guajillo salsa from frontera

just a quick note to recommend this product from Rick Bayless:
Rustic Guajillo Salsa, available at your local Whole Foods if nowhere else
It’s delicious. Great the first time as a dip for chips, great several more times as i used up the jar as a cooking ingredient, either alone with a bit of chicken broth to finish off a thick pork chop, or mixed in with onions and other stuff i forget what to make a thicker more complex stewy dish. Stands on its own, plays well with others, keeps months in the fridge, tastes great. Yummy. Bayless continues to rule.

finally pie

Last night i caught up with work by about 5:30pm, astonishingly enough, and so i went downstairs and made that apple pie. The apples were just about to croak, but they were still fine, and last night’s first slice was delightful.
I am really trying to work on my pie crust, since i come from a line of women who make truly great pie pastry and mine is not yet up to snuff, my impending middle-age notwithstanding. Last night’s crust ended up being extra-flaky, which i attribute to the speed with which cold butter can be cut in when using an old-school wire-style pastry cutter (which i’ve not done lately, because I forgot where it was). It was shatteringly crisp and golden, but yet somehow still a little bit tough. I wonder if I overworked it a bit, trying to get the water incorporated? Or trying to roll it out thin enough? Or perhaps it’s because I made the crust then realized I’d not peeled a single apple, so I put the crusts into the fridge to hold for a half hour or so while I cranked out filling. Not sure, but will continue to experiment.
Also, I am not sure I approve of tapioca as a thickener for apple pie. It seems texturally weird to me, in a way that it doesn’t when it’s in a berry pie. Perhaps I will go with flour next time.
(photo coming)

so far, not much

Haven’t made a pie, haven’t made the sticky rice.
Did manage a decent panful of fried rice last night, made from leftover rice (clever me made a double batch the night before, yay), freezerburned soybeans, carrots, leeks, and the last scraps of salt-fried pork chop from Wing’s Kitchen.
Given the bounty of the winter veg share, we are going to have to start eating meals based on root vegetables, and pronto. Perhaps some nice mittel-european dinners based on pork and cabbage and turnips… and maybe the occasional curried stew of winter squash and potato… the gears are grinding now, hope for the best.

apropos of not one damn thing

Too busy to have many posts. God damn it, this better stop soon. Anyway:
Pretty much anything about Bob Dylan bores me within 30 seconds. There’s a long article about him in the otherwise riveting Oxford American Music Issue, and I got about 3 paragraphs in this morning and couldn’t take it anymore. (for what it’s worth, subscribe to the Oxford American — the writing is good, even if not always to your taste, and the annual Southern Music CD is worth the subscription price alone.)
i am dying to make the sticky rice with chinese sausage and smoked oysters from the recent Gourmet magazine. I am stockpiling ingredients for the time, hopefully soon, that I will have time to undertake a cookery project that isn’t streamlined to the greatest possible extent so as to fit in the scraps of time I am not working or sleeping or attempting to hang up the art in my house.
i also need to make an apple pie. I have twelve boatloads of apples and several eagerly hopeful requests from the husband.

finally, a massmarket American chip flavor with at least a flicker of the extraordinary

Not that this is SO crazy, but at least it is DIFFERENT:
Doritos Collisions: Hot Wings & Blue Cheese flavored chips, together in one bag.
They’re quite good. The Hot Wings are like regular Doritos with a bit more spice and a whiff of vinegar. The blue cheese are actually blue-cheesy, which is totally awesome.

rosemary truffle french fries

OK, so there’s a bar in Cambridge, just outside Harvard Square heading toward Central, called the Cellar. It’s been there forever, it’s always been awesome. I’ve not been there in some time, since a) busy as all hell and b) moved away for 2 years.
However, we went there this week for the tallasiandude’s birthday, and discovered that they have added on some gastropub goodness. Foremost among which are some top-notch french fries: perfectly crisp and golden, scented with rosemary and black truffle. Holy mackerel, those are good.
(They also have homemade tater tots (chunky mashed potatoes coated in panko and fried) and what some consider to be very good cheeseburgers. For me those burgers are way too thick — they ARE delicious, but stylistically not my thing. Plus they fill me up and so i cannot eat so many french fries, another point against them.)

breakfast of champions for a melting-pot nation

While on a weekend visit with friends, circumstances conspired to reveal to me an exquisite breakfast treat.
Because we were all flying in late, our friday night dinner was ready-to-cook bulgogi from the korean market, plus a big jar of kimchi and some sticky rice. Yum yum.
And because we were visiting friends in the Baltimore area and hanging out with at least one other food-crazed person, we visited supermarkets — and at said supermarkets we acquired some scrapple.
And therefore, on sunday morning, brunch consisted of hot sticky rice, crunchy fried scrapple, eggs over medium, and large amounts of kimchi. HUBBA HUBBA. Oh and for dessert, a delicious eggy apple pancake with caramelized cinnamon sugar topping. Yay.

Roundabout to the local

So it figures that I stumble on an interesting locally-written blog by reading about it in a Chicago-based magazine that FoodNerd gets delivered to the house. One of the more recent issues of Time Out Chicago makes mention of a blog on U.S. Food Policy (aptly named, U.S. Food Policy) written by a Tufts University professor.

FoodNerd is concerned that reading it is just going to make her depressed about how bad the policy in the U. S. currently is, but it seems like there’s also a lot of good stuff in the form of local info, resources, and news of good things that can be done and/or are being done.

Hopefully there’s enough balance so she won’t be upset that I posted it. I’ve found it a good read so far, but I’ve haven’t had the chance to dig through the archive yet and I’ve got to get back to work.

Sabur: Balkan yummies

Several years ago, a restaurant opened in Teele Square in Somerville called Sabur. It had the cheesiest looking sign, with the worst sort of self-conscious faux-ethnic font, and claimed to be “mediterranean cuisine.” All of which added up in my mind to an overpriced mediocrity catering to trend-happy yuppies with timid palates. I never went in.
But then over the last year or so, I’ve heard from several people that the food is delicious. And today, we met up for brunch there to celebrate a friend’s birthday — she lives in the neighborhood and also vouched for the place. And i am thrilled to report that the food is indeed yummy, and though it has flashes of various mediterranean flavors, it is primarily a Balkan restaurant with lots of yogurt, fried breads, ajvar and sausages.
Online reviews mention crappy service, and i will say that our server, though pleasant, was a little spacy — but certainly not rude, and we didn’t wait overlong for anything. The decor is not entirely my cup of tea, but it is warm, richly colored, faintly exotic and has lots of pillows, and suits the place. The patio is rather nice too, if it happens to be warm.
But the reason I will go back is the food. Perfectly crunchy potato pancakes with sour cream and spiced pears. French toast with fresh-fig jam and maple syrup and lots of butter. Spiced meat patties on puffy flatbread with ajvar and feta. Stubby little grilled sausages with yogurt sauce and onions. Flaky tender borek stuffed with crumbly creamy farmer cheese. This food hews closely to the traditional flavor profiles, but busts out a few surprises like the pear compote with the potato pancakes (unless that’s a traditional thing i just don’t know about). And everything is well executed, if perhaps a little overzealously dusted with chopped parsley. (A pox on THAT particular restaurant trend.)
It wasn’t seriously busy despite our arrival at 11am on a Sunday, prime brunching hour on a gorgeous sunny weekend. They are reputed to have very good cocktails in their lounge. Someone might need to have a word with management about the Gypsy Kings CD on perpetual repeat… but I am willing to overlook that for a steady supply of delicious potato pancakes and farmer cheese pastries.