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi

Huli Huli chicken has a cute name but is otherwise completely unlike a Big Mac in that it is tasty as well as fun to say. My wife is still saying it as I write this, that's how fun it is. Huli Huli.

Googling around the name, it seems that Huli Huli chicken is a Serious Thing for Hawaiians, something on the order of poutine for Quebecois or cheesesteak for Philadelphians, impossible to find abroad, impossible to find even in Hawaiian restaurants that aren't pulled around behind a truck. Hawaiians abroad actually go on the internet and order the stuff shipped to them. There's no need for that, really, because Huli Huli is one of those foods of the put-upon people of the world, and is therefore fabricated from the cheapest and most accessible foods. No credit card needed. Although I suspect that what the Hawaiian expat is really ordering from the internet is memories of sunshine and blue water. Skip ordering the chicken from the internet, but keep on ordering the memories while you dish up "pa mea ai".

One of the things I do different here is brine the chicken in the salty stuff but brush on the sugary stuff right after cooking. The reason for this is that if you put sugar in the brine and expose that chicken to direct heat, it will turn black and coaly. Then you have a choice. So we could either forgo a crisp skin and grill indirectly (like Thanksgiving turkey), or desugar the brine. I chose the latter and didn't regret it one bit.

Chicken and Brine
1 tblsp oil
12 garlic cloves, minced
2 tbsp ginger, minced
2 qts water
2 cups soy sauce
2 chickens, quartered
Hardwood chunks

Heat the oil until shimmering in a big pot, then add the garlic and ginger. Fry gently until aromatized, about 30 seconds. Add the soy and the water. Allow to cool. Add chicken, making sure the chicken is submerged. Put put in fridge, marinate for 8 hours but try not to go too much beyond 12 hours, let the chicken get overly salty.

If you don't have room in your fridge for a big pot, divide the chicken among two or three gallon size ziplock freezer bags, then portion the marinade into each bag. Zip up the bags and put in the fridge. If you're a big wuss put them in a tray in case of ziplock failure.

Fire up the grill with a moderate amount of coal. We don't want a raging inferno here, we want medium heat a fair distance away. It's chicken not a bloody filet mignon. Stick some hickory chunks on the coals after the latter are covered in a fine layer of ash. Clean the grill if you haven't already, wipe down the grill grates with some oil-soaked paper towels, and put the marinated chicken on the grill skin side up. You can do this right from the marinade. Plop down the cover and grill until chicken is 120 degrees F, about 25-30 minutes. Flip chicken and grill until thigh meat hits 170 or 175, about 20 more minutes. Pull that chicken off the grill and bring inside to meet the glaze.

Sauce (Applied after cooking)
18oz pineapple juice
.25 cup brown sugar
.25 cup soy sauce
.25 cup ketchup
.25 cup rice wine vinegar
6 garlic cloves
2 tsp ginger, grated
2 tsp Sriracha (use chili sambal for more lip in your hip)

Combine pineapple juice, sugar, soy sauce, ketchup, vinegar, garlic, ginger, and Sriracha (or equivalent) in empty saucepan and boil. Bring the heat down to medium and simmer until reduced to about 1 cup volume. It's going to want to burn near the end there.

Grab your cooked chicken and brush half of the finished glaze all over each piece. Serve with the other half of the glaze, and some Hawaiian-style macaroni salad (recipe after the jump)

Ea ai kakou . . and aloha

Bonus Recipe: Pameai Macaroni Salad

2 cups whole milk

2 cups mayo

1 tablespoon brown sugar

salt and pepper

1 pound elbow macaroni

1/2 cup cider vinegar

4 scallions, sliced thin

1 large carrot, peeled and grated

1 celery rib, chopped fine

Make dressing: Whisk 1 1/2 cups milk, 1 cup mayo, sugar, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and 2 teaspoons pepper in bowl.

Cook pasta: Bring 4 quarts water to boil in large pot. Add 1 tablespoon salt and pasta and cook until very soft, about 15 minutes. Drain pasta and return to pot. Add vinegar and toss until absorbed. Transfer to bowl. Cool pasta 10 minutes, then stir in dressing until pasta is well coated. Cool completely.

Make salad: Add scallions, carrot, celery, remaining milk, and remaining mayo to pot with pasta mixture and stir to combine. Season with salt and pepper. Transfer to large serving bowl and refrigerate, covered, for at least one hour or up to two days. Serve.

Enchilada Casserole

2010-01-12T17:10:00.001-05:00

A dinner guest, upon finishing a serving of this stuff, let out a heavy breath and said. "It's a brick. Delicious brick". That sounded like the type of recipe to post in cold weater. We were feeding vegetarians, so be warned that this recipe uses ground "meet", although you could substitute diced dark meat chicken pretty easily. This recipe is the stripped-down version of enchilada pie, but it gets the job done.

Sauce:
1 chipotle, minced
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 tsp chili powder
1 tsp cumin
1 cup water
1 tbsp Tone's chicken base
14 oz can tomato sauce

Filling
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 pound vegetarian ground meat product or carnivore equivalent.
1 onion, diced
1 clove garlic, minced
1 tsp dried oregano
2 cups or so of crushed corn chips
3 cups shredded Jack or cheddar
Nonstick cooking spray

In a big honkin' saucepan, combine the sauce ingredients and let them come to a simmer. Let it simmer while you work on the filling.

Heat the oil in another big honkin frypan, then brown the "meet" in the oil. Add the onion, garlic, oregano and cook until the veggies are soft and aromatic. There's your filling.

Spray down a 9x9 pan with the nonstick stuff. Put down half the sauce, then half of the crushed corn chips, then a layer of filling, then half the cheese. Repeat. Cover with foil and bake in a 350 degree oven for 30 minutes. Remove the foil, bake for 10 more minutes or until the cheese on top is all gooey and fantastic.

Serve with beans and rice and sour cream. Or just eat the damn thing out of the pan, it's pretty good.

Easy Turkey Chili

2010-01-12T16:46:00.001-05:00

Do you ever wonder if you could burn out your pressure cooker? I hope I don't. I'm using the damn thing almost every day. Oh well. When summertime comes I'll probably pull it down like once a month.

2 slices bacon, diced fine
1 lb ground turkey tube or ground meat of some sort
1 chipotle chili, chopped
1 cup chopped bell pepper
1 cup chopped onion
2 tsp cumin
1 tsp oregano
.5 cup crushed tortilla chips
1 14 oz can diced tomatoes
2 tbsp tomato paste
2 cups water
2 tbsp Tone's beef base
1 cup dry kidney beans
1 tbsp brown sugar

In the pot of your pressure cooker, fry the bacon up until it has given up its fat.

If you are like me and never plan anything, dice the frozen ground turkey and put in the pot. It'll thaw then brown. Mash it around with your wooden spoon until it looks like fried ground meat and not fried ground meat cubes.

Once the turkey is browned, add the onion, bell pepper, and chipotle. Fry until the onion is translucent. Add the cumin and oregano. Stir stir stir. You might need to add some olive oil if the meat was particularly lean. Add the rest of the ingredients, stir until everything is dissolved and incorporated.

Lid the vessel and put on high pressure for 50 minutes.

If using a dutch oven, use an extra cup of broth, lid and put in a 350 degree oven for three hours or, alternatively, park it overnight in a 300 degree oven.

Minestronster

2010-01-06T10:20:00.001-05:00

Soup season continues with winter weather, this time with Minestrone!

Take four slices bacon and put into the pot of your pressure cooker. Fry to render out the fat.

Slice three zucchini into rounds.

Remove the crisp bacon. Fry the zuchini rounds in the bacon fat until lightly browned. Work in batches, reserving the cooked zukes in a single layer on a foil-lined baking sheet.

Chop .5 head of green cabbage, removing stalk bits. When the zukes are done frying, put in the cabbage and fry until mostly wilted, 2-5 minutes. If it starts stinking you've cooked it too long. Cabbage cells are tough and the cell walls are filled with all sorts of sulfates and things. Too-vigorous cooking breaks those walls down to the point where the sulfur compounds are released, the chlorophyll oxidizes, and what was once cabbage becomes stinky and brown.

Put the gently-cooked cabbage with the cooked zukes. We'll be adding those near the end. If we added them now, by the time the beans were done these veggies would be completely destroyed.

Unfortunately, you probably lost all your bacon fat. Add some olive oil to the pot, then add 2 chopped onions, 1 chopped carrot, 2 stalks chopped celery, and 6 cloves garlic, coarsely chopped. Fry until the onions are soft and translucent.

Now add 1 cup great northern beans, 6 cups water, 2 tbsp Tone's chicken base, 4 bay leaves, 1 tbsp red pepper flakes, and maybe- maybe- a pinch of oregano. Stir. Put in a 5 inch piece of parmesean rind, or a 2 inch chunk of parmesean. Lid the vessel and cook on high pressure for 45 minutes. If using a dutch oven, you'll want to have soaked the beans with the water and Tone's chicken base (dissolved) the night before, then perform the step above and slap into a 350 degree oven for an hour and a half to two hours.

Unlid the vessel and add 1.5 cups of V-8 juice. Stir gently. Add the zukes and the cabbage, stir to incorporate. Serve with some chopped fresh basil on top.

Weapons of Mass Beefiness

2010-01-04T12:54:00.001-05:00

My first subscription issue of Cook's Illustrated barely had time to rest on the counter before I used it to generate, first, a pot of minestrone, and then a pot of beef stew. You'll notice a "hot liquid" theme here, because the temperatures have plunged past the fifty degree mark, something known in other places as "autumn".

Now, I was missing a fair number of ingredients for the Cook's Illustrated "Best Beef Stew", but even with substitutions it made really darn tootin good stew.

I'm thinking of it right now, in fact, prompting me to consider writing a letter: "Dear Cook's Illustrated, Thank you for another wonderful issue. Absolutely delicious! I, however, would like to ask that your next issue include a training schedule to compete in the Boston Marathon, because, thanks to last issue, none of my clothes fit anymore, and the dog is physically unable to leave the apartment . ."

3-4 pounds beef chuck

2 thick slices bacon

1 onion

2-5 cloves garlic

2 tbsp tomato paste

2 tbsp fish sauce (standing in for 4 anchovies)

1 potato + 10 oz chopped up frozen sweet potato fries (standing in for 1 lb Russet potatoes and 2 medium carrots)

2 cups red wine

1 cup beef stock

1 cup water

3 bay leaves

4 thyme springs

.5 cup instant or "quick-cook" barley (wife's request)

.25 cup flour

1 packet unflavored gelatin

Take your chuck and cut into 1" chunks. Salt it and let rest for an hour. Heat 1 tbsp oil in the chamber of your pressure cooker, then brown the chunks in batches, reserving the browned meat as you go until you are out of raw beef.

Put the bacon in the pot and fry until crisp and rendered of its fat. Remove the bacon crispies. Fry the onions and garlic in the fat until softened. Add the tomato paste and the fish sauce. Faugh! Yes, it smells terrible. Yes, the smell goes away while cooking. CI had a really interesting little sciency sidebar about how various chemicals in bacon, fish, and tomato work together to augment the taste of beef, by a factor of fifteen. The recipe may well be regulated for fear of WMB proliferation. Weapons of Mass Beefiness.

Chop up the bacon.

Put the browned beef back into the pot along with any fluids that have dripped out while they sat, then add the flour, stirring until you see no lumpy bits of white flour. This takes a bit of stirring.

Add the red wine, the beef stock, and the water. Keep stirring. Add the herbage and the barley. Add the potatoes and cooked bacon crumblies. Lid the vessel and set to high pressure for 45 minutes. If you're using a dutch oven, that's an hour and a half in a 350 degree oven.

In a separate container, add the gelatin to .25 cup cold water. It'll turn into a floopy little disk. This floopsinating process is called "blooming".

Once the cooking time is up, unlid and stir. Gauge how much free liquid is in there. If it's too liquid, add some more barley.

Once everything is soft, finish by adding the bloomed gelatin disk to the liquid, stirring to dissolve. The unflavored gelatin plays the part of the calf ear or cow hoof in classic French cooking, but without the endless rolling boiling of carcass bits. I don't like boiling carcass bits, and thankfully neither do the editors of Cook's Illustrated.

Once the gelatin is dissolved you are ready to eat.

Tofousse of Confusion

2009-11-07T23:55:00.002-05:00

Being more GI aware, I made the tofu mousse with a limited amount of sugars. It went very much like this, but with the following changes:

Instead of a store-bought crust, do the following: blend 2 cups almonds, 5 tblsp virgin coconut oil, and 5 tblsp splenda in the food processor. Press into a pie pan until it's the right size for the filling.

Substitute semisweet chocolate chips with sugar-free (SF) choco chips. Also, if the SF is a brand as crappy as hershey, throw in a couple of tablespoons cocoa powder. Those people apparently don't know how to dose chocolate to low carb people.

Be aware that the mix will set up IMMEDIATELY. Like, when you blend the SF chocolate into the tofu. Something to do with the maltidol, I guess.

Flax, Salmon, Whey, Pain

2009-11-01T22:06:00.003-05:00

There has been a painful gap in the culinary tour this blog has become, and that is because my wife and I test-drove the so-called "Velocity Diet" for a couple weeks. It's basically 1400-1800 kCals worth of protein shakes, fish oil, flax seeds, multivitamins, and spectacularly artificial flavorings per day. I had some pretty good results with it, nothing like what a real weightlifter would, but still good, and my sweetie did pretty darn well herself.

The diet meshed well with a generalized feeling I've had since the Virginia hike that the ol' body is not really a body of a thirty-something. It needs to be a lot lighter, for one. I'm beginning to understand that it's not so important how much I can bench/squat/deadlift, but rather the weight in proportion to body weight. Also, if I can't do five pullups it's an obvious sign that I'm not truly fit, I'm just large. The way past that is macronutrient management, along with general caloric management. Don't do carbs last thing in the day. Hold back on the bad oils, like those in corn-fed beef, pork, cheese . . oh hell, everything is corn fed. Broccoli is your God. Choke down twenty five grams of protein at a sitting and little else. Except for good oils and fiber, naturally.

The fun part of this is it's like learning to cook all over again. Like adjusting this flax bread recipe for example. How to make bread without carbohydrates . . hmm. Definitely a challenge. I think it's OK but my wife thinks it's a little foul, until it's toasted, anyway. Might make some fine bruschetta, actually.It seems to rise, but not so much. Maybe next time I should beat the egg whites until they're fluffy, to bring a little more air in and make a better rise.

For me, though, pasting this stuff with chevre and nova salmon (the sort of sashimi kind) is pure joy. Goaty love and fish butter, on a bread like substance? Sign me up!

This particular recipe is going to get the hell modified out of it (staying within health guidelines, of course), because I'm not sure the writer of it is a foodie or has spent any measurable amount of time within thirty kilometers of a foodie. Ha! I can make this delicious.

Belated Mt. Rogers Hike Pictures

2009-11-01T22:04:00.001-05:00

Section hiking from Mt. Rogers National Recreation Area headquarters to Damascus

Easy Spanish Pot Roast

2009-10-15T15:18:00.000-04:00

Serves about 6

You'll need a dutch oven, a cutting board, a sharp knife, some tongs, and a long spoon for stirring.

2.5 lbs chuck roast (chuck blade roast is better, seven-bone chuck roast is best)
1 onion, sliced
1 green bell pepper, sliced
1 yellow bell pepper
8 oz tomato puree
1 cup beef stock
2 tsp cumin
1/4 cup red sofrito (found in the latino ethnic section)
2 tbsp+1/4 cup Olive oil
Salt and pepper
12 oz or so frozen peas
1 cup green olives, drained

EXTRAS
Yellow rice mix
Loaf of bread

If necessary, cut up the chuck roast so it can fit in the dutch oven.

Put 1 tbsp of olive oil in the dutch oven and put it on high heat until the oil shimmers. Working in batches, brown the meat chunk(s) on all sides. Use tongs to manipulate the meat. Remove the meat as you go and put on a platter. Set aside.

Preheat the oven to 300.

Add the onion and green pepper and fry until soft. Add everything else EXCEPT the peas and olives, starting with the beef stock. Stir. Make sure you get the beef crusties off the bottom of the pot and into the liquid. Put the beef back in the pot. Put the cover on the dutch oven and slide into the oven.

Set an alarm to go off in three hours. Turn off the oven and, USING OVEN MITTS, carefully pull the roast and put on the stovetop. Stir in the frozen peas and the olives. Lid and let it sit.

While it's sitting, make up the yellow rice mix according to the directions. Put out the bowl of yellow rice with the pot roast and the bread.

Here I Go Again

2009-09-03T09:58:00.008-04:00

For some reason or other- aka scheduling nonsense- I blue blazed a great deal of the Mt. Rogers section of the Appalachian Trail during my through hike in 2006. I had therefore managed to bypass the most scenic terrain for the next five hundred miles, and one of high points of the entire trail. How clever of me. For the next week or so, I'm going back to correct that mistake, taking the real A.T. from Mt. Rogers National Recreation Area HQ to Damascus, VA.

A refresher on trail terminology. The various kinds of blazing are used by Appalachian Trail Purists and others who maintain that the trial is only properly through hiked if you follow the white blazes every inch of the way from Springer to Katahdin.

Veterans of the Pacific Crest Trail find purists amusing. Gigantic sections of the western trail are regularly closed due to fire, earthquake, John Birch, Gojiro, the Red Chinese, or some combination. All of these hazards require that the through hiker bypass the "official" route.

No such luxury for the AT Purist, though it must be noted that John Birch is loath to enter Vermont for any reason and Gojiro avoids the south because it is very hard to keep kosher there. No, true purists circle trees in the middle of the trail to make sure every inch of the trail is indeed walked. By temperament, I do not agree with these folks, but I respect their opinion while being compassionate of mental illness. Non-purists, meanwhile, do things like blue blazing and yellow blazing. Blue blazing is taking an alternate footpath. Yellow blazing is hitchhiking right past sections of the godforsaken trail, a practice known as Pennsylvania.

I am a little nervous about hiking. I always am. This section has no big climbs-these are not the Whites- but it has a lot of thousand foot humps and bumps, many of which look pretty steep. I only train a thousand feet of vertical climb in the gym, but I'm lucky if I do it several times in a week let alone several times in a day, and I have pretty much completed my transformation from twentysomething slacker to obese fortyish desk troll. The blood pressure is medicated, medical exams have started for random crap, shooting pains when I am especially wrapped up in work, hell, shooting pains pretty much whenever. It looks like the beginning of the path to early death that my father enjoyed, or, if I'm really lucky, Krakauering myself somewhere in the hills of southern Virginia. It doesn't seem like the head is big enough to hold this much anxiety.

And you know what? All that garbage goes right out the window when I have the pack on my back and the poles in my hands. Just plant the tips in the ground and smile, and remember that there is no trouble in the world that does not go away in the first thousand yards.

Coq Talk

2009-09-02T08:01:00.002-04:00

If you let them, hard core French recipe sites will boss you around. Coq au vin, for example, is pronounced imperfect if it is not made with salt pork, old rooster, Chambertin, and thickened with rooster blood. Zut alors! You are usink ze BACON! I've run into the same thing multiplied like a zillion times when I was researching bouillabaisse (different topic, different topic).

The truth is, all those details with the blood and stuff are options. They're power windows on a great car. If you take a piece of meat, salt it, brown it on all sides, remove meat, deglaze the brown stuff with a flavorful liquid, replace the meat in the vessel, lid and braise for a reasonable period of time in a slow oven, it's going to be delicious. This is the Honda Accord of cooking methods, at least for cheaper cuts (you wouldn't cook a beef tenderloin this way). Everything else is optional.

Coq au vin, unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your point of view) is pretty option-heavy. It is, however, very cheap and quite good. You are also considered an apt kitchen hand when you get it down, although for my money it's harder to make good mayonnaise consistently than it is to make coq au vin.

2 cups pearl onions (Publix has these little guys frozen, peeled, skinned and ready to roll)
4 chicken leg quarters, cut into thigh and drumstick portions
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 tablespoons water
12 ounces salt pork or slab bacon
12 ounces sliced mushrooms
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
2 750 ml bottles wine, red flavor, something without a lot of tannins
2 tablespoons tomato paste
1 medium onion, chopped
2 stalks celery, chopped
2 medium carrots, chopped
3 cloves garlic, crushed
6 to 8 sprigs fresh thyme
1 bay leaf
2 tablespoons chicken base or bullion
1 packet unflavored gelatin

A word about the wine. Anything with a lot of tannins is going to taste anywhere from astringent to downright nasty. Beaujolais, Tempranillo, Pinot Noir (red), Burgundy should be safe choices. Stay away from Zinfandel, Cabernet, Rhone, Syrah, Shiraz, and the like. Some Chiantis can work- one of the best coq au vins I ever made was with a giant bottle of cheap Chianti. Not all Chiantis, though. Keep in mind that cheaper wines are often lower in tannins than their more dollarific counterparts.

Salt the chicken pieces on all sides with some kosher salt. Let them sit and watch you cook. They get lonely otherwise.

Thaw out your tiny little onions if you followed my advice and got the bag of prepped frozen onions. If you didn't, peel the fresh ones you bought and try not to slash your wrists out of tedium while I laugh at you from my internet kitchen sanctum. Sure sure, fresh tiny onions are way better than frozen convenient onions, blah blah blah, I know.

Get a big heavy pan out and put it on medium heat. Dice the salt pork/bacon into, eh, .5" cubes. Put the cubes into the pan with a couple tablespoons water, cover. After a few minutes the water should be gone and the cubes should be starting to give up some of their fat. Cook uncovered until the cubes are crispity brown and have covered the bottom of the pan with a nice layer of the pork fat. Remove, let them cool a bit then put them in a giant ziplock bag.

Put those teensy onions in the pan and saute until somewhat brown on most of their surfaces. They won't be an even brown, that's OK. If they're not terribly soft add some water, cover, and steam until they get at least knife tender. Then let the water evaporate and brown them again. These go into the giant ziplock.

Put the chicken, skin side down, into the goopy pan. Sizzle until brown, then flip. Depending on the diameter of your big heavy pan, this will take anywhere from two to four batches. Remember not to crowd the pan.

There's something sort of counterintuitive about browning unfloured chicken in the pan like this. When it comes time to flip, if the chicken skin is sort of clinging to the bottom of the pan, just let it sit a bit longer. Seriously. Don't try and scrape it off, that only ends in despair and shreds of meat and skin clinging to the pan. But by letting it sit and browning a bit longer, the proteins in the skin will change their structure and loosen their grip on the pan. If this technique doesn't quite work, put a bit of water in the pan. The steam will get between the meat and the metal and pop that chicken off, no problem. Well, maybe not pop exactly, but how about not stick quite so tenaciously. You want to avoid leaving big pieces of skin on the bottom of the pan, because the skin is happier on the chicken.

As you cook the chicken, put the browned pieces in a casserole big enough to hold all the chicken in a single layer, plus your 2 750 ml bottles of wine. Put the chicken down in a single layer in such a casserole as you go.

Take your sliced mushrooms and throw them in the pan so they are laying there in a single layer. Saute. Let them take some color from the pan. If you need to do them in more than batch, shove the ones that are done from the center to the peripery of the pan, then dump the newcomers right in the center of the pan. Mushrooms have a ton of water in them, it takes some real determined incompetence to burn them, especially on medium heat, which is what we're still on, if you recall. When suitably browned, put the shrooms in the giant ziplock.

It is now time to be very careful and deglaze. Grab a bottle of wine and put in a cup or so of the red stuff, right into the pan. Lots of steam, it will burn you. Be careful. With the wine in the pan, scrape the brown stuff off the bottom of the pan and into the wine. As we've mentioned previously, the brown stuff is called fond and without it and the process of deglazing French cuisine would probably not exist. It's a great contribution, deglazing, useful no matter if you're making French or Thai. Deglazing also greatly simplifies dishwashing, which I am pretty sure is why it was invented.

Once the fond is completely dissolved in the wine, add the tomato paste, garlic, and chicken base/bullion. Stir until these are dissolved, then pour this over the chicken in the casserole. Then add the rest of the wine to the casserole with the thyme and bay leaf. Chop up your vegetables and add them too, the onion, carrots, and celery. Lid the vessel and in it goes into the refrigerator, at least overnight and supposedly for as long as three days.

Before you forget, seal the giant zip lock full of goodies and put that in the fridge too. You might have to eat some leftovers to make room for all this stuff. Go to bed.

Next day, or whenever you decide to cook the thing, heat the oven to 325 and put the casserole- chicken, marinade, and all- right into the oven. Cook for 2 hours at 325.

When the chicken is done there is a bit of confusing pot juggling. Carefully take your chicken out of the braising vessel. The pieces will want to come to bits, try and keep that from happening. Use tongs. With a colander, strain the braising liquid into a big pot. Discard the sorry remains of the vegetables and herbs. Return the chicken pieces to the braising vessel and lid to keep the heat in. Put the big pot with its braising liquid on high heat. Put the packet of gelatin in 1/4 cup of cold water.

Reduce the braising liquid in the big pot until you have, eh, about 2 cups left. Or so. This depends on your wine choice and a lot of other things. The liquid will be thickened and glossy, and when you stir it you will hear a little sizzle as the sauce pulls a bit from the bottom of the pot. Towards the end you will have to stir constantly to keep it from burning, because wine has a lot of sugar in it and there's not a hell of a lot of water left in there. Once it has thickened to your satisfaction, turn the heat to low and add the bloomed gelatin to the liquid, stir to dissolve the gelatin blob into the sauce. Get the big ziplock full of goodies from yesterday- the one with the pork bits, the onions, and the mushrooms. Add this to the sauce and stir until the goodies are heated through. Take the sauce with the goodies incorporated and just pour that over the chicken in the casserole. See? It's pretty. And you thought it'd never be done.

Serve with lots of good crusty bread. As far as I'm concerned, the chicken is just chicken, but the sauce. Huh, yeah. The bread gives you a good media to smear it in. Try and restrain yourself from smearing it all over your body. Sounds gross? You haven't made this yet.

For this reason, it is customary to serve this with broad egg noodles, again to get more of the sauce into your mouth. I prefer more bread, but whatever works. Little boiled potatoes, or mashed, would work here as well.

Yellow Vindaloo

2009-08-31T10:03:00.002-04:00

Vindaloo started as a portugese phrase before becoming an Indian restaurant staple, but in English vindaloo usually means "pain". The deep red color of the dish has nothing to do with tomatoes or paprika. No sir, the red color is all chili peppers, the tiny varieties, eighteen of them for a pound and a half of meat. Yowza. Not stuff to feed your friends, at least, not if you like them.

I had one guest that was a chili head but the rest were somewhat heat sensitive, and one guest didn't like heat of any kind, so I decompiled my vindaloo recipe and made a vindaloo without chili. The dish turned out to be stoplight yellow from all the tumeric. I also streamlined the recipe for speed. The end result wasn't quite vindaloo, but it sure in hell wasn't bad either.

Marinade
1.5 lbs chuck or other stew meat, cut in 1-2" cubes
2 tbsp black pepper
1/2 cup malt vinegar
2 tbsp sugar
2 tbsp red pepper flakes (OK, so there is some heat)
8 green cardamom pods (omit if you hate cardamom)
2 tsp ground clove
2 tbsp beef base or beef bullion

Paste
10 cloves garlic
2" ginger root
2 tsp cinnamon
1 tbsp cumin
1 tbsp ground coriander seed
1 tbsp tumeric
2 onions

Finishing
2 tbsp ghee or butter
Fine dice potatoes (I used cubed potatoes from the freezer section, aka "southern style hash browns")
Handful cilantro

Raita
Handful mint
Cucumber
2 cups plain yogurt
1 tbsp salt

Basmati rice

Combine the marinade ingredients in a big zip lock bag and let sit for at least 24 hours. It can sit for longer if you like. Vindaloo is a dish designed around meat preserved in vinegar, so sour is OK.

Make a paste out of the "paste" ingredients using your food processor. Start with the wet stuff, then add the spices and pulse just to combine. Don't run the food processor on the spices too long, it will burn them.

Take the meat out of the marinade, pat dry and brown in your dutch oven or pressure cooker. Remove and reserve. Melt the butter in the cooking chamber, then fry the paste in the butter until very aromatic. You'll be sneezing cumin for a few days, that's okay. It's good.

Add the beef back to the paste, stir stir stir, then clamp the lid on the pressure cooker and set to high pressure for 45 minutes. If using a dutch oven, lid tightly and put in a 300 degree oven for anywhere from 2 to 4 hours, until the meat is spoon tender. When using the dutch oven you might want to add a little extra fluid, as the seal isn't near as good as it is with the pressure cooker. The reserved marinade would probably work well here.

Pulse the cilantro in the food processor until chopped.

When the meat is done, add the potatoes and cook until potatoes are done. Stir in the cilantro.

Make some raita. Seed the cucumber and chunk it so it fits in the food processor. Pulse until coarsely chopped. Not pureed. We're not making tsatsiki here. Put in bowl. Put handful mint in food processor, pulse until chopped. Put in bowl. Fold in plain yogurt and salt, stir.

Serve the stew with raita and basmati rice. I like mint chutney and punjabi mixed pickle with it as well, but the mixed pickle is pretty strange. I might be the only one at the table that likes the stuff.

Summerito

2009-08-26T13:54:00.000-04:00

Bean burritos are one of my wife's staple foods, but it was way too hot for that stuff and I wanted something a bit heavier hitting on the nutrition side: a bit more fiber, more protein and healthy fats replacing the not-terribly-healthy fats in the cheddar. So was born the summerito, something like this:

Handful mint leaves, chopped
1 tbsp lime juice
1 avocado, chopped, or 1.5 cup guacamole
1 12 oz chicken breast, grilled and chopped
1 can black beans, drained.
4 low-carb tortillas

Combine first five ingredients, divide in four parts, and wrap each part tightly in the sixth ingredient. Some notes:

When chopping avocado, toss lightly in lime juice. This will prevent the sliced avocados from turning brown.

Grilled chicken breasts can be tricky. Set the grate so the fire will be about five inches from the meat. Start your fire and pile it on one side of the grill. Put chicken breasts on indirect heat (the side the fire isn't) with the thick ends toward the fire. Cover with a loose foil tent. Cook about five minutes, enough for the surface to turn white, depending on your breasts. Flip the breasts onto the hot side of the grill for direct heat. Grill for two minutes until you get grill marks, then flip and cook for another two minutes until an internal temperature of 160 degrees is reached.

Mac and Brocc

2009-08-24T09:35:00.002-04:00

5 tbsp butter
5 tbsp flour
1 tbsp dry mustard
1 tsp paprika
.5 onion, chopped
1 egg, beaten
10 oz cheddar, shredded
2 cups milk
2 cups penne
3 cups broccoli florets
3 tbsp salt
More shredded cheddar

If someone you know has had a stressful day, or if you want to feel a bit better, there is no better medicine than macaroni and cheese. It's high time I wrote my recipe down, an amalgamation of Good Eats and Betty Crocker, with a dose of knowledge from America's Test Kitchen.

Elbow macaroni is preferable to penne, but I have a huge vat of penne from Sam's so that's what I use. Broccoli was added for token nutrient value and because it tastes good.

Melt the butter on low heat in a middlin sized pot. Add the flour and cook, stirring, until the flour takes on a blondish color. Add the mustard, paprika, and onion, and cook for a minute or so. There's our roux. Dribble in the milk, stirring, until you get a gloopy tasty mess. This is sort of bechamel, and it is the basis for our cheese sauce, but we have one little detail to take care of before we start adding the cheese.

Take your little bowl or cup in which you have beaten your egg. Tablespoon by tablespoon, add the hot sort-of-bechamel to the egg, stirring vigorously while you're doing this. Sometime after four or five tablespoons, the egg should start thickening. When it does so, you can add the egg mixture to the sort-of-bechamel. This is called tempering the egg, and it allows you to use egg as a thickener without ending up with scrambled or poached eggs, which is what you'd get if you added the egg straight up.

Add the 10 oz of shredded cheddar by the handful, incorporating each new addition before adding another. You should end up with a light orange gloop that is your cheese sauce. Take it off the heat.

Preheat the oven to 350.

Cook up the pasta as directed in a big pot, for penne, about ten minutes on a rolling boil. Drain, put back into the big pot. Fold the sauce into the pasta in the big pot. Rinse out the little saucepan you used to make the sort-of-bechamel, fill it with water, 3 tbsp salt, and the broccoli. Cook the broccoli until moderately tender and brilliant green. Drain and chop broccoli, add to pasta and sauce in the big pot. Stir stir stir. Put the whole mess into an ovenproof casserole, top with some more shredded cheese, and bake for 30 minutes at 350 degrees.

Broiler Rediscovery

2009-08-21T14:41:00.002-04:00

Most of us live in a world devoid of broilers. Even if the top element in your oven has a decent output, unless you work in a professional kitchen or live in a house far beyond your means you do not have a ventilation system that can clear out the voluminous and inevitable smoke that comes with cooking on direct heat. However, with a cool little trick from Cook's Illustrated you can turn it up to 11 with next to no smoke. For this example, I'll use a 1-1.25" thick strip steak, which I always seem to have on hand for some reason.

Take your steak and put a teaspoon of coarse salt on all surfaces of the meat. Put on a roasting rack. This calls forth protein-laden fluids to the surface of the meat, and it is these fluids that are responsible for browning. Let the salted steak sit at room temperature for 1 hour.

Take a cookie sheet and line it with foil. Now, here's the trick: cover the bottom of the cookie sheet that the steak will be over with an even layer of coarse salt. Remove the salted meat from the rack and put the rack on the salt bed. Not the meat. We need to preheat the rack first.

Put the top oven rack in a position so that when the meat will be about 1.5 inches from the heat. You might need to put a casserole dish as a shim underneath the cookie sheet for this. Keep in mind- listen sharp here- that all ovens are different. One and a half inches is not so close in my crappy little oven, but if you have a nice gas broiler five inches is probably a much better distance.

Preheat the cooking apparatus under the hot broiler for five minutes. We're heating that rack before we put the meat on it because metal has networks of tiny little cracks that change their configuration as they heat. Put the meat on when the rack is hot and you can pull it off when the rack is hot. Put the meat on when the rack is cold, the rack heats up and grabs ahold of the meat.

Cookie sheet elevator shim, cookie sheet with its bed of salt, and roasting rack on top. Into the oven, heat it up. Keep the oven door open or the interior of the oven will quickly reach a temperature that will make the element turn off. You don't want that.

Now put your salted meat in its designated position on the rack above the salt bed. Cook for 4-5 minutes per side for a 1.25" steak, or until each side is crusty and dark brown. Note that the salt absorbs the fluid dropped by the meat so that it does not dry out and burn. Also note that the salt is not in contact with the meat so that your supper does not turn into a Mormon holy site.

Once crusty brown on all sides, your meat is cooked. Of course, there are those of us who don't particularly care how done it is, or if it is vocalizing and/or actively struggling. Cook it for longer if you like it medium-well or whatever. Or eat a hot dog. Cold. From the package. Crying.

This salt trick works with hamburgers, sausages, mushrooms, all sorts of broiler applications where the target wants a lot of intense dry heat and you are for some reason unable or unwilling to fire up the grill.

15 Minute Risotto

2009-08-20T13:34:00.003-04:00

Cuisinart should probably start sending me money given how often I pimp their pressure cooker and food processors. But here we go again, another pressure cooker recipe.

Risotto is a bit tricky given that I have never actually eaten it. My finished product looked like the picture in the cookbook, and the wife liked it, so as far as I'm concerned that makes it risotto. Note to self: go to high-end Italian restaurant to see what risotto is supposed to taste like.

Melt 2 tbslp butter in the bowl of your handy dandy pressure cooker. Well, yours might be handy dandy. Ours is bulky, black and ominous, like a steam-powered R2D2 commissioned by Albert Speer. It's great.

Chop half an onion, .5 carrot, and .5 stalk celery very fine. Food processors work well here. Saute in the butter until soft-ish. Add 1 clove garlic, chopped very fine. Saute until it starts aromatizing, but do not let anything turn brown.

Add 1 cup arborio rice to this mixture and cook, stirring, for about 3 minutes, or until the rice gets a toasty smell and the ends of the rice grains have turned translucent. Risotto scholars assure me this step is critical.

Add .25-.3 cup white wine and .5 tsp salt to this mixture and cook, stirring, until liquid is absorbed.

Add 2 cups chicken broth, lid, and set on high pressure for 6 minutes. Reserve .25 cups of broth.

While that's going on, shred 1 cup Parmesean or similar cheese. Broil or otherwise cook 2 cups mushrooms. I used criminis aka "baby bellas", they're good and cheap. I wished I had some asparagus, 1 cup steamed asparagus would have been nice. I used peas instead and rather wished I didn't. With risotto, always make sure the add-ins are pre-cooked, unless leafy or herbal in nature. Cook mushrooms in with the rice and you'll get rice gruel as the fungi will over-moisturize the risotto. So say the risotto scholars, anyway, and who am I to question them?

De-pressurize the cooker and set it to simmer. Stir. You can tell the risotto is about ready when the liquid pulls completely off the bottom of the pan. If it flows back in, it's still too liquid, and you have some more cooking/stirring to do. If it's too dry use the reserved broth to moisten it, cooking and stirring while you add it in drabs. You can tell it's too dry by tasting: the rice should be just al dente, surrounded with creamy fluid, but not crunchy raw rice. Anyway, if the rice is cooked and you can drag the spoon across the bottom of the pan and see the pan bottom, you're ready for the last additions.

Stir in the cooked veggies/fungus. Keep stirring. Add the cheese in batches, stirring until incorporated. Serve immediately and eat it all. You have to. Risotto does not keep well in the fridge. Take a nap.

Lemon Strawberry Whip

2009-08-19T08:01:00.001-04:00

The tofu pie phenomenon continues. These things are awfully easy for how good they are. This one isn't as good as the chocolate version, but it's nice in its own way.

1 box lemon jello
1 cup hot water
2 tbsp fresh lemon juice
Zest from two lemons
10 oz (or so) soft tofu
8 oz non-dairy whipped topping
1 prepared graham cracker crust
1 cup sliced strawberries

Grate the zest from the lemons into the bowl of your food processor.

Juice out 2 tbsp of lemon juice from one of the zested lemons. One lemon should render about that much juice. Put the juice in a small bowl with the jello and the water. Refrigerate until it has the consistency of raw eggs.

Meanwhile, put the tofu in the food processor and whir until smooth. Add whipped topping, whir. Add thickened lemon jello mixture, whir until combined. Pour this stuff into prepared pie crust.

Place strawberry slices all over the lemon stuff. Cover and refrigerate overnight.

Spanikopita and Tabouli

2009-08-18T10:52:00.003-04:00

1 roll of phyllo (1/2 package)
1 stick (or more) butter
1 pound baby spinach
1/2 cup breadcrumbs or croutons, more or less
1 egg, beaten
1 tbsp olive oil
8 oz feta
1/2 tsp nutmeg

If the phyllo is frozen, thaw it precisely according to the box directions (2 hours).

While that's going on, make your filling. Wilt the spinach in the olive oil in a big pan. Try and sizzle out as much moisture as you can. Put in a big mixing bowl with 8 oz diced feta, egg, nutmeg, and mix. Get a feel for the moisture in there. If it's too wet it will bust out of the phyllo during cooking. It should be about the same wetness as Thanksgiving stuffing. Adjust with the breadcrumbs/croutons.

Melt your butter and get your brush ready. Mop down a cookie sheet with some of the butter. Preheat the oven to 375. Now that the phyllo has thawed for two hours, unroll it.

Lay down a sheet of phyllo, brush with melted butter until transparent. Lay down another sheet of phyllo, brush with butter until transparent. Slice the prepared phyllo down the long axis with the point of a very sharp knife, so that you have two strips of prepared phyllo. Put a heaping tablespoon of filling at one end of one of the strips, then fold the corner over. Keep folding it over and over as if you were making a paper football or folding a flag. See crude illustration:
You should end up with a fat triangle. Lay it down on the cookie sheet. Repeat with the other strip.

Repeat the previous paragraph until you are out of either filling or phyllo. You'll probably run out of filling first, depending on how new you are to working with phyllo. If this is your first time working with phyllo you might run out of phyllo first. Remember, the thin sheets of dough become unworkably brittle after being exposed to the air for too long, so be sure to cover with a damp towel if you are pausing for any length of time.

Take your spanikopita-covered cookie sheet and put it in the 375 degree oven for 20-30 minutes, turning once, until golden brown. Serve immediately. It's nice with some tabouli salad. Tabouli too hard, you say? Horsepuckey, I say.

Add 6 tbsp boiling water to 3 tbsp fine bulgar and let sit for thirty minutes.. In your big food processor put 3 bunches flat-leaf parsley, 1 bunch mint leaves, 2 seeded ripe tomatoes, 1/2 red onion, juice of 1 lemon (strain out the seeds, you lazybones), 1 tsp salt, and a couple shakes of cayenne. Pulse a couple of times until everything is chopped. Add 1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil, pulse a few more times. Has it been thirty minutes since you started the bulgar? Great! Add the hydrated bulgar to the food processor and pulse just to combine. Spooge it out into a serving bowl and there you go. It's preferable to cover and chill this for a few hours to let the flavors combine, but I've gotten no complaints when it's served straight out of the food mongler.

Serves about 4.

That's No Deer, that's a Soy Mousse!

2009-08-04T11:43:00.002-04:00

Cooking for some dairy intolerant friends brings strange recipes to my kitchen, but this tofu-based mousse pie is pretty fricking amazing. My wife, self-described "dessert queen", named this one as a recipe that will soon be memorized. It's quite a bit better for you than mousse, as well, which is to be expected of something that doesn't have a cup or two of heavy cream in it.

1 (12-ounce) package semisweet chocolate chips
1 (12-ounce) package silken firm tofu
Splash vanilla extract
2 egg whites
Prepared chocolate cookie crust
Rasberries in syrup
Non-dairy whipped topping

Melt chocolate in microwave. Don't burn it! It's astonishingly easy to do. After about a minute and a half on medium power, open up the nuker to stir the chocolate every twenty seconds or so.

Blend tofu in food processor with vanilla until smooth. Blend melted chocolate into tofu mixture. Put back in bowl you melted the chocolate in, scrape sides of bowl to get the chocolate too stubborn to join the tofu in the food processor. Mustn't waste chocolate!

Beat egg whites until soft peaks form. Gently fold into the choco-tofu mixture. After it's folded in, pour into cookie crust. Refrigerate overnight.

Scoop out slices and top with raspberries and non-dairy topping.

No Beer Can Chicken

2009-07-09T11:33:00.001-04:00

We don't like beer flavors very much so we use cans of Spicy V-8, because I like it a lot better straight up than regular V-8. Cans of lemonade work too, and if you go to the mexican section, you can get canned beverages in just about any flavor you can imagine.

1 broiler-fryer chicken
1 can spicy V-8
1 tsp each cayenne, garlic powder, onion powder, and paprika
2 sprigs rosemary
4 sprigs thyme
8 leaves sage

For the fresh herbage, I only use fresh in the above cases because I've got it on hand.

Set up the smoker for indirect heat. Start your fire on one side and let it burn down until the coals are almost ash.

While that's happening, drain your chicken and pull out any goodies stuffed in the body cavity. Neck and such. Replace with powdered spices, then stuff the fresh herbage into the cavity. Lube the chicken with some olive oil. Carry out your lubed bird and the can of spicy V-8.

Set up the cooking grill on the side the fire isn't. Open the can of V-8 and put it down on the grate. Here comes the fun part. Spread the rear opening of the chicken and wiggle it down over the open can on the grate. Try to make sure it's level. It helps to whisper reassuringly in Latin to the helpless chicken. Don't ask me why, it just does. With the can firmly inserted into the chicken's cavity, spread its legs so it is sitting patiently on the can and two drumsticks, with its back (the dark meat side) facing the heat.

Load the coals with chunks of hardwood that aren't mesquite, then cover and close vents to 1/8 open or however you maintain a temperature of ~300 degrees for two hours. Put fresh hardwood chunks in every thirty minutes. Take the chicken from the grill and put in a bowl. Be aware that inside the chicken is a metal container full of boiling liquid. I'm not super fastidious about my grill, so I usually pull the cans out of the chicken right there and let it make a mess so I have less mess inside. At the end of a grilling session I usually dowse the smoker in lighter fluid and ignite. Between the accumulated pork fat and other juices that fire burns for a while. Fire cleans anything.

Carve your chicken like so: cut along both sides of the backbone and remove its wee little spine. Spread the breast out cavity side down and push on the sternum to break the keelbone. Chop off the thighs and divide the breast. Arrange and serve.

Butts of Independence

2009-07-07T08:18:00.001-04:00

Well, for the longest time I thought the butt was named for where it was on the animal. A pal and Wikipedia set me straight. It is indeed named for its original packaging, salted in "butts" or barrels. While I knew about the salt butts used in food storage, I always thought the less colorful explanation was more likely, i.e., that the butt is on the butt end of the ham leg. Shank and butt. In life the more colorful option is often the more likely and that is wonderful.

This fourth of July I managed the best barbecue I've made yet, and it went something like this:

Go to Sam's and buy one of those big packages of boston butt, 14-18 pounds or two butt's worth. Make a brine with 4 quarts water, 24 ounces salt, 16 ounces molasses, and 1 cup dark brown sugar. Put the butts in the brine. Fill two gallon zip locks with ice and put them on top of the pork. This will keep the pork under the surface of the brine and it will keep the brine cool through the brining period without using up space in the fridge, assuming you're using a cooler to do this in and not your bathtub or a garbage can or some other damn fool thing. I used a disposable foam cooler. If using disposable coolers makes you "foam" at the mouth . . ha ha, I am a wit and reconteur . . use your own damn cooler and bleach out the porkiness later.

Early on the morning of the big day, about seven or eight hours before eating time, start your fire in your smoker/grill set up for indirect heat. Pull the pork from the brine, toss the brine, and rub both butts liberally with a mixture of 2 tsp cumin, 2 tsp coriander, 4 tbsp chili powder, 2 tbsp onion powder, and 2 tbsp paprika. Put them in the smoker on the side the fire isn't. Put a handful of hardwood chunks that aren't mesquite on the coals. Close up the smoker and bring to somewhere between 250 and 300 degrees. Every thirty minutes for the next four hours, go out and put some more wood chunks in there to keep it smoky and make sure the temperature is staying in that 250-300 degree window. Going too cold is better than going too hot. Too hot is very bad. Everyone's smoker is different, but my smoker did pretty well alternating between full closed and having the bottom and top vents about 1/8 open.

Sometime during this period preheat your oven to 300 degrees.

After four hours of smoking, pull the butts and put in a foil roasting pan. Cover very tightly with foil, shiny side facing out. Put in 300 degree oven and cook for another 2-3 hours. Pull from oven, drain off fluid that accumulated during the oven braise. Using two stout forks, pull apart the meat so that it comes to resemble, well, pulled pork, which is what it is. Chop up any bits that don't pull apart.

Serve with sauce (of all the budget sauces, I like Bulls-Eye best), plain white rolls or even white sandwich bread, and coleslaw. Feeds a bunch.

You Need Baklava

2009-06-24T11:05:00.000-04:00

Back when the Econopolypse was still just a suspicion in the mind of the grim, I remember hearing this anecdote on a Serious News Radio program.

"The United States is like a rich man on a desert island. Other countries- China, India, the developing world- are the people on the desert island, bringing the rich man food, drink, other goods. The problem is that the people working for the rich man can't stop working, and the rich man can't stop eating."

I remember when I first heard this analogy, I pounded the roof of my car with my fist and screamed, "ARE YOU EVEN LISTENING TO YOURSELF!?". Looking at it dispassionately, there is no way a functional human can make that analysis in sound mind and still manage basic potty functions. If China already makes goods it does not need to pay for them. The status quo is functional for China. If the U.S. does not have goods it is stuck. The status quo is not functional for the fat man. You can not actually eat your own debt. I chalked up the lack of analyst consciousness to blackberries and iPhone porn. The economist was probably glued to his internet appliance during the interview, Latvian teenagers dancing in his head.

Do you know what is almost as good as Latvian teenagers? Baklava. In my advancing age I would argue that baklava might actually be better than Latvian teenagers. Baklava does not make 3 A.M. calls to Братва handlers after it walks out on you, nor does it steal all your stuff or invite its violent alcoholic relatives to camp out in your living room for months at a time. Its only job is to be cooked and eaten and to make you happy.

The key to baklava is phyllo dough. I've never made it from scratch and have no desire to. It comes rather cheaply from the freezer section in the local supermarket, from the same area as the frozen fruits and pie doughs. The thing you do need to do is follow the thawing instructions precisely. The stuff is hard to work with in the best of circumstances. If it is thawed too little it will break and shatter as you handle it. If it is thawed too much it will mush apart when handled. Follow the thawing instructions precisely, and if you have to take a break from working with it, cover it as instructed or it will dry out and become brittle in minutes. That said, once you get the groove of the stuff, it's a rewarding tool to have in the freezer; salmon, sausage, and other meats love to get wrapped up in the stuff (who wouldn't?), and with not a lot of extra work spanikopita and even pizza rolls are cheap and easy (although I prefer to make my own shortbread dough for homemade pizza rolls). Anyway, end of phyllo sermon.

In a pot, put 2/3 cup water, 2 cups sugar, the juice from 1 lemon and 1 orange, a teaspoon of cinnamon. Dump in the fruit halves you just juiced, as well. Bring to boil, stirring, until everything dissolves. Stir in 1 cup honey until incorporated. Strain out solids and allow to cool.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

In the bowl of your food processor, put 3.25 cups almonds, 2.25 cups walnuts, 1 cup sugar, 1 tbsp cinnamon, 2 tsp nutmeg, .25 tsp ground clove, and .25 tsp salt. Whir until the nuts are finely chopped, but stop whirring or they'll turn into flour. If you do accidentally get the spiced nut flour, you can still make your baklava, it'll just be incredibly dense. It's a forgiving recipe in some ways. It's just the phyllo that's a tricky bitch. It's the culinary equivalent of the stripper that set your motorcycle on fire with the cops goddamn watching from like a block away.

Melt a stick or two of butter in a little saucepan under low heat. Get out your fine bristled brush, and brush down a 13x9 inch Pyrex or similar baking dish with the butter.

There is a lot of butter in this recipe. You might need more butter, you might not. I always make sure I have a pound on hand before I start baklava; you can melt some more if you need to. Interestingly enough, I've also made baklava with good old fashioned vegetable shortening. It doesn't brown up as much in the oven, but it is a mite bit crispier. I prefer butter.

With the package of phyllo perfectly thawed, as per instructions, gently lift up a single sheet of phyllo and lay it down in the buttered baking dish. Try to achieve coverage. Once it's down, brush it with butter until transparent (or as close as you can get). Lay down another layer of phyllo, brush. Don't get frustrated if a layer or two isn't as pretty as you like. There's a lot of layers, so as long as the average is good, you're doing fine. The corners and edges of the phyllo probably won't fit exactly into the pan, but that's okay. Just sort of wedge them down with the butter brush, soaking them with butter in the process. It results in a somewhat higher phyllo-to-nut ratio around the edges of the dish, but some people seem to like that.

Repeat this process until you've put down ten sheets of phyllo. Put down a third of the nut mixture, then ten more sheets of phyllo, then another third of the nut mixture, then another ten sheets, then the final third of the nuts and the last ten sheets of phyllo. Have a big drink while you chill the baklava a bit to facilitate the cutting.

We cut baklava before it is cooked because it would be a holy mess and a suicidally depressing tragedy to ruin so much careful work if you tried to cut it after it was cooked. Now that it is cooled somewhat, take the sharpest knife you own (a straight razor would be awesome here), and cut into 16 rectangles. The official recipe says to cut these into triangles, but I've only just been able to do the rectangles. If a piece is too big for someone then they can share, dammit. Make sure to cut all the way through to the bottom.

Slide the baklava into the oven and bake until deep golden brown, 50 minutes to 1 hour. Pull it from the oven and allow it to cool, then pour the syrup you made in all the cuts. It might seem like too much, but the nuts will pull that syrup in and sweeten the pastry.

Try not to cover this thing with anything impermeable- it will make the layers not as crisp as they'd be otherwise. Same can be said about chilling. Takes the crunch right out. Same can be said for freezing. It will freeze and be quite good afterwards, you just won't cry after eating it like you did the first time.

A nice slice of baklava is pretty fine with some good vanilla ice cream.

Stories from Galina

2009-06-22T21:47:00.002-04:00

“Wouldn’t it be dreadful if some day in our own world, at home, men started going wild inside like the animals here, and still looked like men, so you’d never know which were which?”
Lucy in Prince Caspian, C.S. Lewis, 1951
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Displaced persons camps after war not always safe. Safer than prison camp where Papa was, putting him in farm work camp where he not know which end of carrot goes in ground, but not safe. You have to watch (Grandma makes shush-ing motion with one finger against her lips). One day, English officer come in, calls all the kadets and so. Reads names, and those who hear names smile and say, hooray, the English come to take us. They step forward and are taken off- but they are given to Communist man who-poo- off to Siberia. My brother, one of these.
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We saw many different Germans in Yugoslavia. Many different ones. One in the camp was SS man (Grandma gives a stern, slit-eyed SS officer look), and he was always looking for kollaborator. Others different, one, a German officer, Schafenhammer (sp?) I saved. I tell you. He always watching for us, making sure we had spek and vegetables, same as his men. We and others, all the men over fifty- other men go to front- we work in cartographers. Once we make him little card, has him with his great coat, and all of us huddled underneath. Over the drawing we write papushka, because he always was watching for us. Anyway, one day, we were all there in Belgrade, and we can already hear the Russian boo-boom. Papushka grabs us and then, long way, to Austria, and then we are in displaced persons camp. Papushka they take for trial. Later he writes and asks for any good thing I can say about him, or else they hang him or worse-poo-off to Siberia. I write letter and you know, years later, I get letter, him saying thank you. Papushka got enough good said about him he was safe through trial. I have picture of him, in his big coat with us. His daughter committed suicide, they say.
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So many things were changing. The prince, some says is going to overthrow. Some say prince is going to be killed.
Suddenly they say Germans are coming. A great man on horseback comes through the town, waving his sword, his horse in the fountain. We are going against the Germans! We never see him or the soldiers with him again.
The next night we hear big engines and Stuka. Next morning, here, there, some buildings gone. Here, there, big tanks, Germans in them in big coats. Sprecht du Deutsch? Ja, Ja, I say. Here my languages are very handy.
But with Germans is very clear. Partisans shoot the German soldier, they take list of ten names. Who shoots the German soldier? they ask. If no one says, they shoot the ten names.
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Talking with Gramma Galina is always interesting. She is a very special lady. She listens and speaks with equal interest, an uncommon quality in people a third her age. It is interesting hearing her first hand accounts of wartime in Yugoslavia and comparing against my far less detailed overview. -Ed.

Fallin, Fallin, Falafelin in Love

2009-06-21T11:35:00.002-04:00

You can buy the box mix but when you're feeding a bunch of people it is laughably expensive to buy a crapload of falafel mix. This recipe feeds eight people for ten bucks, and is a bit better tasting.

Take a 1 lb bag of garbanzo beans and put in a pot of water overnight. Next morning, drain the garbanzos and put them in a food processor. Whir until it's a mealy paste. Put the mealy paste back into the pot (why dirty another dish?). Trim the stems off a bunch of parsley and a bunch of cilantro (when I say "a bunch" I mean about 9 tbsp minced each, which is about the same as the bunches they sell at the supermarket). Put the greenery in the bowl of the food processor with 1.5 onions, 4 tsp salt, 2 tsp red pepper flakes, 12 cloves garlic, 3 tsp cumin, and 3 tsp baking powder. Whir until pureed. Mix the herbage paste with the garbanzo meal. Thicken with flour until it is able to be formed into small 1" balls (about 1.25 cups flour). Proceed to make lots of little 1" balls. This is going to take some counter space. I recommend putting some saran wrap on some cookie sheets and using those as a falafel-forming-and-staging area.

Take a quart of canola oil and heat in a pot until a drop of water crackles in it. Carefully plop in six or so falafel balls at a time and deep-fry until dark brown. Take them out with a slotted spoon and place in serving receptacle.

A word about frying falafel. These little guys are not so durable when they're first dropped in. They'll sink immediately to the bottom and, if left there, will char on the bottom where they are in contact with the metal. At the same time, if you agitate them right when you put them in they'll fall apart and you'll just have amorphous masses of falafel matter. The trick is to plop them in, let them develop a hardy crust (about 15-30 seconds), then gently pop them off the bottom with a metal slotted spoon. By that time the proteins and starch on the bottom will have begun to loosen its grip on the metal of the pot, and the crust around the balls will be tough enough to take a little prodding. Once so popped, they will then sort of float around in the oil and you can proceed to cook them to dark brown.

Serve with middle eastern style accompaniments, like pseudorissa, sort-of-anchoiade, tsatsiki, and hummus. Some chopped up tomatoes, feta cheese, red onions, and bell peppers are nice too. If you get pita bread for God's sake get it from a middle eastern bakery. The Tofuyan brand pita from the supermarket is horrible and probably deserves a death fatwa from the Foodie Ayatollah, if such a thing were to exist.

Smokin Chipotle Hummus

2009-06-11T13:00:00.001-04:00

Until I met middle eastern cuisine, the skills I learned in the restaurant business were enough to get me by in the private kitchen. Searing, grilling, baking, sauces, frying . . no hot line skill would make a bowl of hummus. Thus hummus was the first recipe I researched, and have continued improving and adjusting depending on what I have on hand and the tastes of my guests. I personally believe the tahini-rich recipes yields a tastier, creamier product, while my wife prefers lighter, somewhat grainier hummus with less or no tahini. I'm gun-shy of the low-tahini recipes, I admit. My worst batches of hummus are the ones where I screw with the tahini ratio. I drop the tahini, the lemon flavor leaps to the forefront, then I start feebly compensating with salt, cumin, and sugar, and then I end up with Saladin's Revenge. Which is still good, just not great.

When my wife requested chipotle-flavored hummus I didn't want to take any chances and went with the normal tahini ratio recipe, which is what I show here. I was pretty happy with the results, but for those of you that dislike tahini, feel free to tinker with the recipe as needed, at your peril. The sequence of ingredients is, however, important. If you ignore everything else about this recipe just remember to not thrash the olive oil in the food processor. Add your extra virgin at the end.

Put a can of garbanzo beans, 2 cloves garlic, 1/2 tsp cumin, 1/2 tsp salt, and a whole chipotle in the bowl of your handy dandy food processor. You can do this with the eensy weensy food processor but it's a lot faster and generally better if you haul out the big one for this. Er, I mean, if you live in a house with two food processors.

As previously mentioned in this blog, canned chipotles en adobo are available in the ethnic section and at least one can should live in your pantry at all times. If you want more fire crank it up to two chipotles. I think that would drive this dish around the corner of Cuisine and Sadomasochism, but hey, whatever floats your boat. If you don't have canned chipotles, you poor, poor person, you, toss in a few shakes of cayenne.

Whir the flavorants with the garbanzos until there's no large bits. Add 1/4 cup water and 3 tbsp lemon juice, whir until smooth. Add 6 tbsp tahini, whir until incorporated. Add 2 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil, pulse a couple of times just to get it incorporated. Remember that extra-virgin olive oil has some fragile fruit compounds suspended in the oil that will oxidize heavily if they are hit too hard with the food processor, making nasty bitter oil. So just pulse a couple of times to get the oil in there. If you're really shy of bitter oil (and I know I am), just swirl in the olive oil with a fork after the hummus arrives in its serving container.

Thow a few sprigs worth of chopped cilantro on top, if you have some handy.

Serve with crunchies.

Memorial Tapas

2009-05-25T21:26:00.005-04:00

A friend asked me to bring some little nibblies to a memorial day celebration, and I suppose I got carried away. My wife is out of town for two weeks and I am having serious kitchen withdrawal, so when the chance came to make something I suppose I lost control of myself.

Eggplant rolls stuffed with a chicken and goat cheese mixture, chorizo in phyllo, tsatsiki and punjabi papadams, and french onion toasts all conspired with other appetizers to completely fill up the party attendees before anything could be barbecued. Next time, when I make tapas, I will concentrate on a single tapa.

The only truly original recipe here is the french onion toast, which is basically french onion soup that you eat with your hands. A friend also requested the recipe for the eggplant rolls. The tsatsiki, the papadams, and the phyllo-wrapped chorizo, well. The tsatsiki you've seen before here:
http://philoculture.blogspot.com/2009/02/provisioning-lone-male-opa.html
but instead of using 16 oz of sour cream I used a half cup of Greek yogurt, which surprisingly is available at Publix. Papadams are "Creepy Rabbit Brand" papadams, punjabi flavored, available at your local Indian (dot not feather) grocery.

Supposedly you deep fry them, but a couple of seconds under the broiler do a fine job delivering crisp, delicious papadam. Since they're made from chick pea flour, they're also great for folks watching their insulin sensitivity. When you're doing the broiler trick keep an eye on them. They go from brown to black incredibly fast, and when the Punjabi flavored ones burn they fill your house with pepper fumes.

Sausage in phyllo, well, maybe I'll cover that with a more genteel recipe. This one was pretty slapdash, just cooked chorizo bits in layers of phyllo pastry. When you eat one you can actually feel your gall bladder explode. It's nice.

French Onion Toast

Make your caramelized onions as per the recipe here:
http://philoculture.blogspot.com/2009/04/oven-onions.html
but don't go on to make the soup. Take the caramlized onions, add 2 tsp Tone's beef soup base, and dissolve the beefy goop into the caramelized onions. On to the toasts. The toasts are baguette sliced thin, about .25", brushed with olive oil on both sides, placed on a cookie sheet, then baked in a 400 degree oven for fifteen minutes, until dark brown on the bottom. Top each of the toasts with a tablespoon of caramelized onion placed on the browned side. Why the brown side, you may ask? Well, because the onion mixture still has a lot of moisture, and we want to guarantee that our toasts stay crunchy and delicious even when pre-assembled hours before serving. Shred about 4 oz of Gruyère, sprinkle on onion toasts, and put under a hot broiler until the cheese is melted. I liked these things an awful lot.

Eggplant Rolls with Chicken and Chevre

Heat some olive oil in your handy dandy pressure cooker until almost smoking. Brown 2 14 oz chicken breasts in the oil, then add .25 cup balsamic vinegar and .5 cup white wine. Lid the vessel and cook on high pressure for 45 minutes. What we're doing here is basically turning the chicken into an easily shredded mass that will almost fall apart under its own weight. This texture is important when making a stuffing for something as delicate as eggplant. If the stuffing has chunkies that are too big or too jagged, they will tear right through the eggplant as you're rolling it.

While that chicken is softening, take 8 oz chevre and combine with .25 cups chopped walnuts, 2 heaping tbsp prepared chopped cooked bacon (bagged bacon bits are fine, but not the soya ones), 2 cloves crushed and minced garlic, 2 tbsp balsamic vinegar, a sprig of rosemary minced fine, a tsp of liquid smoke, and 4 green onions sliced thin on the bias. When the chicken is done, shred it, then add to this mixture. Mix until it is a firm paste. If it does not have enough body, chop up some salad croutons fine and mix them in. They will absorb excess moisture.

Grab an eggplant and slice it lengthwise as thin as you're able to get nice full slices. No partial slices, though. I managed slices between .4 and .25 inches in thickness. Brush these slices with olive oil, place on a cookie sheet, and cook in a 400 degree oven for 4 minutes, until just soft. If they overcook you will have a hell of a time rolling them, but it's still possible. Just make sure to handle any overly soft slices by the flesh at the stem end, where there are fewer seed chambers. Grip a slice by the seedy end and it's good night gracie- the slice will just disintegrate.

Place 2 tbsp of stuffing at the seed end of a cooked eggplant slice. Shape the stuffing into a log shape, then roll it up in the eggplant. Chill in refrigerator for a couple of hours, or put them in the freezer for a bit. Once they're firm from cold, slice into, er, "bite size" pieces. They're still huge, but less embarrassing than trying to eat a whole roll. Serve with napkins.

Oven Onions

2009-04-28T09:03:00.003-04:00

Caramelized onions are one of the highest forms the noble lily can take, but are generally so tedious we skip recipes that use them. America's Test Kitchen introduced me to a method that, while not trimming any time off the preparation, does spare me the constant stirring. Not unimportantly, the resulting caramelized onions are dark and fully developed, which is something I never have the patience or stamina to pull off on the stovetop. Needless to say, these are spectacular for such things as French onion soup.

6 onions, peeled, sliced into halves, then thinly sliced into half-rounds
3 tbsp butter
some salt

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Cut the butter into 1 tbsp hunks, put in bottom of largish dutch oven.

Sprinkle the onions over the butter, making sure the half-rounds separate from each other. You can do this by "crumbling" the sliced onions in your fist, as if you were crunching saltines into chowder. Midway through adding the onions, sprinkle them with some kosher salt.

Lid the vessel and put in oven for 1 hour.

Using oven mitts, remove vessel from oven, unlid and stir the onions. They should be very moist but still largely uncolored. Make sure to scrape onions bits off the side of the pot, because they will burn there.

Put vessel back in oven, but with the lid slightly ajar. Cook for another hour.

Using oven mitts, remove vessel from oven, unlid and stir. The onions should be medium brown by now, sort of khaki colored. Put vessel back in oven without any lid, cook for 30-45 minutes. When this step is completed, the onions should be dark brown.

These are caramelized onions in my book, but let's take this just a step further for one of our favorite soups, since we're pretty much there.

For french onion soup, you would stir these onions until they are dark brown or chocolate colored. If they start crusting on the bottom of the pot, add some wine- champagne, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, or Gewürztraminer work well here- and stir until the crust dissolves in the wine. Keep this up until you have something that looks like thick, dark, chunky porridge. About ten minutes.

You'll want to use at least a cup of wine in this process, or as much as 2 cups, depending on how much you like sweet/tart and what the flavor balance of your wine is. All wines will add sweetness and acidity to the final soup, but the combination will be different with the wine, and some wines will bring unique flavors (champagne adds savory in the form of yeast, for example) so taste as you go.

Now that you have your thick onion porridge, add 6 cups mixed broths of your choice. Half and half beef and chicken is traditional. I love it with beef and lamb, but it's not so often I have lamb broth available. With the onions as dark as they are, a good vegetable broth can also work here if you are serving vegetarians.

Stir the broths into the onions, add a couple of sprigs of thyme, maybe a rosemary sprig, and let simmer for 30 minutes. Stir, remove herbage twigs, and eat.

Since I can hear you hollering for the cheese from here, okay, okay, okay, we'll do the cheese thing.

Preheat your broiler and position the rack so the top of your soup bowls will be about 3 inches from the heat. Ladle the soup into oven proof bowls. I've used normal bowls and gotten away with it since the time under the broiler is so brief, but don't come cryin' to me if your bowl breaks and showers your oven in shards of glass and burning onion goo.

Grab a good heavy baguette, slice some rounds .5" thick. Place baguette rounds on soup in bowls.

A brief cheese discussion. Provolone is tasty and convenient as a topping. They sell it in slices and sometimes by this point you just want to get the dish in peoples' mouths. Shredded Gruyere is my favorite but is pricey, at least in the States. It goes really well if you use the lamb broth. At home I often use a half-and-half mixture of mozzarella and Parmesan, since I always have those cheeses on hand.

Put the shredded cheese of your choice on the slice of bread in the soup, then put the prepped bowls under the broiler. Cook until the cheese is melted, then -carefully!- plate them up and serve.

At some point you should warn your guests that the bowls are burny hot.

Be warned that this is heavy duty stuff. A tiny little bowl satisfies even a hearty appetite, so making it as a starter would probably be a mistake unless you were having, I don't know, cucumbers as the main course.

Board Dinner: After Action Report

2009-04-20T11:00:00.005-04:00

I've made basically the same mistake every time I cater the annual board dinner of my wife's non-profit. What I try to do is branch out. I cook some things that I've only made one or two times, or worse, things I've never made. Even if the recipe is followed bang on it often turns out that you just don't like the result. This year, my fifth of catering this event, I resolved to make food that I not only knew mostly by beart but also loved eating.

Appetizers were goi cuon (Vietnamese salad rolls), samosas, and chicken satay.

For the goi cuon, I was warned about the difficulty of working with rice paper, but in actual use the stuff was surprisingly easy to work with: dip a sheet in hot water, put down ingredients, roll tight. I filled the rolls with red leaf lettuce, thin slices of tofu, thai basil, mint leaves, and shrimps sliced in half lengthwise. Goi cuon are one of those rare foods that are both nutritionally perfect and completely delicious. Dip in some chili and some nuoc mam and you've got one of the finer tasting foods on the planet.

Samosas, well, when you're cooking for 24 people you choose your battles. I got some frozen samosas from India Bazaar, the Indian market (dot not feather) in Bradenton. One box of spinach and paneer and another box of potato and pea. This was only the first of many dishes to get deep fried- by the end of the cooking process I had completely fouled 1.5 gallons of peanut oil.

Chicken satay was actually the first thing made, mostly because a) it was marinated, and b) I wanted to get any grilling over with early. The night before, 3 lbs of chicken breast were sliced into thin strips lengthwise, then set into a giant ziplock with .5 cup soy sauce, .5 cup sesame oil, .5 cup rice wine vinegar, 4 tbsp sugar, 4 tbsp minced garlic, 4 tbsp red pepper flakes, and 4 tbsp chopped cilantro. Next morning the marinated strips were then skewered and grilled over a hot hot hot fire for 2 minutes per side. The peanut sauce was a bit of natural peanut butter with sesame, brown sugar, rice vinegar, and some nuoc mam.

Some of the entrees on the menu have appeared in these pages before. The Pad Thai was covered in Pad, Thai, and Tempting (http://philoculture.blogspot.com/2009/01/pad-thai-and-tempting.html), and the green curry was was more or less the Curry from Story (http://philoculture.blogspot.com/2009/02/curry-of-story.html). Both dishes got a bit of a makeover for the big event, mostly in the form of ingredients I don't usually splurge on when cooking informally. The pad thai sauce got a hit of paprika for more redness and a couple of handfuls of pulverized dried shrimp (AKA tam kho thuong) from the oriental market, as well as the addition of 2 tbsp of rice wine vinegar. The green curry got a handful each of kaffir lime leaves, chopped lemongrass, thai basil, and cilantro. Both additions added an incredibly amount of flavor to the respective dishes. I can finally hold up my pad thai and compare it with the better thai restaurants, which is something I've been trying to do for the better part of a decade.

Both pad thai and the green curry got tofu, but I deep fried the tofu before adding to each dish, adding to the general squalor of the oil pot.

The third main dish was kari kari, a Filipino dish written for chuck but which I modified to use beef short ribs. I love both cuts, but for a formal event I felt short ribs were a bit more exotic and prettier in presentation in two-rib portions. I also learned from my experience cooking this for my friends, and omitted some of the more obnoxious ingredients. Slice 4 lbs of beef short ribs into 2 rib portions. Short ribs were browned in batches in a large Dutch oven and reserved. 4 chopped onions and 4 tbsp minced garlic were sweated in the fat rendered from the meat. Once the onions were sweated, 2 tbsp nuoc mam, 4 tbsp tamarind extract, 4 tsp brown sugar, 2 bay leaves, 4 thyme springs, 2 tbsp tumeric and 2 tbsp paprika were added. Once this mixture is incorporated, insert the ribs, pushing each portion into the onion mixture. Lid the dutch oven and put into a 250 degree oven for five hours. At the end of cooking time, remove the ribs and put on a platter. Skim the fat from the top of the braising liquid, then add 2 tbsp peanut butter and 2 tbsp rice vinegar to the reserved braise liquid. Boil until concentrated and thick. Spoon over the rib portions and scatter some deep fried scallions over each portion. Serve.

Deep fried scallions are basically like those fried onions in a can your Aunt Bessie puts over her string bean casserole at Thanksgiving.

Dessert was pretty simple, coconut ice cream and fried bananas with honey. For coconut ice cream, whisk 2 cans full-fat coconut milk with .75 cup sugar and 1 tbsp vanilla until sugar is dissolved. Put in ice cream maker and run until you get ice cream. The fried bananas were just banana portions wrapped in rice paper and deep fried.

The great thing about this menu is that I hardly needed to consult my recipes for most of it. Even the kari kari is cooked pretty much like any meat braise you might put together. So I was relaxed, which helps a day of cooking go by a lot better. Also, I couldn't keep my hands off the lettuce wraps or the pad thai. I'm pretty sure I only served three quarters of the lettuce wraps I actually made.

Peas in Summer

2009-04-16T09:08:00.003-04:00

A variant of potage ambassadeur, this is an easy, cheap dish that tastes way better than it should. This dish is sort of unseasonal right now here in Florida, but I've included a chilled option, which I almost like better than the original. I'm a sucker for cold soups, though.

4 oz split peas
1.5 cups chicken broth
1 onion, chopped
1 carrot, chopped
2 slices bacon

OPTIONAL
.5 cup heavy cream
2 tbsp chopped mint
Croutons or toasts

In the cooking chamber of your pressure cooker or your friendly medium-sized pot, saute the bacon until crisp. Remove and reserve. Sweat the onion and carrot in the bacon grease, then add the chicken broth, scraping the bottom of the pan to loosen caramelized baconness. Add the peas. Crumble the cooked bacon back into the pot, then lid and cook on high pressure for thirty minutes. If using a pot, lid tightly and cook on low for an hour, watching the fluid level carefully (the pressure cooker does not allow any moisture to escape, so it uses less water than the stovetop version). The peas should have decompiled and formed a thick porridge. This is your hot split pea soup.

In the summertime, I highly advise pureeing the finished soup, chilling, and finishing it with a bit of heavy cream stirred in and a handful of chopped mint. Top with croutons or toasts or crusty bread product of your choice. You'll be glad you did.

Ocala Walkabout Thanksgiving 2008

2009-04-14T14:32:00.004-04:00

Many years ago, as a child, I saw a black bear overlooking a picnic site. It was one of my very first bear sightings. I wanted to hide in the car but such cowardice immediately met with paternal scorn. I left the car and observed as safely as I could from inside a bush. It didn't seem to be heading towards me. It seemed to be having some sort of internal argument. The bear went a few steps down towards picnickers, then stopped, tossed its head, returned to the woods. It repeated this for some time. You could almost hear that bear thinking, agonized between the rewards of picnics and the repercussions of tangling with rangers. Hot dogs and Star Crunch are almost as good as getting tranked and hauled across the state isn't.

I do almost exactly the same thing every time I head out to the woods. I used to ascribe my pre-hike pussyfooting to simple alcoholism. No longer. It's more complicated than that, with a more subtle expression of emotions than the simple lust for getting bombed. Subtle emotions involving running water and cushions to sleep on. After doing my hiking shopping I must have cruised past the same fleabag motel five or six times. It sure is late, I said to myself. And there's a Taco Bell. But you have dinner in your food bag, I replied, and it's not like you can't hike at dusk. For God's sake you can put up your tent in pitch black, you know the thing better than you know your own scrotum. The latter voice won with it's ol' 'but you walked to Maine' argument, the same way it wins arguments about going to the gym or getting out of bed in the morning.

I drove into the Ocala National Forest and got my car settled in at Juniper Springs for ten dollars a night, then packed and headed north on the Florida Scenic Trail, exactly opposite the direction I planned to travel the next morning. The reason for this little sidetrip was the general hunting season, in which the Thanksgiving holiday is regarded as the opening bash. Hunting is prohibited in the Juniper Prairie wilderness, but to get into the wilderness you have to leg a mile or so north on the trail from the Juniper Springs entrance. Back in the day I'd hiked farther to get to an AT shelter, so it was no big deal going a mile the wrong way to find a place to sleep. I found a nice campsite just inside the no-fire zone and was chewing and reading inside my faithful tent by dark. Hopefully this year in Ocala would go better than it did last year, a hot, hung-over slog that ended when my food bag was stolen at Hopkin's Prairie, possibly by the enigmatic Rainbow People, whom we'll hear more of later.

Waking up I went south, zapped my cell phone at Juniper, zapped my gut with some microwave food objects at same, and bore down the trail. Using the verb bore here is a bit of a laugh when you see how much mileage you're covering according to the signs in the national forest, which apparently thinks you're barely managing a leisurely stroll. On a memorable hike through this stretch in 1999, my friends Byron and Michelle were similarly perplexed by the apparently random numbers on various signposts. We were all going a little crazy, literally jogging down the trail for hours to see a sign telling us we'd come three miles, which was patent horsepucky, as that mileage would have been covered in half an hour at our pace. We ascribed this problem to the mysterious stations on the map marked "horizontal control". Agents of Horizontal Control included the indefatigueable deerflies tormenting us. Besides drawing blood, we determined that the deerfly were also agents of Horizontal Control and were responsible for manipulating the fabric of space and time. It was hilarious at the time, but then to this date I am amazed at what passes for hilarious to hikers. The adjective "delirious" is all sorts of applicable here.

Years later, I asked a ranger about the horizontal control stations. "Horizontal what?", she asked. I pointed them out on my map. "I have no idea," she said "That's peculiar". Perhaps our theory from 1999 was the correct one. The ranger did give me a phone number of local trail enthusiasts Jan Trail, who give rides to FTA (Florida Trail Association) members, which was fantastic. A lot of the trauma of last year was caused by my inability to find a shuttle back to my car and being subsequently bilked out of eighty bucks for a cab ride.

So I hotfooted it for eight hours, coming- according to the signage- nine fricking miles. Which is preposterous, but they were a good "nine" miles. I like the southern part of the Ocala National Forest a lot better than the northern part, even though it's less pristine. The trail is better maintained, for one. Then there are places where the land goes up and comes down again, a thing I hear are called "hills" by outsiders. There are clear spring-fed ponds, open pine forests, and tunnels through palmetto scrub. I was nearly run over by deer and I saw a dozen little piglets snurfling around on the edges of Geary Pond, ridiculously adorable. Large, smart mammals to have such big litters; I'm not entirely sure how pigs aren't yet running the world. On the down side, this was the free-fire zone, and I was completely dependent on my orange-blaze t-shirt to keep me from experiencing high-speed exploratory surgery at the hands of some half-drunk fatty up from Orlando proving to his Fox News Friends how Republican he is. It probably wouldn't happen far from a road. Most hunters don't walk anywhere, but most hunters don't bring home any fresh meat, either.

Did I mention that most hunters don't walk anywhere? In some places, there were so many two-stroke engines the national forest sounded like a beach popular with jet-skiers. No actual hunting taking place, but a great deal of driving around and shooting. To be the devil's advocate for a moment, I did run into a couple of actual hunters and had a pretty good time talking to them. We seemed to be wired a lot more similarly. I think the difference is between outdoor/non-outdoor people rather than being between hikers/hunters.

Returning to the straight linear narrative, yes, there were a few miles of ATV hell, but the stretch down to Farles Prairie was pleasant. Ran out of water the last two hours and however many miles, then came into the picnic area at Farles. I made a beeline to the water device, cranked out two liters of water and drank almost all of it in one chug. Then I sat down. I had shade, a water source, was moving along pretty well, and had a great book- more on that later- and an afternoon with some real nap possibilities. Deliciously exhausted. This loitering thing is really what hiking is all about.

There was a pleasant little old lady coming out of a Mad Max looking conversion van, coming over in my direction. She looked concerned. I felt great, but I suppose I must have looked pretty ragged. I had a blowdown come down on top of me about three miles previous, so I was a tad bloody from gouges in my legs and head. Clothes torn from same, and there's the normal hiker state of being stinky, dehydrated and tired. So what I thought looked like "cheefully worn out" might look like "terminal collapse" to other people. I remembered looking at my AT pictures from on the trail, and marvelling at how incredibly dirty and tired I looked, even though I remember being ridiculously happy at the time. I got up and was ready to be very polite.

"Hi there. You walkin' the trail?"
"Just from Juniper to wherever in the forest. As far as I can get"
We talked a bit more, about whether or not the water should be treated, whether the site had a spot for me, how safe the forest is. Turned out the little old lady was the Farles camp hostess. The inevitable warning about the Rainbow People came up, and I had to ask:
"I've been hearing about these Rainbow People for the better part of a decade . . what's the deal with them? Are they real?"
She looks a bit horrified. "You don't want to go looking for them," she says.
"No, no, I don't. I was just wondering if they're some sort of urban myth."
"No, they're very bad people. Last year . ." and then enter the murders, rapes, and other sundry crimes of the Rainbow People. Oh boy, here we go again. I've gotten the same stories from every single local since 1995.
I've always taken tales of the Rainbow People with a grain of salt. On the one hand, they're basically freegan hippies, a type I don't generally identify with or like . . much. On the other hand, having known and loved a lot of freegan hippies, I know how cosmically unlikely it is that a roving band of them would go on a rape and murder spree. They just don't have the motivation. Before last year, I've always felt the following scenarios to be far more likely than the Rainbow Rape Holocaust so dramatically spoken of by the Ocala locals:
1) crazy repressed little local girls go out to the forest people to get crazy, high, and drunk, find themselves in flagro delecto with person(s) they would rather not be with, and run into town with lurid tales of molestation at the hands of hairy, unwashed 60s leftovers. Just the thing to get the AM talk radio folks riled, who, in case you couldn't guess, are all armed.
2) crazy repressed little local boys bring girl out to the forest, get her trashed, violate her while she's blacked out, and return to town with vile tales of violent, horny hippies and Democrats. The story matches the consensus reality much better than confronting the possibility that Bubba McSumbitch, high school football hero, is a scheming rapacious f*#$head. Result, see 1), above.
3) crazy little local boys go out into the forest and kill bunches of hikers, return to town with tales of gun-addled hippies mowing down outdoorsmen. This was actually the defense used by some loser kid from Ocala who got nabbed for plugging hikers with an AK-47. "They were comin' straight for me!"

So as she's finishing up with the Rainbow stories I'm beginning to wonder if maybe some genuine criminals are using Rainbow events as cover for other activities. After all, I did have my food bag stolen in the supposedly Rainbow-infested Hopkins Prairie campsite last year, the epitome of uncoolness for a traveller on foot in the wilderness. For God's sake, I can walk two thousand miles up the eastern seaboard and never have a single item missing, yet I can't go ten miles in Ocala without having my food stolen? It made me question, deeply, the state that bore and raised me.
So the jury is out in my book on the Rainbow People and the locals. I do know that *someone* stole my damn food in the middle of a multi-day hiking trip, but I also know the locals, though nice, creep me the hell out, and I've yet to meet a single one of these elusive Rainbow people.
"We've pretty much gotten them out of the southern part of the forest now," said the sweet old lady, "Now we've got ATVers, lots of family people, people that believe in family." Her eyes harden as she takes in my hairy face and stinky body. I nod and try to look very conservative, very stern. She seems reassured. "Good people. We'll go after 'em in the north next year".
I noted to myself, also, that it's impossible to get a place at a campsite in the southern "family" part of the forest. The good family people book everything, even when they're not actually there, and they arrest everyone else, as the sweet old lady was happy to tell me.

I realized that staying too close to Farles campsite would be risky, besides being a violation of the law far too close to where the law drives around. Now, I could always say to a ranger, "hey, you said you had campsites on the phone, and then there were none (because you gave all the reservations to your peckerwood relatives), and I'm on foot, and I've got to sleep somewhere". I'd prefer not to do this, obviously, but I kept rehearsing the sentence in my mind, knowing that it would not come out nearly so well when woken in my tent by big flashlights at 3 AM. I passed the blue blaze to Buck Lake, which I remember as being beautiful in 1999 but was warned against approaching this time. The sweet old lady at Farles had told me a private family event had reserved the entire campground, and that they weren't too keen on hikers. I took the bypass trail around the lake and pushed on. There were two or three ponds between me and the highway, and it turned out that Dora Pond had a great campsite. Sign saying lake named in memory of a Dora. Thank you Dora. It was actually one of the prettiest ponds in the forest. Tent up, stove going, shoes off. Still had 4 liters of water from Farles. Zatarain's Jambalaya and then to bed with my book and to sleep. One thing I got from long distance hiking is the ability to fall asleep almost immediately in a tent. It used to be a lot harder. Now . . home. I'm home. The thought fills my eyes with stinging, silent tears. And then I'm asleep.

Of course, in a real home you are not usually woken up by a giant deer crashing through strings holding the walls up. "SCRAM," I say. The deer snorts and hangs around. Maybe he associates backpackers with safety. This is a terrible behavior to encourage among Ocala deer, because eventually it will get hikers even more shot at than they are already. Eventually he tires of my screaming and yelling. "Huff!", he says, then jumps over the brush towards the next pond over. I start falling asleep again and dream of big dogs. Except I'm not dreaming; there is a big old hound nosing at my bug screen, like he wants in. Hey human, he's saying, I'm done chasing these damn deer. It's cold. Let me in. No, I say. "Go home!" More negotiation. Eventually he wanders off. I hope that poor hound found his way home. I finished Cormac McCarthy's The Road so there nothing left to do but doze til morning.

Speaking of which, what the hell? I go through this tome of misery and I don't ever find out what happened to the goddamn planet? Also, all life is wiped out? How did this miss the humans? It also apparently missed the bacteria, since cans swell when they go bad, and you can still get botulism. A large exchange of nukes would do some of what is described in the book, but would also render a lot of surface water deadly poison, which is not the case in The Road: the characters regularly drink the water and walk unprotected in burned zones without ill effect. Another possibility is some unknown future weapon that shuts down photosynthesis, but in that case the gas exchange in the atmosphere would rapidly change to one that could not support humans. Yep, lots of things could have happened, and guess what? Keep wondering, sucker, because you never get to find out. Also, why in the heck did the characters ever leave the bunker? I turned their decision every which way I could and couldn't come up with any reason except that the novel was called "The Road", not "Huddled in a Survivalist's Cave". The ending is also hilariously pat. You can almost hear his editor telling him to please give a book a not-entirely-depressing ending for once in his life, because this happy ending reads like it was written on pain of torture. So much for the bad. McCarthy does have the most beautiful, poetic prose voice I've ever had the pleasure of reading- I mean *ever* reading- and the language is mixed with a leisurely grim wisdom that couldstand on its own.

The next morning I crossed 19 after dodging past a couple of pretty lakes with houses, then into the pine scrub, then out into the open pine woods I remembered so fondly from ten years ago. Those open woods are very unique, hilly, with almost prairie-like line of sight through the sparse sand pines. I rolled into the Alexander Creek drainage and thicker foliage, then into the visitor center of Alexander Springs and then a call to Jan Trail. I didn't feel like walking in the coming storm, so it was time to go home.

Jan and her friend were the opposite of the taxi ride from last year. We talked AT, Florida Trail, various hiking get-togethers. Sometimes I forget that other people like doing this stuff, so it's always wonderful when I connect with other crazy people that hate cars and houses. I got lots of brochures and am now a happy card carrying member of several hiking organizations, which I suppose I should have been years ago. It made me think of Thanksgiving 2009, and where in Ocala I'd find myself then . .

Pasta Greco

2009-04-07T12:37:00.003-04:00

Conversations about barbecue side dishes- indeed, all "classic" American side dishes- can be troublesome and often violent. I've heard vicious exchanges over mayonnaise versus Miracle Whip (sp?), yellow versus brown mustard in potato salad, and just about anything in tuna salad other than the tuna itself. Potato salad was a perch I dare not tread. So with my pasta salad I abandoned classic for flavors I knew and loved well. Greek pasta salad it is!

The trouble was, I knew what happened from bitter experience when I pre-prepped greek salad. The salt in the feta/olives/anchovies drew out the moisture from the veggies and turned my salad into a cold soup course. I resolved that this would not happen this time. Taking a queue from traditional sauerkraut preparation, I pre-salted the veggies and set them in a colander to draw out excess moisture. As a by-product, this process also:
1) produced a delicious flavorful liquid that I (currently) have no use for
2) enhanced the color of the vegetables
3) lengthened the salad's shelf life. This stuff was quite edible after a week in the fridge.

1 cucumber, seeded and sliced
4 Roma tomatoes, seeded and sliced
1 yellow bell pepper, sliced
1 carrot, sliced
4 tbsp kosher salt
8 oz sheep milk feta, cubed
1 bunch green onions, chopped on the bias
4 whopping tablespoons pepperoncini rings or banana pepper rings. I can't get enough of these things, so add to taste.
A couple of handfuls pitted Kalamata olives
2 tsp black pepper
2 tsp dried oregano
2 tsp minced fresh garlic
Splash red wine vinegar
Extra virgin olive oil
3 cups rotini or penne or some such handy pasta

To slice the first four ingredients, I seriously endorse using the slicer attachment on your food processor. That thing is darn handy.

Toss the first five ingredients together, then put in a colander set over a bowl. Wrap and put in fridge for a few hours. Fluids from the veggies will drip down into the bowl, so try and lay this contraption flat. Every hour or so turn the veggies around to re-distribute the salt and drain the bowl if needed. The orange fluid that collects in the bowl is awfully salty but really tasty; I have yet to figure out a use for it. Perhaps make it into a condiment? This must be akin to how soy sauce was invented. Perhaps I've inadvertently invented Philoculture's Salad Sauce.

As serving time draws near, set a gallon of water to boil. Put pasta in and cook as desired. Drain and refresh with cold water to stop the cooking process.

Combine the remaining ingredients in the serving bowl

Get your salted veggies from the fridge and scoop them into the serving bowl with your hands, squeezing each handful as you go to get any free liquid out. Add the pasta, then toss to combine. Chill until serving.

Tartiflette

2009-04-05T12:30:00.003-04:00

I had read about this potato-cheese-bacon type dish and decided to try it and and see if it was as good as it sounded. Unfortunately, I could not find the recipe from America's Test Kitchen that I wanted to try. I was forced to rely on my culinary savvy and managed to come up with a passable tartiflette. When I do this dish again I will try a pastry crust on the bottom, as I think that might sop of some of the grease- I thought the gratin was a little on the heavy side.

12 oz camembert
2 onions, sliced
2 Idaho potatoes, sliced into rounds 1/8" thick.
10 oz bacon
8 oz sour cream
Salt and pepper

Fry the bacon until crisp. Chop it up coarse

Fry potato slices in the bacon fat over medium-high heat until light brown on both sides, reserve.

Fry the onion slices over medium heat until blondeish-brown, seasoning with salt and pepper as you go. Some darker spots are OK, black is not. Combine with sour cream, reserve.

Slice the camembert wheel in half the long way, so that you have two camembert rounds with a rind on top and cheese on the bottom. Slice the rounds so that they will evenly cover the top of the casserole.

Start building your casserole: lay down a layer of potato, a layer of sour cream/onion mixture, a layer of bacon, repeat. I was able to get two and a half layers out of it, but mileage may vary.

Finish the casserole by covering the top with the camembert slices, rind side up. This will allow the camembert to get obscenely gooey and wander south into the potato/onion/bacon stuff below. The rind will also toast nicely.

Put in a 350 degree oven until bubbly. Turn on the broiler, and put casserole under hot broiler until cheese is lightly browned.

As with most casseroles, tartiflette is better if you let it rest outside the oven for a half hour or so. You certainly don't need to, though.

Ribs of the Proletariat

2009-04-03T11:42:00.013-04:00

You know what I'd like? I'd like to see some support for people that are debt-free and work hard at staying employed at their fartsucking day jobs. Yes, we exist, and Merciful Buddha on a Harley do we get pissed when we see that laws are apparently only written for the irresponsible or massively fraudulent. Ooh, if I lose my job the government will pay my mortgage for six months! What if I do not have a schlocky fake mortgage and have instead been saving real money, You Authoritarian Clods? You better start worrying about keeping those people fed while you pay for their suburban scatshacks because eventually their credit cards won't work and you can't skylift Big Macs without having the USMC pilots eat them all. Trust me, I know. You could skylift pigs, I suppose, and even Special Forces Marines would pause before devouring a feisty and very much alive pack of swine, unless they were Muslim Marines, which is probably illegal or at least severely hazed at the Marines Murder Mansion or wherever it is they learn how to kill people.

To this end, I raise up the Ribs of the Proletariat. Not to aid in the hazing or the murdering. That would be just wrong. This is to help feed America with the pork to be dropped from military helicopters. It's like a Berlin Airlift for suburbia, but with less Nazis and more rustic antics!

This recipe could feed America probably all at once, because when I make ribs there's only one quantity to make and that's Too Much. It's the perfect balm for a nation huddled around 60" LCD screens watching American Idol on stolen A/C power. Enough with the proselytizing, I know why you came here, all five of you:

Mix up 1 cup packed dark brown sugar, 6 tbsp kosher salt, 2 tbsp chili powder, 2 tbsp onion powder, 2 tbsp paprika, 1 tsp each of cayenne, and maybe 1 tsp of some thyme, sage, or other resiny spice- just make sure it's nicely powdered. No whole leaves. Whole leaves will char and we'll have enough of a problem with that during cooking.

Go to Sam's club and get one of those packages of spareribs. 3 slabs to a pack. That's a lot of ribs but I am feeding a lot of people. Smear the rub you just mixed up all over those ribs, then wrap them VERY WELL in saran wrap and put in a deep tray. The salt and the sugar will draw some of the moisture out of the meat and exchange it with flavored moisture, but that means porky liquids will be sloshing around, and that means you want some sort of wide bucket-like device to catch anything that escapes the saran wrap. Put in the fridge overnight.

On the morning of the big day, soak a bag of wood chunks in a big bucket right near your smoker. Don't use mesquite, as it is overly bitter (in my opinion) when used for long smoking projects like this.

4.5 hours before scheduled eating time, get the charcoal ready for indirect heat. I use a drum smoker, so I make the fire to one side. Rack up your ribs in a rib rack, making sure there is adequate space between the ribs. DO NOT USE ALL THE RACKS. They are too close together. Instead, space the ribs out to every other slot in the rib rack.

Put some wood chunks on the charcoal, put the ribs on the side of the smoker where the fire isn't, and close the lid. Open all the vents and let the temperature come to 225. Close the vents. Now, for the next four hours, make sure this temp stays between 200 and 225. It's harder than it sounds. Add wood chunks at appropriate times, approximately every 30 minutes.

4 hours at these temperature will cook these ribs. Longer is always better. When you're satisfied, pull the rib rack into your kitchen and hack the slabs into two-rib sections. Serve with bottled BBQ sauce, because some people like the stuff.

Feeds a bunch.

I served this with a greek-style pasta salad, but hey, that sounds like another post.

Double Mega Cheesy Steak and Bean

2009-03-23T12:45:00.003-04:00

The core component of the world's most addictive fast foods is slurry. It is the stuff that you think about when you are about to drive into the Super Burger Taco Fryer Thunder drive-through. The delicate sauce on the bottom of the burger bun, a slurry of mayonnaise and meat juice. The substance in Taco Bell products- mysterious red sauce and chopped onion intermixing with melted cheese and bean stuff- again, gushy, delicious slurry. Even the sandwich chains exploit this marvelous substance: think about the mush formed in a Subway sandwich by the oil, vinegar, and vegetable/pickle juices, or, way better, Firehouse Subs, with their slurry of piquant sauces and discharge from fatty cooked meats.

Most comfort foods are thick liquids of some kind, but since fast foods are hastily assembled the fast food slurry is almost always composed of ingredients that have just met each other. Compare this with a thick tasty slow food like potage ambassadeur, where the bacon and the peas have been dating for several years before they even began the long, slow simmer of marriage. Fast food slurries are anonymous drunk sex in a club bathroom by comparison. Still, they're both tasty thickened liquids- why does the fast food version incite such wanton lust?

I hypothesize that the big draw to the fast food slurry is a roguish human attraction to opportunity. Journey back in time for a moment. A prehistoric fast food item is basically what you would have gotten if you nipped a bit of food from every person in the tribe into a big starch object. Nuki's Antelope Surprise, Nurg's Green Thing, King Cuchacho's Lemur Cheese, it all goes into the flatbread. Like modern fast food, you would cram it down your gullet, although not because you were late for work but because if he were found with the ill-gotten breakfast there's a better than even chance you would be killed and eaten. It gives the dollar menu a whole new significance.

Anyway, the fast food slurry- i.e., a thick liquid resulting from the liquids of many already prepared and/or cooked ingredients- is something easily replicated in the home. Last night I sought to come up with a Taco Bell-like slurry item and had what I thought was a reasonable success. It went something like this . .

Meat
12 oz steak
Badia Brand Fajita Seasoning. This is one of the best prepackaged spice mixes in existence.

Beans
6 oz dry black beans
1 onion, chopped
1 tblsp chopped garlic
4 tblsp fresh salsa, or some tomato product
1 tblsp chicken soup base
1 tsp rosemary
1 tsp paprika
2 bay leaves
2 tblsp Olive oil
2.25 cups water

ALTERNATE BEANS
1 can black beans

ASSEMBLY
6 oz cheddar cheese, shredded
2 large flour torillas
Canola oil

Liberally dust your steak with fajita seasoning. I used a 3/4" thick strip steak for this, so take note- if you use a different cut it will affect the cooking time.

In the pot of your pressure cooker, fry the onions and garlic in olive oil until soft.Add everything else, set on high pressure for 30 minutes, natural pressure release. Drain extra liquid. Fish out the bay leaves. Yes, the beans are not super soft. They will provide a little texture contrast to our beef and cheese slurry. ALTERNATIVELY, open a can of black beans.

When the coals are ready, cook the steak 3-4 minutes per side on high heat, until rare or medium rare. Try to go rare, because there is more heat coming up for this hunk o flesh.

Put some canola oil in a pan and put on a burner on medium heat.

Slice your meat into strips 1/4 inch thick. Go for bite size pieces, so pulling out a strip doesn't decompile the burrito.

Heat your tortilla 30 seconds in the microware to soften. Lay down the tortilla. Put down half the shredded cheese, then half the sliced steak, then cover with beans. Not too much, you can always have leftover beans. Fold up the ends of the tortilla over the filling, then roll tight, one side over, then the other side over. Put it in the hot pan seam side down (the last side you folded), then fry until brown and crisp on the bottom. Flip carefully and do the same with the other side. Put a plate over it, hand on the plate, flip pan and plate, and you've got a nicely toasted and plated burrito, seam side down. I do this flip trick with frittatas a lot.

Repeat the last paragraph with the other tortilla.

What happens inside this containment unit is the beans drop some moisture to the not-entirely-cooked meats, which then drop grease and liquid into the cheese, which melts with these two liquids, providing us with our faux-fast-food slurry food product.

Consume very quickly before anyone sees you.

Kim Il Delicious

2009-03-18T08:29:00.007-04:00

I've always been curious about Korean food, but the Florida backwoods offer a perhaps unsurprisingly limited number of Korean dining establishments. With access to some Asian food markets, though, it's not a problem, and we decided to entertain with a sort-of-Korean menu:

Dahk galbi: Korean marinated grilled chicken
Bibim Naengmyun: A cold buckwheat noodle thing
Pajeon: Scallion pancakes, also a Chinese staple, purchased from the market because I only have two hands
Ojinguh Moochim: Seasoned dried squid
Spring rolls: not really Korean, but I like them, see note for pajeon above. These had mushrooms and cabbage and were really tasty.
Kimchi
Brown rice

What did I really like from this spread? Well, I like kimchi, the naengmyun was pretty tasty, and the ojinguh moochim was really, really tasty, especially with the rice. It was all pretty good, actually, new and strange. If I did it again I'd use less pickle in the naengmyun and I'd make more ojinguh moochim. Oh, and I'd get actual Korean naengmyun instead of soba noodles.

Korean food seems to be made up of a lot of tiny little dishes. It's the way Koreans eat things, apparently, an array called banchan, usually served with cooked white rice. It uses lots and lots of tiny little bowls. I bought a stack of paper bowls and plates so I didn't use every dish in the house in the process of serving. Unless you want your spouse to murder you in your sleep, I recommend you do the same.

I had some chicken quarters sitting in the freezer in individual freezer bags. Two days prior to the meal, I took each bag and added 2 tblsp ginger, 2 tblsp garlic, a handful chopped scallions, .5 cup soy sauce, .25 cup rice vinegar, 1 tblsp sesame oil, 1 tblsp red pepper flakes. The resulting bags of chicken and liquid had most of the air squeezed out of them, then were sealed and put in a bowl in the bottom of the fridge to await the big day.

One day prior, I seeded and sliced 1 cucumber and peeled and sliced 1 fist-sized daikon radish. Mix up 1.5 cups vinegar with .5 cups water, then add 3 tblsp salt and 3 tblsp sugar. Put veggies in vinegar mixture and put in fridge. These impromptu pickles will appear later in our bibim naengmyun

The rice recipe for korean brown rice I got from the internet had me cook the rice almost into risotto. I thought it looked gooey and sticky, but my wife loved it. 1 cup of rice went into the pressure cooker with 3.25 cups water, a tiny bit of sesame oil, a glurp of peanut oil, and a teaspoon of salt. High pressure ten minutes, natural pressure release, then fry for ten minutes.

Started the fire for the chicken, then came back in and did the bibim naengmyun.

Boil a . . er, damn non-english packaging . . about 10 oz of soba noodles for 2-3 minutes. Drain. Yes, they're still chewy, that's OK. Thoroughly cool noodles in running water, then add yangnyum (sauce): 2 tbsp gochujang (Korean chili paste), 2 tbsp sugar, 2 tsp sesame oil, 1 tsp minced garlic, 1/2 tsp soy sauce. Toss toss toss toss. Top with the pickled cucumbers and daikon you set to marinating last night, then halve four handy hard boiled eggs (what, you don't keep hard-boiled eggs handy?), put those on top artistically. Scatter some white and black sesame seeds over the top of this, and that's your bibim naengmyun, or the gringo version of it anyway. Put it out on the table. It's very pretty and quite good. The buckwheat noodle is surprisingly filling.

Make up some Korean dipping/flavoring stuff. Something besides the chili. Stir up 5 parts soy sauce,1 part sesame oil, 2 parts rice vinegar, 1 part sesame seeds, 2 parts honey, 1 part chopped scallion. Mix mix mix, put it out on the table.

Take your approximately 4-6 oz bag of "Jane-Jane Dried Prepared Squid" and put in a bowl of water. It looks sort of like shredded jerky and has the same texture. The taste is, well, imagine sweetened chewy fish. It's good. Let it rehydrate a little bit, then take it out of the water, squeeze it once or twice, then give it a quick toast in a tablespoon of oil in a hot pan. Mince. Put in a bowl, add 1 tblsp mayo, 1 tblsp gochujang, 1 tsp garlic. Top with sesame, chill until serving, then out on the table.

The coals are probably ready for the chicken. Go put the chicken on for 12 minutes, flip, 12 more minutes, then bring it back in, by which time you'll probably have everything else ready.

Fry up your scallion pancakes, one at a time, and deep fry your spring rolls. If the rolls are frozen when they're fried, chances are they're still cold inside- wrap with foil and put in a 250 degree oven until serving time. Cut the pancakes into wedges. These scallion things were pretty bland, but I didn't make them, so I could only be so apologetic. Put them out in their little disposable serving vessels. I hope you've got your dining table extended because otherwise you're going to be running out of room.

Put out the kimchi, maybe a little bowl of gochujang for people that are true masochists, and make sure nothing's left in the fridge. I'm pretty sure there's some forgotten banchan in there that I forgot about, but one of the great things about Korean is that it's not stealthy food. It'll make itself known in short order, like a really good cheese. Another great thing about Korean food is that it's really fun. Jal meokkesseumnida!

Bean of Darkness

2009-03-10T14:27:00.001-04:00

Black beans are not just full of nutrition, they are great chow for the New Depression. Also, they're delicious. This recipe is a sort of train wreck of Cuban black bean soup and Brazilian Feijoada- I took my favorite parts from both.

1 lb black turtle beans
12 oz bacon
12 oz chorizo or equivalent sausage product
12 oz of assorted meat scraps: chicken parts, ham bits, abandoned toddlers, etc.
2 onions, chopped
2 green bell peppers, chopped
4 Roma tomatoes, chopped
6 cloves garlic, or more
3 bay leaves
1 tbsp red wine vinegar
6 cups chicken stock, what the hell, use bouillon, there's a depression on.

1) In the cooking chamber of your pressure cooker or in your dutch oven, fry the bacon until you have a good bit of cooking fat. Remove the bacon and reserve.
2) Working in batches if necessary, brown all the other meats in the fat, working in order from most flavorful to least flavorful. Remove as you go, reserve. Note that you really don't need anything other than the bacon, and you could probably substitute even the bacon with a quarter cup of olive oil without screwing up the recipe. It's hard for me to say this, but the beans will cook up fine without pork fat.
3) Fry the onions and green peppers in the meat fat until softened, then add the garlic, fry until aromatic. Add the tomatoes and fry until the liquid has evaporated and you are left with basically aromatic-flavored animal fat.
4) Add the black beans, chicken stock or bouillon, vinegar, bay leaves, and reserved bacon. Stir. Lightly place remainder of meats on top. Lid the pressure cooker and put on high pressure for an hour. If using a dutch oven, lid the vessel and put in a 350 degree oven for anywhere from 3 to 6 hours.
5) Unlid, remove the meats. Stir the beans and check seasoning. Freshen up the liquid with some more vinegar if necessary. Serve with the meats, a good hot sauce, some raw chopped onions, and a little sour cream. It's pretty fantastic on yellow rice, as well.

Oven Fry Salvation

2009-03-09T09:36:00.001-04:00

The Sunday afternoon tour de frigo yielded some randomness: a potato, eight ounces of sliced crimini mushrooms (a.k.a. "baby bellas"), a handful of parsley, some bacon, and some chicken leg quarters I'd set in a souvlaki marinade (lemon juice, olive oil, onion powder, garlic, oregano, black pepper, chicken bouillon) a couple of days ago. The bacon was rendered, the fungi fried in the resulting fat and rejoined with the cooked bacon and some chopper parsley. The chicken went on the grill, fifteen minutes per side. The potato was the testbed for a new recipe of oven fry.

I had never actually made a successful oven fry. I used to get either cinders or limp, greasy wedges that went in the trash. Imagine my glee at getting these things sort of right. The key to this recipe seems to be the pre-cooking of the potatoes and the fine coat of corn starch they get before heading into a hot oven. Hats off to America's Test Kitchen for the recipe.

16 oz russet potatoes, cut into wedges. The wedges I used were 1/16 slices- basically, half a potato, half the halves, half the quarters, then half the eighths.
5 tblsp canola or vegetable oil
4 cloves garlic, minced
2 tblsp corn starch
1 tsp black pepper
1.5 tsp salt
1 tsp garlic powder

1) Preheat oven to 475. In big bowl, microwave the garlic in the oil for a minute or two.
2) Spoon 3-4 tablespoons of the garlic oil into a rimmed baking sheet. Roll the oil around the baking sheet until it is coated with the garlic oil.
3) Add potatoes to garlic and oil in the bowl, toss to coat potatoes. Cover in saran wrap, microwave 2-3 minutes, toss potatoes again, microwave 2-3 more minutes. The edges of the wedges should be just opaque.
4) America's Test Kitchen expects you to magically separate the garlic from the potatoes, as the garlic will burn in the oven. I'm not sure how I could have done that exactly. I just spooned the potatoes out of the garlic and oil then wiped the remaining garlic and oil out of the bowl with paper towels. I got most of it, I suppose.
5) Mix corn starch, pepper, salt, and garlic powder. Gently toss hot potatoes with this mixture until the potatoes are well coated.
6) Lay the potatoes down on the baking sheet in a single layer, put in oven. Cook for 12 minutes, then flip the potatoes, then cook for 12 more. Watch them after ten minutes. America's Test Kitchen said to cook them for fifteen minutes per side, but if I did that they'd have burnt. I did 12 minutes on one side and 11 minutes on the other. And yes, any garlic remaining on the potatoes did turn black. I think next time I'll just use the garlic powder. Still, deep brown, intensely crispy oven spuds.

Slumdog Salmon

2009-02-23T10:12:00.001-05:00

Curried Salmon with Dhal

I knew I wanted to get rid of that last piece of salmon in the freezer, but I also knew I didn't have all the ingredients for the poached salmon recipe as it was written. Hmm.

For some reason I also had dhal on the brain. Now "dhal" means "split" in Sanskrit, and refers to any dried pulse that has been split in preparation or as consequence of drying. So dhal can be anything from chick pears to limas. In our household dhal generally means a 2-1 mix of masroor dhal (red lentils) to chana dhal (yellow split peas), with various seasonings. You're also supposed to add two raw green chilis, but not everyone can have the intestinal fortitude of those on the subcontinent and besides I thought too much heat would clobber the salmon. Two green chilis is a lot for two cups of anything.

So what ties together the Frenchy fish poaching fetish and the subcontinent savor? The answer is butter. Both cuisines literally drink the stuff. In this case, there is butter in the finishing sauce for the poaching liquid and butter added to the dhal just before serving. With some adjustments to the poaching recipe, the poached fish dish can be safely wed to the dhal.

In a convenients-sized pot, put 1/2 cup masroor dhal, 1/4 cup chana dhal, 1 tsp garlic, 1 tsp ginger, 1.5 tsp tumeric, and 2 tsp chicken soup base with 2 cups water. Bring to a boil, then park it on low heat and lid with convenient lid-like device. Everyone makes fun of me for using plates as lids, but truthfully they form a tighter seal than most lids that come with the cookware, and they double as serving vessels later, which goes along with my "less dishes=more fun" school of cookery.

Eyeball your salmon and figure out how many slices of onion you'll need to hold them off the surface of your frypan. What you're trying to do is create an elevated bed for the salmon to lay on so it's not sitting in poaching liquid. Arrange the oniony salmon bed in the frypan, then add enough white wine (I used cheap pinot, which was so acid I did not need to add lemon) to come halfway up the sides of the sliced onions. To the liquid add 1/2 tsp garam masala (plain jane supermarket curry powder is fine here), 2 chopped scallions, 2 chopped baby carrots (they were handy), and 1 chopped stalk of celery. Make sure the poaching liquid does not come near the tops of the onion. Your onion bed should be safely above the surface of the liquid.

Bring the poaching liquid to boil on high heat, then bring to low, place salmon skin-side down on the onions, ensuring the fish is above the liquid, and tightly cover the poaching vessel. Leave it for 10 minutes, enough time for me to make a confession.

I confess that I botched the poaching on the first pass. I was using processed Wal Mart salmon filets, which have no skin or much of anything else really. Sad skinny little suckers. Eleven minutes was far too long for such a fish, and the salmon was overdone. Thick, nice skin-on filets should take approximately 10 minutes, but for Wally World salmon or otherwise scrawny specimens next time I'll tune that down to about five minutes or less. In any case cook until the sides of the filet are opaque but the center is still translucent, and an instant-read thermometer reads 125 degrees when inserted in the thickest part of the fish. Using a spatula, remove the fish and onions to a plate and tent with foil.

Crank the heat up to medium-high and reduce the cooking liquid until it is almost dry, sort of a wet paste. Reduce the heat to medium or so and add 1 tblsp butter, swirling the butter until incorporated with the paste. Test the sauce and adjust flavorings, if necessary. If the wine you used isn't ridiculously tart like my bargain pinot was, add a splash of lemon juice for acidity. Something I might add to the sauce when I make this dish again is a little dollop of plain yogurt, I just think it'd be tasty with the salmon.

Check your dhal for doneness, then swirl in a tablespoon or two of butter and a few teaspoons of chopped cilantro or parsley. Discard onions, plate salmon topped with sauce and surround with dhal.

Dot the plate here and there with mint chutney, if you have any handy, or whatever Indian condiment you might have on hand. Speaking for me personally, I'm sort of addicted to the mysterious Swad "Punjabi mixed pickle". What is in there? It's a mystery. I honestly can't identify any of the objects in there, which as far as I'm concerned adds to the flavor. You never taste anything so hard as when you don't know what it is.

Why Did the Chicken Salad Cross the Border?

2009-02-20T09:35:00.000-05:00

Some days it's hard to get food requests out of people. After a bit of pondering and poking at the supplies, we finally had something. "How about some sort of southwest chicken salad?" Oh yeah, I could do that. I love chicken salad and I love mexican- why can't the two get together and have kids? It'd be like a burrito at a Jewish Delicatessen. "Oy vai- ai-ai-ai-ai!"

Dissassemble one baked chicken into a big non-reactive bowl. Store-bought rotisserie chicken works for this too.

Chop up an onion, a big handful of cilantro, 2 seeded chipotles. Toss in the bowl.

Grab a can of black beans, drain, put beans in bowl with 1/3 cup olive oil and 1/3 cup lime juice. I like sour things, so you might want less lime.

Core and cube 2 avocados, put in bowl, toss so that the acid in the lime covers the avocado or else they'll turn all brown and nasty.

Chop up a little bag of Fritos and toss in the bowl.

Salt to taste. Serve with lettuce of your choice. It would also be good in wraps or in some savory corn cake type object, like sopes.

Curry from Story

2009-02-19T08:39:00.001-05:00

A long time ago, my wife-then-girlfriend Monica asked if I knew of a green curry that had lima beans in it. She had eaten such a curry during a trip to Washington DC and loved it immensely. I was stumped. I knew that the Thais make a green curry. The color in a green curry- the Thai one, anyway- comes from cilantro, sometimes basil, and raw green chiles, making it arguably the hottest of the thai curries, at least the coconut-based ones. The Thais, though, generally do not have legume based-curries. The Indian curries do, but search as I may I could not find a green Indian curry. What if I made a Thai green curry based on lima beans? I shuttled various ingredients around and made a green curry with cashews and basil, centered around the lima beans and around raw red bell peppers added at the last moment. "How is it?" I asked. "It's good," Monica reported. "It's nothing like what I had in D.C., but it's good". Since the lima bean curry has become an institution in our household.

Splash of oil
8 garlic cloves
Thumb-sized knob of ginger
Juice of 1 lime
1/4 cup white wine
1 tblsp fish sauce
1 can coconut milk
.25-.5 can green curry
4 oz cashew halves
12 oz baby green lima beans
1 red bell pepper, chopped
Bunch basil leaves, chopped
Bunch cilantro leaves, chopped
Jasmine rice

A word about canned curry paste. I have no idea what the name of the brand is that I usually buy, but it has a tiny picture of a slightly forbidding looking oriental matron on the label. If you buy this brand and make it according to the directions on the can you will die. Well, maybe not die, but you will have a hard time eating the stuff unless you're from the same hell-planet that Madame Heat comes from. Half a can is the maximum for me, and most will probably be comfortable with .25 of a can for this recipe.

Get your jasmine rice going according to the package directions.

Heat the splash of oil in a wok until almost smoking. Saute the garlic and ginger until fragrant. Add the wine, lime juice, and fish sauce. Cook until reduced to the consistency of thick porridge. Crank the heat down to medium. Add the coconut milk, then dissolve the curry paste into the hot mixture. Reduce this until it is very thick. Add limas and allow to thaw if frozen, or to heat through if not. Add bell pepper and let it soften just a bit. Before serving, kill the heat and stir in the cilantro, basil, and cashews.

Serve with the jasmine rice.

Hot Purple Sandwiches

2009-02-18T09:41:00.001-05:00

One of our regular dinner guests is lactose-intolerant and does not eat red meat or pork. A lot of cooks I've known would resent this, but then again, a lot of technical folks I know also resent being challenged and/or working.

The said guest is now also trying to cut down on the amount of meat, period. A fresh challenge!

I just couldn't make myself do another Thai curry, so, well, my mind wandered. How about eggplant and roasted bell peppers? My wife hates grilled eggplant, so that means frying. This was starting to sound like a really good sandwich, but it needs a creamy component, which I intended to supply via melted manchego and softened creamed garlic. Baguette could serve double duty: sliced on the bias and broiled with olive oil and bruscetta for appetizer; sliced lengthwise and lightly toasted for serving with the sandwich stack ingredients. For the side dish I couldn't get my mind off the roasted broccoli I made from America's Test Kitchen:
http://www.slashfood.com/2008/12/13/americas-test-kitchens-method-for-roasted-broccoli/
I made this brocc a couple of days ago with zero expectations. It turned out to be the best single method of broccoli preparation I've seen. The vegetable does not actually need any seasoning with this method- the natural browning of the veg, with the salt and lemon, provides more than enough depth of flavor.

Anyway, eggplant sandwiches:

Put two big handfuls of whole garlic cloves in a pan with some oil or butter, put on low heat. Every time it looks like it's getting too brown, put in some white wine, stir, deglaze, let simmer again. Eventually the garlic will have the consistency of boiled potatoes and have a nutty, slightly sweet flavor. I imagined smashing them into a creamy spread but they looked so pretty that I served them as they were.

Grab a red bell pepper. Run the tip of your knife around the stem, then make a longitudinal cut all the way around. Split the sides, pull out the seed core, clean the insides of any hanging seeds or white rib matter. Halve the sides so you have quarters. Put on an oiled baking sheed cut side down and roast in a 350 degree oven until very soft.

Peel one medium-sized eggplant and slice 1/2" thick. You'll only be using slices wide enough to fit the width of your baguette. Too wide is A-OK. Salt both sides of the eggplant slices with coarse salt, put in bowl. The salt is going to draw off a lot of moisture, you'll be surprised by the amount that accumulates.

Slice the baguette lengthwise, then, using the heel of your hand, flatten the baguette. Cut it into pieces long enough to serve as rolls for the eggplant slices.

Slice some manchego cheese into some pieces that will melt well on your eggplant patties.

Prepare the fry prep line: one plate of flour, one bowl of beaten egg, one plate of bread crumbs. Dry the eggplant with paper towls, then flour-egg-breadcrumb the lot. Reserve on an elevated rack or on paper towels.

In a nice heavy pan, heat some olive oil on medium until shimmering. Fry the eggplant until golden brown on both sides. When frying the second side, put down the manchego so it gets just a little melty, barely translucent.

Toast your flattened baguette slices.

Plating: put down two slices toasted bread. On one side, stack roasted bell pepper and some fresh basil leaves. On the other side, put an eggplant/manchego patty. Put roasted broccoli in the middle, top with softened garlic cloves.

Considerations:
>>Chevre might be better on this than manchego. If you use chevre, don't try melting it on top of the eggplant or it'll turn into a runny mess. Apply it to the eggplant at plating time.
>>I didn't measure anything here because franky I didn't have a recipe. Sorry about that. If you have extra fried eggplant slices, freeze them for later or - I love this- smother in caper butter and serve as another appetizer with lemon slices.

The Fishy Fishy Taste

2009-02-17T09:46:00.000-05:00

Sort Of Anchoiade

The recipe for today is not one that everyone will be happy with. It might make some people run to the bathroom, just reading about it. For me, though, it's a pretty magical thing.

I'm fond of strong flavors. I like subtlety, yes, and well-thought out combinations. Chilled pea soup with mint. Vichysoisse with toasted leeks. Bernaise. These are fine things and I love cooking and eating them. Speaking for myself, though, I prefer the nuclear options, and anchoiade is one of them.

Chop 1 can anchovies with 5 cloves garlic, put in tiny bowl. Add 1 tsp lemon juice, 1 teaspoon red chili flakes, and enough extra-virgin olive oil to form into a paste. Mix it up. Let sit.

Cut half a thin banguette into slices approximately .25-.5" thick. Brush both sides with olive oil, then put on foil-lined baking sheet and broil until toasted. Turn the bread slices and repeat with the other side. Keep an eye on them because toasty brown turns to char very fast under a hot broiler.

Put .5 tsp anchovy mixture on each baguette slice. Use more anchovy mixture per slice depending on the design tolerances of your guests' taste buds.

To provide some relief, alternate this with another topping like bruschetta, chevre, or pseudorissa.

Pseudorissa

2009-02-09T10:10:00.000-05:00

For a middle-Eastern themed dinner, with hummus, tsatsiki, smoked lamb, and baklava, I served something I called harissa which ultimately turned out to be nothing like harissa at all. Why did I call it that? The planners of the event (or someone close to them) asked for something involving roasted bell peppers, and after an internet search of "recipe red bell peppers roasted middle eastern", I got a recipe for something called red bell pepper harissa. Unfortunately for my middle eastern street cred, real harissa is made from roasted chiles and is beyond spicy. It's not something you eat by itself. I had no idea at the time how far off base I was, but though mild, my pseudorissa turned out quite good. In the words of Ian Tattersall, "Goodness, you've taken harissa and made it into something almost civilized". The pseudorissa has since become incredibly popular, and makes a regular appearance when I'm entertaining. It has the side benefit of being dirt simple.

4 red bell peppers
1 medium egggplant
1 tbls red pepper flakes
1 lemon
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
A few squirts liquid smoke
A teensy bit of paprika
Extra extra virgin olive oil for lube
1 tbls salt

I'm not going to give a big lecture on picking out product here. Just one sentence: pick out only mid-size eggplants with green stems and taut skins.

Line two baking sheets with foil and generously lube with some extra virgin olive oil.

Cut a circle around the stems of the red bell peppers, then slice in half. Knock out the seed cores and any seeds sticking to the insides. Pull out the white ribs. Place the red bell pepper halves, cut side down, on one of the lined baking sheets.

Peel and slice the eggplant into 1/2" slices. Arrange on other baking sheet. If there's too much for one baking sheet, fit them in with the red bell peppers as best as you can.

Put both sheets in a 350 degree oven until the peppers are soft and the eggplant is shrunken and somewhat caramelized. If the peppers have a lot of char on them, pull the skins off, then put the roasted flesh in the bowl of a largish food processor. The eggplant will probably stick to the foil- gently scrape the eggplant into the bowl of the food processor. Add red pepper flakes, juice of 1 lemon, salt, squirts liquid smoke, and whir until smooth.

Pour out the puree into a bowl and add 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil. Stir until incorporated. We don't brutalize extra virgin olive oil in the food processor because the whirring sharp metal turns it bitter. Add a teensy bit of paprika if it's too orange- you'll need to do that if the red bell peppers weren't ripe enough. Chill the resulting concoction overnight. Remove, taste, and correct seasoning. It probably isn't salty enough. Salty flavors are muted when chilled.

Serve with the usual middle eastern suspects: falafel, pita, hummus, etc. It's not bad as a bruschetta topping, either.

Provisioning the Lone Male: Opa!

2009-02-05T09:08:00.000-05:00

Continuing to provision the lone male, but this time greek style. I didn't feed myself pita, but went all out on the tsatsiki. Fats are not automatically metabolized into fat tissue when you eat them before sleeping. I remember some meathead telling me, "Carbs and protein in the morning, protein and fats in the evening". Now if only I could get ahold of some of them steroids!

Chicken Souvlaki

3 tablespoons (or more) lemon juice
1 teaspoon dried oregano
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon garlic power
1 teaspoon black pepper
1 teaspoon salt or chicken bouillon
Chicken breast
tsatsiki sauce, chopped feta, tomatoes, onions, pita

Put everything but the chicken in a zip-lock bag and smoosh it around to mix thoroughly. Put in chicken, get as much air out of the bag as you can, then smoosh around to make sure the marinade has good contact with the meat. Let sit for at least an hour, optimally overnight. Grill or broil. Preferably grill. Eat.

If you're being fancy, serve with tsatsiki sauce, chopped feta cheese, tomatoes, onions, and good pita.

Tsatsiki Sauce

Cucumber
16 oz sour cream
2-4 cloves garlic, mashed (I use a garlic press)
¼ cup olive oil
Salt and pepper (about a teaspoon each)

In a perfect universe we’d use Turkish or Greek style plain yogurt instead of sour cream. Greek yogurt is basically plain yogurt with a lot of the moisture pressed out of it, but since you’d have to drive to, I don’t know, Kazakhstan to get some, we’ll use sour cream instead, which works fine.

Chop the cucumber into a couple of chunks. In food processor, whir cuke chunks until pureed. Drain cucumber mush in fine wire sieve or strainer, or use kitchen towels. Try and get as much water out of it as you can. Put strained cuke with the rest of ingredients in big bowl and mix until smooth. You can eat it now, but it gets better after a few hours in the fridge. Actually, it just continues to get better and better in the fridge.

This stuff can be eaten with just about anything from steak to falafel. It’s also a surprisingly good dip for potato chips.

Cheddar at Kursk

2009-02-04T07:58:00.002-05:00

This fondue started as an attempt on my part to break up the monotony of fondue. That's Fondue Neuchatel, the traditional mixture of swiss, gruyere, and kirsch that makes up the vast majority of fondue I cook and serve to others in my never-ending battle to make everyone around me obese. Now, let's get this straight, I love the Neuchatel formula, I think it's pretty much perfect, but for this occasion- Byron's birthday- I thought I should highlight his Southern heritage and make fondue more a la Americaine. Besides, his wife Carine's French and I honestly felt a little unsure of myself cooking the traditional Swiss mixture. I decided to go with a cheddar-beer fondue. A little bit of searching and I found the right proportions for a cheddar-stout mixture. Recipe in hand, I dropped by a convenient gourmet store on my way to Byron's house- European Gourmet, actually, off Brandon Blvd.

After selecting some choice weisswurst and some really tasty little dried sausages, I moved on to the cheddar. They had a seven-year old reserve Irish cheddar, of which I grabbed a pound. The English clerk/butcher/proprietress bobbed about in a wonderful blonde blur of Englishness. I actually could smell the moment she sank her knife into the grim white block. She did wonder what the hell I was using a pound of the stuff for.
"I'm making cheddar-stout fondue, actually"
"Have you the stout?"
"Er, no. Do you have Guinness?"
She snorted a little bit, as I had just asked for a Steel Reserve. Apparently, I was in for a stern correction.
After a brief bustle across the store, she offered me a clay vessel covered in cruel-looking Cyrillic lettering. Heavy steel clamps held a rubber stopper against its unadorned neck, as if in containment of radiation or djinn. Whoever made this thing had not seen fit to put a single word of English on any part of it. This was what a bottle of beer looked like in Mordor.
"Why doncha try this one, love?"
"What the hell is it?", I asked.
"Oh, it's beer. It's very nice. Imperial Stout."
I was beginning to suffer from what is commonly called consumption overload, stunned by all the wonderful things that were going in my big box. I didn't really examine the decision to take ownership of the dire stout. Certainly it must be nice, coming from the nice English lady, I thought dazedly. As I left the premises they offered to grill me some sausages. I've selectively deleted from my memory exactly how much money I spent in there that day.

At my friend's house I started assembling the fondue. The group in the dining room could talk to me over the counter, and I could join in the conversation. I always liked those counter things between kitchen and dining room for exactly this reason. I cut some cheddar, sampled it. "Dear God in heaven," I said to no one in particular. It was overwhelming. The stuff had more cheddar flavor in it than the combined yearly output of all Cheetos plants in North America. Somewhere Chester Cheetah was tapping a vein in anticipation. I hoped that the apple juice concentrate would mute some of that, or else it would just be too much. Somewhat tentatively, I opened the stout and poured out the amount needed for the fondue. In the glass the black liquid appeared completely opaque.
"Is that Worcestershire sauce?", Steve asked.
"Er. No. It's supposedly beer," I said, looking dubious. I held it up to a powerful track light. It became no less opaque. "It's from Russia," I tried to explain. I'm no great beer fan but I decided to try a taste. Urk. There's a reason I don't like beer. I handed it off to Steve, who is a genuine aficionado.
"Malt, " he said. "Chocolate. Something berry like. Complex. Mnh. Very dark."
"Dark as Stalin's soul. Does anyone have a laser pointer?" I wanted to check just how opaque it was, or if the light beam bent in its presence, which did not seem out of the question.
"What's it called?"
"I have no earthly clue" I passed him the bottle. Steve cackled. For all we knew, that bottle of stout was unique. Perhaps it was. Perhaps we had released Stalin's soul, liquified, bottled by Kruschev, as it were, to be delivered into our cheesy pot. I put my ear to the simmering mixture to see if I could hear show trials.

The final product was a desperate land war in the middle of Asia, a trenchline five thousand miles long. "It's like the Eastern Front in my mouth", I remember saying. The stout and the cheddar were just barely at violent, genocidal stalemate, broken only by hints of flavor from the substance dipped into it. Even the spicy dried sausages submerged themselves in this epic conflict. They were even Hungarian sausages, which made the metaphor a bit eerie. We all agreed that it was delicious, but had quite enough after a half dozen bites.

I've replaced the dipping substances in this recipe with the ones I liked the best. It was originally served with dried sausage, black bread, cauliflower, and apples.

Cheddar-Stout Fondue

lots of cauliflower florets
lots of broccolli florets

1 pound very good cheddar, aged at least 3 years, shredded. A food processor's shedder attachment is fondue's best friend.
2 1/2 tablespoons all purpose flour
3/4 cup good dark stout
6 tablespoons frozen apple juice concentrate, thawed
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
1 green onion, sliced on the bias

Prepare veggies by boiling/steaming/roasting etc.

Toss shredded cheese with flour in large bowl. Heat stout, juice, and mustard until steaming. Gradually add cheese mixture, stirring constantly, until cheese is melted and the flour has thickened the mixture. Scatter green onions on surface of cheese to break up that brown color. Put pot on hot pad in the middle of the table. Dip veg in cheese and eat.

Provisioning the Lone Male: Lentil Pots

2009-02-03T10:16:00.003-05:00

The wife is out for a week and it is time to cook. It's always time to cook, though, because I have chosen the role of cook in our household, but when the wife is not around the rules of the kitchen change significantly. This is primarily because the sink can only hold so many dirty dishes. It's a common design flaw of modern kitchens. Also, cooking for myself, I don't particularly care how balanced the dish is, whether it looks nice, or if I made it already this week. All that fru-fru goes right out the window. It has to taste OK, go together without too much thought, and by-and-large go by a few simple rules:

1) Will it make me a fat bastard? More to the point, will it make me more of a fat bastard than I already am? Since I lift big metal things recreationally, I should take in approximately 1.5 grams of protein per pound of body weight per day. I'll aim for seventy grams per meal. The meal should also avoid crap carbs like potatoes and rice, and crap fats like shortening and margarine. It shouldn't have too much of either fats or carbs, no matter how high-quality, and preferably not too much of both at the same time. A lot of both at the same time is also known as a biscuit, or as I fondly call them, obesity tablets.

2) Can it be prepared and eaten using one item of cookware? Preferably a piece of cookware that is also simple to eat out of? This is to avoid covering every horizontal surface with dirty dishes that have to be maniacally cleaned in the last two hours before said wife's return. In the heat of the moment, I had once considered renting a pressure washer for this, but I know that if I did, the temptation would be too great to turn its formidable nozzle on every other soiled surface in the house: toilets, bathtub, litterbox, linens, etc. The results would take some explaining, a lot of flowers, possibly a lawyer and body armor.

3) Does it cost more than gas? I spend about five bucks a day on my commute, so that rules might not go for people that, say, bike.

Once you say "no" to all these questions, one of the perfect foods left is lentils. Fast cooking, tasty, macronutrients evenly split between protein, fiber, and carbs, there's nothing they can't do. We won't be seeing a lot of that today. Sorry to be such a tease. If you want to see saged lentil burgers on homemade brioche with chiles and chevre, you'll have to wait a bit. It's a good dish but it's not what we're after right now. For today, if you want to see cheap and easy lentil pots, you're set.

Sausage and Lentil Pot

½ package Jenny-O turkey breakfast sausage, diced.
½ cup lentils
1 onion, chopped
1 can chopped tomatoes
1 tsp sage
1 tsp cumin
1 cup broth, bouillon, or other seasoned liquid
1 tablespoon olive oil

A word about the turkey sausage. Jenny-O turkey sausage comes in tubes from Wal-mart for something like a buck fifty a pound. It’s easier to dice it while frozen. Wal-Mart has a random selection of ground turkey products that are usually pretty good, including this "italian flavor ground turkey product" that's pretty good and is a buck a pound. Strangely, the "italian flavor ground turkey product" is incredibly fiery- I mean thai hot- while the "mexican flavor ground turkey product" is fairly mild (and also tasy and, like its italian cousin, also a buck a pount, but totally unsuited to this recipe).

Brown the sausage in the olive oil until brown. Add onions, cook until translucent. Add everything else. Cover tightly, cook on low heat for an hour. Eat out of pot while reading Garth Ennis' Preacher.

Chicken and Lentil Pot

½ cup lentils
1 onion, chopped
1 chicken breast or chicken parts (approximately 14 oz)
1 tablespoon garam masala or other curry powder
1 carrot, chopped
1 cup cauliflower, chopped. Frozen is OK
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 cup broth, bouillon, or other seasoned liquid
1 tablespoon ghee or butter

Melt ghee in pot. Brown chicken in butter. It's OK if it's frozen. You just want the flavors from the browning, and the chicken will cook through while the lentils are cooking. Add onions and carrots, cook until onions are translucent. Add everything else. Cover and cook on low heat for 1 hour. Eat out of pot over Grant Morrison's Invisibles.

Fashionable Beef

2009-02-02T10:26:00.001-05:00

As is commonly pointed out, 'a la mode' means "fashionable". What is not pointed out is, fashionable where? Sometimes an archaic 'a la mode' recipe will add a place name and a date, so you get a recipe that, when translated, is something like "Chicken that was really fashionable around 1832 in Amiens, you know, just in case you were interested".

Boeuf a la mode, aka French Pot Roast, is one of these animals, but is such a ubiquity that absolutely no French chef- no matter how megalomaniacal- can lay definitive claim to this particular marriage of beef and wine. The first time some guy called this particular pot roast 'a la mode' was around 1732, but this dish probably predates that date by a little bit. Not by too much, though, as pots and stoves were pretty rare things before the late Renaissance.

I call my boeuf a la mode "pot roast", because that's what it is, although I call it by its frenchy name when discussing with relatives and especially gramma. Households can be defensive about their signature pot roast. Telling a family member you are making pot roast is analagous to approaching the main heavy in a kung-fu movie and saying his kicking style looks pretty gay. If you say you're making Fashionable Beef, it makes it sort of funny and non-competitive, which is what food should be all about, like Aikido.

The recipe is an amalgamation of pressure cooker techniques, the recipe from Cook's Illustrated, and bits I've picked up from Alton Brown's Good Eats program. As a side note, Cook's Illustrated Best of 2008 is an incredible resource of cooking knowledge. Some parts- some very, very, small parts- should be discarded by the careful chef, such as peppering meat before browning (I've learned through experience that pepper burns too much at high heat), but by and large there is a lot of good information in there.

3-4 lb bone-in chuck roast. Try and find a chuck roast called "seven bone roast", if you can. The bone in it is shaped like a seven, hence the name.
1 onion, chopped
1 stalk celery, chopped
1 carrot, chopped
4 cloves garlic, coarsely chopped
Handful each of thyme, parsley, and a stick of rosemary
3 slices bacon
1.5 cups Malbec or Shiraz
1 8 oz package mushrooms, sliced (I was very lazy and got the pre-washed, pre-sliced ones)
1 tbls vinegar of your choice (I like balsamic)
1 tbls butter
1 tbls flour
Kosher salt
Black pepper

How much do you like fat? Figure out how much you want to cut from the roast and trim away. When you're done with your trimming, sprinkle the roast on all sides with some coarse-grained kosher salt. Let the meat sit at room temperature for an hour.

Brown the bacon in the pot of the pressure cooker. I'm using the pressure cooker for this recipe, but if you have a dutch oven that will work fine too. Even a big oven proof pan will work, so long as you have a nice tight fitting lid, which you can make out of some aluminum foil. Or you can use one of those roasting bag things, which I although I haven't used, I do have a friend who is quite fond of them and uses them to good effect.

Once your bacon has rendered out most of its fat, remove it and reserve. Working in batches if necessary, brown the beef on all sides in the delicious bacon fat, about 2 minutes per side. Reserve the browned beef on a convenient plate.

Throw in the onion, celery, carrot, and garlic. Fry until the carrot is thinking about getting soft and the onions are translucent. Try not to let the garlic burn.

Dump in the wine, the reserved bacon, and herbage. Stir to remove the caramelization from the bottom of the pan. I always mean to tie the herbs in twine or kitchen cord before doing this but somehow never do. Don't fret if you don't, you can always fish out the woody bits later. But twine helps a lot, because then you can just pull out the bundle when you're done instead of picking at the sauce with a fork and cursing.

Add the reserved meat and any liquids that might have dripped out while it was sitting. Lid the vessel and set on high pressure for 45 minutes. Yes, that's a long time, but we're going for spoon tender here. If you're going with the dutch oven, lid the vessel and put in a 300 degree oven for 3 hours. Now, this temperature/time combination depends a lot on your oven and the vessel you're using. You could also simmer it on the stovetop, I suppose. When cooking is complete, pull the meat out as carefully as you can (it's going to want to come to bits), put on a platter and tent with foil. You know the meat is done when a probe can be inserted and removed from the meat with little or no resistance. Alternatively, get your finger around that little bone and see if it moves around easily inside the meat. Either way, if the answer is yes, your meat is cooked.

Time to contemplate the sauce liquid. Fish out the sorry remains of your herbage bundle. Put in the mushrooms and let it boil gently to cook the fungi and force them to release their liquid into the sauce. Taste the sauce. Ponder the sauce. Reach out with your feelings. This is a big part of the dish and it might need some tuning. In my case, I always over-salt things. I oversalted the roast when browning it, so the liquid was excessively salty, and this was even after the mushroom brigade made its entrance. Alright, no need to panic. Saltiness can be corrected with sweetness, to a certain extent. I added sugar teaspoon by teaspoon until the saltiness was negated, or at least translated into an oniony savor. The pressure cooker had taken the acid components right the hell out of the wine in the cooking liquid, so I added a tablespoon of balsamic vinegar to freshen it up a bit. Once the flavors were right, I let it continue to gently boil and concentrate its flavors while I worked on thickeners.

It's roux time. In a decent-sized saucepan (enough for the liquid), melt the butter over low-medium heat, add the flour, and fry the resulting paste until light yellow in color. Slowly ladle the liquid into the roux. The liquid should thicken almost immediately. Stir until it's got a nice, gravy-like consistency. Taste and correct seasoning, if necessary. Pour the thickened sauce over the meat on its platter. Now is also a nice time to scatter some chopped parsley on the whole kit and kaboodle. It looks nice and adds some green-y flavor.

Traditionally this dish is served with boiled egg noodles, but in our household mashed potatoes and peas are awfully popular.

Love My Goat

2009-02-02T08:52:00.001-05:00

Not too long ago, I entertained a group with a box of NY Strip steaks, a big bowl of salad, and some good baguette. We're not going to discuss grilling steaks here, because it's something much better cooks than I have addressed maybe a zillion times, and besides, a grilled NY Strip steak possibly has the highest gastronomic reward/work ratio of any food product and so should be made as often as possible. I mean, come on: apply coarse salt to both sides of a 1" strip steak, put 4" away from fire for 4-5 minutes per side, put on plate, eat. It's dirt simple but is one of the best things in the world. Compare this with something like ratatouille, which is a very good thing but is also three hours of your life spent frying vegetables. Anyway, meat. Mmm. The salad was a bit more interesting, but is so second nature that I forget it might not be second nature to other people.

It's rich enough to serve with the baguette by itself, but it also complements the steak nicely. The name for the recipe comes from a totally unrelated sweet red table wine that has a cartoon goat on the front of it, advising the shopper to "Love my goat". We're not sure why.

Goaty Love Salad

6 oz chevre (soft goat cheese)
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
3/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
1 small red bell pepper, diced
1/2 yellow onion, sliced
1 teaspoon powdered chicken bouillon
1 teaspoon black pepper
A fairly large amount of prepared baby salad greens- you can get a big bin of the stuff at Sam's for five bucks or so. Maybe about 20 oz or so.

Combine the first 8 ingredients in the biggest salad bowl you have. Stir until it makes a tangy-smelling, thick brown mixture, with the chevre well-incorporated. Add the greens, and toss carefully. Mix the salad in with your hands. Those baby greens are way to delicate to go stirring with a big hard fork and spoon, and your hands can tell you more about the final texture of the dressed salad than a fork could.

You could add some bacon bits to this but it's not really necessary. If you do, though, omit the chicken bouillon, otherwise it's too salty, and I like salt.

Pad, Thai and Tempting

2009-01-24T20:34:00.001-05:00

It took me a while to get my pad thai recipe down, largely because there is no such thing as a pad thai recipe. The reason why is a bit complicated, and it has to do with how the thai got into the pad.

Back in the beginning, the way I heard it, ethnic Thais did not even have noodles (aka pad), and continued to generally not have them until the late nineteenth century. That's about when a wave of ethnic Han refugees came flooding in from China, fleeing from something called the Taiping Rebellion, the biggest war you've never heard of. It's sort of off topic, but let's just say China had seventy million less mouths to feed at the end of it, some of whom were doubtless refugees bringing noodles to Thailand.

The Han Chinese have this gift of going to random foreign countries and managing to cook for local tastes while still using traditional Han ingredients. Witness General Tso's Chicken. The same thing happened in Thailand. Here's this poor Han refugee with his fistful of rice noodles, and before he opens up his first food stand – here's the part I really admire about the Han- he looks methodically around him at what all the weird jungle people around him are eating.

As far as he can tell it's mostly chili, limes, fermented fish, and whatever crustacean is clinging to the nets but is too small to sell. And some weird jungle fruit thing, and probably more chili because that seems to be the way these Thai people roll. Ingeniously and undoubtedly quite a bit imperfectly at first, our Han refugee seasons his noodles to match the local palate. It's a trial and error thing, but it's also a negotiation. The Chinese guy figures out how to deliver the classic Thai flavors, but the Thai people also get accustomed to things like rice noodles and cabbage pickle. Accustomed is the key word here. Pad Thai was not really a big thing, at least not until The Big Thing, that is, World War II.

Outside of the monasteries and hill country (where Chinese/Buddhist cultural influence predominated), noodle dishes do not get widespread reception until rice rationing in the lead up to the Japanese takeover. That preventative rationing was a pretty amazing thing in itself; the Thai have been gifted with some very cunning and slightly clairvoyant heads of state. Seeing that 1) Japan would soon be commandeering the economy, 2) rice noodles dramatically stretched out the rice needed per person per day compared to the natural product, and 3) starving your people is bad- which is not a foregone conclusion when talking about leadership during WW2- PM Phibunsongkhram pursued an aggressive and if possible pronounceable Pad Thai program. The government distributed leaflets and noodle cart starter kits, recipe books, print shops for the recipe books, workshops for grannies to make rice noodles, even subsidizing entrepreneurs willing to bring this bastard culinary child to the masses, and bring it they did. It's eaten in Thailand the same way Americans wolf down hamburgers today, and for perhaps the same reason is a hard culinary rabbit to catch. It's just not restaurant food. Still not following? Imagine a Japanese businessman walking up to you and asking for "the definitive hamburger recipe", and you've got an idea.

The version posted here is more Thai style than what I usually get in the restaurants here, much drier and fluffier, less heavy. I'm not bragging on this, because it's not always a good thing. Dinner guests expect pad thai to be a loot gooier, a lot more red, sweeter perhaps, and I'm not sure how to do that without unbalancing the flavors and breaking the dish. Since I just figured out how to make the damn thing I'm loathe to break it.

The only trick I'm still working on is getting the noodles done just right. Timing the rehydration of rice noodles is tricky, like when I was first learning how to work with phyllo. Yeah. That. Tricky. Bitch.

All things considered, Pad Thai is probably one of my favorite foods: sour, salty, spicy, fishy, with just enough sweet to not suffer third degree chili burn. This recipe makes two portions. It's important to cook only one or two portions at a time- otherwise the noodles don't get stir fried evenly and it turns to pad thai gloop. If you're feeding more people, cook no more than two portions at a time, which is not-so-coincidentally what the below recipe makes up.

¼ cup sugar

¼ cup Nam Pla (AKA Fish Sauce, which unfortunately is not vegetarian, but you can substitute light soy sauce. It changes the flavor pretty substantially, though. Be prepared for "sort of Pad Thai" on the palate. Of course, it's sort of going to taste that way anyway, because it's your pad thai and not your local thai restaurant's. So whatever.)

¼ cup Tamarind concentrate (Available from Oriental food stores, this stuff is basically ready to roll. Otherwise you have to do all kind of stuff with the blocks of tamarind stuff: soaking, straining, boiling, human sacrifice, etc.)

2 garlic cloves, chopped

1-3 tablespoons red chili flakes

8 oz rice noodles (available from your friendly neighborhood oriental market, or, hell, Wal-Mart has them now.)

8 oz tofu, cut into 1/2 " chunks

2 eggs, scrambled

2 cups bean sprouts or brocco-slaw(I like this one) or thinly sliced cabbage (I like a lot of crunch in the pad thai, and the more vegetables, the less carb-guilt)

4 green onions, chopped

6 tablespoons chopped peanuts

1 lime, cut up

Peanut oil

Mix up the first five ingredients. This is your basic pad thai sauce. Adjust flavors to your taste: fish sauce for salt, tamarind for sour/bitter, sugar for sweet, chili for fire. Keep in mind that sweet is hard to correct for later- you can always add sweet later, tableside even. Thai street vendors often have a big sugar shaker right there for you to sweeten your noodles.

Put rice stick noodles into hot tap water. Let them sit for ten minutes or until they have just become pliable. Don't let them sit until al dente or you will end up with pad thai stew. It's better for them to be too hard than for them to be too soft, because if they're too hard now you can let them sit in the wok longer later on. Once they're at the right consistency, drain and toss with oil.

Make sure everything is chopped, scrambled, sliced, soaked, and/or otherwise ready to rock. Pad thai happens fast once the food hits the wok because the wok is so damn hot. You'll be busy stirring once the food hits the pan, believe me.

Heat some oil in the wok until it's rocket hot. Put in the tofu, stir fry until it gets brown around the edges. Push the tofu up the sides of the wok, out of the way.

Add the egg in the center area you've just cleared of tofu, stir fry until the egg is good and scrambled.

Dump the noodles in the wok, followed by the sauce. Be quick with this because those eggs are going to scorch. In fact, depend on some scorching- from what I've heard, the scorch is actually an essential part of wok cooking. But not too much. Just enough. It's very Eastern. Dude.

Add more oil if you need to. Stir to mix everything up. Add bean sprouts/cabbage/vegetable crunchies. All this mass will drop the heat in the wok a bit so the noodles can soften without burning, if you took them out of the water too crunchy. Stir. If the noodles are still not quite done add some fluid or more sauce if you have it, keep stirring until the noodles get soft enough for you.

Throw in the peanuts and green onions, stir until mixed. Plate it up and serve with lime wedges. Eat.

Chupacabra Chipotle!

2009-01-06T13:14:00.001-05:00

Chupacabra Chipotle

Chipotle Chicken Rollups

These crisp little numbers are spicy, smoky, beany and just about everything else that you could want in a quick Mexican fix. They are also rumored to cure hangovers. If they do not, they will make you happy to call in sick and lay in front of the TV watching Venture Brothers.

Ingredients:
2 chicken breasts
2 onions
4 cloves garlic
4 Chipotle chilis
1 can black beans
1 can diced tomatoes
1 tablespoon chicken bullion
Handful cilantro
4 big flour tortillas
8 oz cheddar cheese
A fair amount of olive oil
Sour cream

If you're like me and never plan anything, you probably only have frozen chicken breasts to work with. That's OK. Heat some oil in a giant skillet on medium heat and throw the frozen breasts in there. This way they can thaw enough for you to slice them, and you won't lose any chickeny flavors in the sink or in the microwave.
While the chicken negotiates with that heat, it's a good time to mince your onions and garlic.
As soon as the chicken's thawed enough to slice without a table saw, take your somewhat-thawed chicken breasts and cube them, slicing lengthwise, then crosswise, until you have approximately .75" cubes. Sprinkle them with salt. Splash a little more oil into the pan if necessary, then put the cubed chicken in the pan, toss with the oil, cooking until lightly browned.
While the chicken cubes are a-brownin', it's a good time to seed the chipotles: slice those buggers lengthwise and scrape the seeds from their soft little insides with the back side of your knife. Once seeded, chop them fine and keep them handy. They're going in that pan soon enough. Cans of "chipotles con adobo" can be found in the Mexican section of your local megamart. You'll likely have some left over from this recipe, but that's OK because they keep pretty much forever once tupperwared and refridgerated. No microorganism is quite brave enough to set foot in there; any foolishly transgressing bacterium would be found beaten and drugged in the bed of a Tijuana prostitute with its kidneys missing.
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.
Remove the browned chicken from the pan and reserve; we'll be seeing it again in a moment. Put the pan back on the fire, hit it with oil as needed, then put in the onions and garlic, frying until translucent. A little brown on the garlic is OK, it's hard to cook onion and garlic together without the garlic taking on a bit more color than the onion.
Open up your can o' black beans and your can o' tomatoes, dump in the pan with the seeded chopped chipotles and the chicken bullion. No need to drain anything, the liquids from the canned beans and the 'maters will add a lot of flavor. If you like it hot, add some of the adobo sauce the chilis came canned in. Be careful. That stuff is pretty fiery but is full of chipotle smoky goodness.
All that liquid will loosen some of the caramellization you've got going on the bottom of the pan. Stir to dissolve this yummy stuff- fancy folks call it the "fond"- into the sauce. Cook this mess on medium until the fluid is cooked down and it has the consistency of, oh, baked beans or similar. Remove from heat.
Get your big ol' food processor ready. Dump in the bean/tomato/chipotle mixture, then add your handful of cilantro, then whir until the mixture is rendered into a creamy paste. Slice up the cheese into 1/4" slices.
To assemble: get two cookie sheets. Line them with foil, because who likes cleaning things? Splash both pans with oil. Slap- not too enthusiastically, unless you want to cover yourself in oil- a tortilla in the pan, and move it around so the bottom of the tortilla is coated in oil. Lay down 1/4 of the bean mixture across the middle of the tortilla, then a 1/4 of the chicken, a 1/4 of the cheese slices, and roll up as tight as you can without tearing the tortilla shell. Put it in the second pan. Repeat until you have four roll ups ready to bake. Wash your oily tortilla hands.
Put the roll ups in the oven for, oh, something like ten minutes, depending on your oven, where the rack is, what type of oil you're using, phase of the moon, etc. It's done when the roll-ups have spots of brown on top. This indicates that the top has crisped and the bottom is at a very hearty state of crunch. The cheesy bean stuff will have melted out of the fore and aft of each burrito, but with a little deft spatula work you can scrape up the spill and smear it over the top of the burrito before plating it up. Serve with a tub of sour cream. Eat. Fall asleep.

Now I sing a song of pressure

2009-01-02T10:59:00.003-05:00

So, pressure cookers. I haven't been this excited about a kitchen gadget since I discovered the food processor. Wonderful but hellishly tedious dishes, bon femme, are now minutes rather than hours away: feijoada, ropa vieja, cassoulet, pot au feu, braised shanks, coq au vin. Food that is maybe a little longish to cook becomes lightning quick, like jambalaya, lentils, and split peas. Here's the latest from the magical land of pressure:

Chicken Jambalaya

I make chicken jambalaya because shrimp makes my feet hurt from the gout. You can add shrimp to the pot for maybe a minute before serving and you'll have shrimp jambalaya, although I am now a marked man in bayou country just for saying that, hunted down by five thousand genetically perfected clones of Justin Wilson. "YOU'LL BURN IN HELL FOR MESSIN UP MY JAMBALAYA, BOY, I GAY-RUN-TEE"

Slice up a rib of celery, a bell pepper, an onion, a carrot, and four roma tomatoes. Fry 2-4 slices of bacon and 1/2 cup good pork breakfast sausage in the pressure cooker on its "brown" setting. Remove the bacon and sausage when it starts to get some color and/or when there's enough fat rendered out to cook with. Brown a chicken thigh in the pork fat on all sides, remove to a patter, then brown another chicken thigh in the pork fat, remove to a platter. Fry the celery, pepper, onion, and carrot in the pork/chicken grease until the onion is translucent and the carrot is just beginning to get tender. Add the tomatoes, Add a teaspoon of salt. Chop up 4 cloves garlic, add to the mess frying in the cooker. Season the frying mess with 1/2 teaspoon cayenne (to taste), a teaspoon of paprika, a teaspoon of thyme, a teaspoon of oregano. Add in 1 cup white rice, 1 cup chicken stock or bouillon, stir until boiling. Place reserved chicken on top, put the lid on the pressure cooker and cook on high pressure for 8 minutes. Remove pressure and eat.

Hoppin John

I wasn't going to post this but I've just had a bowl of it and it's so dicking good, which is a complete and utter surprise since I originally set out to make this as a way of humoring my mother.

The story was that Mom wanted her new years meal of "hoppin john"- i.e., black eye peas and hog jowls-, and I didn't want her to set her kitchen on fire. So I brought my pressure cooker and went to work, this time without a recipe, which always makes me a little nervous, especially with a new piece of cookware that may explode at any time. But lo and behold this stuff was mighty tasty.

Brown two slices bacon and 1/4 cup breakfast sausage in the pressure cooker on its "brown" setting. Slice up two carrots, an onion, a bell pepper, four roma tomatoes (sound familiar yet?), and four cloves garlic. Remove the pork meats, fry four chorizos in the pork grease. If they're good chorizos, make sure you puncture them before browning unless you want expoding sausages injecting hot grease and cayenne into your eyeballs. Once they're brown, reserve the chorizos with the other meats, then fry the carrots, onion, and bell pepper in the grease. As they get soft, add the tomatoes. Dump in 1 lb black eye peas, 6 cups water, the bacon and sausage, and stir. Make a well in this mess and insert the hog jowl. Cover and cook on high pressure 45 minutes. Dump the pressure and eat. I suppose it should be served with cornbread but I say: screw that.

Mighty tasty, of course, maybe it's just that anything involving legumes, pork grease, and cayenne is mighty tasty. Oh yes. Oh my poor arteries.

Keep Your Damn Monkeys

2008-10-17T09:24:00.000-04:00

Stop me if you've heard this one:

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Once upon a time in a village, a man appeared and announced to the villagers that he would buy monkeys for $10 each. The villagers seeing that there were many monkeys around, went out to the forest and started catching them. The man bought thousands at $10 and, as supply started to diminish, the villagers stopped their effort. He further announced that he would now buy monkeys at $20 each. This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching monkeys again.

Soon the supply diminished even further and people started going back to their farms. The offer increased to $25 each and the supply of monkeys became so scarce it was an effort to even find a monkey, let alone catch it! The man now announced that he would buy monkeys at $50 each! However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would now buy on behalf of him.

In the absence of the man, the assistant told the villagers. “Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has already collected. I will sell them to you at $35 and when the man returns from the city, you can sell them to him for $50 each.” The villagers rounded up with all their savings and bought all the monkeys.

Then they never saw the man nor his assistant again, and had only a great deal of monkeys.
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OK, interesting story, but it sounds fishy. Using my less-than-stellar grasp of economics, I plugged in some numbers. In period 1, let's say the villagers grab 100 monkeys, because there are a lot of monkeys and are habituated to humans. The villagers get 1000 bucks in period 1. Period 2, the monkeys are more canny, and the villagers only grab 50, but due to the constriction in supply, they still net 1000 big ones. Things start turning south in period 3, because the price increases are not keeping pace with the reduction in supply- the villagers only net 500 for 20 monkeys. So far the village has 2500 bucks, which means they need to supply 3450 of their own money to buy back 170 monkeys at 35 bucks each. That is a lot of savings, especially for this village. That's where the smell of fish was coming from.

If this village thought that it was worth dropping everything to grab monkeys at 10 dollars each, things weren't so hot to begin with. Given a weekly monkey catch, the ten dollar monkey brings 5200 income per year. To make people stop subsistence economic activity (low return but safe), I'd say you have to double their income, so they were probably making yearly somewhere around 2500 before the arrival of the monkey merchants. How in the world did they save enough to make the payment on the $35 monkeys?

There's two answers here. One is that they've been saving for years and years- decades, or even centuries. This means the monkey merchants will have to make a big circle of the world every time they do their thing, or else the villagers will simply not be able to pay for the $35 monkeys. So in this case the monkeys are sold from saved money, i.e., money from the past.

The alternative is that the villagers go into debt to buy these monkeys, or buy them with money from the future, which, given the low level of native economy in this village, is a lot of future. This can go badly in a lot of ways, but saved money can go badly in a lot of ways too, and those ways are called inflation. No need to bring that up right now.

In any case, both of these options are totally acceptable- spending from the past and spending from the future- if there were any use for the monkeys. Big capitalizations are great, and they don't happen without savings or debt. They got us to the moon, built the internet, split the atom. But a big capitalization for monkeys? The tragedy of the entire scenario could be cured if buyers and sellers both asked the question, "why am I buying monkeys?".

Queen Prawn Spawns

2008-05-27T09:02:00.009-04:00

I am not sure where I first heard about the micronesian or Pacific Proa. I blame it on Wikipedia's article of the day. They had something about the spread of austronesian peoples across the unspeakable vastness of the Pacific, and I had to wonder: what the hell do you use to do that when you haven't yet smelted bronze?

From there I found Tim Andersen's webpage (http://www.mit.edu/people/robot/). Tim Andersen is a hapless adventurer, competent inventor, and loveable junkhound whose utter lack of any sense of personal safety somehow resonated with me. Read his stories if you get a chance; he's a brilliant and very funny writer. I sent Tim's stories of Yucatan proa misadventure to my then-girlfriend Monica. "So this prawn thing is just a really efficient way to drown your girlfriend". Well, from then on I was sold, and the hull had a name: Queen Prawn.

The pacific proa is not appealing because it is dangerous to loved ones but because it is so elegant in concept. It has dynamic lateral balance, which is precisely the axis that a sailboat encounters dynamic force. It makes an awful lot of sense. Besides, if I'm going to build and sail something that looks like a wrecked fleamarket stall, why not make a really fast, weird-looking fleamarket stall?

Once I was finished enjoying myself with Tim Andersen, I moved along to serious thinkers. Gary Dierking seems to have the best handle on hull design, and I grabbed a plan based off his Tarawa hull but executed in plywood, as described here. Sixteen feet (or so) length, twenty-two inches wide and something like twelve inches of draft with three hundred and fifty pounds displacement. Long, skinny, and deep. Aggressive asymmetry to counter leeway and to mayhaps provide a bit of windward creep to help in holding a course when beating. Two chines, about the easiest layout to build. The single outrigger is a somewhat streamlined PVC pipe with the ends clamped shut and epoxied, with about two hundred pounds of displacement, give or take; enough to not sink too quickly when you step on it. Aluminum tubing connects the outrigger to the main hull, and can take five hundred pounds of torque in the middle, which is handy when the wind picks up you, your wife, the outrigger, and whatever cargo is handy before flinging them all into the Gulf of Mexico. "Flying proa" means "effing terrified" in Malaysian.

The various traditional-type proa sail rigs sounded frankly like trouble. The aboriginal crab claw is a great rig for a family of fifteen, which seems to be the minimum crew for safe handling. The Dierking-Gibbons rig involves an awfully big sail flying up over the heads of the crew for several suspenseful, and I suspect mostly tragic, seconds. It also has lots and lots of continuous loop rigging running uninterrupted around the vessel. Interrupt one and you capsize, or, amusingly, take flight. Probably both. I thought the winner was the double sticker used in Mbuli (www.clcboats.com/shop/sailboats/proa/), also known in proa circles as the schooner. This rig, although involving two of everything- two mains, two masts, two sets of rigging- and a substantial decrease in performance, allows the sailor to adjust the center of effort as needed. It also allows the sails to luff, depowered, while I futz with various homemade gizmos and recover family members treading water. I was also interested in the idea of basic steering being done by trimming the mainsails. Sheet in the rear sail to head up, sheet out the rear sail to bear away.

Why did that sound appealing in particular? Well, proa are sort of rudder-challenged, due to the fact that they have no fore and no aft. Since it switches sides every tack, you need to carry a rudder from one side to the other or make all sort of kick up rudder thingies in various places around the boat. With two sails you can mostly steer with the sheets. In theory, anyway. As an alternate I'll program a monster bullhorn to scream "I HAVE NO STEERAGE" at thirty second intervals, and carry enough water to make Texas.

With these loose guidelines in place, I started cutting. The sides began taking shape. It soon became apparent that the last four inches from each side fore and aft was going to be lopped off because I was using two 4x8' panels per side. Whoops.

The sides and the frames are fastened sort of loosely in these pictures. I just put enough tacks in to make it solid enough to move around, which is to say, not very solid at all.
It almost looks okay from this angle.
So much for river cruising. Seen from the lee side, you can see the Queen Prawn is going to draw a lot of water.
Very, very crooked. Have I mentioned how floopsy the structure is? Rails, fiberglass, and addition of the bottom plank will hopefully straighten out the cambers in her sides.

Around Lake Okeechobee

2008-02-20T17:41:00.004-05:00

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Saturday, February 16, 2008
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My homemade panniers decompiled themselves for the first time as I steered the bike down the dike near Buckhead Ridge. I had only been in the saddle for twenty minutes, which somehow included 1) a harrowing crossing of the Kissimmee River, 2) the end of paved trail for the foreseeable future, and 3) the first inroads of broiling sun into my brain. I had aimed the front wheel of the bike towards the picnic table and its blessed shade canopy, started going down the dike, then started to realize I was going down the dike way too fast. The brakes had too much grass in them and were useless. I got up on peddles as the poor frame bounced over dandelions and armadillo holes. My panniers (six dollars worth of Rubbermade and clothesline from Wal-Mart) broke their lashings and burst, like pinatas filled with mildew and jerky. The ground did a good imitation of kids with sticks. I parked the bike at the picnic shelter and went to pick up my litter.

Mostly I was stopping to get some breath after crossing the Kissimmee. Canal crossings turned out to be uphill adrenaline fests spent peddling madly in a two foot shoulder that you share with semi drivers and their bottles of tiny little pills. There were going to be a lot of such crossings, one for each of the waterways that fed or drained the big lake. They made me nervous, if you can read "nervous" as "effing terrified".

My packing method was similarly ridiculous: rubbermade bins and clothesline, with a chopped up piece of bamboo to provide poles for my tent. My tent usually sets up with trekking poles and sticks, but a) I didn’t need trekking poles on a bicycle, and b) the LOST has no trees and hence no sticks. The bamboo did make many locals think I was some sort of fishing hobo, which worked well. I recommend that any traveller in these parts carry some sort of fishing-related item. It makes it easier to talk to people.

Reflecting on this trip at Buckhead Ridge, it all seemed a bit hopeless. The canal crossings, my general ineptitude at this bicycling thing, the late hour, and general misery made me seriously consider turning the bike around, getting a room in Okeechobee town, repacking, installing slam shifters, and heading out the next day. I then seriously considered what would really happen if I got a room, namely, television and vodka.

I retied the panniers, walked the bike up the dike and kept heading south-southwest, on the northwest arc of Lake Okeechobee, towards the Indian Prairie Canal. It was 3:30PM.

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In July of 2007 a bunch of scientific types took advantage of record-low water to scrape some muck from the exposed lake bottom. They found some mud, some archeological items, and a whole lot of poison. The beating heart of southwest Florida's fresh water system was filled with arsenic and a toxicological zoo, which even chronic Republicans agreed was probably a bad idea. They got dump trucks and started hoovering up the lethal muck, only to find that there was no place on earth that would allow the bottom of Lake Okeechobee to be deposited on their land. It was too poisonous. Eventually they just plopped the stuff back on the shores of the lake to create parking lots and airboat ramps. Of course, a word like "shore" is itself dubious in this context.

At roughly half of its historical size, the lake is not visible from the western “shore”. The area technically occupied by the lake is a vast prairie cut with piles of rock and straight canals that run off into the horizon, sort of like the Everglades but with more trees. It's odd, but you would think that one of the defining traits of a lake is that it doesn't have a forest in it.

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It was still very pretty, and very quiet, when I wasn't polluting the silence with grindings and clanking and the occasional clunk of a pannier part falling off. There was a canal on either side of the dike, one following the theoretical shore of the lake and another separating the dike from the mainland. The dike was always the same, a treeless, flawlessly mowed thirty foot mound topped by a path. I always had the lakeside to my left and the canalside to my right.

RV parks and stodgy communities of fish-addled retirees lined the canal from Buckhead Ridge to Moores Head, motoring out religiously in pontoon vessels and bassboats. The lakeside was populated mostly by osprey, with the textbook sharp black coloration and peaked crests, unlike the washed out and undersize brownish osprey that live in my backyard. I watched one snatch a fish out of the water. I got knocked around by rocks.

I had just started the longest unpaved stretch of the Lake Okeechobee Scenic Trail, from Buckhead Ridge to Moores Head. The Trek 7000 that faithfully served my 8 mile town commute was not terribly pleased with the prospect of limestone and gravel for so many miles and with so much extra weight on the rear wheel. It communicated this to me by tossing my panniers off the dike every few miles. With the sun touching the tops of the tallest palms on the canalside, I espied the picnic table and shelter of a backcountry campsite. I parked the bike and went down to the table with my trusty backpack, ahead of schedule.

The breeze was not so bad and came from the NNW, which explains how I was able to make so many miles so late in the day on an unpaved road. The campsite was pleasant but there was no way I was going to drink canal water. I finished up my water from the Kissimmee boat ramp bathroom and contemplated my map. I raised my head to see a lone backpacker loping up. The old banter came back like a native language.
"Where you coming from today?"
"Key West"
"Wow. Florida Trail?"
"Eastern Continental Divide, finishing up."
"Lots of roadwalking in the Keys, I bet."
He made a sour expression. "Oh yeah."
I noted his Granite Gear Nimbus. "Hey, Granite Gear. I got an Ozone 2003, my AT (Appalachian Trail) pack."
He just beamed, his whole face just lit up. "Hey, what year you do the trail?"
"2006. My trail name was Mash."
“Just Kevin.” We shake hands. He’s a “Just”, which is what happens to people when they insist on using their real name on the Appalachian Trail. You become a “Just -”. "Wow, it's probably still fresh for you, isn't it? I must have done it, oh, three times. PCT twice. Last time I was on the AT I went on the International Appalachian Trail, up to Brunswick. Figured I'd finish up the Eastern Divide trail with the Florida Trail, then up the Piwoti connector. ."
Holy crap, I thought, I'm talking with one of those old Appalachian Trail celebrities lost on the shores of Lake Okeechobee. We talked a lot and agreed on the general awesomeness of backpacking and how I really have to do the PCT someday. I took his picture. "You know," he said, "backpackers are the best people on earth. That's the real truth."
"I know," I said. I climbed up the dike, back on my bike, and pedaled away.

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The sun was minutes from setting, and the glittering rocks in the path had taken on a sort of greenish color. Later, when I saw the glitter in normal light, I realized that the green existed only in my mind. With too much orange light, my optic nerve spun the color wheel a bit so that everything would stay in some sort of balance. You can try this yourself at home with a red LED lamp, or, alternatively, stare into the setting sun for thirty minutes.

The sun was just about to go down right before I got to the tiny hamlet of Lakeport, with something that looked like a motel. As a former Appalachian Trail through-hiker, I can detect cheap motels from miles off, and this one looked like a doozy. I took a snapshot of the sunset and pedaled off the dike towards the bridge spanning Harney Pond canal.

It was, unfortunately, an incredibly badly staffed doozy. Though the rooms were all dark, with not a car in the lot, the office had a prominently displayed "NO VACANCY" sign in the window. An immensely fat lady in a mumu glared at me from inside the office over a spread of fried chicken parts. That's OK, I thought. This is why I have a tent.

I grabbed some water at the boat ramp bathroom and crossed Harney Pond canal while there was still light. Without electric lights on the bike frame, I did not trust locals to completely avoid me if I biked on the roadside after dusk. Even if they did see me, I am not sure I would have trusted them to avoid me. It's paranoid, but there's only one thrown beer bottle between being an outdoorsman and being a guy in a dumpster that drools a lot.

If I could go back and change one thing about this trip, I would do a lot more of my biking at night. It was gorgeous. The lights of Lakeport came on as I went, and the glow from the other towns made you look out over the lake and wonder which towns they were. True, I almost creamed myself on some extra-large gravel, and I had to stay a bit more alert to spot the campsite in the dark, but it was great all the same. I eventually saw the site and pitched my tent in the dark without any problem. There was a low one-man tent of the Hubba type off to one side of the campsite, containing what sounded like a very satisfied snorer. More power to him, I thought, as I settled down to my book, some cheese, and some almonds.

Airboaters in this area prefer to go up the ramp with their engines, which are unmuffled small block Chevies with airplane propellers, usually dual counter rotating props that keep the engine torque from spinning the hull like a top. When a bunch of them come in and pull up the ramp, it sounds like an athletic orgy of B-17s. They pull in and go out all hours of the night. Now I know and you know too.

When I packed out next morning the tent and snorer were still there. I marvelled at how he could have slept so soundly through the blitz last night. Probably booze, and lots of it.

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Sunday, February 17, 2008
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There are two important things in bicycling: wind direction, and ass. Wind direction I thought was important but I had no idea just how important it was. When there is enough of it going the wrong way it cuts your mileage worse than an uphill does. Ass is something I did not appreciate. It's why you never see bicyclists with backpacks. Backpacks add to ass. Ass adds to pain. A backpacker has his load elegantly distributed across several points on his body. A cyclist has his ass.

Another important part of cycling is being lost. The first sign I had that I was lost was when I started seeing houses on the lake side of the dike. I was used to not seeing water, but houses on the lakeside? Surely this was illegal, or at least litigiously stupid? The dike was built in response to the second-deadliest natural disaster in United States History, as long as you just sort of stop corpse counting from Katrina, which has worked out pretty well so far. Anyway, what gives? I biked on. The trail got rougher. I lost the canals, and there was a prancing herd of . . antelope . . on my left, behind many hundreds of yards of barbed wire fencing. Yep, definitely antelope. Springbok, actually. I must have taken the off-ramp to Kenya. I went to take their picture but the camera was also apparently DOA, definitely an omen that I was way off course. Feeling stupid, I turned around to get back to Fisheating Creek. By the time I rejoined the trail, I had gone eleven miles out of the way, the wind had slewed around to the SSE, and I was biking right into it.

It went well at first. I got my head in the game and started hauling along. Unfortunately, the trail conditions disintegrated, turning to lumps of limestone hummocked with thick crabgrass. The bike frame began taking big hits, and the panniers, which hitherto had only suffered damage to the lashings, started cracking along their length where they impacted the luggage rack. As I neared the Chokoloskee sunburn was becoming an issue, and the wind kicked up to seven knots. Ass could only think about the trail after Moores Head, where I would rejoin pavement. I had big hopes for that pavement. I was hoping for Pahokee tonight, but in a pinch I could do Belle Glade. Then town happened.

I didn't take a stove or pot with me this trip, thinking cheese, jerky, and nuts would be fine for a few days. Staring up at the bridge over the Chokoloskee, feeling the wind kick up, I figured, hey, I can charge my cell phone and chat with Monica, let my new wife know that I'm alive. I can get a roast chicken, cross the bridge, eat my chicken, read my book, the sun will be a bit lower and maybe- just maybe- the wind will slew a bit more south. Sure, it could happen. Mr. Mogilewsky, have you met denial? Why yes, hello denial, haven't seen you in a bit.

The picnic area on the other side of the bridge was just about perfect, with a big roomy sheltered area, vast if not terribly clean bathrooms, and all the fresh water I could drink. Going over the big Chokoloskee bridge was pretty gorgeous, and Moores Head proved friendly, their non-chain grocery store sporting a beautiful array of barbecue. One of the big problems with the Appalachian Trail, I always felt, was that it left serious barbecue country way too soon. I ate a chicken, read, promptly fell asleep, woke up, peed, fell asleep again, played around with denial, then invited it home and gave it a guest bedroom.

When I finally kicked out the freeloading bastard it was 4:30 PM Sunday afternoon. The wind on the dike had stepped up to twenty knots from the SE, exactly my direction of travel. I had gone less than halfway around Lake Okeechobee. It was time to go.

####################

I downshifted to some ridiculously low gear, but occasionally a crosswind would gust and knock me down. The gusts always came from the same direction, SSW, so I kept the wheels closer to the grass on the lee side of the dike so I would tumble on grass instead of on asphalt.

In any crosswind, the lee side of the path had some turbulence from the windward side lofting all that air into the sky. That turbulent zone was a bit easier to ride in, at least when the crosswind would blow. I could tell when the crosswind was gusting because tiny birds would appear flying over the dike, tumbling utterly out of control until the wind deposited them in the grass on the lee slope of the dike. Poor little buggers.

Otherwise it was just more headwind, more air holding me back. This town Trek doesn't have narrow low bars like a road bike does, so I bent low and grabbed the forks to try and shrink into the wind. My thighs rammed my belly, making me feel especially fat and useless.

A crosswind spilled me, and the panniers finally gave up the ghost. A gazillion little plastic bits smooshed under the bicycle. I contemplated an ancient brick pump house for some minutes, listening to pulleys clang on masts set above the pump house dock. There might not be a soul alive that knows what that tackle was originally built for. The pump house itself looked like it was about ready to follow the rotting dock into the canal, to join the rest of the decay in the water. There but for God go I.

OK, I thought. This needs to change. I'm a better-than-average long-distance backpacker but a pretty crappy cyclist. Time to roll with our strengths, the gloves are coming off, etc., etc. I packed the backpack as if I were carrying it, duct taped the remnants of the panniers with the gear I would not be using again, secured it to the frame, and moved on. The reduced profile sped me up, and not having great big plastic things swinging around probably made me a bit more stable. Increased ass load from the pack, but ass in this case falls under wind in the org chart. Another brilliant sunset biking the shores of Okeechobee.

Is it common for people to never find their real strength until they want to die? I think it is.

After I imagined my totem animal dropping by and having a frank chat with me I found it much easier to pedal, but harder to keep my brain working in normal places. My thoughts wandered.

The entire south end of the lake, from Moore's Head to Belle Glade, is lined with sugar cane on the canal side. The cane smelled bad. I've walked through just about every kind of agricultural land between Atlanta and Bangor and I have never smelt a crop that reeks like this. It's nice enough to look at, but it has to sit in clean water all day and all night just to grow. It gets wild clean water squirted into it from underground and poisoned water gets squirted into the lake. It's like a public health program in reverse: the dike takes your tax money and then injects you with arsenic.

Of course, said the crazy little man that lives in my brain. It all comes down to Hoover.

Oh, god, not this again, I said to the crazy little man

Wild water is feminine; it's the domain of the moon. Hoover's a name that hates wild water. J. Edgar and mansex and all that. This is a Hoover place; it is a place that hates untamed water. So Hoover dressed up his man things, his straight canals and straight dams and straight rocks, he dresses them in wild water and goes and dances with the president! Right in front of everyone's noses! This place is so totally J. Edgar!

Shut up crazy little man, I say.

After a while I was pedaling under a half moon and getting some cover from the wind: a gigantic forest of melaleuca, the biggest stand of the stuff I've ever seen. They've perfected the art of growing up and immediately falling down, like Beirut. Melaleuca shades out native cover but its greatest weapon is its water sucking ability. It's a weapon aimed directly at developers, since this one tree could easily squeeze a lot of residents out of the state by squeezing the water supply. There's something sort of endearing about an invasive tree planted by developers causing developers problems. It would be endearing, anyway, except that those developers have the resources to move on to something else, and we don't.

Back home there was a guy who moved into Lakewood Ranch who- God forbid!- obeyed the county laws governing watering restrictions. His yard turned brown. His homeowner association started fining him for having a brown yard. He started watering again because the homeowner association fined more than the county. Somehow the homeowner association was never, you know, approached by law enforcement for breaking the law. People put too much authority in uniforms. If a cop runs over a hobo and tells you nothing happened, and you say nothing, you're still breaking the law. Of course, if the homeowner association is perceived as being more effective in maintaining quality of life, you might just decide you have another set of laws right there. I could see Lakewood Ranch having a hobo-murdering clause in their CC&R, for example.

Clouds began to blot out the moon, and the night got dark quickly. I could see the lights of Clewiston ahead. It was decision time. If I stayed the night in Clewiston I would have a sixty-seven mile ride tomorrow to my car. If the wind was with me it was possible. If the wind was against me I didn't think it was. I needed weather data and food, and I would have to pass through Clewiston anyway to get over Industrial Canal. A restaurant stop sounded nice. I dropped off the dike, stopped in at a Hungry Howie's and grabbed a spicy something salad and giant diet soda. The staff was kindly enough to tune in the Weather Channel for me. Luckily the NASCAR race just ended.

I was one happy hobo.

####################

The weather channel had spoken. Southwest winds all day Monday, shifting to south in the afternoon, then calm with thunderstorms later. For once I would have perfect winds, pavement virtually the whole day, and I felt pretty good. I made my way to the Relax Inn I saw from the dike, thanking the Hungry Howie people again for letting me watch the weather.

"Two beds, only sleep in one", said the clerk.
"Sorry?" I said.
"Two beds in room," said the clerk, a bit piqued,"You sleep in one."
I tried to smile but I think my face made more of a sneery sort of grimace. I call it my Cheney smile. If I ditched Rajneesh’s Rude Relaxation Inn right here I would have to make a bridge crossing over the Industrial Canal at night, and I’d been trying to avoid the canal bridges at night. The moon was still hidden, which made biking on the dike a bit more difficult. I was sorely tempted to pedal off and let him sell my room to some Haitian prostitot. Still: water, bed, electricity, phone Monica, sleep. Toilet!
"Okay," I said.
"No pack on other bed."
"You bet!" I said, a little too enthusiastically. I gave him a double thumbs up and a crazy smile.
No other words passed between us, which was probably for the best.
I went to my room and tuned in Black Hawk Down on the television, trying to write off the horrible service I always get in motels like the Relax Inn of 820 E Sugarland Hwy in Clewiston, FL.

I ditched my bamboo tent poles and the broken pannier. Camping equipment went into the intact pannier, which was duct-taped behind the seat until it was firmly integrated into the frame. Wouldn't be needing the tent, sleeping bag, or tent poles again. The rear wheel had picked up a bit of a wobble, which I initially thought was axle imbalance, but with a bit more tinkering proved to be bent spokes. Oh heck. Thirty miles of gravel too many. Plus all those miles I was lost back at Fisheating Creek.

The Black Hawk on the television just ate an RPG with its tail rotor. I watched the tail rotor spin on its off-center axle, the rotation whipping around until it sawed off its own nacelle. "Lost rear rotor. Super Six Four going down. Going down hard." Somehow I fell asleep listening to a minigun's chainsaw roar, thinking about the rear wheel on my bicycle.

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Monday, February 18, 2008
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The alarm went off at 6 and I was on the dike by 6:45. Clewiston is "the sweetest town in Florida" due to the sugar industry here. The locals were torn about Big Sugar: on the one hand they like economic activity, but on the other hand they love fishing and potable water.

I rode at a good clip, with no wind of any kind so early in the morning. The sun began peeking between the horizon and the same low clouds that had trapped the moonlight last night. The cane fields were pretty if foul-smelling. As the sun came up the wind started kicking, south out of my starboard fore, but then I started the big turn north outside of Belle Glade, putting most of the wind behind me. Rear wheel began to pick up some noticeable lateral movement. I stopped at a rest area to check it out, but there was nothing I could do with spokes. The rear wheel was going to have to just tough it out.

I was sort of enjoying the relative isolation of the southern shore. Not an RV park in sight, and I could see towns from more than five miles off. At the same time, I was wondering if I was going to have to get a ride soon, with the rear wheel going all over the place, or worse, if it was going to spill me at ten miles an hour. A lot of people would get some cheap laughs if I break an arm going on a paved bike path around a perfectly flat lake.

I grabbed some water from the rest stop and pushed on to Pahokee.

After fifty some miles on the LOST I caught my first sight of Lake Okeechobee, the water part of it anyway. It looked like the Gulf. There was no sign of land anywhere but for the shore I rode on. I wondered at the double-red channel markers. You're supposed to keep the green on your right when leaving harbor, and the red on your right when coming back to harbor, hence the boater's lullaby of "green-going-right-red-returning". Double red could mean many things, I thought, all of them bad. I closed enough to see shoal water underneath the double red markers. They were hazard markers, then. There were a lot of shoal hazards in this lake, perhaps not unsurprising for a body of water that's been losing a foot a year.

I rode past a sketchy little skydiving airport. "SKYDIVE USA" said the sign. Something I'd like to try eventually, if I ever get comfortable with the idea of blowing a couple of hundred dollars on a couple of hour's entertainment. It's also hard to get comfortable with the idea of jumping out of a perfectly good airplane.

I rode into Pahokee at 9:39, marking twenty three miles made in three hours, minus a twenty minute break. The possibility I might actually get through sixty-some miles today became a bit more real. Breakfast in Pahokee was huevos rancheros from the coffee shop. Delicious. The parents to my right annoyed me. Slapping your three year old for picking up a fork is not going to make her stronger or smarter. How about explaining the fork, since that's obviously why she's picking it up? Mom and dad use shiny spiky thing, perhaps I will try to use shiny spiky thing. WHACK! Oh well guess not.

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Pahokee was pretty charming anyway, but I was beginning to notice that the towns progressively became more and more charming the more tired I got, regardless of their actual charm content. I watched sailboats bob on their moorings to my left. I cameled up at the Pahokee boat ramp bathroom, filled up my reserve water bag, every water container I had, actually; this would be the last potable water until I got back to my car at the town of Okeechobee, forty-five miles off, almost directly across the east axis of the lake. Lowgeared up the dike and I was northbound on the east shore at 10:45. Then a sign:

TRAIL CLOSED. FOR MORE INFORMATION CALL XXX-XXX-XXXX

I stopped, cursed sincerely, dug out my cell, and called the number:
"DOO DEE DOO. WE'RE SORRY, THE NUMBER YOU HAVE CALLED IS. ."
"Fiddlesticks," I said as I powered off the phone. This stretch was going to be the last unpaved section, from Pahokee to Port Mayaca. According to the map the only alternate route was northbound US 441, which paralleled the trail. Hopefully I could hop back on the dike at Port Mayaca. I started north on the shoulder of the highway.

There were a lot of trucks. Big trucks, small trucks, middlin trucks, all carrying loads of citrus and dirt. I wished I had a harpoon, but skiing behind a semi at fifty-five miles an hour on a worn out commuter bike with a bad rear wheel would probably not score high on the Smart-O-Meter. Not to mention the problematic operation of such a device. Firing a weapon capable of punching five millimeters of mild steel is not a task you’d want to do from the back of a bicycle; the recoil would send you halfway to Miami.

The shoulder got very small, and then there was construction and one-lane traffic. Kindly Mexican signalmen stopped traffic both ways for me, which they really didn’t have to do, but I always got the feeling that Mexicans get a kick out of gringos on bikes, especially worn-out looking sun burnt gringos with a Clampett assortment of plastic and duct tape on their luggage racks. I thanked them profusely.

Other times I wasn’t so lucky, and had to scamper like a rabbit to get from one shoulder to the next before the shoulder disappeared and I was creamed by a dirt truck carrying toxic sludge from one place to another. Feel that adrenaline! Thanks to my body’s integrated emergency response system and the brisk tailwind, I covered the twelve miles between Pahokee and Port Mayaca in half an hour.

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Up and over the St. Lucie canal near Port Mayaca, I thought about the cemetery near here, where most of the victims of the 1928 storm were buried: sixteen hundred dead, most from exposure after they were washed out into the Everglades. Swamps are one of the hardest survival environments, which is strange when you look at them. Tons of water, tons of critters, should be easy to live off the land . . but you can’t walk far, you can't get dry, the water’s lethal with pathogens, and a lot of the critters that live there are well-equipped to snack on you rather than the reverse. It takes tough, desperate, somewhat scary people to survive in swamps. Pick up any early history of Florida and you’ll see what I mean.

Not too far outside of Port Mayaca I could see the Treasure Island water tower, which I knew was not too far from Okeechobee. The end was sort of in sight. The lake had begun to generate a seabreeze, which was not optimal, but it only managed to slew the wind around just a bit to port, mostly aft. It was going to really bite when I went around the bend towards Okeechobee. I stopped at a picnic shelter near the Henry Creek lock and sucked up some shade. The sun on my head was transitioning from innocent sunburn to hazard. It felt like my forehead was sloughing off. I’m not sure what strange madness caused me to not get a hat for this trip, but it’s another lesson learned.

After Nublin Creek lock the wind unexpectedly shifted to WSW. I was biking square into the wind again, but thankfully Aeolus did not send quite the force he did yesterday. The rear wheel probably appreciated the abatement of velocity; the touring speed today had given the wheel a decidedly dangerous-looking, even third world kind of wobble. The trail remained unchanged. Mound, lake, canal, treeless grass and water. I got to the “official” LOST trailhead, three miles short of my car, at 2 PM, sixty some miles in just over eight hours.

The official trailhead was so incredibly ghetto I couldn’t believe that anyone would brave the trail behind it. The canal crossing of Taylor Creek was the worst on the trail, with absolutely no shoulder, forcing cars to beep and curse at pedestrians. Only the certifiable would try to bike across this. To get to the actual trailhead, you weave through a mostly drunk RV park and put your car between a propane tank farm and an airboat repair yard. I saw a carful of Japanese tourists drive hopefully up to the trailhead, look around politely, then promptly drive back the way they came. No bathrooms, no water, the land itself a sort of watery Mordor. I got back on the dike and lowgeared into a headwind until I saw the US 441 parking lot, so much nicer than the “official” trailhead that I was glad I’d ignored the driving instructions on the LOST website. I coasted down the dike, right up to my car, ending my cycling trip around Lake Okeechobee. It was 3:30 PM.

I walked out on the birdwalk, called Monica, and relaxed, letting my skin spit out some of the heat it had been bombed with. The east shore was awesome. Paved the whole way, relatively undeveloped, and you can actually see the lake. It would be perfect for anyone training in an endurance event. No distractions, flat ground, just go. Tents really aren’t necessary, you can get a bed at regular intervals, and that cuts down loads to almost nothing. The lack of water and bathrooms is a problem anywhere on the LOST. Biking, I could carry a ton of water, but runners wouldn’t have that luxury. Guys can stealth pee on a lonely side of the dike, but if I were a girl I’d have been a little put off by all that open space behind my butt.

All things considered, a decent weekend. In a few weeks I might even be able to sit normally again.

PCT Talk!

2007-12-18T07:48:00.001-05:00

There is a conversation that takes place in the household of former Appalachian Trail through-hikers. It doesn't always go the same way, but it's always something like this:

AT Hiker: "You know, the re-supply points aren't as remote as PCT through-hikers always made them sound."
Spouse: "Uh huh"
AT Hiker: "I mean really, I've been reading the PCT journals and the worst stretch is the Sierras. Outside of that, you got roads every sixty or a hundred miles or so, and it's a twenty-mile hitch, max. PCTers I met on the AT were all like, 'oh, you have to bury food caches' and 'there are no hostels' and all this crap. There's stores and kickass hostels, they were just being pompous bastards. Whatever, most of those PCT people dropped out in Virginia mumbling profanities about rocks and trail maintenance."
Spouse: "You've been reading the trail journals?"
AT Hiker: "Yeah, but it's not like I'm, y'know, planning to through hike the PCT or anything."
Spouse: "Uh-huh."
AT Hiker: "Yeah, anyway, it sounds like the hitches are a lot easier, too. Some of the campgrounds sound pretty sketchy, but there were some sketchy people near the AT, too."
Spouse: "So when are you going?"
AT Hiker: "No, I'm not going to through hike. Not for another, like, ten years. Maybe longer!"
Spouse: "Uh-huh"

I'm not saying that anything like this conversation ever happened in my household. I am, after all, not planning on through-hiking the PCT. As part of my not-planning, a couple of observations about the PCT, the 2,650 mile western sister of the Appalachian Trail

>>The cold is colder, the hot is hotter, the highs are higher, and the lows are lower- physically and psychologically. The Sierra- the most gorgeous stretch of the PCT, by all accounts- is a psychological low for a lot of PCT hikers. Chalk it up to a devil's mixture of altitude sickness and isolation. I can sympathize with the latter. 200 miles is a long way between towns.
>>The wets aren't wetter, though. It's a very dry trail until near the end, and an eight-liter water load is standard. Rule of thumb: when you hit water, act as if it's the last water you're ever going to see. Guzzle a couple of liters, cook supper, fill your bottles- do everything that needs water- then move on. Don't be afraid to dry camp. It's a race and thirst is the timer.
>>The water you do find is awful. We can be honest here: a good thirty percent of AT through-hikers don't treat their water. I was pretty lax about water treatment myself. This is not an option on the PCT. Water sources are, more often than not, lakes that have no outlet and have been hiked and camped on for hundreds of years. Water-borne sickness fells a larger proportion of PCT through-hikers than it does AT through hikers.
>>In spite of its vertical scale, the PCT is suprisingly mild in grade, rarely exceeding 5%. It's also missing the boulder scrambles that slow down AT hikers below the dreaded 2 MPH marker. The PCT was designed for pack animals, God bless them, and you can see it when you pan over the trail in Google Earth- the path actually tries to follow contour lines, as opposed to going up and over every piece of high ground it can find. Because of this, the PCT, although longer, generally takes less time than the AT.
>>The southern section needs special tactics to make miles in unshaded desert. Pack umbrellas are very cool, as long as their locking system can stand the wind. Desert walkers should siesta in a shady spot during the heat of the day (I did this myself on the AT in PA), and consider night hiking when the moon is out (with no rocks, it's not as dangerous as it was in Maine).
>>As always, ultralight wins the day, because it makes room for more water. I'm already pretty close to bottom on the pack scale, but there's room for improvement. A lighter pack like the Mariposa could take off another 30 ounces or so. Replacing raingear and shelter with a poncho tarptent shaves off 15 ounces. Swapping out the sleeping bag with a lighter model, a very expensive 15 ounces. I can ditch a lot of gear in the desert, and mail the cold weather gear to myself before the high Sierras. It seems sort of unfair that the coldest stretch is also the longest between resupplies, sticking you with a ten day food load along with your cold weather gear and your bloody freakin' ice axe.
>>The bears are not really bigger. You don't cross grizzly territory. You do need a kevlar bear cannister, though, not because the bears are more ferocious but because there are not many trees to hang a bear bag from. Everyone cautions about Yosemite bears, which are canny and persistent. They've learned to manipulate friction locks on bear cannisters and unlocked car doors. They'd probably have cell phones if they could find a provider with coverage, but who needs pizza delivery when all these crazy hikers keep bringing food for free?

Anyway, definitely not planning to through-hike the PCT! There's still the Superior Hiking Trail, with all its views of Lake Superior and its adorable Fargo accents. And its quaint three hundred mile length.

Back to the Future

2007-08-15T18:23:00.000-04:00

Link to the photo album of my July hike through one half of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I managed to revisit the site of my bear appointment without wetting myself, and even got a twenty two mile day in. It was strange in the utmost going through all those motions of hiking- taping blisters, getting water, getting rained on - after being back in the real world for a number of months. Something akin to going out to your garage and finding the Batmobile, or finding out that you're Tyler Durden. Probably more the latter, but without Mr. Pitt's personal charisma.

Wedding Site Up

2007-08-15T18:20:00.000-04:00

http://johnandmonica2008.googlepages.com/

Mystery Advisors

2007-06-17T03:05:00.000-04:00

We've know for some time that there were mystery advisers guiding the hands of the teenagers running Abu Ghraib. The question is . . who were they? Not CIA, not Army. Where did they come from?

Traitor and America-Hater Seymour Hersh explores the revelations of General Taguba.

The Underrated Edward James Olmos

2007-06-09T21:11:00.000-04:00

As many know, I do not own a television. I do, however, make exceptions when it comes to uncommon art. The combination of a New Yorker review (notoriously snooty regarding science fiction), and the recommendations of a friend historically loathe to sci-fi ("This Battlestar Galactica . . um . . it's rather good . . ") convinced me to view a DVD that perchance landed on my doorstep, that contained the re-imagined miniseries of Battlestar Galactica.

I agree, it is rather good. In fact, it might be some of the best television ever made. Commander Adama, played by Olmos, might be one of the most well-acted science fiction character actors to ever be portrayed. So little facial movement, and so much said, with just a twitch, or a shake of those acne-scarred jowels. So much so, I can say that when I grow up, I hope I grow up to be Edward James Olmos' Commander Adama.*

*This is a move up, because when I was 11 I was hoping I would grow up to be Commander Spock. Fate is cruel.

Full World

2007-06-07T11:59:00.001-04:00

Something strange happened in the mid 1990s. Liquidity- especially that controlled by the more ballsy investment houses- began moving into the developing world, rather than camp out in its normal homes stateside looking for reinvestment. This liquidity especially enjoyed going to Southeast Asia, and formed the precarious foundation of the "little tigers" that arose there. It came down in a big thump, of course, but the inner question- in my mind- is why they abandoned the traditional market in the first place.

Since the East Asian Financial Crisis, that free-floating global capital has been like a fleeing Frankenstein monster set afire, running back and forth from industry to industry, chased by a mob only it can see. The late Dot Com Bubble, the Real Estate Bubble, the so-far successfully mitigated China Bubble . . that Creature gets around.

Economists disagree about what causes financial bubbles, but it's easy to define it as "too much given to too little". Money, after all, is supposed to represent value. The problem here is that the judgment call of "value" is not lining up with what the real world thinks is worthwhile. That's what makes that monster so skittish. When we get an idea of how the values are going to realign, we not only have a better handle on the future, but we are in a better position to make a whole lot of money.

Money represents stuff. It's a given, but it assumes a constant demand into the future and a constant influx of materiel. What happens when we don't need -or even want- more stuff? It can happen, even to Americans. Furthermore, you aren't guaranteed an infinite world. The Earth is a (relatively) tiny globe of silica and iron floating about in space, not a blue dome maintained by Jehovah. Even if it were, you can't trust the landlord with maintenance a lot of the time.

What happens is that you don't have such an overwhelming interest in making things that make other things, i.e., capital. When you lose interest in that, weird things happen, because capital is very important. We call it"capitalism" for a reason. When the ratio of capital to resources drops, the capital is deflated in real value, and an awful lot of money floats away from the value it was supposed to represent, looking for a bubble to fasten onto. There's that pesky monster again.

It's not a particularly new monster. Locally, this sort of thing has happened all the time- and I do mean all the time- throughout history. There are two things right now that make the monster a lot scarier: one, that the money is so liquid that it presses against the definition of the word "money"; two, the world, unlike a nation, does not have a Federal Bank Chairman.

Ultimately, the safest economic activity will be in those industries that can find resource value in capital. These go all the way from mining old dumps for strategic metals to mining asteroids, or setting up a power grid based on home-unit energy production (imagine a neighborhood where each house gooses the flow of the grid), or something no one has thought up yet. Closed world economics involves a different type of thinking, but it doesn't mean that there isn't money to be made.

Google Streetview: Appalachian Trail?

2007-06-01T16:55:00.001-04:00

For the past unknown number of unknown time increments, Google has been mapping city streets in various locations, like late-Antiquity monks frantically scribing every text they could get their hands on, like something from a Canticle for Leibowitz, but with higher data densities. No matter what might happen, it appears the Church of Google will have recorded our civilization for posterity, but open questions remain as to what a "record" is, and what effect it has on a readership that is, at this point, hypothetical.

There's no upper limit to the distortion an alien culture can make on a data without context- witness the sudden rise of lower case in the Roman script. Something the recorders assigned importance to- letter shape- was actually nothing more than the cursive handwriting of a common scribe.

I imagine artificial intelligences and bio-engineered organisms, survivors of some future catastrophe a thousand years hence, finding Google Streetview and shaping their culture after these pictures of huge cities, their mysterious inhabitants and inexplicable activities. Perhaps they would all choose to make themselves look like classic automobiles. Of all the possible futures, perhaps the one I look forward to the least is the one that resembles a real-life re-enactment of The Transformers.

In any case, it made me curious: would one day a hiker carry the camera and hard drive to do this on the Appalachian trail? There's a reason Google Streetview views mostly from the road. All that data storage is heavy, and I can easily see a through-hiker sacrificing the hardware to some strange god by, oh, Hot Springs. Images of shrines and burning also come to mind. Hikers abhor adding grams, let alone pounds, to their pack weight, especially if the weight is not peanut butter.

My hats off to the first hiker that does it . .

Midwives

2007-05-11T10:33:00.001-04:00

Michael Vlahos has some very interesting thoughts in the feature story of the American Conservative.

The piece is a commentary, the topic nothing you haven't thought of before, but gorgeously written and presented. Mr. Vlahos has a hand with verbal imagery.

http://www.amconmag.com/2007/2007_02_12/feature.html

Searching for the Sphere of Archimedes

2007-05-10T10:31:00.001-04:00

A really, really fascinating article for anyone with a passing interest in the history of science.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/05/14/070514fa_fact_seabrook?printable=true

I had read of the Antikythera mechanism before, but did not quite realize its complexity. Also, I had no idea they found others. The author muses on how technology is abandoned by various cultures over the years. It's something worth pondering, because it goes beyond technology and history, or even design. It has to do with culture. It hurts to say it, and I know of at least one scientist who will throw things at me for saying it, but science is part of culture. Function does not live on a Tibetan mountaintop.

There is a set of alternate history novels in which a group of apartheid South African mercenaries go back in time to the American Civil War. They bring the shematics for the AK-47. In the novel, naturally the South manufactures this asynchronous assault rifle, and things happen as may be.

This article of the Mechanism reveals that such fantasies are exactly that. Our technology does not exist in a Platonic vacuum of absolute functionality, but in a thick atmosphere of our own values, the primordial muck of design. Worthies of the American Civil War would no sooner begin manufacturing AK-47s than we would begin manufacturing race-specific retroviruses. We design and build things according to our values, and not according to a single function.

That said, it's probably a good thing we didn't have tanks in 1600, or AK-47s in 1862. Hooray for values.

At the Mountains of Madness

2007-05-02T23:15:00.000-04:00

One of the enduring literary innovations of H. P. Lovecraft is the idea of an infectious fiction. In his world, there are fictions- or texts, or words, or concepts- that, when read, have immediate and dire consequences in the physical world without a conscious intermediary. It's subtle, terrifying. It means that once you've read an H. P. Lovecraft story it's already too late. By the act of reading, you have tripped into motion a threat from beyond time.

There is a number (more) that I could show you that similarly, merely by the act of you viewing it, would cause you (or me) to be fined or even imprisoned. Those thirty-two characters only have to exist in front of your optic nerves to be illegal, according to the writ of the DMCA. I have chosen not to look at the number for this reason; I don't want to see anything that can get me arrested merely by virtue of being inside my brain. Theoretically the magic number allows you to do something involving movies and LINUX, but I don't care and I don't want to know. I don't even know what I just wrote. I have a very short memory.

As far as I'm concerned, these arcane digits are the Necronomicon, and our corrupt congresscritters are their Shoggoth. I know better than to goose Shoggoths in sensitive bikini areas. Let the movie industry have their magical textbooks and weird secrets.

EDIT: Or you can tempt fate and Death itself! And buy a T-SHIRT emblazoned with the fearful secret number! Or even the deadly secret as spelled in a fiendish hex color pallette! To what depths will these deviants sink?! Verily, I run out of exclamation points!

Dispatches from an Economic Boom

2007-05-02T13:05:00.000-04:00

2006 was a record year for economic growth, said an official on the radio news. Good things to hear on your way to a client's site, a sign that the world is turning at least in some of the right directions. Corporate profits rising at record levels, continued the announcer. Profits mean reinvestment and improvement of infrastructure, said another. Wonderful, wonderful news to hear from a random talking head snorting coke off the teleprompter. It's probably just a moral failing of the people that this neighborhood looks like Tijuana on a bad day.

At 9 am a drunk on a bicycle weaves into heavy traffic, bumper to bumper at fifty miles per hour through a school zone. Chaos ensues as drivers try to make up their minds if they want to hit the schoolchildren, the drunk, or each other. If I was a crossing guard in this town I swear I'd carry a Javelin missile launcher, or perhaps a more rustic RPG-7. It would match the rust and crumbling concrete a bit better, I think.

The youths glowering in front of the Wal-Mart could be distinguished from ordinary gang members by their traditional blue vest and smiley face pin. It's a charmingly multiracial gathering of what I like to call "Future Carjackers of America". A particularly hostile Caucasian who looked to be about eleven sneered ferociously at me while sucking on his Doral Menthol, blowing smoke. I lower my gaze not because I am afraid of a gang of elementary school-age Wal-Mart employees but because I do not want to hit someone who should, at this time of day, be in a clean institutional building learning about multiplication and cooties. Later I check to see if there is some sort of school holiday or vacation that allows school-age children the liberty to be working at Wallyworld this fine Tuesday morning. There is not. Undoubtedly the rainbow coalition on break obtained permission to work all hours from their attentive guardians, parents, and/or grandparents. I remember one kid I used to work with in the restaurant business whose mother charged him six hundred dollars a month to live in a garage with a sink for a toilet. He couldn't get a real apartment because, hey, he was sixteen.

I met with an old friend for lunch, and the discussion got around to making money, and making your money work. "My 401k did one point eight percent for 2006," he said.
"You're kidding," I said.
"Nope. Would have done just as good putting it in the bank."
Actually, given the amount of money in the fund, he would have done better, assuming he put it in a money market, which there is no reason not to do if you are putting in more than about three grand. I was pretty incredulous. Someone somewhere is taking off with a lot of money- pretty much all the indexes did better than fifteen percent in 2006.
"They have a lot of fees they take off," he adds. I'll say. I poked around the story using the magic of the internet, and saw much of what I expected.
401ks all across the country look like this. If it weren't for the matching funds provided by employers, these managed assets would be dumped faster than real estate is getting dumped now. Even with matching, the returns are laughably close to what you could get from just taking all the money and putting it in under some sort of halfway-competent manager. Big companies are basically funding these incompetent managers so that they can get bargain buybacks and keep the roof under their feet, at the expense of investors, and, naturally, those employees stuck with the goddamn things. It does mean record profits, though. Profits are good. Good profits mean you have a good economy.

I got to Bed, Bath, and Beyond fifteen minutes early; I reclined the seat and took a good nap. When I got out, I almost ran into an older woman, about fifty, wearing threadbare clothes but otherwise looking like she took decent care of herself, or at least a good a care as you can take when you make nine thousand dollars a year. She was bleeding from a few places on her face and arms. "Some of the boys around here, they threw some rocks last night, shredded my tent"
"You behind DeSoto?", I asked, remembering a tent village I used to pass when I biked to the DeSoto Mall.
"Yeah, they got a bunch of folks . ." She paused, as if embarassed "Could I get a ride to the hospital from you? I thought I was OK, but . ."
I can't really describe the emotion I felt. It's like you asked a bartender to make the most revolting cocktail that he could imagine, then getting it and drinking it, and then having to pretend to have a good time for the rest of the evening. "I'm sorry . . I'm meeting my fiance . . we're doing our registry."
God bless her, she genuinely looked apologetic. "Oh! You get that done. Sorry, I saw you sleeping in the car, and I just thought . ." She thought I was a fellow homeless person. Someone who could help.
I'm about to mention calling the police, but remember what a buddy of mine in law enforcement mentioned about the Bradenton City police. "We get a call from them, we go to the scene with witnesses. Not from the City. We get folks from FHP, or county." I think about the Sarasota police whaling on those soup kitchen people with big flashlights, and the St. Pete police that tore down the tent city. I chuckle to myself thinking about calling police to help a bleeding homeless woman. I'd be better off calling the Humane Society.
"Take care of youself, ma'am"
"Oh I will. Bless you. And your sweetie."

Monica and I had a great time doing our registry. We are a fine couple, waltzing through dishes and food processors and All-Clad Stainless Cookware. I imagine the sweet, sweet foods I am going to be making with these boss new kitchen gadgets. It's some kind of joy ringing up the most expensive of every possible item. I hear China needs the money anyway. Their economy is growing too. Record profits. Things have never been better. Prosperity, America, that's where it's at.

Supersize Me, Edwardian-Style

2007-04-17T10:00:00.001-04:00

Catering the 25 seat LCF Board Dinner went off smashingly and without a hitch. Last year's was somewhat more hectic as the recipes were more complicated, and there was the additional stress of me leaving for the Appalachian Trail in a few days. It gave everything a Last Meal sort of quality.

This year, the opening night's barbecue had a nice molded Greek salad and sides of hummus and harissa. As always, harissa is a big hit, though it is nothing more than a puree of roasted red bell peppers, eggplant, olive oil, salt, and cayenne. We followed with lemon bars (it is the South, you know) and baklava.

The board dinner's menu included cheese, olives, chopped salad with pine nuts, ciabatta, ratatouille, various pastas, roast chicken, and sliced whole roast tenderloin with a marsala-garlic-basil cream sauce. This sauce had to be improvised since apparently no grocery store in the state carries Knorr bearnaise anymore, or even dried tarragon. Wal-mart does manage to find room to stock no fewer than seventeen different types of sausage gravy.

Tiramisu chased all this food down our gullet, although it would have been much better had I made the tiramisu one more day in advance. It was a bit runny the day of serving, but thirty hours later it had really come together.

All in all, I thought it was a decent meal, a seven or eight on my personal scale. It's a good thing all those leftovers are in a different house. All in all, though, when I groan thinking of the richness of this food, I just think about this article:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/healthy_eating/article1640930.ece

Compared to the Edwardian diet, the board dinner was practically a dietetic.

Bon appetit!

Perfect Storm

2007-04-11T12:36:00.000-04:00

A very nice dissection of what happened at JetBlue in February. To summarize:

Management strangely fascinated by idea of planes stuck to tarmac by ice.
Sabre systems and Navitaire systems don't sit next to each other easily, claim other has cooties.
Attack of the SAP Consultants!
JetBlue ignoring the limitations set down by Navitaire system (who, it should be said, should have laid down the law a little more emphatically)
More Navitaire system limitations: passengers can't rebook without learning SQL and purchasing secret Navitaire passwords from Russian mob.
Serious system limitation in tracking baggage. No system, actually.

Good read.