THE GURGLING COD

News Quiz

One newspaper is lamenting the poor quality of duck breasts used by local chefs.

One newspaper is celebrating pigs in a blanket.

One paper is the New York Times, America's paper of record, and home to what may still be the most influential dining section in the country.

The other is the Des Moines Register, which is located in Des Moines.

A free packet of Splenda to the first correct guess.

Answer:
A) Duck
B) Pigs-in-blanket

Open (up) Sesame

I've been making sesame noodles for about as long as anything else I cook, and it's also probably the dish I make that has changed the most. I cringe to think of earlly efforts involving regular spaghetti, and a regrettable receipt with OJ in the dressing. On the other hand, a slightly more sophisticated mid 90s version was the one thing my antepenultimate girlfriend said she would miss about me, in a Dear Cod letter, even though peanut butter and pasta was the go to choice primariliy when there was too much month at the end of the money.

The biggest change came when I stopped thinking of the dish as akin to a cold casserole, and started thinking of it as a salad with a heavy starch component. The big change here is a move to dressing individual servings, rather than mixing up the whole thing ahead of time. What makes this possible is using the kind of Asian noodles that are flexible before you cook them sold either fresh or in the bag. (Where it is available, I am partial to the Twin Marquis brand, mainly because I spent the summer of 1990 living across the street from the Twin Marquis HQ (the unfabulous end of Ludlow) and was relieved to learn that the gentlemen in the suits with the Gekko-era cellphones actually must have been in the noodle business.

These noodles are slippery enough that you can hold them, undressed, without them fusing -- the unfortunate part is that I no longer bother with this receipt if they are unavailable. The dressing, is of course, the other key. Here the shift is to end, rather than start, with peanut butter. Add some soy sauce, rice vinegar, dark sesame oil,* and some Huy Fong to a bowl, mix it up, and add natural peanut butter until you have a consistency that seems right.

The noodles fare better if you give them a quick dunk in boiling water, but this is not mandatory. Even though I believe this is considered bad luck, you may want to quarter the noodles in the bowl so you do not have long strands of noodle potentially whipping sauce onto your Lacoste shirt. Noodles in bowl, garnish with scallions, cubed cukes, and sesame seeds. As the clip below attests, Ollie, Junior VP of Rose's Lime Enterprises, seems to enjoy the result:

*Dark sesame oil tastes like Hitler's ass when it gets rancid, so buy small bottles.

Diaspora Gumbo Recap

The version of Diaspora Gumbo I made last night seemed to go over well, inasmuch as there was none to put away, and I had briefly feared a week of  Fesser + cinetrix vs. giant pot of gumbo. We did not perform the ritual Justin suggested -- as a non-native, and only briefly a resident,  I did not feel it my place -- but the questions and the answers are worth some reflection. With music and food, we celebrated the culture of New Orleans. I confess, I was secretly glad we did not have HBO, as I then would have felt obligated to screen Spike Lee's Katrina documentary.  I want to see it, but based on the experience a friend had at the New Orleans debut, want to watch it at my own pace, and without a gaggle around.

Here's how the gumbo unfolded. A mixture of pieties and heresies, but I imagine that any single gumbo receipt is bound to be controversial.

Sunday, I made the stock, following Judy Rodgers' advice to remove the breasts from the chicken and reserve them for a separate use. Using the Cameron Smoker, and plenty of oak, I smoked the chicken breasts.

Monday night, I made the roux, dusted the chicken breasts with a little bit of Freuge's crawfish boil. (As we unpack and settle into the Winter Palace, spices emerge erratically -- in a perfect world, I would have made some sort of a rub from scratch, but the Freuge's was pretty good. (Roux is an exercise in stirring -- if you do not stir it, it burns, and is ruined, and you have to start over. There are not many other preparations that demand this kind of focus. Needless to say, make sure you have an adequate supply of beverage at hand. For a color guide, I use a paper bag. You want the roux to be about that dark. [If memory serves, "the paper bag test" also historically functioned as some kind of racial/social boundary in New Orleans, but I could have my details wrong.])

Tuesday, after rounding up the Zapps and the Abita, I started chopping. Here is where the controversy lies.
The traditional "cajun trinity"* is celery, green bell peppers and onions. I am not a huge fan of celery or green pepper cooked, so I kept amounts of those low, and added some red bell peppers to the mix. The final tally was 2-3 medium onions, 2 green and 2 red peppers, and two ribs of celery.

I'd stored the roux overnight covered in the fridge, and it was surprisingly hard, even after microwaving, so I added some butter to the bottom of the soup pan, and let the roux soften in that. I added about 8 cloves of garlic, crudely mixed. At this point I also parboiled the andouille sausage. (What I had was not real andouille sausage, but what Whole Foods calls andouille sausage. The flavor was quite good, but the texture was just like all the other sausage they make in house -- somewhat slack in the case, and uniform in texture, like a decent sweet Italian sausage. The  parboiling was a (successful) effort to keep the sausage from falling apart in the soup. What I would consider real andouille is firmer and more heterogenous in texture. It was ok, but next time, I will DIY, or Fed -Ex.)

When the vegetables had softened up a bit -- I had to add a bit more butter to keep the roux-coated pieces from sticking -- I added some of the stock, which alleviated the sticking problem, and shredded the chicken breasts into the pot. If you make two chickens worth of stock, you should have plenty of stock, with some left over. I briefly grilled the andouille, and cut into small sections. I was only able to secure a nominal quantity of uncooked shrimp, but I peeled those and tossed them  in as well.  When the shrimp were cooked through,  I served it forth.  It is worth checking the seasoning before you start herding your guests with a ladle, but remember that you add stuff late in the process that adds considerable salt and spice, so do not oversalt early.

With the homemade stock, the roux, the sausage, chicken, and shrimp, this is a pretty hearty proposition, so I served relatively stingy portions, with considerable rice participation. Your mileage will certainly vary, based on
what you can get where you live when you make it. But for a series of relatively simple tasks over three evenings, most of which can be done around your regular meal prep, the rewards are considerable. You can bring a lot of folks together with a pot of gumbo.

Watch this space for more NOLA stuff coming soon. And I leave you with at question -- who dat?**

*AKA "creole trinity." "Cajun" and "Creole," words that originally denoted specific cultures, seem to be used more and more interchangably outside of New Orleans to refer to food somehow associated with New Orleans.

**From time to time, other National Football League franchises make the error of asserting that they will defeat the Saints.

Cousin Cod

Just got a shout from The Salted Cod, who is a newcomer to the Cod-themed blog phenomenon. Worth a look -- some late summer New England hotness, and food photos that depart from the Gurgling Cod model by not looking as if they were of the craft services table at a cockfight. Check it out. He may well be the Ansel Adams of fried clams.

Katrina anniversary roundup

Facing South has a flashback to their Katrina coverage of a year ago. Watching the narrative unfold in real time is painful, but worth while -- other good Katrina stuff further down the page.

For New Yorkers, rumors of a benefit dinner at Jaques-Imo's, with 100% of the proceeds funding relief efforts. If you prefer your milk of human kindness at full strength, this is worth checking out. Please chime in with what you are doing at home, or out, wherever you are. Even if it is listening to "Hey Now Baby,"  on repeat and drinking a case of Jax beer, please take some time out of your day to consider the past and the future of the Gulf.

And while you are out picking up your supplies, won't you please register to vote? Katrina was a natural disaster, but a natural disaster made worse by big and small political decisions. We can do better.

For your to the registration place, a little Professor Longhair.
Professor Longhair:_"Hey_Now_Baby" (1949) .mp3

Condensed book reviews

As a service to busy readers, from time to time The Gurgling Cod will summarize current book reviews using YouTube clips. Up first is Martha Nussbaum's review of Harvey Mansfield's Manliness. Nussbaum: #31 in the orange; Mansfield: #12 in the white.

A tip of the fin to the Hav, who gathers the culinary metaphors as if they were pucks, and the Hav were Phil Esposito.

Saturn Bar Rebirth

One of the more heartening signs of life outside of the relatively unscathed portions of New Orleans was the re-opening of the legendary Saturn Bar. Sadly, O'Neil Broyard, the proprietor, died of heart failure in December, but his great-nephew, Neil Broyard, has re-opened the place. They will be marking the first anniversary of the storm in their inimitable style Tuesday night. I know nothing of this Egg Yolk Jubilee, but the fact that there is room for a live band suggests that Neil might have cleared out the back room, in which case you should tip him especially well.

Diaspora Gumbo

With the anniversary of Katrina approaching, The Cod will be heavy on the NOLA content in the days and weeks to come. There are new wars, and important elections, but there are a whole lot of folks in the Gulf whose lives are still all torn apart. Even as the touristic infrastructure bounces back, there are a whole lot of communities that are not communities. Thanks to Cod commenter New Orleans, I learned that FOC Justin Lundgren has a plan - a ritual meal for New Orleans -- restored and displaced alike, to enjoy on the anniversary of the storm. Details, receipts, pix, and music at Katrinadinner2006.com. Show Justin, and the rest of New Orleans, some love, why don'cha?

Somewhere, Thoreau is bummed out.

America has its eye on Chicago, wondering which jackass will be the Rosa Parks of the foie gras resistance:*

In one of the more unlikely (and opulent) demonstrations of civil disobedience, a handful of restaurants here that never carry foie gras, the fattened livers of ducks and geese, featured it on the very day that Chicago became the first city in the nation to outlaw sale of the delicacy.

I have here and there mused on this ban and its meaning, but this does almost as much as a yellow bikini to bring me a little closer to PETA's point of view. Eating well, in any sense of the term, involves respect for ingredients, and for those of us to choose eat meat, that goes double for the animals we eat. Putting foie gras on pizza, or a "Vesuvio-style entree pairing foie gras and tenderloin ($33.95) just to buck the new ordinance," is disrespectful.  I do not support a foie gras ban, because the suffering it alleviates is minute in scale compared to what happens to create McNuggets. Foie gras is a red herring: like so much in American culture, the foie gras comes out of a focus on consumers, rather than producers.  Even incremental improvements in the life of the average Tyson chicken would do far more to advance the ethical treatment of animals. Indeed, for a vegan to make foie gras a focus seems morally dishonest -- somewhat akin to the kind of extreme cases anti-abortion crusaders focus on. That said, adding foie gras to stuffed pizza for the sake of being "politically incorrect" is the kind of oafishness that frequently  makes it hard to take Chicago seriously.**
*Here is the text of Thoreau's essay to clip and save before you storm the barricades with your fleur de sel.
**I lived there for five years, and enjoyed it, mostly.

Sins washed away in sangria

In a twist on the whole washed clean in the blood of the lamb thing, Nicky Longlunch eats meatloaf, feels guilty, and shakes those bad vibes feeling by making a two pitchers of sangria.* Evidently, that's how they do it in Jax. And sometimes they add port. Not wine spectators, but wine participants! In the very same post,  mysterious goat cheese, and a link to a downloadable album titled "Fuck all yall."

*Come to think of it, adding half a bottle of Bacardi Limon to two bottles of vinho tinto might even assuage the guilt of Idi Amin.