holy crap, Libert
Author: foodnerd
fromage fort
I happened to do my shopping at the Framingham Whole Foods this weekend, and discovered a little treasure called fromage fort. It purports to be a mix of four cheeses and garlic and spices, and it is a creamy thick dip for celery sticks and carrots. Normally I loathe celery sticks because they overpower whatever you dip into, but they are downright tasty with this stuff on ’em.
I’ve not seen this at my local Newton WF, but I will take a closer look the next time I am there. I’d keep this stuff around for semi-healthy snackage and impromptu cocktail party nosh.
the true and glorious nature of fried rice
If you grew up anywhere or anything like I did, the fried rice of your youth was dark brown, salty, greasy and speckled with frozen mixed vegetables and tiny scraps of red roast pork and egg. And you slurped it up with vigor, but it was hardly the stuff of dreams.
Enter tallasiandude and his frequent workday lunches at the Vietnamese restaurants of north-eastern Massachusetts. He would come home rapturous over the fried rice at a couple of places in particular. And one day he brought me up there, and we ordered a plate of that rice. And then we ordered another plate because the first was so mind-bendingly delicious, perfect, bright, fresh, white, tasting of the wok heat and clean egg and shrimp and scallion.
Right around that same time, I was reading Mouth Wide Open by John Thorne (a gift from C, thanks, C!). In that excellent volume is an article about Mr. Thorne’s similar progression of experience with fried rice, and since he lives in a less-urban area with less proximity to seriously good Asian restaurants, he went about figuring out how to make an excellent fried rice for himself. Having never managed a successful fried rice on my own by bumbling about experimenting, I tried his method, and holy kershnikeys, does it ever turn out good.
It’s good even when you deviate a little bit and put in different vegetables or meats or seasonings according to the contents of your refrigerator. It’s good with white rice or brown. It’s good and hot and fresh and filling and tastes of toasted rice and heat and white pepper.
So it is with all this for background that we found ourselves at Vinh Sun in Boston’s Chinatown, out on a hot date to eat dinner & see Watchmen after a really stressful couple of days. It was most stressful for me in particular, so I was getting to pick most of what we ordered, and for some reason I was drawn to the list of fried rices. The most unusual-looking one was listed as a “dried scallop and egg white” version, and it seemed like it might be a good flavor balance with the other stuff we were getting.
And it arrived, pristinely white and flecked with scallion, white pepper, big fluffy sheets of egg white, with reckless quantities of shredded dried scallop scattered over the top like golden pine needles. The rice grains were hot and toasty, almost chewy and bouncy in texture, and the whole thing was just perfect, light, savory, rich. The rice is a little different and the flavorings are different, but the spirit is the same, making it a distinctly Chinese version of those excellent Vietnamese fried rice dishes.
So now we know three places to go out and get superlative fried rice, and we make it at home as best we can. If you have reason to be in Boston Chinatown, try and get over to Vinh Sun and order some fried rice and taste for yourself how truly delicious it can be.
noodly thoughts
a couple of things noodle-related:
– tallasiandude has been meditating on the nu ro mian of his youth, and thinking that the plain wheat shanghai-style noodles we’ve been using are good but not quite the same as what he remembers… so when we spied some egg-white noodles of about the same size and shape from the same maker, we grabbed them to see if perhaps they might fit the bill. And they did, and how. They are chewier and more substantial, with a bit more flavor even, and they are spectacular in the beefy broth. All subsequent Noodlefests and nu ro mian endeavors shall be using this improved noodle!
– We tried some brown rice rotini from Trader Joe’s. We are occasionally seized by such insanity, in the blind hope that this time will be different from all the other times when non-durum pastas are just plain awful. And astoundingly, this time it wasn’t so bad. A little bland, but generally quite acceptable. I would recommend cooking them a little bit more than you would a normal pasta, because when one rotini (rotino?) is just perfect, some of the others still have undercooked cores. When it’s uniformly soft, you kind of don’t notice that it’s made of not-wheat when you’re eating it with a robust tomato-meat sauce. I think the fact that it is made with brown rather than white rice gives it a bit more body, texture and flavor. If I was gluten-intolerant, I would be entirely pleased with this product as a suitable vehicle for delicious sauces.
So that makes a total of two non-standard pastas that are decent: TJ’s brown rice rotini, and the whole wheat pasta from Big Y (Full Circle organic whole wheat pasta, apparently not the Big Y store brand, but that’s the only place we’ve found it locally).
shut yer whining
Normally, I adore everything about The Fatted Calf. All their meats are delectable, and I look forward to reading their newsletter even though it inspires dreadful, inconsolable longing, because it is such delightful food porn.
But lately, I’ve been rolling my eyes back into my head when I read those newsletters. And the reason is that they’ve been (goodnaturedly) complaining about the horrors of winter. Oh PLEASE. What a bunch of candy-ass whiners. I’m sorry, if you live anywhere that has a farmer’s market even in February, you have no grounds whatsoever to complain about winter. Ever.
Take this for example, from the newest newsletter:
“Indoor living starts to feel a little stale by the time March rolls around. I start to have hopes and dream of picnicking on less sodden ground. While the rain blows sideways, I think about cooking paella over an open fire at the beach instead of on our Weber in the freezing carport. And already, dressed in parka and galoshes I am gardening in short stretches between rain showers.”
Oh, the terrible sadness of having to cook on your carport Weber in March, and having to garden with a coat on. Listen, wusses, I dug my car out of 8 inches of snow YESTERDAY. Don’t talk to me about your suffering or the cold weather. I don’t get a fresh local vegetable around here until JUNE. SO SHUT IT.
Is this weird? canned peaches & goat cheddar
Lately I’ve been doing fruit+protein breakfasts, and last week that turned out to be jarred cling peaches and a couple slices of goat-milk cheddar.
That got a ringing “dude, that is weird” from the tallasiandude. I’m on the fence: on the one hand, to me it’s pretty normal, but I can see how it might be a little weird, especially for breakfast.
So let’s hear it, Internet: Is this weird?
Top Chef jumps the shark
I am not going to spoil anything, because I am sure lots of you have yet to watch the finale on your TiVo, but I will say that the winner is NOT the best chef of the crew by any measure. Technicality piled on technicality piled on bad luck piled on the producers’ need for Drama, and some of the strongest contenders were out well before their time. Feh. My only consolation is that it could have been worse.
lazy hummus, or parsley-chickpea salad
Somehow this preparation popped into my brain all of a piece. Mix one can drained and rinsed chickpeas, a handful of chopped parsley, a chopped scallion if you have one, juice of half a lemon, a slight drizzle of olive oil, and two big spoonfuls Sabra tahini sauce, plus a sprinkle of salt & pepper. You could also include diced cucumber and/or garlic if you were so inclined and had them on hand.
i *heart* nigel slater
I have a new food-crush on Nigel Slater. I’d read a couple columns of his in Gourmet. I read his book Toast, which I very much enjoyed and recommend. But then I stumbled onto his web-column in the Guardian’s website, and I am smitten. I love his casual but unmistakably British tone, in which he can be offhand about leftovers, be elegantly particular about a technique, and talk about farting all in the same sentence.
But more than anything I love the recipes. They’re clearly the result of a fellow foodnerd who reads a lot of cookbooks and spends a lot of time just making shit up in his kitchen, and they are so very English somehow. How is it that no one in the States, myself included, has ever thought to put a goat-cheese mixed with pickles and pickle juice from the jar into a beet soup? (Maybe they have, but I’ve not found them yet.) There’s always a bit of marmalade or a bit of curry involved, in places I might not think to put them. Every single thing I’ve read on his column sounds absolutely gorgeous to eat. And it’s become a must-read site for me, at least of late… swoon.
Notes on NoodleFest 09
We made our annual vat of nu ro mian last night, and we are in agreement that this is the best batch so far. A few things made it so:
– we upped the spicy even a notch further than last year, and that did the job. the bottles of chili oil went very nearly untouched at the table. 3 chilis + 3 tbsp of peppercorns + 10 tbsp spicy bean paste for the mild version, which was actually a little spicy. 14 chilis, 4 heaping tbsp of peppercorns and 12 tbsp spicy bean paste, three of them of the spicier type, for the spicylicious version.
– we found beef shank at the Kam Man market in Quincy, which is far superior in this application to the stewing beef from Costco. Loads more fat and connective tissue, and it shows in both the moistness of the meat (at last!) and in the richness of the broth.
– we went absolutely bananas with the tendon. Almost 7 pounds went into this thing, along with almost 11 pounds of shank. (Yes, we have rather a lot of leftovers.)
– we finally sorted out the logistics of large-scale noodle cooking. We bought a couple of cheapo electric range-burners at Target, and had one pot of water coming up to boil while the wide steamer-pot base was cooking 2 packs of noodles on the stove. This staging kept the noodles coming at a steady pace without suffering gumminess of any kind (unless they got left in the colander untaken for a while).