THE GURGLING COD

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I made pretzels. They turned out pretty well, in spite of not being very photogenic. I used the killjoy's receipt,* and can't offer much in the way of amendment, other than that bread flour is a completely different creature than all-purpose flour. Bread flour has more glutent, and will hit you back. Also, at least in the Fleischman's line, the "instant" yeast speced in many receipts is now sold as bread machine yeast. Baking is real fussy.

*The Cook's website is a fucking disaster. Searching both the americastestkitchen and cooksillustrated domains revealed no evidence of a receipt they published in one of their own damn books. Considering that Kimball's MO is to recycle the same receipts in as many formats as possible, the the un-robust searching capability may be deliberate for all I know.

Yo, that's fresh

I've been known to get on the Wed Chef in the past for getting all Epicurious commenter on receipts she is ostensibly evaluating, but she does have a decent eye for picking likely stuff out of the paper. Both in evidence in the recent post on Regina Schrambling's Mushroom Ragout. On the one hand, a good receipt to cook -- good things happen with mushrooms, wine, butter, and stock. On the other, wholesale audibles on ingredients, but why beat a dead horse? The news, however, is an aside about making creme fraiche at home:

Pour 2 tablespoons of buttermilk and 2 cups heavy cream (do not use the ultra-pasteurized, additive-filled kind or this won't work) into a clean glass jar. Screw the lid shut and let stand at room temperature (between 65 and 75 degrees) for 8 to 24 hours, or until thickened. Stir and refrigerate at least 24 hours before using (this helps to continue thickening the cream).

I gave this a try, and it works like a charm. It even worked w/ the whipping cream I used, which was the only cream to be had. I felt like Peter Parker. If you find yourself outside of the reach of  the Vermont Butter and Cheese empire, you can still get your creme fraiche on.

Yarr!

So the kiddies from my piracy class are coming over for an end of the semester meal/transparent effort to goose my evals. The class has skewed more Mediterranean than Caribbean, so we get to watch this treasure. Sean Connery in blackface? Sign me up. So, what to cook?

Asian Approximation

Last week, I issued an appeal for some Taiwanese guidance, foodwise, for the cinetrix' screening of Yi Yi for her students. Time, ingredients, technique all militated against any even remotely authentic night market feast, but it did give me a chance to work through a few things in a variety of Asian idioms. (And yes, I recognize that it's like serving schnitzel for an Antonioni movie, but what are you gonna do?

As a baseline for any kids who might be vegetarian or skittish, cinetrix wanted some cold sesame noodles. Not fancy, but they seemed to do the job.

For sides, I looked at Kylie Kwong's Simple Chinese Cooking. This is a big and handsome book from Viking Studio that I have unduly neglected since its arrival last winter. It is definitely on the coffee-table side of the spectrum, with proportions similar to Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet, or other Alford/Duguid jawns. The focus is on tight shots of food, with none of the National Geographical stuff that many cookbooks in English treating non-Western foods feel obliged to include. One feature of the design worth emulating is that each receipt is on a single page, with an illustration facing. I can take or leave the illustrations, but it is a treat not to have to flip back and forth. (The Zuni cookbook, for all of its strengths, pulls the ingredients on one page, technique on another trick a lot.) The layout means that there are not that many receipts overall, and some surprising redundancies -- many more receipts for soft-boiled eggs than one might expect, for instance. It's certainly not the only Chinese cookbook an experienced home cook would want, but it  would be a good first Chinese cookbook for someone looking to expand their repertoire.

From the Kwong, I made the spicy dry-fried green beans with  hoisin sauce and garlic. Basically, she has you fry green beans in peanut oil, discard the peanut oil, and run them back through the pan with hoisin and garlic. These were tasty, if oil-intensive and one of those dishes that puts the lie to the idea that vegetables are good for you. On the plus size, if you do not have, like a Berkeley philosophy professor who grows perfect haricots verts for you, one at a time, this is a forgiving prep for the ornerier green beans one is likely to see this time of year.

I also too a stab at Kwong's celery, cabbage , and carrot salad. In the absence of decent lettuce where I am, I've gotten more interested in salads that are not lettuce-driven. This is one of those receipts that seems needlessly fussy the first time through, but once you get the basic idea, it would not be hard to improvise. The detail of a quick pickle of the carrots was a nice touch, though there was considerable vagueness in the directions about what to do with the pickling solution after removing the carrots. A bit refined to call a slaw, but that's the basic idea.

For the main, I absorbed the helpful suggestions from Emily Upjohn, did a bit of interwebs research, and then made something up. I diced and trimmed some Boston butt, let it marinate overnight in sherry, five spice, garlic, chilies, and molasses. I drained the meat, reserved the marinade, boiled it, and let the drained meat sit in the freezer for a while before I ground it through the bigger setting in the Kitchen-Aid. I browned the meat in a big skillet, added some of the boiled marinade, and the water from the shitakes I had soaking. I removed the meat from the skillet,  warmed up some mushrooms and a head of bok choi, sliced horizontally and relatively thinly. I recombined the meat, and then tossed this with some thin Asian wheat noodles. I made a lot, and there was none left, so the kiddies seemed to like it.

At Home with the Big Red Chef

Last winter, I made a skeptical comment about the above knife over to Chow. A few months later I got an email from the knifemaker: 

Hi, just came across your post on Chow.com from 4.24.  I'd very much
like to show you these knives in person and address some of your
assumptions.  They are by no means for everyone,
but they are coming from a place of experience in food and design.
Anytime after this next Monday.  Just give a shout.

Eventually, this August, I got a chance to visit MKS proprietor Adam Simha's studio, see where the knives happen, and get the heft of one. I've been living with his red-handled 10" Chef's since.

Croquet and Baked Alaskas

or, at least Indian Summer. After a weekend of disappointment, and a virulent case of the mean reds afoot in the Cod household on Sunday, something simple and leftovery seemed to be the call. There was the question of the six ears of Silver Queen corn the lady at the farm stand had insisted I buy the day before, which had not found its way into the previous evening's Dinner for Henry pizzas. I did not want to shop. I grabbed a few remaining cherry tomatoes from the garden, and a few hot peppers, and some basil. I scraped the kernels off the cobs, being sure to rub the dull edge of the knife along the cob after I'd stripped off the kernels, to get the good stuff there. I did not have any white wine I wanted to cook with, so I poured some dry vermouth into a saucepan, added about three ears worth  of corn, some mashed garlics, and a couple of hot peppers.

I let the corn simmer while I quartered about a dozen basil leaves, and halved all the cherry tomatoes I had (about 8). I started a box of farfalle. I uncovered the corn which had cooked about 20 minutes, and let it cook down a bit. I put a couple of slugs of good (Frantoia) olive oil in a skillet, and added the corn, basil, and tomatoes. When the pasta was done, I mixed the lot together, and served it forth.

For an out of the pocket improvisation, and accidentally vegan to boot, this was solid. The pepper gives the corn a little bit of character, and the summer flavors of basil and tomato come through in a sort of attenuated way that is appropriate for this time of year.* Also, very good the next day cold. I hope to do this once more this season, and if I do, I will try to get yellow corn, to accentuate the color contrast with the pasta.

*If someone else had cooked it, I might call it "wistful, austere, but satisfying."

Lord, got tomatoes.

In an effort to get away from blogging about a blog about a TV show about cooking, a retardedly simple actual cooking post:
Tomatoes are, like, so good right now. If you are fancy, like Max, you go to an artisan bakery run by one of the lesser Coppolas, and make a tomato sandwich like he does. Many of the rest of us do not even live within a convenient drive of a Baldwin bakery, and have to make do with what's at the supermarket. But there are large parts of the country where tomatoes will grow like the Dickens,* far from any fancy bakery. You can save for that move to esseff, or you can improvise. I purchased a package of the widely-available Thomas's English Muffins. I toasted one. I sliced a tomato that was still warm from the garden. I spread a bit of mayo on the toasted muffin. I enjoyed my sandwich. Not as much as I would have enjoyed having Ludivine Sagnier pop bits of pan bagnat into my mouth, but it was better than 83% of the lunches I've had in 07.

*I saw an unusually robust Beefsteak shoot violating a blueberry bush just this morning.

Orecchiette all' Eero

An actual cooking post just to mix these things up. A receipt in the form of one of these things are not like the other:
A) Fancy cream from home-schooled local cows.
B) Fancy imported orecchiette.
C) Fancy locally-grown, pan-pipe-serenaded English peas.
D) Pinot Grigio
E) Junior Johnson's Country Ham Biscuit Pieces.
If you guessed E) you are correct. In the midst of a bunch of ingredients hand-raised by Hampshire College alumni, or lovingly imported from Italy, is a bolt of fat and salt right out of the Dirty, endorsed by a stock car legend, no less, and smuggled north of the Mason-Dixon by our pal Daniel.
The process is pretty straightforward. Boil pasta water. Shell peas -- you will want about 2 cups worth, shelled. Cut ham into pieces about the size of the nail on your pinkie. Brown the ham in a saucepan, add white wine to deglaze. (I used the PG that was open.) Reduce the wine, add cream to thicken (maybe 1/2 pint or a bit more -- I wasn't making a vaccine, so I did not measure). Start the pasta. When the cream is about the consistency you want, and the pasta is ready, add the peas and just allow to warm through. Toss the sauce with the pasta, and serve. When you combine the sauce and the pasta, you will see why it is called what it is. The peas, some of them anyway, nestle into the hollows of the orecchiette, creating an effect very much like David Frost sitting in one of the ball chairs that Aario Eero designed.* This is a keeper -- I look forward to trying it with different types of country ham, but I do not think it would be worth making without fresh peas to hand. I did try this once before, and was well into the receipt before I realized there was no orecchiette in the house -- I made it with twists, and it was not nearly as good.

*This image is in The Best of Life, but evidently not in the internets.

Fathers' Day

Shrimp and Mushrooms with Dill

Ingredients:
1 pound medium-size raw shrimp, about 26
½ pound mushrooms
1 TBS butter
Salt and pepper
3 TBS cognac
1 cup heavy cream + 3 TBS heavy cream (or sour cream or crème fraiche)
1 egg yolk
1/8 tsp cayenne pepper
Juice of half a lemon
¼ cup finely minced dill.

1. Shell and devein shrimp (or thaw if frozen); run them under cold water and drain

 2. Thinly slice mushrooms.

 3. Heat the butter in the saucepan and add the mushrooms.

 4. Add the shrimp; salt and pepper to taste. Cook about three minutes, strirring frequently.

 5. Ignite the cognac, which you have heated in a small saucepan and pour into dish

 6. Remove the shrimp with a slotted spoon (this is the hard part) and set aside. Add one cup of cream and cook over high heat about six minutes to reduce the liquid. Blend the remaining three tablespoons of cream with the egg yolk and cayenne, and stir the mixture into the sauce. Cook briefly, stirring rapidly, and the add the shrimp. Add the lemon juice and the dill, and serve with rice.

The cinetrix once pointed out a peculiar phenomenon to me: Among our parents' generation, moms did the majority of the cooking, but most dads had two or three dishes they could pull off reliably in a pinch. Despite their relatively prosaic nature, these dishes were frequently known as "Dad's famous _____" (Chicken or spaghetti or whatever.) My father was no exception. Especially after he retired, he stretched his repertoire a bit past the Daddy's bean soup of my childhood. (Campbell's Bean with Bacon, doctored with sliced onion, and maybe chunks of Danish salami, and definitely croûtons from Pepperidge Farms whole wheat bread.)

As I mentioned earlier, my father was never particularly comfortable in the kitchen. Recipes were scripts, rather than guidelines, and improvisation was to be avoided at all costs. To help with this approach, he would type out dishes that were particular favorites, and tape them to the inside of kitchen cabinets. The shrimp and dill concoction above was one of them. I never cared for it much, not being partial to shrimp or dill. I would be delighted beyond all words to have the opportunity to have it for supper tonight.

I've said this elsewhere, mostly in the context of Thanksgiving, but the point of food, beyond sustaining our metabolic functions, is the time it allows us to spend with people we love. And the people around the table are more important than what's on the table.  Think of us on Sunday, and the Cod's best to fathers, sons and daughters, present and absent.

Home Canning is killing hipsters?

For June, canning has been on my mind more than usual. A friend of mine, knowing that I'd been known to put stuff up from time to time, asked if she might be able to put up some of the produce she's growing this summer and live to tell.*  Similarly, as I flipped through an issue of ReadyMade, I saw a letter that said basically that the how-to canning article in a previous issue had not been scary enough:

"I'm 110 percent behind empowering people to can their own fruits and vegetables, but  I'm surprised how little attention your article paid to health and safety issues. I would hate for botulism to wipe out a bunch of hipsters.* The easy instructions you published are a great start, but some links to canning basics would have been a good way to put safety in the  minds of canning novices. I've found that uga.edu/nchfp is a solid resource for beginners."

I have not been following the reactions, but I imagine that the Rick's Picks DIY asparagus demo in last week's Boston Globe might garner a similar reaction:

First Field sterilizes glass jars in the dishwasher. "If you're low-tech, you can boil them for 15 minutes," he says. The pickles start with two pots on the stove, one for the vinegary brine, which is the flavoring liquid for the vegetables, the other filled with boiling water to seal the filled jars later.

Before he starts pickling, Field lays down the law. "You shouldn't be scared of pickling at home," he says. "One, pickling in your kitchen is really fun, and you should be able to find your own way through it. And two, you will not die of botulism making pickles. Just follow the steps carefully and patiently."

I'd put the over/under on folks writing in to say that you will die of botulism at five. "A dishwasher is not an autoclave" they will say. "The  USDA* says you should process jars in boiling water for a minimum of an hour!" True enough.  But the gap between what the Man says you need to do, and what home picklers actually do without killing themselves is considerable. Simply put, the interests of the USDA, as an agency, and you as a pickler, overlap, but are not identical. The USDA does not want you dying of botulism. You don't want to die of botulism. You want your pickles to be crisp. The USDA does not give a flying fuck at a a rolling pepperoncini how crisp your pickles are. These are, after all, the same folks who brought you the gray steak.

The Ball Blue Book (say that five times fast, and try not to think of junior prom) is similarly risk-averse, based as it is on state and federal processing guidelines, and on the desire of its publishers not to get sued. Unfortunately, that means that reliable and reasonable pickling information is hard to come by. (You won't find any here, either-- with no assets other than a few imaginary friends, the Cod is in no mood to be sued.) That said, get the Ball Book, experiment a bit with processing times, (keep records, and mark individual jars). If the lids fail to seal, you will know right away, and can put that jar in the fridge and eat soonish. If the jar seals, but later turns black, smells weird,  recoils from light, or friends Mastodon on MySpace,  throw it the fuck away. If they aren't right, you will know it.

*So would we, except for the times and places when we hope that a vengeful, Old-Testament style Lord delivers a truckload of botulism-tainted PBR. 

**Or your state extension office -- the Man, generally speaking.