Layered Ratatouille

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Easy Spanish Pot Roast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.