Pursuing quality gastronomical endeavors for the general good
Today I made some tiny meatballs and miniburgers out of:
1 lb ground pork
5 soaked and minced shiitake caps
a minced scallion
juice from a thick slice of ginger
2 or 3 tablespoons of oyster sauce
ground pepper
a crust of multigrain bread
1 egg
I browned ’em in peanut oil, and I just had some now as a snack, and they came out pretty good. Good with rice, Asiany in flavor but not so much so that they won’t also be tasty with the peas-and-turnips in butter I’m making next. Nom.
I finally broke down and bought a fancy electric meat slicer in order to properly slice the salumi I often get from my brother. Now, this is not the slice-everything-in-sight wonder that the brochure claims it is, but hot damn if it doesn’t slice the paper-thin bejesus out of my cured meats. Worth every penny.
Last night I sliced up some mole, finocchiona, and tartufo salumi to eat with the pasta and red sauce that was the sole dinner option after a hectic week. Yes, and it was only Tuesday. Yeesh. And today I was able to enjoy the leftover sliced goodness with a few slices of bread and fresh cherries for lunch. Summer does not suck.
Whenever we get BBQ takeout, inevitably there is a bunch of obligatory cornbread, and because we are in the North, said cornbread is inevitably as sweet as cake. Eeew. I never eat it. But I feel guilty throwing it away if no one else eats it either. So this morning, I took a couple of pieces, crumbled them into a bowl with some canned peaches, poured milk over it like cereal and ate it for breakfast. Not at all terrible, and remarkably filling.
I couldn’t help it — today I was seized by an overwhelming desire for a rice ball filled with canned salmon and chopped kimchi, and I even waited to eat lunch until the rice was ready — but damn it if that rice didn’t collapse all over the place as soon as I picked up my nice pressed, molded treat. I have been buying the short-grain brown rice from Whole Foods. It’s tasty and easy to acquire in the course of normal food-gathering. However, I find that it is utterly useless for making onigiri — the grains don’t stick together for crap. This confuses me, because the grains are the same shape as the white short-grain rice I use for less-diet-friendly onigiri. However, that white rice I bought at the Korean market, so perhaps they are not the same varieties of rice despite their similarities. I would prefer, of course, to just buy one kind of brown rice, since it keeps much less well than white rice, but I guess I better trot over to the Koreans and see if they have any brown rice that can be used for my fiberrific rice balls. Or is it just that brown rice doesn’t work for this application? Maki at JustHungry claims that it does…
Oh, what a wretched pun. Last night we made spaghetti all’ubriaco, the delicious pasta cooked in red wine that we ate in Florence, tipped off by E&O, our intrepid eating pals. And our other pal brought over a huge baggie of ramps that she foraged with her mom, and it seemed only logical to chop some ramps and add them to the pasta. Logical, and in actual fact, truly delicious. The ramps added a sharpness and savoriness to the buttery, nutty, fruity weirdness of that pasta, and made it even better. The other nice thing is that a bowl of chopped ramps makes your whole house smell terrific if you leave it out on the table for a couple of hours while you finish off some sliced salumi and bread and cheese and wine. Better than air freshener!
I learned something useful today when I put Kosciusko mustard on bread, added some thick slices of cheddar, and stuck the whole thing dry into the toaster oven for a double toasting. And that lesson is that such a sandwich comes out even crispier, and stays crunchy longer, than a sandwich grilled in butter. WIN!
also: Kosciusko mustard is very likely the most delicious mustard on earth. yum.
I wound up making the moroccan one last night, with some variations due to lack of ingredients, but these all sounded quite good as different options for flavoring braised cow:
boeuf a la mode (beef with onions)
beef and carrot stew with dark beer
carne deshebrada en salsa rojo (shredded beef in guajillo sauce, awesome in tacos)
Tallasiandude came home from the H-Mart with a big pack of meaty pork neck bones that cost all of $3.50. He figured I could come up with something cool to do with them. (This blind faith in my cookery is another reason why I love my husband.)
I decided that I wanted to cook them with sauerkraut, at least partially because the recipe in Craig Claiborne’s New New York Times Cookbook sounded both simple and delicious. So I did that yesterday, browning the meat off in bacon fat and smoked salt, and then putting in onions and garlic, then topping it with 4 pounds of fresh sauerkraut, 13 juniper berries, 2 cloves, 1/2 tsp caraway seeds, cracked pepper and a bay leaf, and setting it to stew with just over a cup of white vermouth and a can of chicken broth.
It came out yummy, and the house has smelled like kraut and pork since yesterday. My intention was to make some spaetzle to go with it, since there was another easy-sounding recipe in the same book. So today, when we had some guests over, I put the water on to boil and whipped up the recipe — 2 cups flour, 3 eggs, 2/3 cup milk, salt & nutmeg. But the batter was sticky and elastic, and would NOT go through the holes of the colander no matter what I did. So I scraped it back out, added about 50% again more milk, and tried again with marginally better luck: I could get the dough out of the holes, but only slowly and with great efforts. After about an hour standing over the stove, with various helpers holding the colander or taking over completely, we did actually have enough spaetzle to eat, so we quit. I cooked the rest of it in huge lumps later on, being unable to completely give up and throw out the rest of the dough.
I suspect that I should not have used the stand mixer. Too much beating made it elastic? But it said to beat continually, and did say something about an electric mixer as an option to the hand whisk. A hand whisk would have been a complete pain with the original dough, as thick as it was. Sigh. I wish I knew what went wrong for sure. They came out tasty enough, with the right texture and taste, but it just CANNOT be that hard. Yipes.
It’s been cold, so we felt like having a batch of chili. Two pounds of ground turkey and a bag of small red beans and a bottle of Rogue Mocha Porter later, among other things, we had a big pot of tallasiandude’s special-recipe chili. Yum!
And because we are both nerds, and both thinking about how to save money on food, we tried to figure out how cost-effective this chili really is. So far we reckon it’s about 10-11 person-meals’ worth of food, and it cost us $21 to make. That’s $2.10 per meal. If you also count the accessories (plain yogurt, brown rice, cheddar cheese, toast, and corn chips), that’s an extra $5 to the total… leaving the per-meal cost still pretty damn low, at $2.60.
That’s not too shabby, considering we used expensive beer and kosher meat and organic vegetables (for the most part). It’s a good meaty chili, flavorful and filling.
Saute 3 roughly-chopped onions and 1/2 a head chopped garlic in 2 tbs butter (or bacon fat if you have it). Add the turkey and cook through. Chop half a head of celery, and saute in 1 tbs butter in the soup pot. Stem and seed 6 serranos and 3 anaheims (or whatever chiles suit you), chop and add to celery. Dump the turkey and onions into the pot with the chiles. Add 1 lb of small red beans, previously soaked (or quick-soaked), and 1 large can of whole tomatoes, plus half a can of water and a bottle of dark beer. Add 3-5 mini Hershey bars and/or dark chocolate mini squares, whatever you have around — unsweetened chocolate does tend to make it too bitter though. Add chili powder, cumin, black pepper and salt to your liking. Stew the heck out of it for a few hours on low heat. Serve hot with toast or rice, topped with cheddar cheese and/or plain yogurt and a tangy hot sauce if you want a little more than the mild oomph the fresh chiles give. Tortilla chips are nice with it too.
A friend makes a cranberry-orange relish at Thanksgiving that is to die for, and all she does is throw cranberries and oranges in the food processor to chowder them up. So good!
And I had a handful of leftover cranberries from the last upside-down cake, and one lingering clementine, so I figured I’d just grind ’em up and eat them with something. But the pork roast I envisioned is getting delayed by all the other leftovers in the house, so I threw some of my ground-up goodness into some yogurt with a splash of the orange syrup left over from candying oranges at Christmas.
Yum.