Wedges

brodo

There was one day last week when all my meals were shaped like wedges. I had leftover pizza, erbazzone, and fennel-leek tart. Funny. We were not supposed to order pizza, but we had to because, although I had been in and out of the kitchen for five hours that day, dinner still didn't come together in time. Ridiculous. I managed to shed zero tears, but I did feel like punching something. The pizza guy. With his smug grin and stupid pizza bag. 

Although there is no photo of the pizza, I would like to air Pizza Complaint Number One: raw toppings. When I make pizza at home, it takes forever because I cook everything that goes on it. We ordered a fabulous, seasonal mushroom pizza that was covered in mushrooms ... raw mushrooms. Well, okay, they had been cooked for 10 minutes in the oven with the dough and cheese, but that's not enough. You need to saute, people! (If I had left the comma out of that sentence, it would have sounded like I make cannibal pizza. Saute people! Let's eat Grandma! Yum.)

So, for pizza night, I was in the process of making Brodo with capellini and chicken. The broth is made by browning the chicken and the vegetables, then simmering everything, adding wine, herbs, and water. I am always worried that I am going to season incorrectly, so I commit the same sin that home cooks everywhere commit - under seasoning. You think I would have learned by now; I am even writing about it, so I have learned, I just refuse to liberate my hand when it has salt in it. 

So, the brodo was dark and lovely looking. And under-seasoned. It goes well with lots of pepper. And, funny enough, the parsley brings it together. 

chard erbazzone

I was also making erbazzone that night, which came together by 9pm. It is easy, but requires attention during its several steps. Attention that was drawn away by my children. I do a dance in the kitchen: I look at the clock and think, Okay, I need 20 minutes solid for this next thing, can I start now? Well, if Teddy wakes up ... hmmm, I do need to shower ... Oh, Sam needs me ... hmmmm, how about now? I have ruined two dishes so far during this Two Kids thing I am doing. Burning garlic is the pits. I considered this meal the third Ruin, since we didn't eat it until the following night. 

I have posted about erbazzone before, but this was the first time I made my own crust. It is the easiest crust ever! This from someone who cannot make crust to save her life: 2 cups flour, 1tsp. salt, 1/2 cup olive oil and 1/3 cup water. Bring it all together in a food processor. Knead for 30 seconds; let it rest in plastic wrap for 30 minutes. Bam. Crust. It rolls out to 1/4-sheet pan size, too.  

fennel-leek tart

The third wedge was of this tart: fennel-leek. It is sooooo good. I did not make the crust; it is puff pastry. You have to be ready for the off-gassing that follows this dish. What? Too much for a food blog to talk about the GI implications? Sorry. Did you know that Gulliver's Travels was the first novel that dealt with matters of the water closet? Bawdy, no? You have to think about these things (gas, not Gulliver) when you are nursing because what goes around comes around, if you know what I mean. 

Enough, I know. I'm not sure how many people I have looking at this blog anymore, so I am going for shock value. 

Where is Panasia?

kimchi

I have been watching The Kimchi Chronicles. As you can guess, it takes place in Korea and is about Korean cuisine. I only have a couple of experiences with Korean cuisine:  bibimbap in a restaurant and Julie's mom's cooking and, well, that's a couple and that's it. 

Kimchi, for the uninitiated, is a spicy, fermented cabbage - a distant cousin of sauerkraut - pictured above. It is stinky and can age for years; these two attributes combine to mean that households make and keep their kimchi outside. 

Needless to say, this show gave me serious cravings for Asian fare, so I devoted a week to creating Asian meals. First was bibimbap, which is pretty simple, as it turns out. I think a lot of Asian cooking is simple, but requires so much prep that when you finish your meal the kitchen is cluttered with the biggest pile of dishes and bowls and pans ever. Josh hates it when I cook Asian for this reason, since he is usually on cleanup. I do firmly believe in and practice Clean As You Go, but, as you may know, things happen so quickly in Asian cooking that there isn't really time to pre-clean. 

finished bibimbap

Anyway. Bibimbap consists of vegetables, beef, rice, kimchi, and an egg. Then you flavor with the Korean spicy sauce called gochujong. Easy. I chose lu choy, carrots, zucchini, shiitakes, enokis, and bean sprouts for my veggies and blanched them. Well, I cooked the shiitakes in some oil. For the beef, I bought Beef for Sukiyaki and marinated it for about 6 hours. It is sliced so thin that it took a couple minutes to cook. I found good kimchi that didn't have MSG or food coloring or other crap - you would be amazed at the number of items with crap in them. Why is there food coloring in sushi? Aspartame in pickled ginger? I then baked brown rice, but needed to innovate to get a more authentic bowl of bibimbap. You see, the dish should be served in a clay pot so that you get two things: (1) some caramelized rice stuck to the bottom (socarrat, for paella eaters), and (2) a degree of heat so high that all you do is crack the egg on top and mix it in to cook it! So, in order to approximate this, I busted out my cast iron skillet. 

Truth be told, I fear my cast iron skillet. But, there are three culinary objectives I am trying to achieve: (1) drink more sparkling wine, (2) eat more interesting cheeses, and (3) use my cast iron skillet. I fear the CIS because you don't wash it. Ever. That's weird. 

You'll be happy to note that my experiment worked and I got crusty rice for my bibimbap. I did have to fry the egg in a pan, however. 

For my next trick, pad thai with real tamarind paste! I have made pad thai before, but I used ketchup to get that sweet and tangy flavor found in this dish. All I have to say is praise be to men who opened Uwajimaya. You need kimchi? No prob. Gochujong? Yup. Tamarind paste made from a pod that grows on a tree that lives nowhere near here? Yup, got that too. Oh, and lots of Spam to boot. 

tamarind paste

Pad Thai is another very simple dish. It consists of rice noodles and bean sprouts, with a protein of choice and a flavorful sauce. I was surprised that the method was to pour quite a bit of sauce over the noodles and let everything cook in it. I added vegetables, cabbage and carrots and zukes, because that's what I do.

So my pad thai with a side Thai beef salad was awesome. My Thai beef salad beats the pants off of any you can get in a restaurant. Again, I used the cast iron to get my beef just so. The tomatoes are from my garden, but you don't need them. The recipe calls for cucumber, but I didn't get one and you don't need it. As long as you have lettuce, beef, herbs, red onion, and the sauce, that's all you need. 

We have mint growing in our yard, and that's half of the herbage there. I planted the herb thinking it could spread around a lilac tree in one corner of our front yard. he he, funny ... mint doesn't like to be contained. Underground runners. I think that, by definition, plants that run underground are from Hell. 

My last dishes, which I will not wax lyrical about, even though I should because they kicked ass, were  Hanoi soup with marinated pork and vegetable lo mein. All I will say is that the broth is flavored with star anise! What?! Delightful, that's what.

I was also going to make laksa, an Indonesian dish, but a combination of events led me to postpone it. I have made it before - it has squid, scallops, shrimp, fishballs (which have nothing to do with fish anatomy, per se), and sometimes chicken or tofu or beef in a thick broth with noodles. I will be making it this week because I have squid in the freezer and lemongrass in the fridge to use. Not to mention fresh Chinese noodles, which also are hard to find without food coloring and weird chemical ingredients! What the?

Hangry Glucosavore

I learned a new word that I shall add to my idiolect (feel free to add that one right there to yours): hangry. It is a combination of hungry and angry - something that I often am. When my blood sugar drops, I will take someone's head off. That might be one of the reasons I think so much about food and need to have meals planned and feel it is really strange when others do not plan meals. But won't you be hangry later if you don't make a game plan now? 

Josh's good friend Jason also gets hangry. His wife Julie said she used to carry around granola bars so that when Jason started barking, she could shove one in his mouth to curb the hanger. Awesome.

Remember my canning woes? Well, the green tomato pickles are awesome. It kind of messes with your mind to bite into a tomato that is green and that tastes like a pickle, which is automatically a cucumber pickle in my mind. 

I found out that fried green tomatoes are meant to be dredged in cornflour and fried in bacon grease! Hm, I do have another round of green tomatoes that need to come off the vine, given that the 60 degree weather has begun. And I do have some bacon. And I did bust out my cast iron skillet last night. Would that be what they call a "perfect storm"? I hate that phrase; but I detest "literally" even more. Have you noticed the pandemic overuse of this word? Ug. 

Next, I am trying to purge all the sugar from the house so that I don't eat anymore. Naturally, I have to make some dessert in the mean time. I made Mexican chocolate souffles. I noticed that the first ingredient in Ibarra chocolate is actually sugar and not chocolate. Interesting. These were really good. And I have come to realize that souffles are ridiculously easy. I also made ricotta souffles, but didn't take a photo. It takes me four minutes to hand-whip egg whites ... silly how easy souffles are. 

This sugar thing. So I read an article called "Is Sugar Toxic?" Scary title and scary topic. The author, in all his research, concluded that sugar is linked to all manner of metabolic diseases AND cancers. He didn't even mention the whole teeth rotting out of your head thing. 

Then I go on thinking that life is meant to be enjoyed and surely I do not consume gross levels of sugar because we eat lots of veggies and little to no processed foods in my house.

Then I think about how much longer living cultures (some Italians, Okinawans) really eat of sugar, and I wonder if I should compare myself to their intake or if I should go cold turkey to be safe. 

In short, I go back and forth in my sugar eating (glucosavorous) philosophy. It's a First World problem, isn't it? Probably just an American one, actually, because our food culture is so ... stunted? Inane? F'ed up?

Canning

Preserving, canning, making your own sausage, keeping chickens - all these atavistic lifestyle choices are back en force.  There is even a guy in this town who will come to your house, install a beehive, and then tend it for you. You get honey out of the deal. 

I like the idea of urban quasi-homesteading, truly creating all these things for yourself and your family. Why not? 

I'll tell you why not! Because I suck at it. Well, I have only tried the canning part and I am sufficiently bad as to stop trying. Last year I made blueberry and peach preserves - separately, not together in a jar - and they were both good, and the preserving process went fine. This year I canned four different things: raspberries, strawberries, pickled green tomatoes, and spiced peaches. Each one leaked juices into the canning water; each has too much liquid in the jars because I didn't smash the contents down enough. Bother. 

Canning, heck, even making your own sausage, is about preserving the harvest, right? I realized, after spending a bunch on flats of berries and pounds of peaches, that I do not have a harvest to preserve. Meaning, since I pay for someone else's harvest, all I am doing is exercising some notion of what I am supposed to do in this post-Martha Stewart, post-women's lib world of homemaking I currently inhabit. 

I did harvest our very own green tomatoes for the pickles. That feels satisfying. I would have harvested blueberries from our bushes, but since I did pretty much zilch in the yard this year, I couldn't be bothered to put nets over the bushes, so the cursed robins ate all the berries. 

I did learn what "freestone" means in stone fruit. It should be obvious, I suppose. Now I know what a total jerk the peach guy at Ballard Farmers Market was when he sold me nine peaches that were not freestone when I specifically told him that I was using them for a cobbler. I smashed up several peaches trying to get the flesh off the pit before I relented and took my knife to them. I learned from that mistake and got a freestone variety for my canning. I have high hopes for my spiced peaches this winter on my oatmeal. 

I was also going to ruin some marionberry preserves this year but didn't get the chance because the ladies in this neighborhood lined up 30 minutes before the berry stand opened. Apparently, the first few people in line bought up all the flats so no one else could have any. The lady running the stand said that they got 10 flats in a day and limited people to two. Can you imagine being sixth in line and watching everyone before you buy two so that you get nothing? And what happened to just buying a couple of pints to eat? Sheesh. I would have settled for a couple pints for a pie or in my yogurt!

I always seemed to pick the hottest day of the week to can too. Bah. Next year I'm sticking to cleaning. Oh, I bet I would be good at sauerkraut because you stick it in a jar and leave it to rot. That I can do.