When the time comes to add garlic to a dish, do you break out your knife and cutting board or do you reach for your garlic press? It’s a touchy subject for a lot of people, and the Cookthink blog gives a great rundown of the garlic press objections today.
Where do you stand? For the record, I have no issue whatsoever with using a press when I want minced garlic or garlic paste. Sometimes, though, I like a little texture. It’s all about context for me.
I don’t care if it is safe to eat, you’ll never see me featuring a big ol’ mess o’ squirrel on this site. Though I do have recipes — mine is a wondrous and varied cookbook collection. (Darn, if only that 101 Cookbooks idea hadn’t already been taken…)
Cheese is philosophically interesting as a food whose qualities depend on the action of bacteria — it is, as James Joyce remarked, “the corpse of milk.” Dead milk, live bacteria. A similar process of controlled spoilage is apparent in the process of hanging game, where some degree of rotting helps to make the meat tender and flavorsome — even if one no longer entirely subscribes to the nineteenth-century dictum that a hung pheasant is only ready for eating when the first maggot drops onto the larder floor. With meat and game, the bacterial action is a desideratum rather than a necessity, which it is in the case of cheese — a point grasped even in Old Testament times, as Job reveals in his interrogation of the Lord: “Hast thou not poured me out as milk, and curdled me like cheese?” The process of ripening in cheese is a little like the human acquisition of wisdom and maturity: both processes involve a recognition, or incorporation, of the fact that life is an incurable disease with a hundred percent mortality rate — a slow variety of death.
– from The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester
To hear Gil tell it, he was a bit … cuddly … and carried around an extra 40 pounds before we met. Though I’ve seen evidence of it in pictures, I still find it hard to believe, given his rangy look these days. Granted, he’s almost a foot taller than me, so that amount of weight isn’t quite the disaster it would be on someone my size, but still — it’s pretty significant. So like a lot of other people at the time, he turned to the Atkins diet for a quick fix (which happened to stick).
Even after he lost the weight, he continued to shun carbs for a long time. And then he met me. (Mooo-haaa-haa-haaaaaaaaah!) Actually, I’m not really that big of a fan of carbs, but I don’t believe in depriving myself, so we eat a pretty well-balanced diet these days. And that includes carbs — sometimes quite a lot of them, as it turned out this weekend.
Scrambling for a late lunch Saturday, I threw together what is always a no-brainer: Orecchiette with chicken sausage and broccoli rabe. It’s easy, filling, not unhealthy, and best of all, delicious. But this wasn’t to be our only pasta indulgence over the weekend, thanks to the chuckleheads working the meat counter at Zeytinia.
I asked — twice! — for two duck breasts. They repeated my order and told me with regret that the breasts were frozen into one big package and I’d have to wait for them to thaw it enough to separate two. Not a problem, since I love to browse the store, so I waited. And waited. Five minutes turned into 15, but the thought of my duck breast dinner kept me going.
When I took the package out of the fridge the following day to begin marinating the duck, imagine my surprise to find two legs where the breasts should’ve been! Allowing myself only a momentary growl, I plunged headlong into preparations for duck ragu. (I suppose I could’ve made confit, but it didn’t seem to be worth it for only two legs, and dagnabbit, I wanted duck that very day!)
Can I just say a quick thank you to the aforementioned chuckleheads for their error? Though I had to supplement the duck legs with a few chicken thighs, this dish was really, really, really good. And pretty simple, too, once the nasty business removing the visible fat from the legs/thighs was done.
I’m so happy Gil learned to be flexible with his diet once his excess weight was lost. If he hadn’t, there’s no way I could’ve attempted the carbo-loading I did this weekend, and our recipe binder would’ve been much poorer for it.
recipes after the jump
I realized last night that my closet and my pantry have a lot in common — both are pretty well packed, but nothing really goes together. The closet situation makes getting ready for work a challenge, while the pantry challenges me to make dinner on the fly without a trip to the grocery store. Seriously, I don’t even have an onion (An onion! I’m the most pathetic of food bloggers!) in the house, but I did find a big bag of porcini-encrusted country ribs in the freezer from my last slow cooker experiment. And, after rummaging around in the pantry, I found a can of hominy I’d picked up on a whim a few weeks ago.
Have you ever had hominy? I hadn’t until last night, and just naturally assumed it would be a lot like grits with gigantism, but hominy’s actually very nutty, with an almost roasted corn flavor — quite tasty. I decided to make a quick “stoup” — part stew, part soup — influenced by a few recipes for posole I’d read along the way, using ingredients I had on hand.
I sautéed a couple minced garlic cloves in olive oil and added a bunch of chopped swiss chard that had seen better days, like just last weekend:
When the chard started to wilt, I added the pulled rib meat, some hot pimentón, and chicken stock and brought it to a boil, then added the hominy. Because I made the original rib dish with soy sauce and porcini powder, the stoup had a pretty complex taste, and the orange zest carried through nicely, adding a fresh note to what could’ve been a heavy dish. After it simmered for a while, I garnished the stoup with minced green onion and cilantro, and we had a very enjoyable dinner of leftovers. Go figure!
I look forward to cooking with hominy again, and soon. Maybe a real posole is in order once it cools down more.
R - red bell pepper
O - carrots
Y - yellow bell pepper
G - green cabbage, cilantro, basil, mint, lime juice, green onions
B - OK, the conceit breaks down a little here
I - yeah, yeah, so sue me
V - purple bell pepper! Ha-HA!
To look at this site, you’d think we only eat brown or red food around here. I guess my weekday meals are more multi-hued than the dishes I make (and post about) on weekends, but still: They say you should eat the rainbow to get the most nutritional benefit from foods, so I thought I’d give it a go in one dish last weekend with a Vietnamese chicken salad from the pages of my beloved Cooking Light.
For once, I didn’t really depart from the recipe much, except to use a little less chicken and a little more veggies than called for. I might use the proper amount of chicken next time, but this salad already was delicious with its balance of salty, sweet, and sour, with unami thrown in for kicks. In fact, it was Gil’s favorite dish of the weekend!
Goooo, Roy G. ‘v!
recipe after the jump
I know, I know, broken record — but it’s that time of year again, isn’t it? The farmers’ market had loads of beautiful organic apples, so I consulted with the seller and bought a few opalescents. Isn’t that a great name, by the way? It seemed impossible to go wrong making brunch with them, like the whole affair would be graced by their jewelled name.
So I started with my basic bread pudding recipe and changed the blueberry filling (everything from blueberries down in the ingredient list), adding caramelized apples instead. I peeled, cored, and sliced three small opalescents, sautéed them in a couple tablespoons of butter, then added about a tablespoon of brown sugar (they were the tiniest bit tart), a few heavy sprinkles of cinnamon, and a whisper of mace. Once the apples started to brown and caramelize in the pan, I added them to the bread mixture, then set it to bake. About 45 minutes later, I opened the oven to find an airily puffed and browned bread pudding that seemed more like a virtuous apple pie than anything else.
This’ll be my go-to recipe for the fall into winter, I think. Gil and I agreed that the blueberries I favor in summer can sometimes be a little overwhelming, but the apples were a perfect marriage with the rest of the pudding. I won’t be kicking the bananas foster version to the curb anytime soon, but this one was more brunch, less dessert — perfect for a girl lacking a sweet tooth.
I’ve been kicking around the idea of making a coq au vin for a while now. But it’s a two-day process, according to the Les Halles Cookbook, and I just never remembered to start it a full day before I planned to serve it. But finally, this weekend, I got my act together.
Do you have the Les Halles Cookbook? No? Quel dommage! It was one of the better Christmas presents I got two years ago. Not only do you have Anthony Bourdain guiding you through recipes with his no-bullshit banter, but the recipes themselves are wonderful. And the design is gorgeous. I mean, really, a lot of thought was put into this book from start to finish. The butcher paper cover (hardcover ed.), the plain, serviceable, but elegant fonts, and the pictures announce exactly what you’ll get when you start reading — a no-nonsense approach to cooking some damned fine no-nonsense food.
So I started with the easy part — marinating the chicken and vegetables in red wine overnight. Even though I was warned right there in the recipe that this dish would start off pretty nasty, I didn’t think what 24 hours in red wine would really do to a whole chicken, and found myself unprepared for the horror that emerged from the fridge 24 hours later:
You know, I’ve been a carnivore all my life, but until today, I’ve never once thought of my food as a corpse. I may submit that photo to David Fincher for consideration in his next opening credits.
Soldiering on, I browned the wine-bloated chicken corpse in butter and olive oil, and the promised alchemy soon took place; it really did result in something magical, considering the — ahem — humble beginnings. But when a recipe calls for an artery-clogging amount of butter and 1/4 lb. of bacon, magic is bound to happen.
All in all, it was good. Satisfying. Tasty, even. And I got a real feeling of accomplishment just from seeing it through to the end. But it isn’t something I’ll be making again soon — while good enough for a Sunday lunch, it just didn’t seem to be worth the effort.
Sigh.
Oh, if you ever decide to make this, take his advice and clean as you go along. It’s something I do anyway, but you’ll appreciate tackling the dishes before they grow into a mountain in the sink.
